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 […]
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 […]
An exhibition of the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in co-operation with the Exhibit Gallery, curated by Alexander Roob 7.3.–25.5.2025 Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1st floor, 1010 Vienna Opening: 6.3.2025, 19–22 h Opening hours Daily except Monday: 10–18 h Song recital with lesson: Atelierhaus, […]