Decades before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment witnessed an outbreak of national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm whose force, as cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder observed, resembled the epidemic arrows that open Homer’s Iliad. Alexander Roob’s image-text essay traces this attraction to a newly discovered “primitivist” Homer – from the cult surrounding his Nordic counterpart Ossian to […]

I Classic / Anti-Classic Decades before the French Revolution, a culture of intoxicating affects burst into the heyday of the Enlightenment, increasingly boosted by national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm. The cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder compared its impact to the epidemic projectiles that marked the beginning of Homer’s battle epic Iliad. Terms such as the ‘Age […]

III Blind Visionaries –True Homers Paintings Gallery The dismantling of noble Homer had already begun in the 1730s, in the cultural-anthropological milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was characterised by approaches based on early cognitive science and evolutionary theory. The atavistic portrait bust, which on a self-portrait of the Edinburgh barber and graphical chronicler John […]

V Companionship of the Afterlife. Departure to the Past Exhibit Gallery The mesmerist influence on the Romantic generation was highlighted ideal-typically by several heads of a book of portraits that Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a main proponent of the Brotherhood of St Luke, created between 1816 and 1824 in Rome. Their gazes to the afterlife […]

CS: New Series. A first visual essay in the wake of the Wild Apollo’s Arrows project.  What happened after the Ossianists discovered the descendants of their wild Homer among the North American tribes and Blake identified their shamans as visionary Ezekiels? Lightning strikes a curved thimble in a garden by night.

This large-format etching in the collection of the Melton Prior Institute, executed by E. S. Henne after a lost grisaille painting by Heinrich Füssli, documents a key event in the culture of Enlightenment friendship in the German-speaking world. Depicted is the visit of the three young Zurichers Johann Caspar Lavater, Felix Hess, and Heinrich Füssli […]

This dense allegorical-parliamentary composition by Dutch engraver and political image-maker Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) stands at the intersection of graphic reportage, propaganda art, and early constitutional theory.Originally conceived in 1689 to celebrate the enthronement of William III after the Glorious Revolution, the plate was reissued in 1702 with a portrait of Queen Anne, and again […]

The work, featuring over 100 wood-engraved illustrations by its author and editor, drifts like a phantom through Linton’s bibliography. This compilation, consisting predominantly of his own poetic texts, is not recorded in any library and was described by F. B. Smith – otherwise a highly reliable biographer of Linton – as a collection of works by […]

Too beautiful! The English Gaze on the Rhine
, Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz, 10 May – 7 September 2025 After the end of the Continental Blockade, the Middle Rhine Valley became a major attraction for English travellers. The exhibition presents paintings, watercolours, prints, photographs, caricatures, and travel objects of this early form of tourism. Central to the popularisation […]