Re: Bosch schizophrenic?

[harvard!topaz!harvard!mit-eddie!harvard!topaz!harvard!mit-eddie!harvard!topaz!petsd!peora!jer]

> These psychology people are just plain silly.  Art is a study of the
> human mind.

I think the underlying reason for suggesting that mental illness might have
been behind Bosch's paintings (some of them, anyway), is the nature of the
things depicted.  There is one painting, in particular, which psychologists
have gone to a great extent analyzing; it depicts a human being with a lot
of rooms inside of him, and within each room is the same person again having
various experiences.  The experiences he's shown as having are psychologically
interesting ones; but also, if you really think of the things being shown
there, it is hard to imagine how anyone could have thought of such things.
(Although this is also true for one of the members of Monty Python's group,
and also of the artist who did the animations for Pink Floyd's ``The Wall''.)

However, I will agree that if you define Schizophrenia (or whatever) as
not being able to tell the difference between imagination and reality, then
it is hard to claim from a painting what an artist's psychological condition
was, since the painting usually doesn't say anything about what he believes,
it's just a painting.  (This one by Bosch, though, does depict a lot of
strange experiences which it has been argued lead to various psychological
problems.  I think that was where part of the line of reasoning came from.
I forget what all it shows, but I remember things like the person as a young
child being severely punished; being sick for a long time; loneliness;
being persecuted by other children (I think it shows children throwing rocks
at him); etc.)

There are also some styles of art (the Time-Life book mentioned above gives
Louis Wain, a painter of cats, as an example) that generally are believed
to be a strong evidence of certain types of mental illness.