Art
and literature are full of lunatics and criminals as shown and recorded
by the history of art, literature and poetry.
Let's dwell here upon the
artistic field that includes such painters as Caravaggio and Van Gogh.
Some years ago the Triestine Mauro Covacich wrote a “History of lunatics
and of normality”, where he claimed that severe psychotics never recover
and that ordinary psychotics never recover completely. People having mental
disorders - which even affected famous artists - go through restlessness
and an excruciating anguish.
Ronald David Laing said:
“Sitting for hours near a catatonic who looks as though he doesn't recognize
his own existence may somehow not be a loss”.
Charcot, who was also called
“the Napoleon of neuroses”, created a world centre of neurological research
at Versailles de la misère de la Salpetrière, where mad and
crippled people once used to seek refuge and that inspired Gericault's
lunatics.
Charcot collected an extremely
rich iconography of satanic reproductions, images and prints of possessions
and exorcisms, which are included in very interesting pages of his “Les
Démoniaques dans l'art”.
Richard Dodd, the nineteenth-century
English poet, spent many years in a mental hospital because he killed his
father with a jack-knife while peacefully walking in the countryside. He
took him for a prince of the darkness, the enemy of his divinity, the great
Osiris, for whom he had transformed his London rented bedroom into a shrine.
In those same years the French writer Gerard de Nerval, another lunatic,
intimated that he was a devout of Isis.
Dodd claimed that the task
to defend Isis had been suggested to him by the Sphinx that had whispered
him some mysterious words.
Dodd had been drawing little
fairies, goblins, gnomes, elves, a strange world made of small creatures
for his whole life.
Dodd gave the first signs
of being mentally ill during a journey in the East, in Egypt, and was then
thought to be caused by an insulation.
When he returned home, before
killing his father, he attacked and tried to kill various people that he
thought were plotting against Osiris.
Dodd lived in a mental hospital
from 1884 to 1886 where he died at seventy. He never stopped painting and
his most famous work was “The little spirit's masterstroke” which shows
a goblin hitting a nut with a hatchet, a work in a tiny format that took
him nine years to finish.
Dodd is not the only mad
artist, though: we have Bosch with his “The boat of the lunatics”, and
Gericault that I mentioned earlier, who searched his models in a mental
hospital. Delacroix, a pupil of Gericault, painted a portrait of Tasso
afflicted by his mental disorders. Goya painted a lunatic house and Soutine
depicted “The idiot of the village”.
Even Brueghel the Elder
painted a “Woman affected by the St. Vitus dance at Wilenbeck's pilgrimage”.
Rubens immortalised “St. Ignatius curing the madmen” and Degas in the work
“L'absinthe”, painted in 1876, depicted decay caused by alcohol abuse.
Hemessen painted the quarrying of madness' stone and Griesinger himself,
the founder of modern psychiatry, once said “Are mental disorders diseases
of the brain?”.
The schizophrenic language
can also be found in many literary texts, such as in Gerard de Nerval and
Antonin Artaud's, that are almost a challenge of schizophrenia to psychiatry
because, as Kafka said in “The message of the Emperor”: “Writing recipes
is easy, but understanding people is difficult”.
We could read Ada Merini's
texts, upsetting poems that reveal her huge need of love after her experience
in a mental hospital with all her rites and fears, from the constriction
bed to electroshock.
Madness and schizophrenia
express man's splitting, and words like mind, body, psyche and soma, Es,
Ego, Super-Ego, shed light on schizophrenia's different project as a different
project of being in the world.
Madness has frequently been
strictly associated with art. It almost promoted it.
Madness has frequently been
told and represented as Ambroise Tardieu did. He illustrated Esquirol's
book “Mental disorders considered under the medical, hygienic, medical
and legal aspects” (Paris 1938) with twenty-seven valuable copper engravures.
Logliet too was known for his illustrated sayings like “Lunatics always
make themselves known”.
The object of portraits
were not just the lunatics, but physicians as well.
In “Portrait of Pinel among
the madmen”, Robert Fleury (1797-1890) depicted the Salpetrière's
chief physician removing chains from men and women while a patient bows
and kisses his hands.
And talking of Charcot's
famous and mawkish hysterics, “Le Figaro” published some articles that
attacked his spectacular medicine, while Maupassant wrote in his “Gil Blas”:
“We're all hysterics since Charcot, this breeder of hysterics, began to
manage expensively a population of neurotic women who are inoculated with
madness and shortly transformed into frenzied people in Salpetrière's
modern facilities”.
Art, painting and poetry
were born from loneliness and madness.
Recently madness even originated
the “art brut”, an artistic current made with the artistic works of mentally
sick people that was promoted by Jean Debuffet and presented for the first
time in 1946 in France at St. Anna's mental hospital. |
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Théodore Gericault
"Alienata
monomane del gioco"
Parigi, Louvre
Richard Dadd,
"The Fairy Feller's
Masterstroke"
(Il colpo da maestro
dello spiritello)
Particolare
Tate Gallery, Londra
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