Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma

Fuseli painted this scene from Arthurian and Spenserian legend in 1783, depicting Percival rescuing Belisane from the enchantment of the sorceress Urma. Fuseli specialized in supernatural terror and literary fantasy, bridging the Neoclassical and Romantic periods with his dark and uncompromising imagination. He had encountered the material of medieval romance and epic poetry through his wide reading in English, German, and classical literature, and his ability to give terrifying visual form to these literary sources set him apart from virtually all his contemporaries. His elongated, contorted figures, derived from his study of Michelangelo and Mannerist painting, gave his supernatural subjects an intensity bordering on nightmare. The work is now at the National Gallery, where it stands as an example of the visionary imagination that made Fuseli the most original British painter of his generation and a direct precursor to the Romantic movement's full flowering in the next decade.

Fuseli's elongated, contorted figures and dramatic contrasts create otherworldly menace. The composition emphasizes vertical energy and muscular dynamism in his distinctive mannerist style.