Hamlet, Horatio and the Gravedigger

Taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 1), the composition is adapted from Veronese’s St John the Baptist Preaching (Galleria Borghese, Rome) which Fuseli would have seen in an exhibition at the Louvre in 1802. The influence of Michelangelo can also be seen in the treatment of the gravedigger. The composition draws the spectator into the space of the grave, thus heightening the force of Hamlet’s reflective speech on the nature of death.

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