About this work
What arrests the eye immediately in this work is not violence itself, but its aftermath — and the cold, resolute power of a woman delivering it. Kriemhild has ordered Gunther's execution, and here she presents his severed head to Hagen. Fuseli renders the confrontation with the taut economy of a two-figure standoff: Kriemhild upright and commanding, the head thrust forward like an accusation made flesh, while Hagen — bound, defiant, unmoved — returns her gaze without flinching. Fuseli orients the composition around a visual parallel to the antique Perseus myth, Kriemhild extending the head as though it were a hypnotic Medusa, with Benvenuto Cellini's famous bronze of Perseus before the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence likely a deliberate formal model.
Executed in pencil and watercolour on cardboard and measuring 48.8 × 38.7 cm, the work is intimate in scale but enormous in psychological charge — the spare medium lending the figures a spectral, bone-pale intensity against the shadowed ground.
Fuseli first began to illustrate the *Nibelungenlied*, the medieval German epic of more than two thousand stanzas, around 1800, and he would continue producing works based on the legend — drawings, watercolours, and even a poem — until 1820. This watercolour dates to approximately 1805, placing it in a richly productive late period: Fuseli had just closed his Milton Gallery, assumed the Keepership of the Royal Academy, and was delivering his landmark lecture series on painting. He had first encountered the *Nibelungenlied* as a student at the Collegium Carolinum in Zürich — it was among the formative literary works, alongside Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, that would shape the entire arc of his painting. Returning to that earliest, most Germanic strand of his imagination in middle age, these *Nibelungen* drawings feel like a private reckoning — the recently rediscovered saga giving Fuseli a new vehicle for the literary motifs that almost invariably drove his art. The work now resides in the Kunsthaus Zürich, the city where Fuseli was born, completing a kind of homecoming.
On the wall, this print announces itself quietly and then doesn't let go. It belongs in a room with substance — a dark-walled study, a library, a spare modern interior where a single image is given room to breathe. It speaks to the reader, the myth-lover, the person drawn to art that operates at the border of the historical and the psychological. The palette — cool, restrained, shadowed — means it holds in evening light as well as day. This is not decorative art; it is a confrontation between two immovable wills, distilled to its essential gesture, and it rewards sustained looking.
