THEhe history of art tells the story of madness. At the end of the 18th century, the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel distinguished the mentally ill. He sees them and understands their specificity, so that they can be subjected to “appropriate” care, in dedicated places.
In 1656, by royal decree, it was established the HÔpital Général, to welcome disadvantaged people “of all sexes, origins and agesof any type and extraction, and in whatever condition they find themselves, valid or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable”, who came spontaneously or were brought there by force. And here the madmen were confused with any other situation of hardship.
Pinel “frees the mentally ill in the Salpêtrière hospital”, or “has the chains removed from the mentally ill in Bicêtre”as stated in the titles of two paintings, respectively, by Tony Robert-Fleury and Charles Louis Müller.
Vittorio Sgarbi Art critic and historian
At the same time, theInstruction on how to get rid of the senses and work to be guided in the kindergartens where they are destined of two psychiatrists, Jean Colombier and François Doublet, in which the four classes of spiritual diseases are distinguished: frenzy, melancholy, mania, imbecility. The medical gaze is refined, but also the pictorial one.
In 1818, struck by the shipwreck of the ship “Meduse” in Mauritania, Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusaa lifeboat where the surviving castaways find temporary refuge, before being swallowed by the sea or devouring each other due to hunger on the landing atoll. The large, overwhelmingly dramatic painting, exhibited at the Salon of the same year, aroused harsh criticism and new enthusiasm.
Théodore Géricault: “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818-19), Louvre Museum, Paris. (photo DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI / De Agostini via Getty Images)
Géricault chooses a particular moment in the story, when, on the eleventh day at sea, the castaways see a ship in the distance, which however does not notice them and goes on. It is the moment in which you encounter the frenzy of those who wave their arms to attract, in vain, the attention and abandonment of those who, exhausted, lie on the wooden planks or are about to slip irremediably into the sea. Death and life, anguish and hope.
The anatomical details are formidable, which the painter refined by frequenting morgues and anatomical theatres of Beaujon Hospital, with a growing interest in medical science. The raft loses its reference to the historical record to enter a universal dimension, yet another reincarnation of Ship of Fools of Bosch or, also, of humanity overwhelmed in Last Judgment by Michelangelo. Géricault recounts the shipwreck of a desperate humanity, every shipwreck, of every time. And humanity as a shipwreck.
The Raft of the Medusa is a significant antecedent of Cycle of the alienatedwhich the painter attended between 1820 and 1824, commissioned by Etienne-Jean Georget, psychiatrist, student of Philippe Pinel, in Salpêtrière, and who also treated Géricault, suffering from depressive melancholyand that in his family he had known how devastating mental illness was.
Jean Georget needed for his students to visualize classes of mental deviationnot dissimilar to those identified by Jean Colombier and François Doublet, and thus opens the doors of Salpêtrière to Géricault, who portrays 10 monomaniacs, of which only five remain: the insane woman with the mania of gambling, the insane person with the mania of command, the insane person with the mania of kidnapping infants, the insane woman with the mania of envy, the kleptomaniac.
Nothing more disruptive than the contemporary, albeit wonderful, portraits of Ingres, men and women of the upper middle class, powerful, crystallized in an eternal ideal, Raphaelesque model. Géricault and his psychiatrist seal a pact between art and science, but the painter goes beyond the commission, frees himself, and restores the drama of madness but also the profound, intangible humanity. The eyes of the alienated leap from monochrome backgrounds, they look at nothing, except beyond, but they are not dull. The liquidity of their pupils is restless, and calls us to account for our normality.
The “illness” does not disappear, it is confined to the clothes, the scruffiness of the hair, the skin, but the look is abysmalas if Géricault had wanted to capture his own “sick” gaze in that of the madmen. More than the psychiatrist Pinel, it was Géricault who liberated the mad with his portraits.
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