Madness, Psychiatry, and the Visual Arts in History
Maarten Van Overeem
Madness from the outside in
Dementia by Esquirol
Since at least the 13th century, artists have been fascinated by insanity. There are literally hundreds of images, most stylised and stereotypic, of ‘madness’ and ‘the madman’ (or woman).
Gail A. Hornstein considers artistic depictions of insanity, article in The Psycologist, december 2015
When asylums spread across 19th-century Europe, providing a captive population of mad people, artists began to use actual patients as models for their drawings and paintings. These images are often less extreme than earlier portraits, but their typically grotesque emotionality is just as dehumanising.