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The relationship between art and mental illness has, one suspects, been speculated about since the beginning of history. Both Plato and Aristotle addressed the question of the “divine madness” of creative individuals. In more recent eras much was made of Michelangelo's “terribilita” and romantically tinged formulations about the nature of Vincent Van Gogh's disorder and its effect on his art continue to flow unabated. There has, too, been a significant body of art about mental illness, systematically discussed in Gilman's Seeing the Insane (1982).
Interest in the artistic productions of persons who are mentally ill is, however, of more recent vintage. Beginning with Lombroso's efforts in the last years of the nineteenth century, the subject took off with the (almost) concurrent publication in the early twenties of Morgendialer's (1921) Ein Geisteskranker ah Kunstler [A Mental Patient as Artist] and Prinzhorn's (1922) The Artistry of the Mentally Ill. The scholarly contributions of Cardinal (1972) and the tireless propagandizing of Jean Dubuffet (1976), culminating in the