In the weeks leading up to the publication of his first major philosophical work, Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been less concerned about the reception of its controversial arguments than about the design of the title page. This was adorned by a vignette showing not an ivy-crowned Dionysus, as one might have expected, but the unbound Prometheus, or rather—Prometheus at the moment of his liberation. At the Titan's feet, there lies an eagle, rather clumsily drawn, whose curiously long neck has obviously just been pierced by one of Hercules' arrows. It is an ambiguous image that perhaps deserves more attention than it has hitherto received in Nietzsche scholarship.

At first sight, the Prometheus vignette seems to be a more or less straightforward reference to Wagner's program of cultural emancipation and renewal, which Nietzsche propagated quite blatantly in the final chapters of his book. Aeschylus's Prometheus was Wagner's favorite Greek tragedy and a model for his Gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork.” The figure of the unbound Prometheus, thus, evidently represents the deliverance of art from its humiliating fetters in modern, industrial society, which Wagner had heralded in his essay “Art and Revolution” (1849). Likewise, Nietzsche's comment, in section 10 of The Birth of Tragedy, that Prometheus was liberated by “the Herculean power of music” (BT §9), seems to be alluding to Wagner as a kind of Hercules redivivus whose musical drama would once again emancipate contemporary European Kultur.