ABSTRACT
(1741–1825), Swiss artist and writer. Fuseli was born in Zurich, Switzerland, second of five children of Johann Füssli, a portrait painter, town clerk and writer on art, and his wife Elizabeth, who died when Henry was an adolescent. He grew up surrounded by drawings and engravings of sixteenth-century Swiss mannerist artists, absorbed his father’s appreciation of winckelmann and Mengs, and learnt about the emerging cult of the antique, centred in Rome. During his education at the Zurich Collegium Humanitatum he became an enthusiastic classical philologist and was introduced to the works of Homer, the Nibelungenlied, Dante, shakespeare and Milton, which later provided many of the subjects for his paintings.
