The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur of Antique Fragments

An artist sits slumped and weeping beside the colossal marble fragments of an antique statue - a giant foot and a vast pointing hand - overwhelmed by a grandeur he can never hope to match. Henry Fuseli renders the scene in stark chalk, the broken giant towering over the despairing draftsman. Now in Zurich, the drawing crystallizes a Romantic anxiety: the crushing weight of the classical past on the modern artist, awe and inadequacy mingled before the ruined splendor of antiquity, the present forever dwarfed by what came before.