“L'intrico della ‘Tempesta‘ tra industriosità e pigrizia”

The paper focuses on Hogarth’s illustration of “A Scene from The Tempest” starting from David Dabydeen’s insightful post-colonial re-reading of the painting, which privileges the grotesque and menacing physicality of Caliban as the dominant element of rupture of the familial, patriarchal and colonial plan magically contrived in the Shakespearean romance. The Guyanese poet, writer and art historian nicely highlights the deep fascination exerted by the monstrous Caliban upon the painter’s imagination, recognizing in the character a sort of extreme, mythological equivalent of those ‘low’ subjects that obsessively crowded the streets and brothels of London in Hogarth’s popular prints and progresses . In line with this perspective, the paper suggests that Caliban plays the same estranging and satirical function as the black servant in the fourth piece of "Marriage à la Mode" and the black servant in the eighth piece of "Industry and Idleness", thus bringing to the fore the eighteenth-century painter’s radical project of dismantling and reassembling the (Neo)classical iconographical hierarchy in his ambitious vocation as the ‘author’ of ‘modern moral subjects’.