The second chapter revisits the work of Henry Fuseli, an artist whose notoriously distorted representations of the male nude puzzled viewers. Yet Fuseli remained significantly invested, intellectually and artistically, in the legibility of the body: for more than two decades, the Swiss-born, London-based artist collaborated with his childhood friend Johann Lavater on a treatise on physiognomy, the study of the face to determine man’s inner traits. As part of his effort to transform physiognomy into a modern empirical science, Lavater placed great emphasis on the physical correspondence between the external appearance of the body and its internal, imperceptible truths. However, Fuseli often represented bodies that could not be read according to the criteria of Lavater’s system. In doing so, the artist called into question not just physiognomy but the underlying claims on which it was based, unveiling a world in which “appearance” and “truth” fail to correspond.

While Gothic scholars of the last two or three decades have explored forms of Gothic sensation, spectacle or visuality, they have generally had as their focus illustrations, caricature prints, graphic ephemera and advertising material rather than oil paintings and watercolours by the famous artists associated with Romanticism. This chapter considers precisely those works of art that have defined Romanticism. The more circumscribed notion of art and the artist associated with the ‘autonomisation’ of art around 1800 is here tied to the emergence of Gothic forms and themes within painting. It is argued that it is more than coincidental that the chronology of the original phase of Gothic literary and cultural production matches that of the development of aesthetics as philosophical discourse, and the ‘invention of art’ as a relatively autonomous field of activity. That a full-blooded Gothic art subsequently resurfaces only intermittently in the history of ‘high art’ exposes not only the volatility and inconstancy of Gothic culture, or the irreconcilability of the Gothic and art, but also the general ambivalence towards the indeterminacies of art in the modern era.