The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500-1850 [1 ed.] 0826456413, 9780826456410

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The Art of Frenzy

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The Art of Frenzy Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500-1850 JANE KROMM

continuum LONDON

•

NEW YORK

Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 First published 2002 © Jane Kromm 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-5641-3 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kromm, Jane, 1949The art of frenzy: public madness in the visual culture of Europe, 1500-1850. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-5641-3 1. Mania—Europe—History. 2. Psychiatry—Europe—History. 3. Psychiatry in art. 4. Art—16th century. 5. Art, Modern—17th century. 6. Art, Modern—18th century. I. Title. RC450.A1 K76 2002 616.89'0094-dc21

2001047583

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents Illustrations

vi

Introduction

x

1

Mania in the classical tradition: a madness of warriorheroes and tyrants

1

2

The unmaking of heroic mania

39

3

The politics of mania

100

4

Mania, riot, and revolution

164

5

The measure of mania

208

6

Mania and hysteria

254

Bibliography

272

Index

279

Illustrations 1.1 Asteas, Attic calyx krater, c. 340 B.C., The Madness of Hercules. 1.2 The Lykaon Painter, Attic bell krater, c. 440 B.C. 1.3 Apulian loutrophore, Lycurgus and Lyssa, c. 320 B.C. 1.4 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Gioli de Ferrari, 1543, canto 23. 1.5 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Valgrisi, 1556, canto 24. 1.6 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, London, 1591, canto 24. 1.7 Christof LeBlon, frontispiece, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1652 edn. 1.8 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1625, "Furore." 1.9 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Paris, 1644, "Fureur." 1.10 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Amsterdam, 1644, "Colerico." 1.11 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1625, "Ira." 2.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Marie de' Medici as Bellona, 1622-5. 2.2 Henri Gissey (attrib.), La Guerre, 1654. 2.3 Henri Gissey (attrib.), Une furie, 1654. 2.4 Charles LeBrun, La Colere, c. 1660s (Guiffrey and Marcel 6501). 2.5 David Colijns, David Playing the Harp, c. 1635-40. 2.6 Lucas Vorsterman, after Adrian Brouwer, Ira, c. 1628. 2.7 Adrian van de Venne, All-Arm, 1621. 2.8 Adrian van de Venne, Kalis-Boud, 1634. 2.9 Anon., Tom o' Bedlam, Bagford Ballads, c. 1680. 2.10 O. Gatti, emblem 72, "Pazzo colla spada," in Paolo Maccio, Emblemata, 1628. 2.11 Jean Le Pautre, La Rue aux Ours, 1661. 2.12 Aniello Falcone, Portrait of Masaniello, c. 1647. 2.13 George Glover, The Seven Deadly Sins, "Wrath," c. mid-1630s. 2.14 Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, c. 1630-3. 2.15 Anon., Mother Damnable, 1676. 2.16 Jacques Callot, The Possessed Woman, or Exorcism, 1630.

Illustrations

t'ii

2.17 Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola, c. 1617-18. 2.18 Marinus van der Goes (Ignatius Cornelius Marinus), after Peter Paul Rubens, St. Ignatius Loyola Healing a Demoniac, c. 1630. 2.19 Peter van Coeverden, relief, 1686, formerly asylum s'Hertogenbosch. 2.20 Peter Schenck, Dolhuis, c. 1710. 2.21 Gerard Lambertsz., Frenzy, c. 1619-20. 2.22 Pieter Xavery, Two Madmen, 1673. 2.23 Robert White, after Thomas Cartwright, Bethlem Hospital, 1677. 2.24 Perette, Hopital de la Salpestriere, Paris, c. 1668. 2.25 Caius Gabriel Gibber, Raving Madness, c. 1676. 2.26 Caius Gabriel Gibber, Raving Madness, c. 1676. 3.1 Anon., after Romeyn de Hooghe, 't Verbeter-huis der Torys, onder de cure van de Whigse Doctor, 1713. 3.2 Bernard Lens and John Sturt, "Digression on Madness," from Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1710. 3.3 Jean Audran, after Claude Gillot, The Passion for War, 1727. 3.4 William Hogarth, "Rake in Bedlam," The Rake's Progress, pi. 8, 1735. 3.5 Overton, King, Bowles, after William Hogarth, "Rake in Bedlam," 1735. 3.6 William Hogarth, "Rake in Bedlam," 1763. 3.7 Henry Peacham, "Ad Britanniam," emblem from Minerva Britannia, 1612. 3.8 John Hamilton Mortimer, Britannia, 1777, Bell's Poets. 3.9 Anon., The Execution, 1763. 3.10 Anon., Britannia in Fetters, 1769. 3.11 Anon., Britannia in Distress, 1770. 3.12 Robert Edge Pine, engraving by James McArdell, A Madwoman, 1760. 3.13 Francois Boitard, frontispiece for John Fletcher, The Pilgrim, 1711. 3.14 Robert Edge Pine, Madness, c. 1772. 3.15 John Hamilton Mortimer, Read with Expression of Insanity, 1775-8. 3.16 Carle van Loo, Allegory of War, 1753-5. 3.17 Laurent Cars and J. F. Beauvarlet, after Carle van Loo, Mile Clairon in the Role of Medea, 1764. 3.18 Sir John Soane, St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, 1777.

viii

Illustrations

3.19 Thomas Lawrence, Mad Girl, 1786. 3.20 Thomas Stothard, "She Pulled out a Poniard and Vowed to Plunge it into His Heart," Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 1783. 4.1 Anon., The Scotch Damien, 1763. 4.2 Anon., Ecce Homo, 1775. 4.3 James Gillray (attrib.), The Political Moon, or the Present State of the Majority as They Appear Everywhere, 1780. 4.4 Anon., The Burning and Plundering of Newgate and Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob, 1780. 4.5 Thomas Rowlandson, Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed, 1784. 4.6 Thomas Rowlandson, [The Incurable], 1784. 4.7 Anon., The Devonshire Amusement, 1784. 4.8 Isaac Cruikshank (attrib.), [Fox in Bedlam], 1784. 4.9 Richard Newton, A Ministerial Fact; or a Squib of the First Day, 1786. 4.10 Thomas Rowlandson (attrib.), The Hospital for Lunatics, 1789. 4.11 James Gillray (attrib.), Cooling the Brain, or — the Little Major Shaving the Shaver, 1789. 4.12 Thomas Rowlandson, A Peep into Bethlehem, c. 1792-3. 4.13 Henry Fuseli, The Lazar House, c. 1792. 4.14 William Blake, Europe, "Preludium," pi. 2, 1794. 4.15 Francisco Goya, Yard with Madmen, c. 1794. 4.16 Thomas Rowlandson, Philosophy Run Mad, or a Stupendous Monument of Human Wisdom, c. 1792-3. 4.17 William Dent, The French Feast of Reason, or the Cloven-Foot Triumphant, 1793. 5.1 Charles Devritz, Theroigne de Mericourt, 1845, after a lost painting of the 1790s. 5.2 Georges F. M. Gabriel, Theroigne de Mericourt a la Salpetriere, 1816. 5.3 Ambroise Tardieu, Theroigne de Mericourt, from Des maladies mentales, 1838. 5.4 Anon., Philippe Pinel, Traite medico-philosophique sur I'alienation mental ou la manie, 1801. 5.5 Georges F. M. Gabriel and E. Lingee, "Demonomanie," Dictionnaire des sciences medicales, pi. IV, vol. 8 (1814). 5.6 Georges F. M. Gabriel and E. Lingee, "Manie," Dictionnaire des sciences medicales, vol. 30 (1818). 5.7 Georges F. M. Gabriel, Officier, devenu fou, par opinion politique, c. 1813.

Illustrations

5.8 Georges F. M. Gabriel, Negotiant furieux, c. 1825. 5.9 Georges F. M. Gabriel, Fille publique, c. 1813. 5.10 Georges F. M. Gabriel, Ancien capitaine de la Garde Imperiale, furieux, c. 1825. 5.11 Ambroise Tardieu, "Manie," Des maladies mentales, 1838. 5.12 Ambroise Tardieu, "Dementia," Des maladies mentales, 1838. 5.13 Ambroise Tardieu, "Dementia," Des maladies mentales, 1838. 5.14 Theodore Gericault, Monomanie du commandement militaire, c. 1819-20. 5.15 Theodore Gericault, Monomanie du vol, c. 1819-20. 5.16 Theodore Gericault, Monomanie de I'envie, c. 1819—20. 5.17 Horace Vernet, La Folle par amour, 1819. 5.18 N.-T. Charlet, La Manie des armes, 1823. 5.19 Anon., Chasses de I'Hotel des Incurables, Us vont a Charenton, c. 1820. 5.20 Honore Daumier, Le Charenton Ministeriel: differentes monomanies des alienes politiques, 1832. 6.1 Paul Richer, "Attaque demoniaque," Etudes cliniques sur la grande hysterie, 1885. 6.2 Paul Regnard, "Attitudes passionelles, Menace," pi. 27, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, II (1878), D. Bournville and P. Regnard. 6.3 J. Scarlett Davis after Peter Paul Rubens, "Demoniaque," pi. 40, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, (1876-7), D. Bournville and P. Regnard. 6.4 Photogravure Goupil, after Tony Robert-Fleury, Pinel delivrant les alienees, 1876. 6.5 Renauld (attrib.), Ruinepuhlique, soeur de I'an-pire, 1871. 6.6 Anonymous etching after Andre Brouillet, Une lecon clinique a la Salpetriere, 1887.

ix

Introduction This is a study of the most public, and consequently most visible, form of madness - that identified traditionally with the condition called mania. Conceived from the outset as an externalized disorder, mania was typically taken at face value. It was always identified with the visible trappings of behavior, gesture, and expression, and never associated with the subterranean, the subtle, or the elusive. What gave the maniacal its startling, even arresting, quality was this demonstrative, almost performative character: mania was a private trauma that intrusively claimed the public's awareness. A high degree of visible notoriety was thus always central to mania — in fact, the disorder's history and significance can only be fully understood by investigating its visual articulation across images and texts. Despite its association with such simplistic exteriorized traits as agitation, impetuous movement, and disorderliness, mania was no mere superficial phenomenon, but one characterized by impressively fluid and complex historical affiliations. Mania was also called furor or frenzy, and its symptoms were sometimes regarded as the root cause of demonic possession. The condition was related to an excess of the passions, and to excessive anger in particular. Acts of violence without rational justification were considered a common form of the disorder, but other aggressive traits, especially sexual ones, were also thought to be typical. This inclination toward belligerence and aggressive sexuality meant that contemporary assumptions about gender would always be critical elements in the dynamics of mania. The position of mania, furor, or frenzy altered dramatically in the early modern period when their traditional themes were implicated in a series of major shifts and critical debates. Redefinitions of civility and incivility in primarily exterior terms alerted many to the dangerously uncivil behavior identified with mania. The increased number of wandering, marginal, unsavory types associated with too much of the wrong kind of liberty similarly raised the specter of mania's symptoms and their logic. Practices of confinement also targeted mania, and the creation of imposing edifices with decorative signage raised maniacal traits to a permanent visual and civic status. Mania's relation to energy, passion, and excess construed in increasingly secular, behavioral terms colored re-evaluations of the

Introduction

xi

diagnosis in medical writing. As vices were transformed into passions, they were codified in emblem books and expressive studies, gaining both a standard form and a prospectus for limited variation. In their handling of furor and ira, these treatises typically promoted the classical habit of aligning individual experience with that of the state, assuring for mania a critical role in the changing iconographies of war and tyranny. Debates about madness in the early modern period tend to position folly or melancholy at the center of their definitions of significant disorder, allotting to mania a minor role on the periphery as a profoundly uninteresting phenomenon. But this marginal position has less to do with the disorder's comparative metaphoric thinness, and everything to do with the progressive loss of status and downward trajectory that mania's reputation suffered. The social implications of mania's symptoms facilitated this decline in status and enabled the disorder's attributes especially aggression, insubordination, and disregard for authority - to be drawn into a series of political controversies from the seventeenth century through the post-Napoleonic period. Mania figured prominently in the claims and counterclaims exchanged around such issues as the pursuit of mindlessly aggressive policies, and disputes over prerogatives and rights, liberties and anarchy. Eventually mania's repeatedly politicized status made it a liability for those describing its symptoms in word and image. Representations of the insane that included mania along with a variety of other ailments first became a particular area of study in the late nineteenth century. The earliest publications on the subject typically interpreted images as a means of exploring themes in medical history, often using them for discussions of retrospective diagnosis. Two prime examples of this sort are Les Demoniaques dans I'art (1887) and Les Difformes et les malades dans I'art (1889) by Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, whose efforts in this field were well known and identified with the asylum where both held appointments, the Salpetriere in Paris. 1 Richer went on to produce L'Art et medecine in 1902, and another colleague, Henri Meige, contributed various articles throughout the 1890s to one of the asylum's journals, the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere. In Germany, Eugen Hollander published Die Medizin in der Klassischen Malerei (1903) and Plastik und Medizin (1912). L. P. Mark's Art and Medicine came out in London in 1906.2 Most of the studies in this first wave of interest in representations of physical and/or mental disorder were the work of medical professionals with a special interest in art who used their expertise in one area and connoisseurship skills in the other to congratulate or chide the abilities of a Rubens or a Raphael. This orientation flourished in subsequent works on the history of medical illustration, whereas other recent studies incorporate a more extensive investigation into the cultural and historical context in which the images were produced. Notable works of this type are William Schupbach's essay "A New Look at the Cure of Folly" (1978) and Sander Gilman's Seeing the Insane (1981).3 Several catalogs for

xii

Introduction

exhibitions drawn from collections of art on medical subjects have also contributed much to our understanding of these images' connection to cultural perceptions of, and attitudes toward, mental illness. These include Carl Zigrosser's Ars Medica (1955) and Medicine and the Artist (1970), based on the Smith, Kline, Beecham Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Madness in America by Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, which brought together works from various museums. 4 As distinguished from traditional accounts of medical progress, recent work on the social and cultural history of medicine in the early modern and modern periods has contributed greatly to a more complete understanding of public perceptions of madness. Some works summarize vast amounts of primary source material from treatises to statutes and court records, such as Basil Clarke's Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (1975), or offer close readings of significant new discoveries, like Michael MacDonald's analysis of Richard Napier's casebooks in Mystical Bedlam (1981).5 For the later period, Roy Porter's synthesis of key developments in eighteenth-century England, Mind-Forg'd Manacles (1987), and Jan Goldstein's study of the development of the psychiatric profession in nineteenth-century Paris, Console and Classify (1987), have provided critical guidelines for this present study.6 Any project of this type must also acknowledge the influence of Michel Foucault's controversial Folie et deraison (1961).7 My study shares some misgivings over Foucault's analysis that have been voiced by other scholars in the field, especially the applicability of his conclusions outside France and his reification of the confinement phenomenon. 8 Beyond these general reservations are those more specific to this study: Foucault's interest in the visual culture of madness is occasional and sporadic, and his casual handling of the relationship between motifs and actualities also limits the validity of some of his conclusions.9 Alongside representational concerns, Foucault's interest in the relationship between anarchy and madness is addressed, in this study, but in a more delimited form as a recurrent aspect specific to mania's historical trajectory. Finally, the present study is indebted to three influential methodologies that have altered the way images are understood in relation to their historical context. The first is Saturn and Melancholy (1964), the joint work of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, which traces the iconography of melancholy alongside that humor's position in philosophical and medical treatises from antiquity through the Renaissance.10 The most traditional of the three positions considered here, this study nevertheless demonstrated not only an exemplary interdisciplinarity but also that changes in perceptions of melancholy were often shaped by its visual articulation, or through some interactive relationship between the visual and the textual, significantly weakening the conventional premise that images are reflective rather than constitutive elements in culture. Lynn Hunt, in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), advanced this position by demonstrating the critical

Introduction

xiii

role of images and symbols in articulating political processes and in giving direction to the forces of social change. Hunt argued that it was the symbolic practices (images, gestures, and rhetoric) as well as the people who practiced them that "provided the logic of revolutionary political action." 11 Looking at other models for the way art functions in the public sphere, Linda Nochlin's adaptation of Frederic Jameson's notion of a "political unconscious" proposed that the political element in visual culture might not always be the result of a self-aware or even fully conscious application, but that the "political in the work of art ... or in the processes of art making" was more in the nature of an "unconscious . . . inscription" across the visual field. 12 Elements derived from all three of these projects have influenced the methodological composite that has guided the present work. Tracing mania's trajectory from classical motifs and texts through the humoral tradition of the early modern era takes its inspiration from the study of melancholy by Panofsky, et al., but supplements this model with a more socially conscious conception of historical context. The maniacal elements of visual culture are considered, following Hunt's lead, as integral to the processes that shaped certain political discourses, and this representational percept can be found in relation to major upheavals even before the decade of the French Revolution. Adopting Nochlin's orientation, the phenomenon of mania in its visibly dangerous aspect can be best understood as a not always entirely conscious pictorial and political strategy. Most of the works analyzed for this study are European representations produced from the 1500s through to the 1830s. English, French, and Dutch contributions dominate the field, with the exception of some crucial Italian works that revived mania's antique prototypes and codified its classical motifs for emblematic and allegorical consumption all over Europe. The images consulted range from book vignettes, engravings and print cycles, to altarpieces, asylum sculptures, royal decorative projects, political and social caricature, and medical illustrations. All of the works under consideration were acknowledged by their authors and audiences as having some distinctive connection with mania or the conditions affiliated with it. Chapter 1 examines mania as it was conceptualized in the classical era and in its particular role in the madness of warriors. Chapter 2 traces the decline of this form of heroic mania as it was diffused over a broad range of everyday, unheroic circumstances as likely to involve women as men. A new level of notoriety for mania was achieved when it became the representation of choice in depictions of demonic possession and asylum decoration. In Chapter 3, maniacal characterizations begin to infiltrate political caricature and allegory, with women increasingly taking on the role of the belligerent maniac. Chapter 4 examines the position of mania in out-of-doors politics and in revolutionary ideology, while Chapter 5 studies the dominance of the disorder among representations of the insane of the kind that were manipulated for professional and political advantage

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by the alienists of nineteenth-century Paris. The epilogue sketches out the nineteenth-century theories and representations of hysteria that colonized and then obliterated mania's visibility and performative uniqueness. I am grateful for the financial support that I have received in the course of working on this project. My initial research was funded by a grant from the American Association of University Women, and subsequent work was made possible by grants from the University of Alabama at Huntsville and Purchase College, State University of New York. Many friends and scholars have encouraged and advised me over the years. I would particularly like to thank Patricia Allderidge, Marilyn Brown, Eric Carlson, Elizabeth Childs, William Crelly, Meghan Ducey, Elizabeth Feerick, Elizabeth Guffey, Judy Henson, Steve Henson, John Howett, Patricia Johnson, Paul Kaplan, Gari LaGuardia, Cynthia Lawrence, Heather McPherson, Jonathan Miller, Linda Nochlin, Rose Norman, Robert A. Paul, Roy Porter, William Pressly, Rosalie Reutershan, William Schupbach, Christine Stevenson, Wayne te Brake, Victoria Volk Bennett, and Carla Yanni.

Notes 1 Both works were published in Paris by Delahaye & Lecrosnier. A particular kind of retrospective diagnosis in light of contemporary medical thinking with strong moral overtones can actually be traced further back to works like Lavater's physiognomical studies of the late eighteenth century. 2 Hollander's works were published in Stuttgart by Enke; Bale brought out Mark's volume. 3 Schupbach's essay appeared in Medical History 22, 3 (July, 1978): 267—81; Oilman's work was published by Wiley and Brunner/Mazel in New York. 4 Zigrosser's catalogs were printed in Philadelphia by the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Madness in America was published by Cornell University Press in 1995, and accompanied the exhibition at Binghamton University Art Museum. 5 Clarke's work was published by the University of Wales Press in Cardiff; MacDonald's title appeared in the Cambridge History of Medicine series published by the Cambridge University Press. 6 Porter's book was first published by Harvard University Press, but is now produced by Athlone; Goldstein's work was published by Cambridge University Press. 7 First published in Paris by Librairie Plon; translated by Richard Howard and published in abridged form as Madness and Civilization (New York: Random House, 1965). 8 See, especially Lawrence Stone, "Madness," New York Review of Books, 29 (December 16, 1982): 28-36; H. C. Erik Midelfort, "Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault," in Barbara C. Malamut, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 247-65; Jeffrey Weeks, "Foucault for Historians," History Workshop Journal 14

Introduction

9 10 11 12

xv

(Autumn, 1982): 106-19; Porter, Mind-Forg'd, pp. 5-9; Arthur Still and Irving Velody, eds, Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault's Histoire de la folie (London: Routledge, 1992). On this issue, see especially Midelfort's work on the ship of fools theme, "Reading and Believing," in Still and Velody, Rewriting, pp. 105—9. Published in London by Nelson. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 11. Linda Nochlin, "The Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art," Art Journal 46, 4 (Winter, 1987): 11.

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Dedicated to my mother and to the memory of my father

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1 Mania in the classical tradition: a madness of warrior-heroes and tyrants Popular belief throughout the classical era identified madness with visible signs or perceptible actions, and usually this meant startling or otherwise unaccountable behavior. Wayward acts of this type were attributed to supernatural forces, and it was common to assume that they were punitive visitations from an affronted god. Contemporary accounts emphasize the menacing presence of the visibly insane, who were objects of scorn to be avoided in the streets and excluded from the temple. 1 The word used most often for madness in Greek prose writing is mania, which could mean both insanity generally as well as a narrower condition linked to anger and a martial kind of frenzy. 2 In Latin, the disorder was called furiosus because of its source in anger; furor could in fact refer both to excessive fury or simply to the passion of anger itself. A number of the words associated with madness, including mania, figure in Greek religion and mythology as personifications who induce the condition in others.3 The most ancient of these are the keres, a kind of personified bacillae that surreptitiously invade the body through the open mouth, and thereby cause either madness or blindness - an intriguing equation. The fully human personifications of madness are Mania, Lyssa, and Oistros, and they developed later. The maniac are goddesses of madness with no known genealogy whose wrath might be assuaged by sacrifice. Lyssa is a more individualized abstraction who represents violent frenzy, and who, like the maniac, is a female goad charged with the pursuit of warrior-heroes. Always appearing alone, Lyssa is also distinctive for a remote retributive connection to Dionysian cult practices. In appearance and function, the maniac and Lyssa are very similar, and they also resemble the erinyes, or furies, as angry women who are dispensers of madness. There is some evidence based on the naming of shrines that the erinyes and the maniac were on some level interchangeable entities. All of these women have disturbing looks, with disheveled hair, and ugly, even monstrous, distorted features. Lyssa and the maniac are typically wreathed with snakes, and carry whips and torches. Oistros, the least common form of madness personified, shares many of these attributes but is distinguished by his sex. While Oistros' literary

2

The Art of Frenzy

representations suggest a stinging insect in relentless pursuit of his typically female victims, his pictorializations show a man who, like Lyssa or the maniae, holds snakes and torches or whips. It is Lyssa goading the warrior-heroes who have run afoul of the gods who appears most often in the mythological tradition and in the tragedies. Her name means both martial fury and wolfish rage, and as such she inflicts a form of madness that is synonymous with mania. 4 This pattern is set as early as The Iliad, where Lyssa is invoked three times. She is said to enter and overtake both Hector and Achilles, inducing in them a kind of berserk behavior identified with ekstasis, or the state of being outside oneself, in its most negative form. Such raving was valued during a pitched battle, but its occurrence outside the context of war was considered a disastrous inversion of prowess. Lyssa's targets are always major players, the protagonists of extensive story cycles or myth clusters, and they have a greater significance than the comparatively archaic and obscure malevolent forces represented by the female personifications. While there are some variations in this pattern, certain critical features are consistent: caused by supernatural forces and delivered by Lyssa, the hero's mania or berserk attack, often with bestial undertones, is grounded in the angry violence associated with war, and the result degrades and impugns warrior virtues. The philosophical debate around mania draws on the dynamic processes embedded in this mythological paradigm, and the condition is universally taken to be the most extreme form of human behavior possible. A series of differential arguments in classical philosophy distinguish an inferior "organic" mania from a favored "charismatic" kind, and separate both from the superior state of melancholia. These distinctions are usually theorized by contrasting negative forms of excess and anarchy with positive forms of magnitude and expansiveness. In the Phaedrus, Plato allows both organic and charismatic mania the shared symptoms of frenzy and ekstasis caused by the soul's desire for freedom.5 But here the similarities end, because the charismatic maniac could then experience any of the four kinds of good mania - prophesying, revelation, poetic inspiration, and love madness - whereas the organic maniac would experience only an illness of overexcitation and chaos. Aristotle also acknowledged the superiority of charismatic mania by interweaving it with melancholia as elements essential to the creative process.6 He maintained that both forms of mania, the organic and the charismatic, were caused by melancholy, and that the melancholic temperament was a necessary prerequisite for producing a work of genius. However, this could only happen if the spark of maniacal inspiration was also present. The resulting compound was essentially volatile and unstable: it could lead to admirable results, as in the works of the "manic melancholies," Plato and Socrates, or it could misfire, as Aristotle claimed it did in the frenzy of Heracles. While philosophies of creativity relegated organic mania to a relatively

Mania in the classical tradition

3

minor role in this way, the condition figured independently, without negative comparisons to charismatic mania or melancholia, in Plato's visceral model for types of government. In The Republic, Plato aligned health with orderly rule in contrast to illness as a reign of disorder. Organic order, or health, relied on the correct relations of dominance and subordination among the body's component parts. Illness or disorder comes about when these proper relations of power are overruled: to produce health is to establish the elements in a body in the natural relation of dominating and being dominated by one another, while to cause disease is to bring it about that one rules or is ruled by the other contrary to nature. (444 D-E)

Plato identifies these improper forms of domination with the political models of tyranny and despotism, but also with madness: "The madman, the deranged man, attempts and expects to rule over not only men but gods ... Then a man becomes tyrannical in the full sense of the word" (573, A—C). A disrespectful and usurping domination is thus central to organic mania in Plato's thinking, making the condition a standard against which control and subordination within the body and within the state might be judged. Organic mania assumes the status of an ur-illness in Plato's political philosophy, both in the sense that it is the most disorderly of all disordered states, and in the sense that, as a favored trope for misgovernment, it is a principal disease of the body politic. Medical writers on mania set the internal unruliness that erupted into despotic behavior within the larger conceptual framework of the humoral tradition. This venerable physiological system was consolidated around 400 B.C. in the Hippocratic text, On the Nature of Man, a work that combined the theories of Alcmaeon of Croton and Empedocles.7 The constructs and correspondences of the humoral system soon became ubiquitous features of the classical world. In this system, four humors were identified with the bodily fluids of blood, phlegm, yellow bile or choler, and black bile; they correspond to the four cosmic elements of earth, air, fire, and water, and incorporate varying degrees of the four qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and wetness. Health reigns when there is a balance among the humors, but at the same time, it was widely believed that each person's constitution and visual complexion were marked by a preponderance of one humor over the others. A predominance of blood characterized the sanguine temperament, of phlegm the phlegmatic, of yellow bile or choler the choleric, and of black bile the melancholic. Yellow bile was both hot and dry, and so the choleric temperament was distinguished by a heated irritability and quick-temperedness that could readily escalate into frenzy or mania. Those afflicted with this kind of madness, according to the Hippocratic text The Sacred Disease, were "noisy, evil-doers and restless, always doing something inopportune." 8 In contrast, black bile was cold and dry, and the cool deliberativeness of the melancholic temperament could devolve into a deeply depressive

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The Art of Frenzy

melancholic condition. Internal, organic changes could trigger off these imbalances, but they might also be caused by emotional disturbances, and so emotions, or passions, were also thought to disrupt the humoral climate. In most classical schemas, the passions occupied an ambiguous position, because they could be positive or negative depending upon the intensity or situation of their occurrence. Some saw them as innately problematic, as in the Stoic view that emotions invariably overpowered the individual. Others, like Aristotle, insisted that emotions were good when judged ethically appropriate to the circumstances. Both Plato and Aristotle elevated anger, the passion that could excite the choleric humor into mania, above the other appetites of hunger, greed, and fear, because anger was capable of siding with reason in conflicts between the rational and the sensual. For the Epicureans, anger might be similarly beneficial, but excessive anger was invariably bad, and Seneca insisted that anger was never salutary. And so while it was acknowledged that anger might serve a useful, rational purpose, there was some consensus that in practice, it was more likely to manifest itself in a sinister way.9 Alongside mania's humoral implications, the Hippocratic treatises acknowledged the disorder's status by including it in the classification of mental diseases as separate from, but equal in importance to, melancholia, epilepsy, and paranoia. Consistent with the philosophical tradition, medical writers emphasized mania's difference from melancholia, and saw in the former a pathological degree of agitation that was both excessive and dangerous. But here citations from clinical experience bear out such claims: Paul of Aegina observed that mania "occasions ungovernable madness, that those affected with it destroy persons who come near them unguardedly," and Soranus recommended the use of quiet rooms for their treatment.10 Some maniacal symptoms were discerned in those suffering from other ailments, especially epilepsy and hysteria. Ruminations over the exact nature of Heracles' disease illuminate the extent to which these three conditions could overlap.11 In the Hippocratic text, On the Diseases of Women, a certain kind of hysteria is said to share some of the symptoms of Heracles' disease, particularly the rolling eyes, clenched teeth, and foaming saliva. This is the first mention of Heracles' ailment in a medical treatise, and the writer has assumed his readers' familiarity with the syndrome. Most commentators in the medical tradition think that Heracles suffered from epilepsy, but a later Hippocratic lexicon by Erotion, while preferring this diagnosis, does acknowledge the existence of a parallel claim for mania. Non-medical literary accounts consistently identified the disease as mania. The visual representation of warrior-maniacs like Heracles, Hector, or Achilles, goaded on by Lyssa or Mania, span the entire classical era, but a significant cluster of depictions are found on south Italian vases of the fourth century B.C. During this period, the south Italian settlements of Magna Graecia were continually under threat from a series of tyrants and

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from invasive, belligerent Italian tribes. The area was frequently facing attack, or at best suspended in a state of imminent siege, and the result was a pervasive instability. In response to a succession of tyrants, a newly pertinent topic was defining the good ruler, and numerous works produced from 400 to 350 B.C. were dedicated to this theme, such as Xenophon's popular Cyropedia, a fictional life of the Persian king Cyrus. These treatises articulated a timely wariness about despotic individual behavior that threatened the very survival of the polis model.12 Throughout this insecure era, the southern Italian cities favored the art forms of previous generations, which, in theater and in painting, were repeated with increasing stylization and elaborate effects. Greek vase painters had migrated to the area, and centers of pottery production developed here when the export trade dried up during and after the Peloponnesian War, allowing Attic painting to influence significantly the local Apulian and Lucanian schools of vase production. Greek mythological themes and stories drawn from the great fifth-century tragedies were especially popular in all the south Italian pottery works, but they were particularly strong around Paestum. Artists in these local workshops typically preferred more complicated effects than those of the Attic tradition, with statuesque figures dispersed across double superimposed friezes. This taste for compositional complexity and stylized rhetorical poses is known to have had its source in contemporary stage practices.13 Among the surviving vases in the beleaguered Greek settlements of fourth-century Italy, the notable ubiquitous maniacal visitations are those of the warrior-hero Heracles and the warrior-tyrant Lycurgus. The instigator of this madness is usually Lyssa, who appears on over thirty surviving vases from this period, with Oistros and Mania goading victims more rarely. 14 Around 340 B.C., Asteas, the leading Greek master in Paestum, depicted the scene of Heracles' madness on a red figure krater (Figure 1.1). The story in most accounts relates how a vengeful Hera induces Heracles' frenzy following his murder of the usurper, Lycus, who was himself about to sacrifice the hero's family. In his madness, Heracles unknowingly kills his wife and children. The vase shows the principals, Heracles, one of his sons, and his wife Megara, before a two-story, palatial-like scaffolding. There are half-length renderings of Mania, lolaos, and Alcmene, who observe events from the balcony above, much like contemporary stagings of the previous century's tragedies. Still in his warrior regalia, Heracles has seized his son and rushes toward a bonfire of household goods, clearly about to throw the child on this makeshift pyre. Philostratus, describing a later and perhaps imaginary, but certainly similar, painting of this scene, identifies these items as the sacrificial basins and utensils associated with Zeus as god of the hearth and other social institutions. 15 The agitated draperies of the hero's chiton, and his wide-eyed stare are the collateral signs of Heracles' madness, the main evidence of which is the very act of killing his family. An impassive

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The Art of Frenzy

Figure 1.1 Asteas, Attic calyx crater, c. 340 B.C., The Madness of Hercules. [Heracles] A. Trigo: Museo Arqueologico Nacional, Madrid.

Mania, named and visible in profile at the upper left, holds a whip to identify her role as dispenser of Heracles' madness. This pictorial version of the hero's frenzy differs in several respects from the mythological variants of the story, the most unusual feature being murder by fire rather than arms or brute force. There are significant differences as well from Euripides' tragedy of c. 420 B.C., including the substitution of Mania for Lyssa, and that Heracles is shown performing the killing in his warrior gear. In Euripides, the murders take place in the

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palace and offstage, with Heracles only afterwards visible raving, roped to a column on a platform rolled out onto the stage, his murdered family strewn around him. 16 Also in the play, incremental changes in the hero's mental disorientation and the steps leading up to his violent deeds are related first in careful detail by a messenger, who notes the abrupt alterations overtaking Heracles as he stalks his family throughout the palace, deluded that he is in another land, and mistaking them for relatives of a great enemy who must be killed. Along with his dislocation and violent, valor-perverting behavior, Heracles exhibits the standard features of frenzy: "he was no longer himself. He contorted, he/rolled his eyes so bloodshot roots/protruded" and later still he "rolled his eyes with a Gorgon's savage glare" (932-3; 990).17 For his rendering, Asteas has deployed what was clearly the well-known expressive facial element in mania, the glaring, rolling or diastrophos eyes, and has shown Heracles' furor at its most destructive, characterizing the scene with a sense of the accelerated, cataclysmic violence that Euripides has Lyssa invoke: Then I shall run races into Heracles' heart more forcefully than the ocean groaning with breakers or than earthquake, or than the painful impact of the thunderbolt. I shall shatter his house and bring it down upon him. But first I shall have made him kill his children. And although he will be their murderer, he will not realize he has killed until my madness leaves him. Look at him! He is already shaking his head at the start of his race, rolling his distorted flashing Eyes without speaking. His breathing is uncontrolled like a bull ready to attack and he bellows terribly. I call on the Fates from Hell to follow immediately in full cry like the hounds following a huntsman. I shall soon make you dance more wildly and I shall play upon you a pipe of terror. (860—72) The chorus describes the terrifying sight of Lyssa's departure: She has gone in her chariot, she who is the cause of so much suffering. She goads her team as if intent on doing damage, her eyes flashing, Lyssa, a Gorgon of Night (surrounded by) a hundred hissing snakes. (880-3) Asteas accentuated certain features for his rendering of this episode, while omitting or downplaying others. Mania/Lyssa is shown as the horse-driving, whip-armed goad, but without the chariot, snakes, or scarifying gorgon aspect, and so there is little sense of her active intervention in the cosmic or personal mayhem she has brought on. With the supernatural and monstrous elements marginalized, Asteas gives the

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The Art of Frenzy

field to Heracles, delineating him at the height of his destructive behavior, showing the dishonored hero with wide, unseeing eyes, who exemplifies the horror of warrior behavior turned upside down. Most of the fourth-century vases assign a larger role and degree of agency to the female abstraction who is the bringer of madness, developing this personification from its initial appearance around the end of the previous century. One of the earliest of these is the red figure krater attributed to Lykaon which depicts the death of Aktaion (Figure 1.2). Here Zeus and Artemis look on as Lyssa encourages the goddess' dogs to attack Aktaion, whose transformation into a stag is already under way. Lyssa strides stiffly into the scene, intervening directly to incite Aktaion's destruction. In hunting gear with a short, spotted, animal-like chiton, the head of a dog or wolf sprouts from the top of her own head. This Lyssa is part-huntress, drawn to the chase and active in pursuit, and part-animal, in league with the dark forces of the lower natural orders, and thus a match for the wolfish rage and martial frenzy that her name signifies and that explain her role in Aktaion's animalistic destruction. Lyssa is also a major presence in scenes depicting the madness of Lycurgus, a disreputable Thracian king and impious tyrant who was

Figure 1.2 The Lykaon Painter, Attic bell krater, c. 440 B.C. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund (00.346). Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved.

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disrespectful of Dionysius and impeded the worship of his cult. 18 In some accounts, Zeus blinds him, but in most, including Aeschylus' lost trilogy, The Lycurgeia, Lycurgus is visited with a madness which, like that of Heracles, maneuvers the king into the delusion that he is doing something valorous, when he is actually killing his wife and sons. When he realizes his mistake, he is said to commit suicide in some sources, while in others, he is torn apart by horses. Through behavior that suggests both royal hubris and a despot's need for total control, Lycurgus usurps divine privilege and eschews mortal obedience. Scenes of this berserk rampage can be found on at least six Italiote vases, and the usual depiction presents an enraged Lycurgus, wild-eyed and wild-haired, who wears only a mantle and boots as he attacks his wife and children while Lyssa looks on impassively. In most representations of this episode, the unnatural features of the personification Lyssa are more elaborate and disconcerting: an Apulian loutrophore from c. 320 B.C. is a good example of this development (Figure 1.3). It depicts the helmeted, cloaked, and booted but otherwise nude Lycurgus holding the body of his dead wife, his eyes wide and startled as he raises his sword toward Dionysius. Armed with a spear, Lyssa as a winged huntress rushes into the scene from the right. Her expression registers anger with the brow drawn down toward the eye, but even more alarming are the snakes entwined in her hair and encircling her arm, a corroboration of the gorgon attributes with which she was associated. A spotted panther at her feet repeats the dots on Lyssa's chiton, and so represents a parallel construction of their interbred characteristics. Other depictions of Lyssa develop these traits, with animal skins and increasingly aggressive weaponry, like multiple pikes and torches, becoming more prominent. Lycurgus is portrayed here as a threatening warrior-type who sallies forth with sword drawn, and this characterization also becomes standard. That madness combined with arms is the trenchant feature of this motif is borne out by Callistratus' description of a sculpture representing a similarly deranged tyrant, Athamas: There was a figure on the Scythian shores, not set up for display but fashioned not inelegantly for a contest of beauty in painting. It represented Athamas goaded on by madness. He was shown naked, his hair reddened with blood and its locks flying in the wind, his eye distraught, himself filled with consternation; and he was armed not by madness alone for a rash deed, nor did he rage merely with the soul-consuming fears which the Furies send; nay, he even held a sword out in front of him like a man making a sally.19

The visual tradition of mania that this group of vases establishes consistently pairs a warrior-tyrant victim with a personified female goad, and both are rendered with theatrical touches of complex scenery and melodrama along with the strident, rhetorical notes by which frenzy was

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The Art of Frenzy

Figure 1.3 Apulian loutrophore, Lycurgus and Lyssa, c. 320 B.C. Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich (AS 3300).

then recognized, especially the glaring, wide-opened eyes, the nakedness, and the appalling act of physical violence. For their part, the abstractions become more terrifying and supernatural: visibly angry with snake familiars, their resemblance to gorgons or furies is increasingly explicit. They also become more dangerously armed and amazonian, equipped with torches, pikes, and animal skins. The militant, stricken heroes or tyrants gave artists the chance to illuminate the paradoxes of a warrior

Mania in the classical tradition

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ethic that celebrated physical prowess and exceptional power by ratcheting up the negative visual effects of ferocious virtue. In an age of incessant petty conquest, the mad hero/king effectively articulated the Platonic conceptualization of organic mania as an improper and abusive demonstration of dominance and power manifested in a despotic, insane individual. Many of these elements drawn from the classical construction of mania persisted into the early modern period. Abundant evidence continued to support the diagnostic truism that mania was a state of agitation that could endanger others. Common symptomatic details recorded by Bartholomeus Anglicus (c. 1200) and John of Gaddesdon (c. 1315), among others, repeated the expressive features of extreme anger, especially the glaring and rolling eyes. Nakedness was identified with the most advanced cases of the ailment. The disorder was still called mania or furor, and in England, the term "wood," as in Andrew Boorde's 1547 Breviary of Helthe, "madness or woddnes lyke a wylde beest," was also used.20 The tradition that mania had a special significance in the adventures and trials of brave aggressors persisted, such that the notion of a furious, maniacal form of madness as the traditional affliction of heroic warriors remained strong. From Ajax to Lancelot, disappointments in love or lapses of fealty were known to provoke a powerful man's raging rampage. But the transformative complexity of the disorder, derived from the melancholic aspects which had since accrued to the warrior-knight's ailment, declined in the early modern period just as a series of representations appeared that accentuated the rougher and less thoughtful features of Heracles' mania. This retreat from the melancholy of chivalry in favor of a focus on Herculean brutality was achieved by concentrating on attributes of anger, traits of masculinity, and forms of antisocial behavior. Sixteenth-century revivals of Seneca's Hercules furens, and a new, tremendously popular work, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, were the principal didactic prototypes articulating the deranged extreme of heroic prowess. In the 1500s, Senecan drama was highly influential all over Europe, and consequently his plays gave a standard-setting rhetorical shape to the Greek mythological characters on whose stories the plots were based.21 Various characteristics of his style dominated Italian, French, and English dramatic practice, and pithy excerpts from Seneca's moral treatises were regarded as guidelines for prudent behavior. Jasper Heywood's English translation of Hercules furens was published in 1561, and most of the other Senecan tragedies appeared in translation during that decade as well. In Hercules furens, Seneca staged his hero's tragedy through a furious madness whose symptoms adhere to but exaggerate, as they had in Euripides' version, the dominant traits of Hercules' character. Juno/Hera explains in a lengthy prologue that she is visiting this temporary insanity upon the hero because of his unseemly ambition, and his desire to usurp some of Jupiter's/Zeus' authority. And it is not only Juno who perceives

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The Art of Frenzy

that Hercules' character is somehow flawed: the chorus also believes that his actions are motivated by pride and ambition, and even his father maintains that the constant engagement in competitions and tests of strength are evidence of his son's flawed judgment. Hercules himself, in repeated assertions that power, physical strength, and aggressiveness are his principal virtues, similarly fails to acknowledge that these abilities ought to be expended to some rational end. The point is clear that, even though Hercules' madness has a supernatural cause, the form of his disorder is consistent with his "normal" character rather than being foreign to it, and emphasizing the continuities between the hero's character and his mania remains as important to Seneca as it had to Euripides. Juno takes the native belligerence of an unbeatable fighter like Hercules and inverts it into self-destruction when she vows, "now with himself let him war."22 She elaborates on this madness as an inversion of armed aggression a few lines later, and Heywood's translation of the passage specifically emphasizes the formative role that anger plays in this disorder: Let hateful hurt now come in anger wood, And fierce impyety imbrew himself with his owne bloud, And error eke, and fury arm'd against itself to fight.23 Once Hercules' madness descends during a sudden darkness falling at midday, terms like fury, rage, and frenzy are invoked repeatedly by his father and the chorus. In his mad speeches, Hercules threatens to undertake a catastrophic war against Jupiter, but the force of his belligerence is all played out at home, when, in his rage, he kills his wife and children. These murders are accomplished with a repulsive and excessive violence, and not offstage as in Euripides. One son is shot through the neck with an arrow and another dragged from the scene. Hercules catches another son, and madly hurling him again and yet again, has hurled him, his head crashed loudly against the stones, the room is drenched with scattered brains. (1006ff.) The last son dies of fear from the look of Hercules' "blazing eyes" (1022). And finally, Hercules uses his club against his wife so that "her bones are crushed, her head is gone from her mangled body, gone, utterly" (1023-6). The viciousness of Hercules' actions, and their relation to his normative displays of valor, are played up by repeated references to the symbolic and honorific status accorded to the hero's arms. Most modern commentators agree that the play appealed to a theatrical taste for excessive violence then widely current, a taste that was itself grounded in other Senecan didactic examples. In terms of the portrayal of mania, the play popularized anew the disorder's identification with a classically derived but highly stylized version of warrior-based fury. For contemporary audiences, Seneca's emphasis on the abnormality

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in normal heroic physical culture, and on the extensive damage attendant upon strong passion in a martial character, gave new currency after 1550 to the devaluation of warrior virtues. Subsequent portrayals of Hercules, like Thomas Heywood's in the early seventeenth century, continued the progressive decline of the warrior ideal, diluting the hero's mad frenzy and reducing it to an aimless, monotonous brawling with no element of tragic magnitude or transformative power.24 In calling his poem Orlando furioso, Ludovico Ariosto acknowledged his work's engagement with two traditions of disorder, the distracted knights of chivalric romance like Roland, and the destructive, furioso type of madness that afflicted warring characters like Hercules. His title is transparently a variation of Seneca's, and Hercules is mentioned in the first canto.25 Ariosto's poem dominated the century in much the same way that Seneca's dramatic works did. Written around 1514 in Ferrara, the first edition was printed in 1516, with an expanded, revised version appearing in 1532. The work achieved the status of a bestseller, and was available all over Europe, inspiring various imitations and stimulating learned critical debates as well as popular discussion. An Italian oration of 1583 went so far as to claim that the poem was as well known in taverns and barbershops as it was in palazzos and villas. 26 The work's publishing history is extensive. Italian editions were, of course, the most numerous, with French translations appearing in 1545, 1577, and 1615. An English translation by Sir John Harington came out in 1591, and was reissued in 1607 and 1634. There was even a dramatic adaptation by Robert Greene that was performed in 1591-2, and the playscript was published in two editions of 1594 and 1599.27 Set within an elaborate tapestry of traditional characters as well as recent and historical events, the story of Orlando unfolds as the knight forgoes his proper duty of fighting Saracens and instead follows the beautiful Angelica, whose preference for another drives him mad. Orlando's distraction is set in the center of the poem: its onset and development take place in canto 23 and the beginning of canto 24, with subsequent episodes occurring from cantos 29 to 39. In canto 23, Orlando's madness begins when he sees the names of Angelica and her lover Medor carved into trees and around the interior of a room he has taken in an inn. He runs off into the woods, discarding his armor and rending his clothes until he is left naked. He suffers from a "fire of frenzie": "Now all inflam'd I burne, I rage and rave" (23, 100-1). He wreaks havoc upon those elements of the natural setting associated with the lovers, and especially "He roots up trees as one would root a weed" (23, 107). By canto 24, Orlando's actions have become more dangerously antisocial, a dramatic contrast to his vulnerable, unprotected condition: And though he wandered all unarmed and naked, Yet at his presence all the countrie quaked. (24, 4) People flee their fields and homes:

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For those he caught he did this lesson teach, To keep aloof from out a mad man's reach. (24, 5) He attacks the herds abandoned in the countryside and steals food from the hearths of the deserted villages. He pursues the escaping people: Among the rest he takes one by his heele And with his head knocks out an others braine. (24, 7) Some he beats with his fists. He drags a horse around after it is dead, and kills the man who refuses to swap his own living horse for this carcass (30). In his progress through the countryside, he cuts an irrational swath of wild destructiveness. Like many chivalric tales, Orlando furioso focuses on the incompatible demands between private love and public obedience or duty inherent in the chivalric code itself. Ariosto had composed his poem when the oldfashioned French tales of chivalry were enjoying a revival of popularity in Ferrara. He was at this time attached to the Estense court, which had lately exploited the venerable ideal for its own political advantage.28 All across Europe, the decline of these ideals was regarded as a fait accompli. The professional soldier had overtaken the older knight-errant role, and new advances in warfare techniques deployed in the kinds of recent battles to which Ariosto explicitly refers throughout the poem contributed further to the earlier form's obsolescence. The poem thus mixed nostalgia for outmoded combat strategies with ample proof of the newer tactics' greater effectiveness; with both standards in play, conflict and confrontation dominated the action.29 Orlando's madness re-engages the chivalric clash between love and duty, but his furor is itself a kind of shallow, farcical digression on the casual circumstantiality in which belligerent acts are committed and judged. Orlando's behavior is thus very different from the kind of chivalric love madness that resembled melancholia, and took the more effeminate form of sighs and emotional sensitivity. With Orlando, as with Yvain, Tristan, and Lancelot, love madness assumes the characteristics of mania and follows a course of exaggerated masculinity. 30 Yet Orlando's violence is casual, inadvertent, and indiscriminate. Indirectly he brings about the death of friends; he directly causes the death of strangers and animals. Ariosto calls Orlando's frenzy a bestial rage that afflicts two kinds of beings — warriors and animals. From the more than twenty words used to enunciate this madness, the majority refer to extreme variants like furore and insania. Nothing is clarified for Orlando while under their sway: there is no transformed awareness or revelation, and the cure is effected through the unreflective means of a supernatural intervention. Orlando's state does not diminish his warrior's invincibility, and not even his lack of arms or nudity exposes him to any vulnerability. The complete nudity sustained over many episodes is quite specific to Orlando. Neither Hercules nor Lancelot, for example, ever appear totally bereft of civilizing

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fabric, and so their relation to bestiality, while present, is less persistently displayed. Because the disorder catalyzes no interior change and seems, in fact, to have no impact on what passes for Orlando's character, the impression of his condition is registered primarily through actions witnessed by unfortunate spectators. In this sense, Orlando's nudity is less expressive of the self revealed or "unaccommodated man" than it is of the scenic, exhibitionist aspect of the warrior's bestial-like furor. An impressive number of illustrated editions of the poem were printed in the 1500s, and this gave artists and engravers ample opportunity to consider how the scenic potential of Orlando's warrior mania might translate into visual form. 31 In the sixteenth century editions, only certain elements of Orlando's madness were singled out for visual emphasis. The selectivity of the illustrators in fact reveals a pattern of interpreting Orlando's madness that proceeds in two stages with a significant alteration in the second half of the century. All of the illustrations call attention to the incongruity of Orlando's nudity as he freely roams about the countryside. Most of the earliest depictions likewise emphasize his discarded arms and armor, which typically are shown lying prominently on the ground. A 1526 Venetian edition displays just these salient features in a rectangular field divided into quadrants. Three of these fields show knights involved in different kinds of aggressive acts, and so contrast with the fourth, in which a nude Orlando, whose physique is only very generally articulated, strides forcefully across the landscape past his castoff equipage. In all the illustrations of this early stage in Orlando's madness, his nudity and aimless roving are consistently framed by reference to the highly symbolic circumstance of his disarmed status. To be deprived of one's arms in the early modern period was equated with forfeiting one's position in society, and it amounted in effect to losing place and status within the various significant hierarchies of the era.32 It was thus a critical gauging mechanism whereby the social consequences of Orlando's waywardness could be demonstrated in contemporary terms. This aspect of Orlando's disorder occurs in canto 23, the canto in which the knight's madness begins. Small vignettes introducing each canto are the dominant format for illustrations introduced in the first half of the century. In this arrangement, the madness of Orlando appears three times in the vignettes for cantos 23, 29, and 39. The most celebrated example of this vignette type are the anonymous woodcuts printed by Gioli de Ferrari in 1543, which were later much copied. For canto 23, the explicit muscularity of a hefty, nude Orlando is shown from the rear as he tears a large tree, roots and all, out of the ground (Figure 1.4). His discarded armor is prominently placed, with scattered groups of knights who relate to events prior to the breakdown receding into the distance. In a subsequent development, Franceschi's illustration of 1574 reverses the scene and gives Orlando an appearance more markedly expressive of furor, bellowing with head thrown back and flame-like hair. The resonant, multiple elements that

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Figure 1.4 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Gioli de Ferrari, 1543, canto 23. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

register Orlando's madness in the canto 23 illustrations include his nudity and discarded arms, his action — and particularly its pointless excessiveness - and, finally, in the later version, expressive facial devices. By contrast, the other illustrations of the vignette type that depict Orlando's madness rely primarily on nudity and combativeness to convey his disordered status: for canto 29, a nude Orlando wrestles with a knight on a bridge, while for canto 39, he lies on the ground tied up and surrounded by knights. In fact, the only way the viewer is able to identify Orlando with certainty is by his nakedness, because the actions of all the figures represented are variations on chivalric confrontations. This makes the image for canto 23 in the vignette format a more specific visual formulation of Orlando's disorder than those accompanying the other cantos. Both wild man and knight, freakish and awesome, Orlando's madness is manifested here through the astounding exhibition of prowess spent in a purposeless endeavor, his discarded armor a poignant reminder of his former self and of his forfeited status. After mid-century, the vignette schema's popularity was checked by the introduction of a full-page format that allowed artists to delineate the multiple events of each canto with greater detail and complexity. In this configuration, Orlando's madness is only shown in the illustrations preceding cantos 24 and 30. The new designs appeared first in Valgrisi's edition of 1556, and have been attributed to Dosso Dossi (Figure 1.5). When these wore out, they were redone by Girolamo Porro and used in Franceschi's edition of 1584. Porro's plates were themselves copied anonymously in 1591 for the Harington translation (Figure 1.6). Shifting the mad scene illustrated from canto 23 to canto 24 resulted in an image brimming with the many combative, destructive episodes characteristic of all but the earliest stages in Orlando's madness. Even the decorated initial for the canto underscores this change in emphasis by showing a depiction

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Figure 1.5 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Valgnsi, 1556, canto 24. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 1.6 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, London, 1591, canto 24. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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of Hercules crushing Antaeus. Now Orlando does not forfeit his armor or make sport of trees, but is depicted numerous times across the page engaged in acts of violence against animals, people, and property. In the chaotic foreground scene, Orlando rampages after a group of shepherds and villagers, who scramble to escape his reach. They make their retreat just as he flings one of their comrades by the heel into the air. Several animals also attempt to get out of Orlando's way. Across the middle ground, Orlando can again be seen menacing the villagers' abandoned buildings, stealing their food, and in the Valgrisi image, he also wrestles with a bear. The illustrations to canto 30 are similarly dominated by Orlando's destructive acts. Occupying a prominent position is the gruesome episode in which, unable to trade the dead horse he has been dragging along for a live one, he kills the horse's rider, and then rides off to make other attacks in the distance. Both the vignettes and the full-page illustrations reconstruct scenes that have their source in Ariosto's text. However, the change in format provided an opportunity for illustrators to select those qualities from among the different aspects of Orlando's madness that would make the most compelling, representative, and relevant visual configuration of the knight's disorder for their audience. Thus, the earlier images, the vignettes, show the initial stages of Orlando's furor, and in so doing emphasize a madness nostalgically construed in chivalric terms and Herculean myth. From the forfeited knightly status to the excessive physical prowess, Orlando's furor is awesome but not especially menacing. The illustrative focus after mid-century is on an Orlando who repeatedly commits random acts of antisocial aggression, and so a less violent iconography is replaced by one that exposes the criminal consequences of unchecked furor. This criminal conception of warrior mania is then multiplied across the visual field by dominating two canto illustrations, with an all-over, pictorial deployment that gives a diffuse and socially unavoidable quality to Orlando's confrontations. The result is an imagery evocative of the marauding bands of vagrants who, it was feared, similarly lurked abroad in the countryside. Like Orlando, they represented to the general public an image of a social outcast identified by his potential for antisocial violence. This shift in emphasis on Orlando's symptoms established by the change in illustrations accentuates the declining didactic status accorded chivalric or Herculean furor after 1550. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) continues this re-evaluation of mania's symptoms: when deliberating over which models for madness would suit his circumstances, the Don ruled out the "downright madness" of Orlando in favor of a melancholia like that suffered by Amadis, because the former would only compromise his reputation (chs. 25, 26). He has a logical defense for this choice based on disparities between Dulcinea's and Angelica's conduct, but it is clear that his major reservations are the social embarrassment and loss of status that Orlando's raving represented. A parallel downgrading of mania and its related phenomena, and a

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growing tendency to define it negatively, like Cervantes, in contrast to the more preferential treatment accorded melancholia, also typifies the theoretical discussions of the period. Before the 1500s, medical writing treated mania with about as much significance as the melancholia from which it was always distinguished. Both conditions were regarded as the principal mental illnesses brought about by humoral imbalance, but a precise relation between the two was rarely ever articulated, and contradictory claims over similarities and differences were scarcely addressed and never resolved.33 An earlier tendency to align mania exclusively with overheating the choleric humor endured alongside the newer theory that any humor when heated or "burnt" might produce mania. This was even true for melancholic humors, because burnt or "adust" melancholy did not lead to an illness with melancholic traits, but to one with maniacal characteristics. 34 Some writers made this distinction explicit: Marsilio Ficino specified that "when the burning kind occurs, it is harmful to judgment and wisdom, for then this humor rises and burns, it makes you upset and angry, what the Greeks call mania, what we call madness."35 For others, melancholy was both a temperament and an illness with an extreme state that resembled mania. This palimpsest of models, in which all four humors could be burnt into mania so that mania supplanted the extreme forms of the other three humors, created an increasingly ancilliary yet adversarial position for the condition. Maniacal symptoms were traditionally in diametrical opposition to those of melancholia, the former being consistently agitated, extroverted, and aggressive, while the latter consisted of traits derived from interiorized experience. It was standard practice for someone like John of Gaddesdon, in his Rosa Anglica of c. 1315, for example, to contrast the withdrawn behavior of the melancholic with the noisiness of the maniac. As the influence of Renaissance humanism spread, the classical tradition's emphasis on melancholia as a desirable character type for creative persons worked to enhance the significance of this particular temperament at the expense of all the others. Especially important in this development was the revival of interest in Aristotle's Problem XXX, which seemed to prove that genius was possible only where the melancholic humor predominated. In this circumstance alone could the visitations of Platonic mania or inspirational furor lead to real achievement. More intricate discussions of the humoral system became possible as more accurate editions of Galen and the Hippocratic treatises were printed through the 1500s, but interest in the psychological theories of the classical era was highly selective, and in particular, the inspirational manias of the Platonic tradition were regarded with ambivalence and suspicion; little mention was made of them except for the restricted instance of mystical rapture, or, as was more common, its negative variant, demonic possession.36 Even the positive forms of classical mania were in this way pushed to the margins. Discussions of mania throughout the 1500s continued to view it within

Mania in the classical tradition

21

the context of the humoral system, but specialists turned to issues left unresolved within the venerable paradigm. The critical variables had to do with accommodating degrees of affliction, and adjusting the relationship between the choleric and melancholic humors in the development of mania. Different kinds of mania might ensue in relation to admixtures from the different humors, but there remained widespread agreement that heated choler produced the worst form of the condition. Fontanon's On the Cure of Internal Diseases (1549) is typical of mainstream work on this point: Mania is less dangerous if frequent laughter accompanies it, along with behavior which seems ridiculous in the eyes of the onlookers. But if much yellow bile [choler] is mixed with the blood they turn out angry and heedless. But, if it is excessively burned and rendered heavier, there will be brutal madness [furor] and this is the most dangerous mania of all. 5

In discussions of burnt or adust or atrabilis melancholy, it became increasingly common to find that a condition of humoral combustion was recognized both as the worst form of mania and the most dangerous, or so-called "unnatural," form of melancholy. Timothy Bright's position accepts this option, but with serious misgivings, for, while he will still refer to burnt choler as causing melancholy ('If choller have yeelded matter to this sharpe kind of melancholic"), he yet maintains that the result is such an unnatural variation that even calling it melancholy is not really accurate.38 The chapter on unnatural melancholy rising from adustion in his treatise of 1586 begins with this disclaimer about terminology: the adust form is "of another nature farre disagreeing from the other [natural melancholy], and by an improper speech called melancholy" (110). Writers into the next century continued to differentiate mania from melancholia, with most concluding that mania was the most negative and undesirable outcome. Even those who allowed for some organic causal interconnections for the two disorders tended at the same time to make statements that increasingly established a distance between them. In his Medicina Practica of 1601, Hieronymus Mercurialis distinguished the conditions from each other and also from the privileged or inspirational manias: Mania is a mentis alienatio or continuous ecstasy, without fever or inflammation ... It is called an alienation of the mind as distinct from melancholy, in which it is the imagination which is alienated, not the mind . . . From this description it is obvious that this sick furor is far different from the furor which Plato talks about in the Timaeus.^

Just as the boundary between mania and melancholia became more distinct, that between mania and madness became more porous. In some cases, as medical treatises were translated from Latin into a vernacular tongue, the more specific term "mania" would be rendered into the less

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scientific "madness."40 Robert Burton complained in his famous compendium, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), that "madness, frenzy, and melancholy are confounded by Celsus and many writers." Burton argued against this habit, but even as he distinguished melancholia from mania, he freely used the term madness for the latter condition: Madness is therefore defined to be a vehement dotage, or a raving without a fever, far more violent than melancholy, full of anger and clamour, horrible looks, actions, gestures, troubling the patients with far greater vehemency both of body and mind, without all fear and sorrow, with such impetuous force and boldness that sometimes three or four men cannot hold them. (I, iv, 140)

Thomas Willis, who agreed with the notion of mania as a fury without fever distinct from melancholia, emphasized that "Madmen are not as Melancholicks, sad and fearful, but audacious and very confident, so that they shun almost no dangers, and attempt all the most difficult things that are."41 Willis' handling of the two disorders is usually championed for regarding them as two sides of the same ailment. He posited a model of cyclical alternation in contrast to the traditional understanding of mania as a deteriorated end stage of melancholia, and in so doing, has been credited with anticipating the modern construct of manic-depressive or bipolar illness.42 However, this new paradigm is not so much a reevaluation of mania as it is a reinterpretation of melancholia's course. It is another measure of the way that he, along with most other writers on the subject, was not only more engaged by melancholia, but that its preferential treatment was accomplished at the expense of mania. While Burton's anthology was, of course, principally about melancholia in its protean manifestations, it was only logical that he devoted little space to the discussion of raving conditions or frenzy. But even a work like Felix Plater's practical medical treatise of 1602 devotes to melancholia three times the space accorded to mania.43 The reification of melancholia in this period is well known, but the fact that the devaluation of mania was an integral part of this reifying process has received relatively little attention. Yet it is clear that mania, the madness of heroes, was progressively redefined away from noteworthy significance, and described with decreasing subtlety and variation. Accounts of its symptoms undermined the traditional acknowledgments of mania's potentially positive qualities, such as the capacity for action, energetic accomplishment, and superhuman feats, by replacing them with a litany of much more disturbing behavioral traits. Quickness, audacity, and fearlessness were gradually absorbed by mere anger and vehemency in a streamlining of the choleric attributes from which mania was thought to be derived.44 Menacing behavior and aggressiveness divorced from valor are the traits that accumulate throughout most descriptions of mania's symptoms. A medical dissertation of 1608 emphasized that

Mania in the classical tradition

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the behavior is wild and uncontrolled. The patient may be impudent, merciless, careless in performing tasks, showing a ferocious and menacing expression. He may be elated, joking, and laughing, but easily upset and angry. In fury he smashes objects and uses weapons to hurt and even kill others, but he may also commit suicide . . . The patient has great strength . . . At times, patients become untidy, even filthy in appearance, soil the beds and lack shame in their behavior. 4 ''

Plater described in detail the way maniacs readily translated their aggressive urges into indiscriminately damaging actions: they tell false, obscene, and horrid things, cry out, swear, and with a certain brutish Appetite they go about things like beasts, ... They strive to offer violence both to themselves and others, wherefore they pull out their hairs, tear their cloaths and sometimes hurt their own Body by biting, and other waies that unless they be diligently restrained with Bonds and Chains, the which they study to break with all endeavor, and be kept close in custody, where they try to break open the gates, and oftentimes by a certain industry digging their Pryson to make a passage for themselves, falling violently on the standersby, like Beasts they endeavor to scratch them, bite, strangle and kill. (28)

The danger to unsuspecting strangers, among other disturbing signs, was a newly common theme: such maniacs will have "a horrible expression in their eyes, making terrible noises, dancing, yelling and [making] wild attacks on passersby."46 Mania's symptoms in these accounts begin with precipitous movements that escalate rapidly, producing a terrifying prospect for spectators, with alarming eyes, naked or near nakedness, torn clothes and hair, and violent intentions. Recommended treatments, in addition to herbal recipes, bleeding, and water immersion to cool and moisten mania's heat, were designed to overmaster the maniac and inculcate submissiveness. Plater mentions bloodletting, purges, cordials, moistening, and fear as efficacious in mitigating the anger upon which the condition is based (37-43). A sixteenth-century recommendation calls for the madman "to be kept in savegarde in some close house or chamber where there is lytel light," adding that it also helps to "have a keper the which the madman do fear."47 The transition from safeguarding to a more punitive model of incarceration was well established by Willis' prescriptions of 1672: The first Indication, viz. Curatory, requires threatenings, bonds, or strokes, as well as Physick. For the Mad-man being placed in a House convenient for the business, must be so handled both by the Physician, and also by the Servants that are prudent, that he may be in some manner kept in, either by warnings, chiding, or punishments inflicted on him, to his duty, or his behavior, or manners. And indeed for the curing of Mad people, there is nothing more effectual or necessary than their romance or standing in awe of such as they think their tormentors ... Furious Mad-men are sooner, and more certainly cured by punishments and hard usage, in a strait room, than by Physick or Medicines. 48

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A basically punitive model of treatment was the logical response to mania's aggressively antisocial symptoms. A viciously aggressive person for whom incarceration is the best antidote characterizes the way mania was portrayed in Christof LeBlon's frontispiece added to the third edition of Burton's Anatomy in 1628, and repeated in subsequent printings (Figure 1.7, 1652 edn). Victims of love

Figure 1.7 Christof LeBlon, frontispiece, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1652 edn. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

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melancholy, religious or superstitious melancholy, hypochondriacal melancholy and mania occupy the principal fields of the title page, along with animals, herbs, and astrological signs traditionally associated with the ailments and their cures.49 LeBlon's "Maniacus" in the lower-right field shows the "vehement dotage, or raving without a fever" that Burton described as madness. Depicted in mid-action, the maniac in his simple room strains most vigorously against his confining bonds, wearing torn clothes which expose a powerful muscularity, and with a fierce expression on his face. In contrast to the different melancholias which are based on excesses in the business or leisure activities of civilization, mania is shown as an absolute rejection of civilizing processes. The image gives a readily comprehensible, telegraphic summation of those features regarded most essential to mania as a type that is ciemonstrably not melancholic and recognizable by a wild, antisocial, masterless status that justifies overmastering through restraints. Burton intended the frontispiece to have a didactic function, and added explanatory verses to the fourth edition of the Anatomy in an effort to clarify their instructional purpose: But see the Madman rage down right With furious looks, a ghastly sight. Naked in chains bound doth he ly, And roars amain, he knows not why? Observe him; for as in a glass, Thine angry portraiture it was. His picture keep still in thy presence; Twixt him and thee, there's no difference. Burton salutes the image's critical features, the rage, furious look, and binding chains, adding a moral lesson for the viewer-reader familiar with traditional depictions of the sins. In Burton's scheme, studying the image of a maniac should be a ghastly but sobering experience, because it presents the same opportunity for reflection as that of venal anger in a normal person: in both cases, the dangerous flaws of character come from within and belong to the sphere of personal control and responsibility. All of the frontispiece's sufferers are men, and the verses reinforce the masculinity of the subject, as, in addition, they presuppose a masculine audience. While this tendency may in part be attributed to a generic assumption of masculine privilege associated at this time with medical and philosophical topics, there is more particular evidence that mania was commonly assumed to be a male-oriented disorder. A medical dissertation of 1669, for example, made the direct claim that mania occurred among men with a higher frequency. 50 Men clearly dominate discussions of mania's symptoms, and this happens most often when traits like physical power and belligerence are treated as the pivotal diagnostic qualities. When women are cited in case illustrations, they tend to present symptoms of aggressive sexuality and foul, obscene language, whose severity is judged precisely by their non-feminine character. 51 A variety of

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sources lend support to the conclusion that mania was regarded as a gendered disorder. Burton makes the masculine connection in cases where the condition rises from anger or heated choler: "If it arises from choler adust, they are bold and impudent, and of a more harebrained disposition, apt to quarrel and think of such things, battles, combats, and their manhood" (I, 3, iii). The idea that being preoccupied with one's manhood or virility was the basic problem in mania was so strong that it led Plater to suggest that gelding would be a reasonable treatment of last resort for the more intractable cases, "because it changes the temperament of a man, quels his virility and vehemency, and renders the Body more lax and moist, in mad men especially that have been long imprisoned and are desperate, being otherwise unserviceable, it is good to see what benefit can be reaped by it" (43). We have seen how the virile vehemency of mania had led to its association with the behavior of warriors and soldiers in the classical era. This kind of battle madness persisted within the romance tradition, but by the fourteenth century, the behavior was held in a less positive light, and its proximity to bestiality was increasingly decried.52 Montaigne, among others, compared a soldier's frenzy to the mental state of obsessive scholars, as both groups were "beside themselves" and willing to die for inconsequential matters. He thought that battle madness was actually on the rise in the late 1580s, fueled by the anger and zeal that the Wars of Religion encouraged.53 Again in the early 1600s, Burton, too, regarded battle furor as increasingly common, amounting to a potentially serious public problem, because "it ruins and subverts whole towns, cities, families, and kingdoms" (I, 2, ix). In this anti-heroic and civilianthreatening form, the largely mythic berserk fury or battle madness amounted to a newly pertinent threat to social order. Maniacal warriors also had a significant focalizing role beyond the writings of scholars and medical specialists, the performances of Seneca's Hercules or its offshoots, or the many printings of Ariosto's poem. The iconographical treatises and emblem books so popular from the sixteenth century onwards also brought together in their image and text entries frenzied heroes, battle madness, and the humoral economy. Elements in each pictorial abstraction are traced back to their classical roots, and authorities cited range from epics and tragedies to philosophies and medical compendia. These treatises effectively set the visual personification of learned abstractions like justice or anger for public consumption by establishing a standard motif with collateral variations for every entry. One of the most accessible of these compilations was Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. Although issued in its first printing of 1593 without illustrations, by the time the Roman edition of 1603 was printed, the work boasted woodcuts at the head of many entries. Other editions and revised versions proliferated: Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia of 1612 was one of the first English interpretations of Ripa, and a French translation by Jean Baudouin with new plates by Jacques de Bie appeared

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in 1644. The Dutch edition of the Iconologia was published in Amsterdam in 1644 as well. While there is a basic resemblance in the standards shared by all these printings, the French and Dutch versions break away from their Italian prototype in significant ways. A number of topical categories in Ripa's Iconologia, including melancholia and folly (pazzia), connect with the larger subject of madness, but there are three entries that relate specifically to mania: these are mania's Latin cognate, furore, its predisposing trait, the choleric humor, and its precipitating passion, anger (ira). In most Italian editions, furor is preceded by a brief, unillustrated notice for its kindred, furie, as Dante described her with serpentine hair and a brutish aspect. Furore proper follows, opening with the image of a blindfolded man wearing a short, wind-blown garment and hoisting a bundle of pikes (Figure 1.8).54 The bulk of the entry explains the symbolism behind these features, and offers several other iconographical options. Only the last variant, poetic furor, is shown. It is quite distinct from the others, and could never have been confused with them, because the inspirational, privileged furor is depicted as a young man in antique drapery poised in the act of writing.

Figure 1.8 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1625, "Furore." The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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The principal forms of non-creative furor exhibit features derived from the entry's leading image. The blindfold means that the furious man acts without reason. A plurality of weaponry defines furor's aggressive force as excessive, inexhaustible, and self-generating. His garment's skimpiness registers a disrespect for decency and decorum. While there is little facial expression shown in the image, the text emphasizes an appearance of frightening brutishness. Four variants on this principal condition are given, and each is more excessive and horrifying, with furor described as a kind of war madness delineated by male figures who are chained and writhing in rage atop heaps of weaponry. These variants exemplify Virgil's adage that it takes furor to make war. Additional attributes given to this group of extreme furors include helmets, torches, the head of Medusa, and animals thought to be especially ferocious. In Baudouin's French edition, the text delineates the same types but, as "Diverses Fureurs," the depictions have increased to four with additional illustrations for "fureur extreme," and "fureur indomitable" (Figure 1.9).55 As in Ripa, there is the very different poetic form, and the standard FVKEVR .

FVREVR EXTREME.

PVHEVR TOETIQVE .

FVREVHIND OMTABL E.

Figure 1.9 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Paris, 1644, "Fureur." By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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for plain furor is a blindfolded man about to throw his bundle of arms. However, this furor's apparel is in greater disarray, and the text also places more emphasis on the element of indecency that this feature represents. The short, disheveled garment signifies three shortcomings: the furious man shows no respect for manners (fafon du monde), decorum (bienseance], or civility (honestete}. Those elements critical to the French definition of a gentleman are just what furor lacks, making it in effect the perfect anti-type of masculine deportment. The last two furors are described as vicious, horrible figures, but this frightening unruliness is not shown. Instead, extreme and indomitable furor are dignified by their classical military accoutrements that reinforce the view that these were a warrior-hero's afflictions. The Dutch edition of Ripa is also innovative when it comes to the handling of furor. 56 The entry recalls the Italian precedent by repeating a similar depiction of the masculine furore, but translates the Latinate term into the vernacular for frenzy (razernij] and madness (dolligkeit). As in the French version, more attention is given to fleshing out the abstraction's variant strains. While retaining the same overall characteristics, in the Dutch account the two most extreme forms of furor are not men — they are women with frightening facial contortions and disordered hair. Reinforcing this gender shift, the entry closes with an account of the furies incorporated into the scheme as versions of furor itself. This adjustment allows the classical goad figure to merge with that of its victim, so that the traditional binary of female goad with male victim is collapsed into a single female figure. Both examples of this type carry the usual attributes of sword, torch, and shield, and are described as cruel and frighteninglooking with tangled, disheveled hair. Terrifying women antagonists are here recommended in lieu of male military figures as plausible variants for furor. These various renderings of furor map out the ways in which the emblematic format converted mania's manifold causes and effects into comprehensible strains of notable and recognizable features. The irrational deployment of arms and an overall aspect of menacing rage received their most consistent endorsement here as crucial to the incidence of furor. Allegorized primarily through references to weapons and decorated armor, the condition thereby assumed a military outlook much indebted to classical precedent. Yet embedded within the entries are certain verbal and visual elements that do not simply reinforce the standardizing or idealizing aims of the emblematic orientation. These non-cohering elements are the contradictory motifs of enchainment and insufficient garment, and the equivocating stance toward gender. The image of a man struggling furiously against his bonds conveys a sense of military conquest rather than aggression, and presents a state of being overmastered, which was consistent with the way the principal dynamics of furor were defined. These are aspects of furor emphasized by medical writers who advocated overmastery techniques as central to the treatment

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of mania, and who recommended chaining the most violent sufferers in safe houses or asylums as a guarantee of social order. Furor's disheveled short garment also contrasts with the attributes and other forms of the Roman military uniform. This vaguely generic costume makes identifying the figure by occupation or class more difficult, and it is both the garment's non-specificity as well as its dishevelment that alerts the spectator to the figure's antisocial potential. The effect recalls not so much the appearance of threatening soldiers, as that of vagrants or mad people roaming the streets or countryside. As a non-martial offense against decency, it garners for furor an additional arena of social conflict. The issue of decency also leads directly to the issue of gender ambiguity. Especially in the French depiction of simple furor, the billowing or separating of the garment's skirt, and the casual opening or loosening of the shirt, call attention to sites of indecent exposure associated more with women than men. The equivocation about gender implicit in this physical exhibitionism was resolved in the Dutch edition of Ripa, when two types of furor were depicted as female and given the additional feature of Medusa-like disordered hair, a characteristic that had previously only been a shield decoration for one of the male variants. Despite furor's central preoccupation with combat and militarism that aligned it with an excess of masculinity, the condition could thus be embodied without apparent contradiction by the image of menacing, disheveled women. The two predisposing elements associated with furor, the choleric humor and the passion of anger, exhibit similar qualities of belligerence and confrontation. A nearly nude young man charging ahead with sword drawn and billowing drapery represents the choleric temperament.57 He is described as slight of build with a yellowish tinge caused by his excess bile. The flames depicted on the discarded shield stand for the hot dryness attributed to choler in the Galenic tradition, and the entry includes a full presentation of the classical humoral system. The attendant lion bears the furrowed brow and clenched teeth that are choler's physiognomic features: this contrasts with the man's expression, which, described as cruel and ferocious, is conveyed only by a humor-derived swelling around the eyes and throat. In the Dutch edition, the image directly addresses these expressive human elements, depicting the man's agitated, angry look, unruly hair, and clenched teeth (Figure 1.10). The advancing stance common to both images indicates that the choleric man is impetuous and battle-ready, but he is in effect a vulnerable adversary: citing the authority of Seneca, the discarded shield and nudity are really anti-heroic features, because they represent poor judgment. Higher status garments characterize Ira, who is a sturdy woman in full Roman military dress, a sword and flaming torch grasped in her hands (Figure l.ll). 58 The text explains that everything about this fiery passion attests to a degree of rage that is all-consuming: this excessive feature is what justifies calling anger a furor or madness of short duration. Horace's famous phrase, "Ira furor brevis est" from the Epistolae (I, 2, 62), was

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Figure 1.10 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Amsterdam, 1644, "Colerico." The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lihrary, Yale University.

widely accepted, and Robert Burton too insisted that "there is no difference between a madman and an angry man in the time of his fit" (269). In his moral essay, "De ira," Seneca gives a more detailed account of their resemblance, describing how both have

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Figure 1.11 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1625, "Ira." The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. a bold and threatening mien, a gloomy brow, a fierce expression, a hurried step, restless hands, an altered color, a quick and more violent breathing so likewise are the marks of the angry man; his eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is crimson with the blood that surges from the lowest depths of the heart, his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched, his hair bristles and stands on end, his breathing is forced and harsh, his joints crack from writhing, he groans and bellows, ... His whole body is excited and performs great angry threats; it is an ugly and horrible picture of distorted and swollen frenzy ... Other vices may be concealed and cherished in secret; anger shows itself openly and appears in the countenance, and the greater it is, the more visibly it boils forth.59

In fact the overlap among the three conditions - furor, the choleric humor, and ira - is a notable feature throughout the emblem treatises, and the truth claims made for their affinities are only enhanced by the frequent citations from classical authorities. The visual templates for all three concentrate on confrontational aggressiveness usually set in a military context, with indecency or vulnerability suggested whenever the uniform is absent or incomplete. Shared expressive traits include the furrowed brow, reddened eyes and fiery color, or swelling up of facial features.

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Anger exhibits the most explicit connection to a female alternative and the gender identity here is a significant issue. Both ira and war are portrayed as women dressed in cuirasses, armed and dangerous. But unlike ira, war is not illustrated in either the Italian or the Dutch Ripa, and it is not even included in the French edition. This concentrates the visual focus for a belligerent female figure entirely on anger, and, in so doing, it assimilates anger to Bellona, the bellicose sister of Mars and the goddess of discord.60 Bellona as ira shows the goddess in her negative aspect as a promoter of disorder rather than a conciliator. Like the Dutch variants for furor that opened up the category to include women furies, ira makes the female figure a negative exemplar within an essentially masculine context of aggression and domination. They share this circumstance with other femmes fortes or "women on top", who likewise were considered both exemplary and subversive. 61 As a collation of classical exemplars, the emblem tradition reprised in its entries relevant to mania — furor, ira, and choler — many of the condition's features that had originated in Greek mythology and were depicted in the vase paintings of late antiquity. The various forms of furor are conceived as warrior types, and so recall Hercules or Lycurgus by emphasizing the potential for abusive acts latent within the warrior ethos. Furor, ira, and choler also exploited in varying degrees the symbolic status and complicated etiquette of arms and armor that was similarly rooted in classical precedent and perpetuated in tales of chivalry. Furor's hurling bundles of arms, a characteristic closer to the goad Lyssa than to any major male protagonist, initiates a shift in emblem culture away from the individual combatant of significant stature to the rank-and-file status of the professional soldier who has ample opportunity to fight outside the protocols of fairness and equality. Both the standard and excessive forms of furor are elaborated in terms of large-scale confrontations, of wars and armies, rather than along the lines of a single mortal's deluded rampage. The conventions of masculine prowess predominate, but some entries for furor, along with that of the vice or passion, ira, allow for variations that are gendered female. Repeated references to the furies as adjuncts of furor help to sustain the alternative ancient iconography of harrowing female figures who induce rather than suffer from the condition they represent. The influence of Lyssa is also palpable here in the wild hair, the snakeand torch-bearing attributes, and in the Amazonian cast given to ira's characterization. Revivals of the great themes and texts of the classical era insured that these and other salient points about mania derived from that tradition were perpetuated. The visibly erratic behavior fueled by anger and an excess of the choleric humor, and variously called furor, frenzy, mania, or madness, was nurtured by aggressive female abstractions and associated first with those ill-fated warriors whose attitude threatened a god's authority. Based on these precedents, anyone whose symptoms of excess

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and agitation were uncontrollable and violent was likely to be viewed as maniacal. The ailment's penchant for chaos and disorder, its inappropriate presumption of abusive, tyrannical behavior encouraged a uniquely political understanding for this mental condition. As Plato acknowledged, the condition's characteristic internal and external despotism was an apt example of bad government in practice. From its mythological heritage, mania already carried the distinction of projecting a challenge to authority. Furor thus came to be regarded as both a rebuke to those in power and the abusive exercise of power itself. These two dynamics characterize the most concentrated visual formulation of mania in antiquity, and appear on the vases produced in the Greek colonies of southern Italy during a period when a sequence of tyrants made democratic rule seem increasingly unlikely. Throughout the early modern period, mania continued to be associated with furious agitation catalyzed by anger and remained the particular problem of the heroic warrior. In the 1500s, the popularity of Seneca's Hercules furens and Ariosto's Orlando furioso helped to revive the classical definition of mania as a warrior's disease grounded in physical prowess, aggressive competitiveness, and poor judgment. The many illustrated editions of Ariosto's poem register an important shift in the way Orlando's madness was configured, with earlier printings emphasizing his discarded armor and consequent loss of status, along with his powerful assault against nature signified by uprooting trees. Editions published after 1550 show Orlando's madness in a later canto, when, still nude, he assaults animals, humans, and property, committing the criminal acts of any social outcast without place or status in society. The loss of status and reputation made Orlando's mania an unappealing exemplar for a knight's mental trauma, and Don Quixote's rationalizations helped to reinforce this perception. Medical discussions of mania in this period similarly distinguished a higher-status melancholia from the overheated circumstances that produced furor and agitation. Burton's Anatomy even castigated those authors who failed to differentiate frenzy from melancholy. Mania's symptoms were vehement, aggressive, and menacing, representing an untidy appearance and often lacking any sense of physical shame. Flashing or rolling eyes, torn clothes and unruly hair all apprised the public of mania's predatory potential. Recommended treatments concentrated on cooling, moistening, confining, overmastering, and instilling submissiveness, with castration being the most extreme option. Burton's frontispiece shows the maniac as characteristically muscular in torn, makeshift clothing, and chained in a place of confinement rather than roaming abroad like Orlando. Most descriptions of furor's victims presume a masculine subject, and many writers were confident that the condition afflicted men more than women, consisting as it did of symptoms that were predominately traits of masculinity. When mania affected women, they typically assumed masculine characteristics, such as aggressive

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sexuality and foul language. But usually the combativeness of anger and heated choler created a kind of "battle mania" or berserk fury that was in effect a preoccupation with demonstrations of virility, which was thought to be on the increase. The emblem culture of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered artists and writers standardized templates which incorporated both the classical guidelines as well as those early modern variations that tended to assume the circumstances of war and the outlook of armies and professional soldiery. The next chapter examines the dissemination of this emblematic material and its transformation into a broader but selective group of historical and contemporary subjects.

Notes 1 For madness in antiquity, see Ainsworth O'Brien-Moore, Madness in Ancient Literature (Weimar: Wagner, 1924); E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Bennett Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 2 Padel, Whom Gods Destroy, 30; Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 249, 252. 3 Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 166-8, 225; Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational, 273; Padel, Whom Gods Destroy, 17, 21; "Lyssa" and "Mania," in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, 8 vols. (Zurich: Artemis, 1981ff.), VI, 1, pp. 322-32, 353; and "Oistros," Lexicon VII, 1, pp. 28-9. The maniac, the erinyes, and Dionysian maenads all share similar features of physical abandon and menacing behavior. 4 Padel, Whom Gods Destroy, 53; Bruce Lincoln, "Homeric Lyssa: 'Wolfish Rage'," Indogermanische Forschungen 80 (1975): 98-105. 5 M. A. Screech, "Good Madness in Christendom," in William Bynum and Roy Porter, eds, The Anatomy of Madness, 3 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), I, pp. 28-9; Phaedrus, 244-5, 265. 6 Simon, Mind and Madness, 148; Screech, "Good Madness," 35; Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 28, 32. 7 For the humoral system, see especially Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964). 8 Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease, tr. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), II, p. 177. 9 Christopher Gill, "The Emotions in Graeco-Roman Society," in Susanna M. Braund and Christopher Gill, eds, The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5; Alessandro Schiesaro, "Passion, Reason and Knowledge in Seneca's Tragedies," in Braund and Gill, The Passions, 89-111; D. P. Fowler, "Epicurean Anger," in Braund and Gill, The Passions, 16-30. 10 Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 45-6, 48; Simon, Mind and Madness, 243; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 252-3.

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11 Helen King, Hippocrates' Woman (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 217, 221; Heinrich von Staden, "The Mind and Skin of Heracles: Heroic Diseases," in Danielle Gourevitch, ed., Maladie et Maladies (Geneva: Droz, 1992), pp. 131-50. 12 Jean Hatzfield, History of Ancient Greece (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 189-93, 240-2; A. G. Woodhead, The Greeks in the West (New York: Praeger, 1961), pp. 72-100. 13 Woodhead, Greeks in the West, 144-8; P. E. Arias, A History of 1,000 Years of Greek Vase Painting (New York: Abrams, 1961); John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). 14 For Lyssa, see Lexicon, VI, 1, pp. 28-9; for Mania, VI, 1, pp. 351-3; for Oistros, VII, 1, pp. 28-9. 15 The description combines elements from Euripides' tragedy with observations of the painting in Philostratus of the third century A.D. Imagines, tr. Arthur Fairbanks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 233. 16 Siegfried Melchinger, Euripides, (New York: Ungar, 1973), 3. 17 Euripides, Heracles, tr. with notes by Shirley Barlow (Warminster: Aris and Philips, 1996). 18 Lexicon, VI, 1, p. 313. 19 Callistratus, "Descriptions," in Philostratus, Imagines, 421. 20 Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), pp. 92, 98-9; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 249, 254; Boorde is cited in Clarke, Mental Disorder, 219. 21 T. S. Eliot, "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation" (1927), in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1964), pp. 51-88; G. Karl Galinsky, The Heracles Theme (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972); JoAnn Shelton, Seneca's Hercules furens: Theme, Structure and Style (Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1978). 22 Seneca's Tragedies, 2 vols., tr. Frank J. Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), I, 1, p. 85. 23 Lines 96-8 from the 1581 edition printed in London by T. Martin. 24 On the ambivalence characteristic of Hercules' myth-cluster, see von Staden, "The Mind and Skin of Heracles," and Marc-Rene Jung, Hercule dans la litterature francaise du XVI (Geneva: Droz, 1966). Hercules appears thus in Heywood's The Silver Age (1613), The Brazen Age (1613), and The Apology for Actors (1612), and also in Francisco Lopez de Zarate's Hercules furente y Oeta (c. 1650). 25 Most commentators mention this relation, but see especially Elizabeth Chesney, The Counter-Voyage of Rabelais and Ariosto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), p. Ill; Peter Wiggins, Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando furioso (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. Ill, 125; James V. Mirollo, "On the Significant Acoustics of Ariosto's Noisy Poem," MLN 103, 1 (January 1988): 100. Ernest Grassi and Maristella Lorch emphasize the relation to Sophocles' Ajax in their Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature (Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University Press, 1986), pp. 47, 97-8. 26 C. P. Brand, Ludovico Ariosto: A Preface to the Orlando furioso (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), p. 94. 27 Ariosto, Orlando furioso, tr. by Sir John Harington, ed. with intro. by Robert McNulty (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), p. xvi.

Mania in the classical tradition

37

28 Wiggins, Ariosto's Tapestry, 113; Chesney, The Counter-Voyage, 185; Gwyneth Hood, "Medieval Love-Madness and Divine Love," Mythlore 61, 3 (Spring, 1990): 20; Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Andre Rochon, "La folie d'amour dans le 'Roland furieux'," in Augustin Redondo and A. Rochon, eds, Visages de la folie 1500-1650 domaine hispano-italien (Paris: University de Paris III, 1981), p. 97. 29 Grassi and Lorch, Folly and Insanity, 102; Brand, Ludovico Ariosto, 89-93; Chesney, The Counter-Voyage, 14; Michael Murrin, "The Siege of Paris," MLN 103, 1 (January 1988): 147. 30 Ann Hunsaker Hawkins, "Yvain's Madness," Philological Quarterly 71, 4 (Fall, 1992): 380-2. 31 Gabriel Rouches, "L'interpretation du Roland furieux par la gravure," Amateur d'Estampes 4 (1925): 107-12; Ugo Bellocchi and Bruno Fava, LTnterpretazione grafica deW Orlando furioso (Reggio Emilia: Banco di Credito Populate, 1961); Louise George Clubb, "Pastoral Elasticity on the Italian Stage and Page," Studies in the History of Art 36 (1992): 110-27. 32 On the symbolic valuation of arms and armor in the early modern period, see Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), ch. 9; and Peter Stallybrass, "Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage," in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 314-15. 33 Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 252-4; Oskar Diethelm, Medical Dissertations of Psychiatric Interest Printed Before 1750 (Basel: Karger, 1971), pp. 50ff.; Clarke, 86-99. 34 Screech links this development to Avicenna (Montaigne and Melancholy, 26); Clarke, Mental Disorder, 92; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 254; Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 132; Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951), pp. 21-36. 35 Marsilio Ficino, De vita triplici, cited in Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, 132. In addition to Ficino, Avicenna and Andreas Dulaurens called the adust form mania rather than melancholia. See Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 36. 36 Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 17; Screech, "Good Madness," 35, 37; Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy, 28; Robert Kinsman, "Folly, Melancholy, and Madness: A Study in the Shifting Styles of Medical Analysis and Treatment, 1450-1675," in Robert Kinsman, ed., The Darker Vision of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 275; Clarke, 208. 37 Diethelm, Medical Dissertations, 50; H. C. Erik Midelfort, "Sin, Melancholy, Obsession: Insanity and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany," in Steven L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 117. More unusual is the system presented in Lorenz Spies' dissertation of 1519, in which mania is the baseline condition, and different forms of it develop from each humor: the sanguine consisted of talking, laughing and dancing; the melancholic of sadness; the phlegmatic of delusions about water. 38 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London: Vautrollier, 1586), p. 111. 39 Cited in Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy, 160, n. 8.

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40 Jackson points out that this is true of Thomas Willis' De anima brutorum (1672), as cited from the English translation of 1674 (255). 41 Ibid. 42 Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 255; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 131. 43 Felix Plater, ch. 3, "Of an Alienation of the Mind," in A Golden Practice of Physick (London, 1662). 44 Klibansky et al., in Saturn and Melancholia, date the beginning of this change in the temperament's definition to the early medieval era (63). 45 Cited in Diethelm, Medical Dissertations, 57. 46 Diethelm, referring to a dissertation of 1615 (55). 47 Boorde's Compendyous Regimente or Dyetary of Health (1542), cited by Kinsman, "Folly, Melancholy, and Madness," 290. 48 Willis, The Soul of Brutes (1674), cited in Clarke, Mental Disorder, 294. 49 The maniac's signs are Mars and the moon in conjunction with or opposed to Saturn and Mercury. See William Mueller, "Robert Burton's Frontispiece," PMLA 64 (1949): 1074-88. 50 This is a dissertation by Mathus of Strasbourg, cited in Diethelm, Medical Dissertations, 57. 51 Plater, Golden Practice (1662 [1602]), 43. 52 Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 138-9, 140. 53 Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy, 64, 71. 54 Padua (1611), 189-91; Padua (1625), 262^. I thank Gari LaGuardia and Paul Kaplan for assistance with the Italian. 55 Paris (1644), 68ff. 56 Amsterdam (1644), 430—1. I thank Elizabeth Ferrick for assistance with the Dutch. 57 Padua (1625), 84. 58 Padua (1625), 263; Margaret A. Sullivan, "Madness and Folly: Peter Bruegel the Elder's Dulle Griet" Art Bulletin 59, 1 (March, 1977): 58. 59 Seneca "De ira," in Moral Essays, tr. John Basore (London: Heinemann, 1928), I, pp. 107-9. 60 On the tradition of Bellona as ira, see Maurice L. Shapiro, "The Virtues and Vices in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Franciscan Martyrdom," Art Bulletin 46 (1964): 369. 61 On the type of the unruly women, see Natalie Z. Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 124-51.

2

The unmaking of heroic mania Like many of the abstractions in emblem collections, furor, choler, and ira were adapted to demotic as well as allegorical uses and soon migrated to different settings across popular and elite culture. Ira and furor, in particular, assumed a significant role in the political imagery of absolutism. The aggressive presumptions of both conditions were well suited to symbolic representations of leaders identified with issues of conquest or power. Furor also figured whenever the critique of tyranny was construed as the extreme mental state of an individual ruler, while anger and choler were dominant features in less elite representations of antisocial behavior among soldiers, vagrants, scolds, and witches. These marginal types who constituted a danger to the public became popular subjects in print cycles of the temperaments and sins or vices. Anger also qualified as a special object of study in theories of the passions and their expression, furor's somatic display, its uncivilized exhibitionism and uncontrollable agitation were critical features in the depiction of demonic possession, and in the new didactic sculpture created for asylums. The adoption of mythological personae had long been a traditional privilege of sovereignty, but a monarch's emblematic choices could also be persuasive elements in shaping public opinion and in clarifying political status. This kind of careful attention to grooming the royal image developed into a critical part of state machinery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Official, historiated portrayals in painting cycles, or in the more ephemeral spectacles and entertainments, were now considered more precisely as a way of establishing a new rhetoric for modern rule. 1 In this context, elements from ira or furor could be effective in describing a king's role as a formidable adversary or conqueror. Anger as a traditionally female personification of belligerence had an additional effect on the reception of images of powerful women, both historical and contemporary, and helped to stigmatize the proponents of more assertive forms of queenship. Female figures with martial traits resembling ira's became fashionable in France during the first half of the seventeenth century. Richelieu and Anne of Austria, among others, had galleries decorated around the theme of femmes fortes or women worthies, those biblical and classical heroines of whom many were known for their military exploits. Richelieu's gallery in the Palais Royal was adapted to this topic in 1635, and his femmes fortes included the usual subjects, but also Joan of Arc, Marie de' Medici,

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and Anne of Austria. The attraction of being positioned alongside the imagery of strong heroic women soon spread among contemporaries: Mme de Scudery observed that by the 1640s, many upper-class women, including several implicated later in the Fronde's anti-monarchical activities, were intrigued by the iconographies of ira and furor, and chose to be painted with a helmet, pike, and shield decorated with the head of Medusa.2 Peter Paul Rubens' cycle of paintings for Marie de' Medici's gallery in the Luxembourg Palace begins with just such an image. Commissioned in 1622 following the regent's reconciliation with her son, Louis XIII, the project's ambitious program was intended to persuade male courtiers that she continued to wield considerable political power. The initial image, Marie de' Medici as Bellona^ shows the regent in a guise constructed from the various attributes of that goddess as well as Minerva (Figure 2.1). She dominates a battlefield littered with armor and weapons, and a large phallic cannon reinforces her association with a forceful virility. While the helmet and scepter are standard for Minerva or Bellona, the disheveled garment and exposed breast introduce disorderly elements that conflict with Minerva's pacifism and suggest the more belligerent qualities of Bellona, ira, or furor. 3 Similar iconographical tensions characterize the entire series, but this particular image is notable for the mixed messages of its allegorical attributes and for its clash between masculine martial prerogatives and explicit female sexuality. The handling of the battlefield setting also complicates the image's function as a representation of triumphant victory. Abandoned bits of armor and weaponry are prominent foreground items that signify defeat, but, more provocatively, they call attention to the familiar chivalric symbols for male dishonor and disenfranchisement. The strangely prominent cuirass and two separate but complete arms suggest an uncomfortably literal sense of disarmament as dismemberment. Visiting courtiers viewing the cycle would be apprized at the start that Marie de' Medici's strength was achieved through assuming male roles and usurping male power by force. This reception was abetted not only by the fact that the regent had a degree of real power but also because this kind of femmes fortes iconography was implicated in the anti-feminist debates of the period. Figures like Judith or Zenobia were cited as proof that the heroic, martial role was not suitable for women, and representations of them in classical military gear like that worn by ira were associated with the truism that, in actuality, virile women posed a serious danger to men.4 Other voices in this debate identified social disorder with an increasing incidence of female rule and exercise of public power.5 The number of women who assumed roles of governance rose abruptly after 1550, with Mary Tudor (1553-8) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603) reigning in England, Mary Stuart in Scotland (1542-67), Catherine de' Medici as regent in France (1552, 1560-3, 1574), and Margaret of Parma as governor-general in The Netherlands (1559-67). In France, the Salic Law forbidding the

Figure 2.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Mane de' Medici as Bellona, 1622-5. Musee du Louvre. Photograph © R.M.N.

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The Art of Frenzy

accession of women to the throne was circumvented twice more with the regencies of Marie de'Medici (1610-16) and Anne of Austria (1643-51).6 Both seventeenth-century regents incorporated ira's heroism into their political imagery as a positive symbol of women's ability to govern. But the motif's representational strains of discord and the presumption of male power undercut that intention, and, in Marie de' Medici's case, this enabled her detractors to use the imagery to discredit her regency and to disparage the rule of women in general. This subversive development of furor and ira in femmes fortes iconography was blocked, perhaps intentionally, and diverted to a masculine advantage, in the French court in the 1650s, when the young Louis XIV began performing in ballets as various personifications. Convinced of the political advantages in royal image-making, Louis and his advisors created a kind of "theater-state" in which entertainments and spectacles could stimulate perceptions that the king's personal presence was brilliant and awesome.7 Artists working for the court like Jean Berain and Henri Gissey collaborated in these productions, and they were noted for their skill in turning Ripa's static templates into dashing costumes for the performers. It was common for Louis and his male courtiers to perform all the ballet parts, including the women's roles, and the king in particular was known for his talented dancing, an ability he put to good use in the development of his image. In 1654, Louis danced several parts in the ballet Pelee et Thetis: he took the role of Apollo, his favorite persona, but he was especially striking in the parts of La Guerre and Une furie.8 As "La Guerre", the king performed brandishing sword and torch in a costume mimicking Roman armor (Figure 2.2). In this rendering of the part attributed to Gissey, Louis also bears a convincing expression of anger, and, except for gender, the personification clearly resembles the template for ira. Apart from the torch, the ensemble also evokes the French masculine variant of furor, fureur indomitable, that signified the highest degree of ungovernable unruliness. The combined templates amplify Louis' qualities as a supreme force, and underscore his identification with an extreme degree of formidable power. As "Une Furie", Louis grasps intertwining serpents and a flaming torch, his costume writhing with snakes, his hair fanning out in reptilian waves, and with a furious expression, he achieves the effect of a shrieking goad as described in Ripa for the female furies (Figure 2.3). In this guise, the Roman tunic costume and male identity again indicate a combination of sources: the furies' snakes and hideous expression have actually been grafted on to the French variation for furor as a way of accentuating the awesome, quasidivine force of Louis' adversarial power. During the period that Louis danced in court ballets, he compared himself most often to Alexander the Great, so it is clear that at the very beginning of his reign, he regarded the warrior-king affiliation as a strategic enhancement that emphasized his mature martial prowess and aggressive aura. It is just these qualities that would later be controversial in the assessment of his policies.

The unmaking of heroic mama

43

Figure 2.2 Henri Gissey (attrib.), La Guerre, 1654. Musee Carnavalet, Paris. Phototheque des Musees de la Ville cle Paris.

The facial expression given the king in both roles, a combination of frowning and staring that has an especially threatening aspect, is the traditional formula for the appearance of anger or rage that was reinforced and codified by Charles LeBrun in the 1660s (Figure 2.4). LeBrun, director of the Academic royale from 1663 until his death in 1690, devoted himself to theorizing the passions when he was not absorbed in the decoration of Versailles. 9 Taking Descartes' Traite des passions (1649) as his primary source, LeBrun gave detailed descriptions of each passion as it materialized on the face:

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The Art of Frenzy

Figure 2.3 Henri Gissey (attrib.), Une furie, 1654. Musee Carnavalet, Paris. Phototheque des Musees de la Ville de Paris. When anger fills the soul, he who feels this passion has red and inflamed eyes, the pupils restless and shining, the eyebrows now lowered, now raised, and contracted against each other. The forehead will appear deeply furrowed, forming wrinkles between the eyes; the nostrils will be open and enlarged, the lips full and turned out and pressed against one another with the under lip raised over the upper, leaving the corners of the mouth slightly open to form a cruel and disdainful grin.10

LeBrun's insistence that the brows moved in two directions at once, a movement now known to be physically impossible, and that the lips can both turn out and be compressed, gives anger a fantastic, mask-like distortion like the Medusas engraved on Roman shields to terrify opponents, and Louis in fact owned this type of parade shield. A similar

The unmaking of heroic mania

45

Figure 2.4 Charles LeBrun, La Colere c. 1660s (Guiffrey and Marcel 6501). Musee du Louvre. Photograph (C) R.M.N.

kind of apotropaic power characterizes all of Louis' ballet performances, but it is particularly strong in the belligerent roles that relied upon an exceptional degree of expressive exaggeration. The classical topos of royal furor, in which the display of unchecked power combined with warrior bravado, was a model that Louis XIV's role-playing entertained but did not explicitly articulate. A number of other literary and historical characters, however, did literally reinforce this topos, and references to them helped to establish the model's particular role in seventeenth-century political iconography. Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, and Saul were the Old Testament figures most associated with insane despotic tendencies, and, of course, the notable late classical model for the type was Alexander the Great. 11 A leader's insatiable drive for conquest, unjustified pursuit of revenge, or surprise attacks against his own men were the key characteristics of this kind of royal furor. A

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The Art of Frenzy

commonality of symptoms seen in both ancient as well as more recent rulers gave the model continuity, enabling it to appear both legendary and historically pertinent. Several medieval kings in England and France suffered from bouts of furor and their example contributed to the impression that monarchs were especially prone to violent attacks of frenzy, being particularly vulnerable during the hot summer months when choler was most likely to overheat.12 King John, who reigned in England from 1199 to 1216, suffered outbursts of rage during which he tore his clothes and chewed straw. Henry VI (r. 1422-61) fell ill initially from an attack of "ffransy." In France, Charles VI (r. 1380-1422) experienced numerous anger-derived, heat-related attacks that led to maniacal symptoms, including rolling, diastrophos eyes and violent behavior against his household and men. Of the many narratives recounting tales of royal furor, the story of Saul comes closest to these early modern examples of a king's frenzied belligerence, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth century, he was the tyrant most often depicted in art exhibiting such extreme behavior. Most artists preferred the scene from I Samuel 18 that encapsulates all the critical elements in Saul's dangerous mania: this describes the moment when, as David tries to soothe the king with music, Saul's furor erupts in revenge. While occasionally the king is shown as edgy and unstable, just contemplating action, as in Rembrandt's Saul and David (c. 1655, The Mauritshuis), most, like David Colijns' organ cover of c. 1635—40, depict Saul acting out the full extent of his rage (Figure 2.5).13 He stares wildly, lunging toward the youthful David, and pointing his weapon toward the defenseless young man's back. The force and intent of the action are clarified in the text: "And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it" (I Samuel 18:10—11). Colijns' painting originally covered the organ wings in the Nieuwe Kijds Chapel in Amsterdam, an acknowledgment of music's soothing, therapeutic effect (it is possible that Rembrandt's painting had likewise been intended as an organ cover). Painted organ wings like this, as one of the few didactic, visual objects permitted in Dutch Protestant churches, could serve as a pointed public display of concern that here warned against a ruler's proclivity for irrational behavior and its dangerous consequences for his subjects. The message of Saul's unreliable sovereignty was also reinforced in popular, readily accessible illustrated bibles, such as Peter Schut's Historien des Ouden Testaments of 1659, in which the enraged king is shown being physically restrained. In fact, Dutch artists depicted Saul's combative fury against David with some frequency throughout the century, particularly during the 1630s and the 1650s.14 Since the early Renaissance, David's victory over Goliath had been a symbol for cities unfairly besieged by tyrants, and, in Italian art, finding contemporary political significance in aspects of David's story was by the seventeenth century a well-established interpretative habit. 15 In the northern Netherlands, the practice of couching political circumstances in biblical terms

The unmaking of heroic mania

Figure 2.5 David Colijns, David Playing the Harp, Catharijneconvent, Utrecht.

47

1635-40. Museum

can be found as recently as the 1590s in works by Cornells van Haarlem. Several of his paintings, including The Massacre of the Innocents (1591), are thought to be commentaries on the policies of Maurits, and perhaps even warnings against the stadholder assuming a tyrant's prerogatives. Maurits himself voluntarily assumed the guise of a Roman general for his representation in allegorical works from 1610 to 1620, thereby adopting a distinctly martial and imperial persona for his political efforts.' 6 The contrasting of Saul's royal furor with David's innocence should thus be read alongside these contemporary events as a moral lesson that was particularly meaningful for a burgher audience lately free of foreign domination, and wary of the aggressive, imperialistic tactics undertaken

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The Art of Frenzy

by sovereigns closer to home, like the stadholders Maurits and later, Willem II. After Maurits' death in 1625, there was a reaction in the 1630s against his aggressive strategies, especially the execution of Oldenbarnevelt in 1619. In the 1650s, following the death of Willem II, there was a similar response to his martial initiatives, particularly the failed attempt at a military takeover of Amsterdam.17 The pertinent symbolic elements in Saul's frenzied disorder are that personal imperial rule is inherently unstable and flawed, and that a tendency toward the tyrannical was the most troublesome aspect of contemporary leadership in The Netherlands. It was not just the ruling or military elite who were thought to be susceptible to furor: young soldiers and cavaliers, because of their weaponry skills and wartime experiences, were also regarded as especially prone to anger. Images of armed, hotheaded youths who are eager to draw swords or knives at the least provocation occur frequently as ira in seventeenth-century Dutch, English, and French print series of the seven deadly sins. These figures display - in order to censure - behavior identified with sin or vice, but they have an entertaining as well as instructional purpose.18 The Flemish artist Adrian Brouwer painted a series of the seven deadly sins sometime between 1626 and 1628 when he was in Haarlem and probably in contact with Frans Hals. Influenced by the Utrecht followers of Caravaggio, Hals had developed a spontaneous, spectator-engaging variation of the three-quarter or half-length genre/ portrait format in which they had specialized, and which Brouwer proceeded to adapt to the subject of vice personified. 19 Brouwer's compositions were much admired and copied: during the first half of the seventeenth century, many reproductive engravings were published after this particular set of paintings. Prints based on works like these with cropped figures in modern dress were a novelty, so that Brouwer's paintings were a timely match, probably intentional, for what was a new graphic development.20 Lucas Vorsterman was the principal engraver for Brouwer's deadly sins group, producing four different variations which inspired at least seven versions by other engravers across northern Europe. These variants were offered by publishers separately as well as in sets, a marketing flexibility that made Brouwer's image one of the most widely available depictions of ira.21 Vorsterman had been a principal engraver for Peter Paul Rubens, but their collaboration ended abruptly in the summer of 1622 when the young assistant supposedly made an attempt on his master's life.22 Shortly thereafter, the engraver relocated to England with a recently acquired six-year privilege to reproduce works by Brouwer. Vorsterman's engraving of c. 1628 shows a three-quarter-length young and well-dressed soldier or cavalier unsheathing his sword with a strong grip (Figure 2.6). In an abrupt movement that has upset a table and jug in the tavern, the man's wide-open eyes bulge as he stares at his adversary with a look of excessive rage that is more dazed than focused. The confrontational orientation toward the spectator heightens the scene's immediacy, a typical aspect of the cropped format popular at this time. As

The unmaking of heroic mania

49

Figure 2.6 Lucas Vorsterman, after Adrian Brouwer, /ra, c. 1628. Graphische Sammlung Alhertina, Vienna.

with much art in the moralizing tradition, collusion as well as censure are reinforced by the composition's formal elements. But only ira in this series has such a precipitous pitch toward the viewer, accentuating the peculiarly contagious aspect of this passion. The effect functions specifically here to insinuate the spectator's complicity as threatened opponent or willing adversary ready to take up the challenge. The print's accompanying inscription emphasizes the passion's destructive drive, but

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also that its greatest victim is the angry person himself: "Anger destroys all it encounters/It offends the other some, but mostly its own state." Another edition of the image engraved in Paris by Sebastien Vouillement similarly focuses on personal admonition, advising the viewer: "You ought to be moderate." But a second version alters the message, referring in the first person explicitly to the vast and uncontainable rage of soldiers: "It is not enough for me to have subjected so many brave people to war,/I want to drown the whole earth in the blood of my enemies." Weak on restraint and moderation, these belligerent types threaten to extend their aggressive behavior beyond the battlefield. Ira as a soldier or cavalier injecting disorder into a civilian setting differs dramatically from the uniformed officers who paraded their martial skills in Dutch prints from the 1580s. This change from a positive, morale-boosting iconography to one that is negative and demoralizing articulates concerns provoked by contemporary events.23 Throughout the 1620s, mercenaries who had been used by the stadholder at his most monarchical were demobilized on a large scale, and those retained were used to control contentious local militias. Disbanded mercenaries were regarded as a major source of social disorder: unable to find suitable employment, they were especially dangerous as armed vagrants. Across the continent and in England, the vagrancy of so-called "masterless men" released from a range of occupations had increased dramatically between 1560 and 1640.24 Masterless soldiers represented only about one-tenth of this larger vagrant group, but they were more feared for their violent propensities as well as the fact that sites closest to military encampments were widely held to be the most volatile. It was also thought that the discharged soldiers who were especially vulnerable to falling vagrant were those recruited from the lower classes, and their armed and uprooted status caused particular concern. People without a place in the social hierarchy who roamed freely abroad and who, like demobilized soldiers, were capable of the invasive violence characteristic of furor and ira were considered a real threat to public welfare. Within this group, a small yet highly visible and especially threatening contingent were the mobile and mercurial insane. This "ragged regiment" as Thomas Dekker called them in The Bellman of London, was vividly described in the rogue literature of the period, and included vagrants, pedlars, itinerant workers, musicians, imposters of all sorts, criminals, masterless men, and husbands of scolds. Engravings of vagrants, like those by French artists Jacques Bellange and Jacques Callot, emphasize a physical grotesqueness both improvised and real, as well as a propensity for infighting and for inducing brawls or inciting riots wherever they congregated. These prints continued a popular formula in which tavern habitues armed with knives rather than swords exemplified the kind of brawling provoked by anger: Hieronymus Bosch's "Ira" from his table of The Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1485-1500, Madrid: Prado) is a well-known example of the type, and many of Brouwer's tavern paintings

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were also variations on this theme. Vagrants around taverns inspired fear among citizens and onlookers: Robert Copland, in The Highway to the Spital-House (1535-6), acknowledged their anger and inclination to menace: How say you of these folks full of ire That burn in wrath hotter than fire, And never be quiet, but chide and brawl With wrath and anger, fretting hart and gall, Wayward, wood, furious, and fell; For where they be, quietness cannot dwell, But always strife, mistrust and great disease, And in no wise no man can them please. 25 Most vagrants were young single men, usually disengaged from service, apprenticeships, seasonal farm work, or military duty. The income-less poor, the able-bodied unwilling to work, the lawless, and the insane were interspersed throughout these groups. Altogether they were an ominous presence in towns, which frequently tried to expel them, and equally threatening in the surrounding urban areas, where they often settled in the alehouses along the city limits. The summer season, also the critical period for those susceptible to furor and ira, saw their greatest migration, and official responses to contain their movement usually took place then. 26 Traditional forms of poor relief were unable to meet the demands created at this time by a confluence of harvest failures, land shortages, increased population growth, and high inflation, and so it became increasingly common to view the poor and vagrant as objects of fear rather than charity. The possibility that large groups of vagrants were readily available as participants in or inciters of rebellion, along with what was perceived as their generally contemptuous attitude toward authority, added to the fears that their mere presence already inspired. From Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1583-4) to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), it was commonplace to regard these vagrants as rabble who resembled enraged beasts and who were thought, with the exception of civil war, to pose the greatest threat to social order. 27 Depictions of these malcontents unleashing their mayhem across the social landscape drove these fears while simultaneously justifying them. Adrian van de Venne's All-Arm from 1621, for example, shows a motley group of disabled vagrants in a pitched battle, their lameness a thing of the past as they vigorously assault each other with crutches and staffs (Figure 2.7).28 The enraged features of someone gone berserk with fury characterizes the dominant attacker on the right. Van de Venne produced numerous grisaille paintings like this, as well as designs and engravings for books on moralizing subjects. His composition here may owe something to an earlier print by Bellange, but van de Venne includes more details from the masterless way of life. He also added complexity to the subject by providing an inscription that, working on several levels and languages,

52

Figure 2.7 ~

Museum.

The Art of Frenzy

Adrian van de Venne, All-Arm. 1621. Amsterdams '

}

Historisch

accentuates the image's connotations of insurgence and spreading danger: the title's meaning is literally "all poor," but in Dutch and English, its enunciation produces the exclamation "alarm!" as well as the French a I'arme, or "to arms." These puns emphasize the ambiguous status of the vagrant poor, acknowledging their duplicity and the double threat they presented to public order as both rabble and platoon. Van de Venne, whose works were acquired by the stadholder and the elite citizenry of The Hague, returned again to the topic of a regiment of masterless men, when he adapted it to the northern tradition of a ship of fools in the grisaille painting, Kalis-Boud (1634) (Figure 2.8).29 Here, a roguish and grotesque vagrant dominates the space of the picture with a purposeful stride and power-signifying, arms-akimbo gesture. The man's

Figure 2.8 Adrian van de Venne, Kalis-Bond. 1634. Maida and George Abrams Collection. Photograph courtesy Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

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torn, ragged clothing is accessorized with a motley collection of pipes, pans, pots, and straw that mimic military costume. A bowl and a basket decorate his shoulders like epaulets, and he wears a large leaf for a helmet. In the left background is his honor guard of drummer and standard-bearer. Other vagabond men, presumably subject to his leadership, are visible in the distance. His accouterments are usually taken as signs of a vice-ridden way of life (smoking, drinking), with the straw and broken vessel highlighting his unworthy status. His name contains referents to vagabondage and beggary, but also to boldness and arrogance. These latter qualities are borne out by his stance, adoption of military costume, and presumption of leadership status. These features also make an issue of his mental status: references to folly include the ship of fools motif and the crossed pipes that mimic folly's traditional pinwheel symbol. A more serious form of disorder is suggested by the cracked pot, an item emblematic of a "crack-brained" condition just as much as it is evidence of drunkenness. Specific references to the condition of mania include the bizarre clothing and physical exposure that the torn apparel creates, along with the straw that was identified with the kind of institutional confinement that frenzy usually required. But most of van de Venne's inventiveness has gone into relating vagrancy to the presumptions of military culture, and in so doing, the artist has made mania's characteristic inclination towards arrogant domination central to his symbolism. These and other images of "masterless men" made sport of vagrancy, but they also alerted the public to the dangers inherent in rebukes to social hierarchy, and called attention to the unacceptable display of physical prowess. Vagrants typically threatened violence when alms were denied them, vowing to steal, set fire to houses, kill animals, and fell trees.30 Begging with a distinctly menacing air was a common tactic, especially when there was the advantage of only servants and women at home, and this became the offense most frequently associated with the more devious vagrants. Feigning illness along with various kinds of disabilities was another form of fraudulent activity calculated to swindle honest citizens. Both the unpredictability and the violence of these dangerous vagrants, in addition to their bogus association with some of the most frightening incurable illnesses like epilepsy and furor, combined to give observers a clear impression that the vagrants most to be feared were the wandering, violent insane. In England, the best-known subgroup of lunatic vagrants were the notorious Abram-men and Toms of Bedlam who claimed to have been discharged from Bethlem Hospital uncured.31 The figure of roaming, begging men grew out of the older stereotype of the woodwose, madman of the forest, but at this juncture, these men were associated with criminal acts, especially theft and fraud, and they also specialized in counterfeiting various ailments to gain a sympathetic advantage. Some even claimed to have Bethlem's authorization to beg, a practice which the hospital repeatedly took pains to deny. Women and servants, in particular, feared

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the Abram-man's strategy of approaching homes when they were relatively defenseless. When Robert Greene adapted Orlando furioso for the stage in the 1590s, he made Orlando's roaming resemble the aggressive begging of a Tom of Bedlam: he came to our house, when all our folkes were gone to church, and there was no bodie at home but I, and I was turning of the spit, and he comes in and bad me fetch him some drinke. Now I went and fetcht him some; and ere I came againe, by my troth, he ran away with the rost-meate, spit and all, and some had nothing but porredge to dinner. (Ill, i)

In appearance, Toms of Bedlam were recognizable by their disheveled costume. As in this woodcut from around 1680 attached to the ballad, "New Mad Tom of Bedlam," most wore ragged, torn clothing that exposed portions of their bodies, and often they were bare-armed and bare-legged as well (Figure 2.9). The disdain for propriety communicated

Figure 2.9 Museum.

Anon., Tom o' Bedlam, Bagford Ballads, r. 1680. :(' The British

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by physical exposure and disarray is of the same order as that displayed by furious madmen. Long dirty hair, a horn, a sturdy wooden staff, sometimes sharpened into a pike and sometimes hung with bacon, make up Tom's accessories. Patterns pricked into the skin of their arms like tattoos were offered as more particular proof of time spent in Bethlem. When Edgar pretends to be a Tom in King Lear, he has experience enough of the type upon which to model his performance: The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills, Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers, Enforce their charity. (II, iii, 13ff.) In ballads like the "New Mad Tom of Bedlam," Tom contrasts his aimless wandering with his previous confinement: Forth from my sad and darksome cell From the deep abyss of Hell, ... Through the woods I wander day and night To find my straggling senses.32 Other ballads, like "The Mad Man's Morrice" of 1637, make it clear that this roaming is accompanied by frenzy: Heard you not lately of a man That went beside his wits, And naked through the streets he ran Wrapt in his franticke fits?33 The majority of these ballads emphasize the social embarrassment that the madman represented in distinctly masculine terms.34 This recurrent, didactic ingredient suggests that many of the songs were cautionary tales for young men at the outset of their careers in relatively tenuous social positions. Most of the symptoms Mad Toms exhibit are typical masculine traits like aggression combined with incivility prompted by largely male concerns, like the loss of jobs and status, and sometimes they are simply criminal. Lunatics inclined to rage or furor were regarded as the most dangerous because they were prone to assault and likely to threaten both persons and property.35 These seriously disordered types were also most likely to end up vagrant, and their vagrancy was the more frightening, owing to their volatility and propensity for sudden, extreme acts of violence. It was traditionally a family responsibility to keep the dangerous insane from doing harm, either by restraining or chaining them in houses, outbuildings, or, as was particularly common, in the sturdier stone structures

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of churches.36 The poorer families, such as those of laborers and artisans, were unable to afford the considerable costs of containing and guarding the violent insane. Consequently, it was common for lunatics from the lower classes to fall into vagrancy when their families could no longer pay for their care. Subsequent efforts to confine the insane were in effect prompted by an interest in containing the danger their vagrancy posed to the social order.37 In England, the casebooks of the physician-astrologer Richard Napier, as well as various Quarter Sessions records, are filled with descriptions of the "ragious" undertaking to commit "several outrageous acts." We hear of a man in 1641 "lyinge bound in Cheannes . . . the neighbors fearful to come near him in his fits," and of another in 1688 who in his lunacy was tabled with a parishioner and was kept and chained - but in his lunacy broake of his chaines and went to a house and pulled down the slates and spoyled the goods and but for that Neighbors came in would have burnt the house and is a person not fitt to go loose.38

Challenges to individuals included threats to kill, rushing people in the streets, and refusals to be ruled by elders or social superiors. In 1630, warrants were issued by the Privy Council for "certaine persons who run up and downe the streets and doe much harme being either distracted or counterfeites, and therefore not to be suffered to have their liberties to range."39 John Somerville, on his way to court in 1583 to shoot Elizabeth I, attacked passersby in the streets with his sword; in 1642, Tobias Hume was "dangerous in goinge abroad and doinge hurt"; Aliezar Coppe admitted "charging so many coaches, so many hundreds of men and women of the greater rank, in the open streets, with my hand stretched out, .. .40 Visual images of the urban danger precipitated by the violent insane emphasize the startling nature of an encounter in one's own neighborhood. Two images in particular demonstrate how scenes of lunatics' unpredictably violent actions and spectators' reactive distress could afford didactic opportunities through which the importance of civility and respect for traditional social values might be reasserted. Both depictions show the madman as dangerously armed and running amok on a city street. Each lunatic is characterized with enough status-lowering features that viewers might readily identify the person as unbalanced as well as criminal. Both armed men are isolated and obviously unallied. One of the emblems in Paolo Maccio's collection of 1628 is illustrated with an angry, frowning madman, who, sword drawn, rushes toward a group of pedestrians in a city square (Figure 2.10).41 All react with alarm and attempt to get out of the maniac's way. He wears a short garment whose unkempt state, a symbol of impetuous movements and social disrespect, resembles that of Ripa's Furore. The extensive sartorial disarray also attests to his vagrant status, and the shadowed face, frowning expression, and bristling hair register the state of rage that

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Figure 2.10 O. Gatti, emblem 72, "Pazzo colla spada," in Paolo Maccio, Emblemata, 1628. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

propels his attack. The emblem's accompanying text contrasts the armigerous lunatic with the educated, eloquent man of letters. Sword play fanned by fury is a trope for excessive language, and the verses advise judiciousness and moderation in word and act. Furious aggression is the exact opposite of tempered eloquence; such physical assault is purposeless and should be left off in favor of verbal distinction.42 A marauding urban vagrant sallying forth with his sword supplies the visual argument for this lesson in masculine moderation. The second image of lunatic urban violence is also an engraving, but not an illustration in an emblem collection. Jean Le Pautre's print of 1661 for the Confrairie Royale des Bourgeois de Paris depicts a berserk man, un desespere, as the legend below explains, about to attack a statue of the Virgin and Child with a long dagger as several bystanders react with

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Figure 2.11 Jean Le Pautre, IM Rue aux Ours, 1661. Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.

shock and dismay (Figure 2.11). The attacker's old-fashioned, shabby livery suggests that this itinerant, masterless lunatic might be the kind of out-of-work tavern habitue typically shown in such dress in early seventeenth-century art. Here given a contemporary setting, the assault actually took place in the rue aux Ours in 1418. When the statue shed real blood from the knife's wounds, it was declared that a miracle had occurred and the sculpture was removed to a special chapel in St. Martin des Champs. The brotherhood's proprietary enthusiasm for the statue is the print's primary focus, and there is no suggestion that the miracle included or even facilitated the madman's cure. But the image gives primacy to isolating the frenzied act of impiety that provoked the miracle,

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and in so doing, underscores the invasive presence of such lost and wayward roaming people. Contemporaries worried about the characteristic insubordination underlying much of this behavior and its resistance to being "overmastered" by either self-control or containment. Napier's case notes mention this stubborn uncooperativeness over seventy times, and a similar rebelliousness is notable in accounts of lunatics whose behavior could be interpreted as seditious or treasonable. The insane generally remained at liberty and were tolerated with considerable latitude at this time, unless they acted violently, amassed a following, or threatened the person of the sovereign. When this threatening behavior exceeded the bounds of family and neighborhood, it garnered more public acknowledgment, and various degrees of official response ensued, from family guardianship, to confinement, even to imprisonment and execution. Because of its ties to city and crown, various governing bodies typically sent to Bethlem those individuals who appeared to be insane and dangerous in a political way.43 In the 1570s, the Privy Council on several occasions ordered the commitment of those found guilty of "sedicious" words, and in 1595, after speaking out against the city government and the mayor, a silkweaver was committed, sparking a civilian riot that effected his release. Claiming to be the queen's son, Bartholomew Helstone was confined in 1607 largely because crowds gathered to hear him make his case for legitimacy. It was one of the responsibilities of the Board of Green Cloth to send to Bethlem anyone threatening the royal household, and offenders typically were unruly petitioners who gathered in the royal parks or anyone who spoke dangerous words against the king within a 12-mile radius of the court.44 The public problem posed by unruly vagrant lunatics was in this way identified with the royal or civic threat created by seditious individuals who drew and even incited crowds, making any clear distinction between unpredictable furor and calculated insubordination difficult to maintain. Fears that a growing underclass might threaten sedition on a larger scale were confirmed in 1647, when the so-called revolt of Masaniello nine months of violence following protests over taxes levied by the Spanish government in Naples - gained international attention. 45 Masaniello, the fisherman acknowledged as the leader of the riot, was assassinated only ten days after the protest began. But even in that short period of time, contemporaries were convinced that, following what observers noted was a marked tendency toward choler and anger, Masaniello developed a kind of tyrannical insanity likened to Alexander's that resulted in increasingly erratic behavior, including attacking his own men with a sword. His madness might have been only a rumor spread by patricians aligned with Spanish interests, but it was readily accepted by many that his brief exposure to power had unhinged him. Prints conflating the riotous and murderous events of the revolt were published and paintings commissioned within a few months, and several

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first-hand written accounts were also issued in Paris and London as well as in Italy. These emphasize the extent of the disorder the riot unleashed, and give supposed eyewitness descriptions of Masaniello's demeanor and character. Full-length depictions show him in shabby fisherman's loose clothing with short pants and wearing a Phrygian bonnet, details gauged to heighten the idea of his marginal status. A portrait sketch by Aniello Falcone modeled on Leonardo's expressive studies for The Battle of Anghiari highlights Masaniello's identification with the battle-ready choleric humor and the passion of anger, and reinforces the view that his instability was a principal motivating factor in the revolt (Figure 2.12).46 Attention to the riot's phases and participants was strong in The Netherlands, which saw the proceedings in light of their own struggles to be freed from Spanish domination. In France, reactions prompted the critical review of Mazarin's policies and sparked a sympathy march in

Figure 2.12 Aniello Falcone, Portrait of Masaniello, c. 1647. The Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York (I, 107).

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protest against the king by Parisian women that many regard as a premonition of the Fronde. Several medals were minted which depict Masaniello along with Cromwell; those cast in England contrast the fisherman unfavorably with the Protector, while those produced in The Netherlands use the Neapolitan's example to discredit Cromwell.47 Most responses to the rebellion called attention to a sequence of events in which disorder was created by the seditious elements of the lower classes whose novel experience of power turned them into despots of the first order. There was a widespread rumor, and many of the revolt's accounts included it, that Masaniello had allowed an armed regiment of women to participate in his uprising, and perhaps this example, along with the tradition of women protesting about the inflation of food prices, encouraged the Parisian women to assume a more active involvement, too. The idea of a female regiment along the lines of amazonian legend, as well as the more recent femmes fortes incarnation, had been the focus of male anxiety and vilification in numerous treatises, beginning with John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). Even less extreme writers on women's behavior than Knox, like Baldassare Castiglione and Juan Luis Vives, recognized the wisdom of placing limits on women's aspirations and discouraged any significant leveling of gender or class distinctions. Many tracts repeated the fear that social disruption would follow the increasing incidence of female rule and exercise of public power, and several expressed anxieties that new options for women had in effect encouraged their adoption of unruly and belligerent behavior at all levels of society. Sparked by these fears, and by women's expanded roles in society and more assertive relation to fashion and material culture, print cycles of modish females in the latest French styles proliferated after 1628, including entire series of the vices and temperaments. 48 In sets of mixed gender, ira and choler were typically masculine proclivities, but in these all-distaff collections, belligerent, unruly behavior was given a female, domestic construction. George Glover's series of The Seven Deadly Sins is a good example of this development.49 Here, "Ira/Wrath" is stylishly outfitted, her dress adorned with lace and bows in competition with a matching set of bracelets and necklace (Figure 2.13). The dress's lacetrimmed bib accentuates her breasts, calling attention to an immodesty that is a consistent feature of these sets. With disheveled hair, flying drapery and head cover, the angry woman rushes obliquely toward the target of her ire, with two sharp knives or household implements grasped firmly in her hands. The action is as precipitous as it was in Brouwer's image (Figure 2.6), but here the spectator is not aggressively cast as the implied target of the attack. The woman's face has the familiar set of swollen features, raised, furrowed brows, staring eyes and open mouth that were traditionally identified as the expressive marks of anger. Verses below the image couch the experience of a woman in this state in terms of a natural disaster suddenly descending upon a calm, domestic refuge:

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Figure 2.13 George Glover, the Seven Deadly Sins, "Wrath

The British Museum

No peace can bee, wher Angry Woeman dwe Her eyes sparke Fyer, Her Cheekes with fury swe Silence is turned to Clamour, and no wond Since such in Calmest weather can rayse thund

Descended from the northern tradition of Dame Anger and "fight for breeches" iconography, Glover's "Ira" ,s recast as a currently fashiona variation on the shrewish housewife motif.- She is no regiment leader, disrupter of peace on the home front, and as such a familiar inversion o traditional gender expectations for which the interest in French fashion

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merely supplied a new outfit. It is thought that these prints were designed for a male audience's entertainment in taverns, etc., which is why only a small percent of a presumably large number of originals have survived. In this case, the function as well as iconography of such sets demonstrate that a woman's angry assertiveness - her "short madness" - was an anxiety-provoking problem in private as well as in public spaces. Fears about the encroachment of disorder in the period extending from 1560 to 1640 encouraged a reading of behavior in terms of obedience and disobedience. At a time when political theory emphasized patriarchal assumptions as the guiding parallels between family and state, obedience was a critical linchpin. As women's obedience was absolutely essential to household order, by extension, it was necessary also to the maintenance of public peace, as works like The Lancashire Witches (1634) by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome took pains to reinforce.51 Court records support this pattern as well, and make it clear that women's disorderly conduct, especially when measured by scold charges and witchcraft accusations, amounted to a worrying social problem. These women, social outcasts without family support or protection, enhanced the tensions already engendered by the deterioration in neighborly customs brought on by the same upheavals that caused the vagrancy problem. Women, however, were rarely a vagrancy concern, because poor women and their children tended to stay close to charitable establishments. Even Mad Bess, the female counterpart of Tom of Bedlam, was rarely glimpsed outside the cells of Bethlem in the ballads that recounted her plight. The women thought to precipitate communal disorder are thus not wandering vagrants or lunatics but scolds, witches, and the possessed. Members of these three groups exhibit similar propensities and share significant features with the condition of mania. This is not to suggest that all three were identical, but that in the minds of contemporary specialists, as well as the average observer, these conditions were regarded as sharing an impressive number of overlapping "symptoms." With disruptive behavior disturbing to spectators, all three types were known to be harmful to persons, property, and the general welfare of the community. Their aggressive inclinations were measured by ugliness, forwardness, or other traits of an unsuitable masculine cast. Through myriad devices of excess and exposure, members of each group were liable to take egregious liberties with standards of verbal and bodily decorum through which they could seem to approach a state of mania. In fact, a scold's anger and verbal hostility were regarded by contemporaries as female analogs for the anger-fueled physical violence of maniacal men.52 Such equivalences help to explain why immersion in water was regarded as a suitable antidote for both scolds and maniacs.53 And it is an often-cited fact that contemporary skeptics about witchcraft thought they were not only marginal outcasts but likely to be mentally unstable as well. The frenzied, as well as scolds, the possessed, and witches, were inclined to verbal obscenities and

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sexually explicit forms of physical agitation, in a manner much like Plater's observation of maniacs as those who tell false, obscene and horrid things, cry out, swear, and with a certain brutish Appetite they go about things like beasts, and some of them otherwise unusual even to men; and especially some of them desire Venery very much; as I have seen it befal a noble Matron otherwise most honest, who did invite both men and dogs to Copulation by the most filthy words and gestures. (Practice of Physick, 28)

Plater saw continuities between the possessed, scolds, and maniacs, "now raving Angrily with Scoldings, Clamors, Blasphemies, and desiring also to do hurt as the maniacal" (28). Burton associated these symptoms, not with hysteria, but with the kind of burnt melancholy that was so like mania, claiming that "women misaffected are far more violent, and grievously troubled."54 Scolds were angry, unruly women who fought with neighbors and caused disruption in public places. Reports of scolds and accusations against them occurred most often in urban areas, where neighbors were in close proximity, public spaces were shared, and where more women could involve themselves in public discourse. Most women accused of being scolds were associated with other crimes. Occasionally, witchcraft is suggested, but it is more common to hear of theft, sexual immorality, swearing, and drunkenness.55 A recurrent figure is the scold who is a nuisance in public places like taverns, where she disturbs the other patrons by cursing, shrieking, and starting brawls. Using the same format that had influenced Brouwer's image of ira, Frans Hals' painting of Malle Babbe from around 1630 shows the cropped figure of an ugly, drunken woman noisily interjecting some remark or shriek into the communal setting of the local tavern (Figure 2.14). Her disheveled dress with its matted collar are indications of a slovenly decline, and the coarsened appearance of her features gives them a distinctly masculine cast. The deeply furrowed brow, open-mouthed, tooth-baring grimace suggestive of anger, along with the soiled, perhaps hirsute, facial skin, all contribute to the impression of a disobedient, unacceptable form of female behavior with masculine features in a setting normally associated with men. While her clamorous behavior suggests that she is a female ira or a scold, the owl perched on her shoulder adds to this mix the possibility that she is also a witch. Owls may be symbolic of a number of traits, including folly and drunkenness, but they are also witches' familiars, and the painting has often been referred to as "The Witch of Haarlem." Verses attached to one of the painting's many variants develop the owl symbolism further: Babel of Haarlem, to you, your owl is a falcon; O Babel, I am glad of it. Play with an illusion. You are not alone.56

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Figure 2.14

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Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, c. 1630-3. Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

The insubstantially painted owl, looking more imaginary than fully realized, supports on one level the claim that this solitary, outcast woman is a witch whose speech is therefore at least troublesome and might even be powerful in a dangerous way. Her antic expression with its hint of repartee, suggests, along with the references to Babel, that she is a scold whose speech is plentiful and clamorous. The verses confirm the didactic basis for such an image, much like the series of vices or sins, admonishing viewers not to assume they are immune to such behavior. In particular, they are warned that they, too, like Malle Babbe, might think their owls are falcons. Mistaking the humble owl for the noble falcon is an act of misprizal, but also one of claiming status not deserved. It represents the kind of inflationary thinking associated with mania, and in street ballads about madness, the tendency to overreach in this way is regarded as mania's most status-laden trait, which almost always results, ironically, in forfeiting one's place in the social order.57 That scolds and witches occupied a common ground in popular culture is also the premise of an anonymous engraving from 1676 of the legendary obstreperous character, Mother Damnable (Figure 2.15). She is shown in a shabby interior above verses detailing the uncivil acts which gave her the

Figure 2.15

Anon., Mother Damnable, 1676. C The British Museum.

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worst reputation of all tavern viragoes and hostesses. As Mother Damnable grips the fireplace knob for ballast, her other hand firmly grasps a walking stick as if it were a weapon. Coarse with ugly features, a large nose separates the furrowed brows as she grimaces with a suspicious, sidewise glance. Around her, broken pipes, crockery, and other debris attest to previous confrontations. The alert, guarded glance and ready weapon are clear signs of her penchant for belligerent action. Her most common attacks are in the form of "Cursing, Scolding, Fuming, flinging Fire/ I' th' Face of Madam, Lord, Knight, Gent, Cit, 'Squire." When peeved, she hides the cellar key so that no more ale may be served, thereby instigating a scold's typical brawl. Her loudness penetrates into the streets, for she Sends forth such dismal Shrieks and uncouth Noise, As fills the Town with Din, the Street with Boys: Which makes some think this fierce She-dragon fell, Can scarce be matcht by any this side Hell. Like Malle Babbe, Mother Damnable is likened to a witch: she is in fact introduced through an unfavorable comparison to Macbeth's witches: " 'Tis Mother Damnable! That Monstrous thing,/Unmatcht by Mackbeth's Wayward-Women's Ring." She is depicted with cats, because, the verses explain, no dog would live with her, but a special affinity between cats and witches was also a commonplace. All together, the slovenliness, ugliness, and cranky but also fierce and fiery interfering tendencies give Mother Damnable an overlay of features derived from ira, the scold, and the witch. Accusations of witchcraft peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and throughout this period, contemporaries tended to view the phenomenon as alarmingly on the rise: "The land is full of witches," asserted Lord Chief Justice Anderson in 1602.58 Behavior likely to incur the charge of witchcraft included quarreling and cursing: Reginald Scot emphasized in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) that their "chief fault ... is that they are scolds" (II, x). As with the scold and the different forms of male vagrancy, tensions in the community over an individual's disorderly or disruptive behavior in conflict with traditional neighborly responsibilities of assistance were the principal motivation behind suspicions that a particular person was a witch. Sometimes these accusations were more grounded in appearances than behavior, as longstanding popular notions construed the witch as elderly, ill-kempt, and disheveled. Treatises and prints consolidated and circulated a stereotypical view of the witch as young and sexually bewitching or as repulsively old and hag-like. Facial hair and excessive facial expressiveness were also characteristic: as John Gaule summarized in 1646, a witch was an "old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr'd brow, a hairy lip, a gobbler tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue."59 Even progressive treatises that argued against the existence of witchcraft

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reinforced the common visual stereotypes of witches: the frontispiece for the 1586 German edition of Johannes Weyer's De praestigiis daemonum, for example, is illustrated with four nude witches stirring their brew and engaging in the most preposterous sabbat activities. Subsequent publications perpetuated these stereotypical conventions of a witch's sexual impropriety with physically provocative or revealing poses and long, disheveled hair, together with the broomsticks, potions, magic talismans, and familiars. Dutch and Flemish artists in the seventeenth century gave witchcraft images alternative contexts, constructing them as genre scenes and carnival-like outdoor gatherings in which women of different ages and classes came together, or as an alternative device for illustrating the seven deadly sins, especially ira.60 The focus on anger as the source of a witch's unruliness or a scold's disruptiveness is a reminder that for many observers, these women were thought to suffer from the mental imbalances associated with that passion. A skeptic where witches were concerned, Jacob Cats had one of his stories in Alle de Wercken of 1655 illustrated with the image of a very agitated, vagrant woman, her disheveled condition the result of psychological distress, surrounded unconvincingly by a witch's charms and familiars. Weyer had likened such women to "demented persons" and to the "frenzied" or those with burnt melancholia. 61 Montaigne, too, after questioning ten or twelve women incarcerated as witches, claimed to find them more mentally unstable than demonic ("On the Lame," Essais, III, ii). Like mania in women, witches' behavior represented a nonconforming, deviant inclination characterized by unruliness and an unfeminine degree of vulgarity at a time when the socially disintegrative impact of this behavior was greatly feared. Many people thought that witches could induce the state of demonic possession in others, and many knew that witches could appear possessed themselves, engaging in the same kind of physical display and unruliness, and exhibiting a similarly disheveled appearance along with masculine traits of demonstrative sexuality and vulgar speech. The incidence of demonic possession increased dramatically from the late sixteenth century in the wake of Counter-Reformation efforts to call attention to the efficacy of miracles, like exorcism, so as to discredit attacks from Protestants that such phenomena smacked of magic and fraud. 62 Women seem to dominate reported cases, especially the very young and the elderly, although it has been suggested that archival sources reveal more of a balanced ratio between the sexes.6* Among contemporary observers, the affinity that women demonstrated at this time for the condition of being possessed was widely accepted and ascribed to several causes. Some witnesses claimed that biological and emotional weakness made women generally more susceptible to the devil's influence. Skeptics saw possession as an excuse for venting frustrations through the attention-seeking display of disobedient gestures and disorderly conduct. Modern commentators see in this an acknowledgment that possession was a kind of mental

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instability grasped in popular terms of sin and transgression. Other scholars have emphasized the factor of spiritual rebelliousness, finding that possession seemed to offer wealthy or cloistered women some special access to spiritual credibility and authority, although this route never proved to be effective.64 The physical marks of demonic possession included eyes rolled back in their sockets, an open mouth with distended tongue, writhing movements and contortions, speaking languages never studied, clairvoyance or prophesying, and vulgar or blasphemous speech.65 Extremes in bodily movement and an awesome, unnerving sense of physical presence dominate the accounts of witnesses. This is especially the case when possessions became occasions for publicly demonstrating the truth or falsity of the phenomenon or the claimant. Counterfeiting the condition was as much a preoccupation here as it had been with vagrant lunatics and Toms of Bedlam, whose fraudulent efforts similarly victimized the public and undermined civic and/or religious authority. In a sonnet recounting an exorcism he witnessed in 1550s Rome, Joachim du Bellay described the experience and its unsettling impact.66 He found the movements of head and body appalling, and was struck by the frantic power of the sufferers, which reminded him of ancient sibyls and made his hair stand on end. In face of this somatic intensity, du Bellay found the actions of the exorcist laughably inadequate. Like sibyls, the possessed displayed the outside- or beside-oneself psychological state characteristic of those in the classical tradition who were conduits for divine revelation or who were maniacal. In Aristotle's Problem XXX, sibyls are the only women allowed into the ranks of the melancholic, but not as sufferers of the so-called good melancholy — they instead are inflicted with the adust form identified thereafter as mania. 67 A medical observer like Plater who understood possession in terms of mania or extreme melancholia also found elements of physical uncanniness in the possessed's movements just as du Bellay had done: But some amongst those maniacal or melancholic sometimes shewing forth these accidents more vehement, sometimes more wild, and also speaking things preternatural and monstrous, do manifestly declare that they are possessed by the Devil, which for that reason they call men possesst and daemonical; ... and sometimes they so wreath their Body, bend and winde it, that as I have seen with my own Eyes, it could by no means be done Naturally without Luxations of the Joynts; (28)

Most accounts of possession describe these exceptional movements, contortions, and expressions, and then gloss them for their moral significance. Leon Letourneur, a physician from Paris writing in 1634 about the cases at Loudun, itemized facial features and related each to the language of the vices and virtues: the forehead spoke only of dignity, the eyes and lips of modesty, the mouth of things grave and serious, and all with an air quite distant from imposture. 68 This habit of glossing face and

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body parts also applied to the negative disarray of the possessed. Through this mechanism, a body language of demonic possession was developed that was legible in popular terms of sin and propriety. Whether Catholic or Protestant, most observers dwelt on the physical dimension of demonic possession and its threat to public morals. Constant writhing movements fascinated onlookers and seemed to promise indecency, while grotesque contortions themselves resulted in actions that contradicted most definitions of decorum, and especially those regarding feminine behavior. Acceptable standards for bodily comportment were thus compromised by the performative obligations through which possession's supernatural claims were established. Most visual representations of demonic possession present the phenomenon in the context of an exorcism ritual, and so their content largely corresponds to Counter-Reformation interests. The images typically validate famous instances of miraculous intervention or celebrate members of the religious community who were currently being considered for canonization and who were reputedly successful healers or exorcists. Because the works had to document the spiritual authority of exorcism in performance, the subject is set in a scenographic manner that casts the spectator as an eye-witness to an elaborate, even operatic, event. Jacques Callot's engraving of 1630, The Possessed Woman, or Exorcism conceives the ritual in this way (Figure 2.16).69 Framed by a proscenium arch and flanked by figures of religious and military authority, an audience drawn by the event watches the exorcism rite proceed as the agitated possessed woman is restrained by two men. She clearly displays the marks of demonic possession in the arched body and twisted torso, the fully extended limbs, the open mouth and abrupt head movement. Her frantic agitated gestures, like mania, require external restraints, but the intact garments and dignifying cruciform configuration moderate the wayward limbs and contorted body, blunting the more vulgar potential of her movements. As the print's inscription explains, the sufferer's deliverance was achieved and attributed to a painting in the chapel's niche of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. The reliance on Marian authority and the device of a Christological symbol give the body its sacred imprimatur and contain it within the limits of decorum: these features support the miraculous status of the exorcism rite even as they diminish possession's potential for exhibitionism and notoriety. Just as serious and instructive but deploying more vigorous physical cues and exhibitionistic features is a series of possession scenes undertaken by Rubens between 1618 and 1630 and intended for large altarpieces in prominent churches. There are many variants and copies of these works, and each composition was engraved, insuring their wide familiarity and extensive circulation. One series of images celebrates the miraculous accomplishments of Ignatius of Loyola, who was beatified in 1609 and canonized in 1622. Rubens was commissioned around 1618 to produce a work on this subject for the high altar of the Jesuit church in

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Figure 2.16 Jacques Callot, T/?e Possessed Woman, or Exorcism, 1630. Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.

Antwerp. Both the preliminary sketch and the completed painting make it clear that demonic possession was a prominent feature of the composition from the outset (Figure 2.17). As Graham Smith has demonstrated, Rubens' design actually combines various events from Pedro Ribadeneira's Vita Ignatii Loiolae, which was first published in Naples in 1572. According to Ribadeneira, Ignatius never performed exorcism rites himself, but he did cure one man and ten women through intercession, relics, and images. The saint's biographer described how one woman had "used extremitys, making many motions and visages" and that five of the women had "rent thyr garments, pulled of the haire from their heads, beating them to the ground."70 In the painting, Ignatius stands at the high altar in an impressive church interior that resembles St. Peter's. Looking up, he lifts his right hand in a gesture of benediction, while behind him stand other religious figures, and

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Figure 2.17 Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola, c. 1617—18. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

below, groups of sufferers hopeful of assistance. The man and woman suffering from demonic possession and those who are trying to protect and restrain them fill the picture's lower left quadrant, always a prestigious compositional position. In fact, of all the sufferers seeking assistance, the possessed, who are further accented by the small airborne devils escaping from them, dominate the dramatic action of the scene. The possessed man lying tensely on the ground is positioned with the ostentatious kind of baroque foreshortening that pushes his inverted head and body toward the viewer and pulls the eye directly into the composition. Two companions assist him, with one protecting his head from injury by carefully cushioning it from impact with the ground. He wears only loose drapery around his muscled, writhing figure, and he has nearly worked free from the ropes that loosely entwine his muscular arms.

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The paradoxical defenselessness of his visibly impressive physique is accentuated by both the inverted prone position and the ineffectual action represented by his upraised, exposed legs. His expression is contorted, and he displays the open mouth and rolled-back eyes often noted as signs of possession. In contrast to his peripheral location, the possessed woman is more centrally positioned and displayed like a traditional object of presentation. She struggles energetically in a nearly upright stance, pulling her hair and bodice with tightly clenched fists. These exertions have left both hair and clothing loose and disheveled, with her neck and chest particularly exposed. In the oil sketch, her facial expression is one of anger, while in the painting, she has the more explicit demonic contortions of rolled-back eyes and distended tongue. She is being supported by several men, whose hands are clearly visible as framing devices around her decolletage, an effect that calls attention to the problematic physical intimacy that possession seemed to authorize in public spaces. In Rubens' depiction of possession here, an explicitness of pathological detail (culled perhaps from experience, but certainly from classical literary sources, Ribadeneira, and the exorcism vignette in Raphael's Transfiguration) more than religious symbolism is offered as proof of a spiritual authenticity strong enough to invalidate any Protestant countercharges of fraudulence. 71 The subsequent engraving by Marinus van der Goes from the 1630s is based on a reproductive drawing executed under Rubens' supervision in 1619 and attributed to Antony van Dyck.72 Van der Goes' print is thus not a copy of the completed work but a variant of it in which some features of the original oil sketch were still part of the intended final composition (Figure 2.18). Probably discarded as unsuitable for the work's eventual high altar placement, these features are aspects of the possessed figures that were evidently extreme if nevertheless critical elements of their condition. The prostrate man's pose repeats that of the sketch and altarpiece, and the torn clothing of the former has here, too, been replaced with classical drapery, thereby distancing the figure from any suggestion of impoverishment or vagrancy and enhancing the antique, heroic connotations. The engraving's main adjustment here is to give a slightly more feral cast to the man's frenzied expression. For the female figure, the feminine body type of the preliminary study is discarded in favor of the more hefty, virile model of the altarpiece, but the fully exposed breast of the sketch's possessed woman has been added to this more muscular body. In the terminology of possession's somatic display, the print's female figure is more marked with indicators of vice: her wayward, uncontrollably powerful stance is well outside the bounds of decorum; the disheveled hair, clothes, and immodest exposure are shaming elements that are indices of furor, anger, and lust; and her face bears the imprint of the scold's intractable tongue and the swollen features of rage. This multiplicity of negative elements is not shared by the possessed man. While he displays some traits of a powerful enragement like heroic mania

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Figure 2.18 Rubens, St. Miriam and York Public

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Marinus van der Goes (Ignatius Cornelius Marinus), after Peter Paul Ignatius Loyola Healing a Demoniac, c. 1630. Print Collection, Ida D. Wallach, Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs. The New Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation.

with his strong physique and classical drapery, his prostration gives more weight to an alternate, more sympathetic reading of his helpless condition as epilepsy, the "falling sickness,' 1 rather than a dangerous frenzy. The female figure is simply more open to multiple readings of unruliness and disorder. The various indicators of vice, the disrobing and hair-tearing, and the necessity for physical restraint are certainly not fraudulent; rather they are all attributes identified with the condition of maniacal madness. The raving and raging features, the physical turbulence, and the nuisance factors of extroversion that enabled the blurring of boundaries between maniacs, vagrant lunatics, scolds, and the possessed were pre-

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eminently displayed in works of didactic art created at this time for asylums and houses of correction. Almost all accounts of mania and maniacs had advocated the desirability of restraints and sequestration, with the aim of curtailing violence and disruptions in public spaces. Bequests for the care of the insane also repeated the validity of this match between disorder and remedy, as in Willem Arntz's donation of 1461 for six "poor, miserable, mad and raging people who are in need of being kept constrained or under lock."73 The new ornamentation for institutions of confinement specifically identified their constituents, and in so doing publicized the kind of assistance municipalities were able to offer there, calling attention to their authoritative role in civic charity. By concentrating on various stances of aggressive raving activity, the iconography of this predominantly sculptural ornamentation drew upon the intractable nature of tensions between individual freedom and public order which mania more broadly represented. Asylum sculpture was an important aspect of the effort to build and embellish charitable institutions so as to attract donations and patrons.74 The visual impact and didactic import of these works were integral to this practice, and they must also be factored into the experience of touring the asylum itself. Whether sited in newly constructed buildings or in recently confiscated religious properties, charitable establishments whose sculptural decoration took the form of their clientele's realistic portrayal were most typical of premises located in FLngland and The Netherlands. It was more common for institutions in predominantly Roman Catholic countries, such as the various components of the Hopitaux generaux in France, to be decorated with devotional paintings destined for their chapels' altars, rather than with realistic, secular sculpture for portals and courtyards. While such paintings could include realistic depictions of sufferers the way Rubens' altarpieces had done, or might be derived from imagery based on Christ healing the sick or the seven acts of mercy, the majority of these works concentrated on a traditional devotional iconography of Christ, Mary, and the saints. In The Netherlands, orphanages, old people's homes, houses of correction, and asylums were established and enlarged from the midsixteenth century on, with particular concentrations of activity from 1590 to 1620, and just after mid-century.75 The benevolent responsibility represented by this building program was motivated by longstanding conventions about charity, by the dramatic increases in the ranks of the poor and vagrant that made traditional resources of family and parish assistance insufficient, and by declining confidence in the truth claims of possession and exorcism. By the early seventeenth century, the financial prosperity of many of these establishments made it possible for them to embark upon projects of expansion, repair, and decoration. For example, the houses of correction in Amsterdam were erected in the 1590s, with the Rasphuis for men dating from 1595, and the Spinhuis for women from 1597. Portals of each institution were decorated in 1607 with works

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commissioned from Hendrik de Keyser, the city's principal architect and sculptor, whose large workshop was a training center for Dutch and English sculptors and stonemasons.76 De Keyser's allegorical low relief for the Rasphuis shows a man driving a wagon of wood for rasping, the principal work activity at this house of correction. With his whip, he subdues the lions and wolves who pull the load, goading them to work as an obedient team. Inscribed above this tablet are verses in Latin from Seneca's Hercules furens: "It is a virtue to subdue those before whom all go in dread." The Spinhuis portal depicts one woman at work and another about to punish a third who is less diligent. At their feet are verses by the contemporary poet P. C. Hooft: "Cry not, for I exact no vengeance for wrong but force you to be good. My hand is stern but my heart is kind."77 Although the Rasphuis portal is learned and allegorical in its message, it relies visually on a conventional master-beast analogy that emphasizes the necessity of subjecting oneself to control. The Latin verses, with their reference to classical frenzy, presuppose an elite audience drawn from Amsterdam's prosperous, educated men, whom the institution doubtless wished to inform of its part in preserving public order and removing fear and dread from the social milieu. By itself, the image sufficed to educate lower-class men and boys about the difference between a workhouse and apprenticeships or service. The Spinhuis relief, by contrast, is a genre scene with simple contemporary details and a vernacular inscription. Its verses, like those at the Rasphuis, defend workhouse practices, and its message is comprehensible, too, across class lines to the literate as well as those capable of comprehending the image's simple, direct moral exemplar. Features common to both works characterize most subsequent institutional commissions: there is an educational message conveyed on several different levels that is based on a presumed familiarity among spectators with an interactive model of constituent parts, usually text and image, derived from the emblem tradition and commemorative sculptural monuments. Cynthia Lawrence has emphasized the significance of such "interactive dynamics" for transmitting the didactic purpose of memorial tomb sculpture, and these dynamics likewise underlie the sculptural projects at charitable institutions. Each workhouse relief has a thresholdmarking function, and is integrated into an architectural frame which provides it own hierarchical interplay at various levels of complexity. In fact, such dynamics of interrelation and association are pervasive in both works, and extend to the interaction between text and image, the mixture of idealism and realism, and the associations - folkloric to learned - that the sculptures' components might evoke. These multiple, interrelated characteristics must be kept in mind if the spectatorship of institutional sculptural programs is to be fully understood. Because of the close relationship and symbolic affinities between houses of confinement and asylums, encouraged either by the common practice of joint administrative bodies or by an occasional intermingling

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or even confusion over their disorderly clientele, didactic sculptures created subsequently for asylums share a number of interactive features. Three extant works with connections to seventeenth-century Dutch asylums bear out these resemblances: a facade relief from the asylum or dolhuis at s'Hertogenbosch, a courtyard statue from the Amsterdam dolhuis, and a small terracotta figure group that might have originally decorated an asylum's regents' chamber. Most like the de Keyser workhouse reliefs is the stone tablet from s'Hertogenbosch, now attributed to Peter van Coeverden and dated 1686 (Figure 2.19). It commemorates the bequest made to the asylum in 1442 by Reyner van Arckel to support the care of "six poor insane people," and includes the terms of the donation inscribed underneath the six exemplary recipients of the donor's largesse. Unlike the Amsterdam workhouses, here there is no explicit verbal defense of the asylum's practices, but only the insistence that inmates be impoverished as well as insane. Van Coeverden must have been informed about the bequest's stipulations in more detail, because asylum documents specify that the suitable objects of charity here are those who "are insane and are not masters over their senses and of necessity have to be kept constrained and under lock."78 Features that match these specifications dominate the tablet's imagery. There are four adult men, one homely older woman, and a grinning youth who is perhaps a "natural" or idiot. Three are locked in cells, their heads projecting through the doors' hatches, and three occupy a less secure outdoor communal space that might be the institution's courtyard. The architectural particulars of the cells' construction and details of their

Figure 2.19 Peter van Coeverden, relief, 1686, formerly asylum s'Hertogenbosch. Geestelijjke Gezondheidszorg regio s'Hertogenbosch.

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fortification are depicted with clarity, showing solid bolts and reinforced, studded planks with a specificity which reminds us that van Coeverden was also a mason. Only the female inmate still has the chained drinking cup hanging outside her cell door; presumably mischief or confiscation explains the absence of the men's bowls. All the inmates are in innervated states of attentiveness, extroversion, or agitation, offering ample evidence that constraints and solid locks are necessary here. The disheveled hair and strange attire similarly reinforce the notion that these people are not fit for society. In particular, the formidably sized men are barely garbed; in this they resemble furor and Burton's Maniacus, exhibiting that degree of agitation and incivility which such insufficient apparel represented. As figure types, they are distinctly beefy and herculean, and the oral focus of their senseless gnawing and biting emphasizes the bestial nature of their appetites. Biting human flesh, as the seated figure on the left is doing, was more specifically a gesture of anger that is found in Dante's Divine Comedy, where it occurs in the fifth circle of the wrathful (canto VII). Shabby garments and subhuman traits, both also well-known features of mania, reaffirm the inmates' suitability to their habitation, and so support the relief's principal function as a public definition and defense of the institution's charge to care for six poor insane people. The sculptor has shrewdly combined the familiar, wandering, vagrant lunatic types with the rarer figures of incarcerated inmates. These restive confined people sticking their heads out of their cells, whether watching, grinning, or scolding, compete for the viewer's/visitor's attention, being not nearly as selfabsorbed or oblivious as the two raving men appear to be. Visiting asylums was, of course, a popular pastime in the seventeenth century, and in The Netherlands and England the peak season for these excursions occurred in the context of religious observances during carnival and Lent.79 The confined inmates' address to the spectator acknowledges the latter's voyeurism, but also their responsibility to conclude the visit with an act of charitable assistance. By factoring the audience into the composition in this way, the interactive premise of didactic institutional sculpture has been cleverly manipulated to create a sense of obligation in the viewer. However, this could be aroused only by first demonstrating that raving madness confined actually constituted a cautionary spectacle. In the s'Hertogenbosch relief, the admonishment is perhaps overshadowed by the sense of a humorous spectacle supported by the image's various marks of levity, from the smiling inmates and ridiculous scold, to the antic main figures and the hackneyed, skit-like compositional structure. These vivacious features, reminiscent of carnival or rhetoricians' performances acted from tavern windows, are reminders that viewing inmates as very light, instructional entertainment was the core experience in popular culture surrounding the asylum tour. Like the s'Hertogenbosch establishment, the dolhuis in Amsterdam was founded on the basis of a charitable bequest. Henrik Boelens left his

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benefaction to the city in 1561, and, according to popular tradition, the donation was based on personal experience. Years earlier, Boelens' pregnant wife received a nasty shock on the city's streets when a furious madwoman suddenly accosted her.80 Supposedly, Boelens vowed that, if his child was safely delivered, in thanks he would leave money to the city towards the building of an asylum. The terms of the legend thus reveal a concern that citizens, especially vulnerable ones, would not be endangered by sudden, frenzied encounters with roving, insane people on the city's streets. After Boelens' death in 1562, construction began on land that formerly belonged to St. Ursula's cloister, and subsequent bequests and at least two lotteries made expanding and decorating the buildings financially possible. Additions and embellishments were undertaken principally in 1591 and 1615, the latter improvements necessitated also because of an increased demand for space. A stone entrance portal, several tablets inscribed with verses by the poet Joost van den Vondel, and a sandstone sculpture for the courtyard garden were added in these two waves of improvements (Figure 2.20). De Keyser's workshop, because it handled so many city commissions for portal reliefs and statuary, most likely was responsible for Kavernij ("Frenzy") or Dolhuisvrouw ("Woman of the Asylum"); it is currently attributed to Gerard Lambertsz.,

Figure 2.20

Peter Schenck, Dolhuis, c. 1710. Gemeentearchief, Amsterdam.

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Figure 2.21 Gerard Lambertsz., Frenzy, c. 1619-20. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

an associate of de Keyser's (Figure 2.21). The work's date has also been debated, and estimates have ranged from 1591 to c. 1650. Elisabeth Neurdenburg argued for a date following the 1615 improvements and after the Spinhuis portal commission. In view of its striking resemblance to the possessed woman in Rubens's altarpiece of c. 1618, to which it seems particularly indebted, a date of 1619-20 seems most probable. 81 Just over life-size, Razernij depicts a seated, nearly nude woman attired only in the most minimal drapery. With her torso awkwardly twisted, she pulls her long hair with both hands in a nearly vertical alignment. This arrangement mimics Rubens's writhing possessed woman and also recalls a particular pose common to reliefs of women mourning and classical sculptures of Venus bathing. A swollen tongue protrudes from her open

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mouth and her brow is furrowed, an expression combining the compulsive oral features of possession with those of furor. Each face of the plinth beneath her features the head of an insane person projecting through a small cell-door opening, and is presumably the first instance of this architectural asylum feature being exploited simultaneously to contain and display exhibitionistic maniacs. All four of these inmates show varying degrees of agitation, clamoring, and dishevelment. The main figure's nudity and relation to an antique prototype, together with the mask-like configuration of the heads beneath, give the sculpture a degree of classicism, but on the whole, it is the vigorous realism in the unidealized handling of the figure and in the expressive extremes that dominates the work. The asylum's notable architectural feature, its individual cell configuration with small door openings, defines the structure of the pedestal, providing a platform for the full-blown, unbridled frenzy depicted above. Contemporary engravings confirm that the sculpture was set up at the intersection of walkways in the formal garden section of the asylum's courtyards (Figure 2.20). It thus never functioned as a portal ornament that would represent the institution's purpose to pedestrians. Positioned within the asylum, and so removed from quotidian public consumption, Razernij was intended for more specialized circumstances of viewing. Only those admitted into the asylum's precincts, such as regents or visitors interested in touring the premises, would be afforded this opportunity, although, at the height of the Easter visiting season, larger groups of people from all classes might have wandered through the area as well. Even the inmate population could glimpse the work from the windows or cell doors along the adjacent loggia, and so might have been reminded of the way others viewed them. Perhaps it was hoped that this exposure to unconstrained frenzy would have a salutary impact upon the behavior of the inmates. However, Schenck's engraving of the garden allows only for a hortatory viewing practice: the print, whose legend documents the institution's building history and boasts in Latin of its ability to contain and preserve minds, depicts only a few, highly respectable people promenading in the garden. Evidently, the print was commissioned in part to endorse the notion that viewing the sculpture and the inmates was an activity primarily undertaken by the city's prosperous, serious-minded and well-educated men, and this is most likely why the sculpture was commissioned in the first place. Unlike the Spinhuis and Rasphuis portal reliefs, this work was not inscribed with any explanatory verses that clarify its meaning for a literate audience. But both the asylum portal and a tablet positioned near the garden at the entrance to the east gallery contained inscriptions that do just this. Above the portal, one could read that the institution's purpose was to rein in madness, and, above the gallery's entrance, Vondel's lines reassured visitors to the premises that they might "Walk slowly and wander unabashed," because "Here Frenzy is reined in."82 One can walk without threat or fear here and in the city,

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only because, in order to prevent encounters like that of Boelens' wife, the asylum successfully "reins in" or "bridles" frenzied behavior. Reining in and bridling were often mentioned in references to controlling impulsive behavior, and in the seventeenth century, the terms were regularly applied to vagrants, scolds, and maniacs. Vondel's message encourages the citizen to stroll slowly around the premises and meditate on the implications of "reining in" as they relate to the setting as well as to Lambertsz's sculpture - its confined figures around the base and the freely frantic female figure above. The figure's near-total nudity is a pivotal factor in this colloquy, because it was a common emblematic practice for abstractions, especially those adapted to garden sculpture, to be represented by nude or nearly nude female figures, and because shameless physical exposure was repeatedly proffered as actual evidence of mania. This is precisely where the configuration of "Frenzy" poses some difficulties: it exceeds the bounds of social decorum even for an image of madness or possession, and such impropriety discomposes a public sculpture's didactic role. Not since depictions of the mad Orlando has this degree of undress, as opposed to intermediary stages of dishevelment, been a part of representations of madness. In this situation, however, there is no pretense of the classical heroics understood as male physical display, or of its opposite, anti-heroic criminality. Instead, "Frenzy" is an image of the overt, transgressive sexuality specific to female maniacs, but also associated with possession, witchcraft, and aggressive or domineering women. The selection of a female figure for the dolhuis courtyard was determined by a number of motivations. There was the dangerous, roaming madwoman of the institution's founding legend, a type resembling the Netherlandish tradition of anger personified as a destructive, marauding woman. The cumulative effect of this motifs repetition reinforced the idea that "reining in" obstreperous women contributed significantly to the maintenance of public order. As Burton and other scholars asserted, women's mania was more violent and excessive than men's; such comparative judgments made female disorder better suited for embodying the condition for didactic purposes. The pulling or tearing of hair or clothing was a principal symptom of mania. s ? An inmate who has already been relieved of torn clothing, as was the common practice with the most agitated, confined insane, and who has very long hair, certainly makes for the most extreme formulation of mania's symptomology. Both of the female variants for furor, a gender variation unique to the Dutch iconographical tradition, identified the condition through the disorderly hair that related furious women to the aggressive goading furies of mythology. 84 Finally, women dominated representations of demonic possession, and Rubens' compelling formulation of the condition easily won prototypical status in The Netherlands. Lambertsz. nevertheless adjusted Rubens' model to fit a secular institution where it represented an object of public assistance rather than a spectacle .

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of supernatural interference. The diagnosis is now different, the nudity perhaps just a realistic, descriptive accompaniment to this change, and the motif has clearly been de-sacralized. Like the practice of visiting asylums, but in an even more forceful, plastic form, the sculpture remains a powerfully ambiguous and problematic mixture of exhibitionism and voyeurism defended as an object for quiet meditation and as an inducement to charity. The unavoidable conclusions from such a colloquy are that, although the institution promises to rein in and bridle madness, in women, 'Frenzy' was liable to be obdurate and physically exciting: here the condition persisted, rebellious and resistant to control. Of course, not only women were represented as intractable and difficult: on a smaller scale, men were equally obstreperous in the s'Hertogenbosch relief and on the base of 'Frenzy'. There is also a small terracotta work by Pieter Xavery from 1673, Two Madmen, in which the figures exhibit the hair-pulling agitation of frenzy in a masculine variation (Figure 2.22).85 About twenty inches in height, Xavery's figures are depicted in the midst of frantic twisting and flailing. One lies arched on the ground, his head dramatically inverted like Rubens' possessed man in the St. Ignatius series. The other man sits astride a stump to which both legs are chained by the ankles. Also chained here is a bowl reminiscent of the one in the s'Hertogenbosch work. With a forceful, twisting movement, this man tugs at the drapery and pulls his beard along with a piece of cloth clenched between his teeth. These function as equivalents for the hairtearing and garment-rending actions of possessed and insane women. Like Razernij, Xavery's sculpture secularizes demonic possession in several ways: first there is the echo of Rubens' magisterial configuration in the prostrate figure, and then there is a further reference to the lore of possession in the other man's beard-pulling gesture. This motif has been traced back to Scandinavian images of possessed men that entered continental iconography around the eleventh century. 86 Repositioned in the context of prominent iron chains and rings, however, these devices are reinterpreted as features of insanity with little in the way of supernatural connotation remaining. Given the powerful virility exhibited by the figures' maniacal exertions, the tree, and implied outdoor setting, some commentators, not surprisingly, tried to identify the subject as an episode from Orlando furioso.87 However, nothing in Ariosto's epic quite matches up with the terracotta's imagery, nor does the work display any other epic proportions: the modest size of just under two feet, along with the comparatively fragile material used, indicates that the work was never destined to serve as a monument but in all likelihood was intended as an ornament for a table or cupboard, perhaps in the regents' room of an asylum or pesthouse. Like the Amsterdam houses of correction and dolhuis, London's Bridewell workhouse and asylum, Bethlem Hospital, were objects of improvement and embellishment in the seventeenth century. Once the workhouse was rebuilt following its destruction in the great fire of 1666,

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Figure 2.22

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Pieter Xavery, Two Madmen, 1673. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

the Board of Governors elected to construct the undamaged but significantly dilapidated Bethlem as part of a larger scheme to renovate many civic institutions at this time. The new structure was designed by Robert Hooke, a member of the Oxford circle of experimental philosophers that included Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren. Besides Bethlem, he is credited with building the Physicians' College, Montague House, and the Monument in Fish Street Hill. He also served as Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, Cutlerian Lecturer in Mechanics, Gresham Professor of Geometry, and City Surveyor from 1666.88 The asylum was erected with remarkable speed, and was completed in July, 1676. As shown in Robert White's engraving of 1677, Hooke's design for Bethlem consisted of three projecting pavilions joined by lower horizontal wings (Figure 2.23).89 Sited in one of the airiest and hence most

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Figure 2.23 Robert White, after Thomas Cartwright, Bethlem Hospital, 1677. ©The British Museum.

therapeutic sections of the city, Bethlem also had the longest long gallery in England, extending throughout the entire horizontal length of the plan and designed for inmates' exercise and stimulation. 90 Each pavilion has a semicircular pediment in front of a hipped roof surmounted by a cupola, and each lateral wing has a central projecting frontispiece with triangular pediment. The pavilion facades are distinguished by rustication, engaged columns and swags, and decorated pediments. Descriptions of the new hospital invariably emphasized its extravagant exterior, variously crediting the design to French royal residential antecedents, like the Louvre, the Tuileries, and Versailles. These resemblances were the source of much subsequent satire about the building's and the occupants' deluded pretensions of status. Such comments relied not only on metaphors of palatial grandness and critiques of luxury but also on the grandiose dimensions of Louis XIV's reign itself. Actually, Hooke's design combines features of French and Dutch building practices, conforming to a residential configuration of a main block with connecting wings accentuated by ornamental detail and by separately roofed pavilions. Sir John Summerson viewed this arrangement as Hooke's effort to emulate the work of Jacques Lemercier or Louis Le Vau, and Christine Stevenson has seen it as an effort to compete with the new palatial hospitals of Italy and France.91 Jibes about Bethlem's resemblance to Le Vau's work for the Louvre or Versailles overshadowed the fact that Louis XIV's architect had also produced designs for two institutions of the Hopitaux generaux that accommodated the insane, including a chapel for Bicetre and the Mazarin pavilion for the Salpetriere (Figure 2.24).92 Rather than the more elaborate palace complexes, these charitable institutions, organized by royal decree in 1656, and, as was the case at the Salpetriere, the best-known of the Hopitaux generaux institutions and notable for its marked horizontality and pavilion

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Figure 2.24 Perette, Hopital de la Salpestriere, Paris c. 1668. The Wellcome Library, London.

construction, would have been a salient model for the investigative, scientifically progressive Francophone Hooke. In its completed state, Bethlem combined the elements, scale, and charitable enthusiasm of the Hopitaux generaux with the English residential feature of the long gallery and the beneficial aspects of location. And while the Salpetriere boasted facade sculptures of Hope and Charity by Gerard van Opstal (d. 1668), Bethlem was inspired in this area instead by the didactic realist tradition of Dutch institutional sculpture. In 1674, the governing board of Bethlem decided to add an imposing entrance gate and wall to the building. While committee minutes contain specific details about the gates' ironwork and flanking piers, there is no mention in the hospital's records of the two pier sculptures attributed to Caius Gabriel Gibber and produced around 1676. White's engraving, however, suggests that the sculptures were an integral part of the gate's design.93 Gibber, originally from Denmark and trained in Italy, was also familiar with the projects and style of the de Keyser workshop in Amsterdam. Most of his career was spent in England, and by 1667, he was attached to the London workshop of John Stone who was a relative of the de Keyser family. Gibber produced a number of works for the city, including the relief for the Monument in Fish Street Hill. He was later appointed Carver of the King's Closet, serving under Charles II and William and Mary, subsequently obtaining the post of Sculptor in Ordinary in 1693.94 Traditionally known as Raving and Melancholy Madness, the two life-

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Figure 2.25 Caius Gabriel Gibber, Raving Madness, c. 1676. By permission of Bethlem Royal Hospital.

size madmen executed in Portland stone were positioned on the broken pediment above the gate piers at a height of fourteen feet (Figure 2.25). Each reclines on straw or rush matting, and the ensemble contrasts an active, extroverted disorder with a passive and depleted state of inanition. Their form and disposition are derived from funerary sculptural monuments in general, and are especially reminiscent of the allegorical figures of Night and Day from Michelangelo's Medici tomb.95 The socalled melancholy figure strikes a pose of regressive purposelessness that, besides its recumbent position, bears none of the traditional marks of melancholia. Yet it is clear that a deteriorated state was intended: the shaven head was a customary treatment - thought to allow vapors to escape - for insanity in men, and the disheveled attire was also a characteristic device for registering an extreme condition.96 Rather than bearing a look of introspective melancholia, his expression of vacancy, slightly crossed eyes, and dangling tongue convey a state more like dementia, since these are features indicative of a permanent decline into vacuity. There is evidence that some spectators noticed this discrepancy between characterization and diagnosis, but at a height of fourteen feet, contrary details of expression were readily absorbed into a generalized impression of melancholia derived simply from the reclining pose itself and substantiated by the popular tendency to think of madness as a binary construct in which melancholia or mopishness typically occupied one pole.97 There were no hesitations surrounding the interpretation of the raving figure, however, who is clearly restrained by chains at the wrist and by

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Figure 2.26 Berlin.

89

Caius Gabriel Gibber, Raving Madness, c. 1676. Staatliche Museen,

straps around his upper arms. He most certainly exhibits the capacity for physical violence and noisy vehemence associated with mania and evident in the powerful physique, clenched fists, tensed muscles, and open mouth. The degree of physical agitation and his disrobed state are similarly unmistakable indications of a furious condition of some duration, and while his expression suggests a wounded, bestial anguish, Gibber's small terracotta model shows that the figure was first given an expression of belligerent anger directed at the spectators below (Figure 2.26). Gibber moderated this effect of an aggressive volley by tilting the head back and easing the lines of the brow so that there is no suggestion of a direct external provocation or target for the madman's display. Consequently, the maniac exhibits effects that suggest pathetic suffering more than the threatening fury central to Gibber's initial idea and most renderings of mania. The modification is instructive, because it altered the sculpture's principal effect as well as its relation to the spectator, and to the public in general. By making raving madness appear less abusive and menacing, and more circumscribed and self-involved, Gibber significantly detached and defused the maniac's impact. Still, the prominence given to chains and vehement activity, standard features for the maniacal in most written accounts and in visual representations from Burton's frontispiece through Xavery's figure group, works to support the common knowledge that mania and the maintenance of public order were best served by confinement.

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In a longstanding tradition, Gibber's raving madman was popularly thought to be based on Daniel, Oliver Cromwell's porter, who suffered from excessive religious enthusiasm and was admitted to Bethlem in 1656. A man of formidable size, Daniel was also an alarmingly prophetic figure who it was believed had correctly foretold both the plague of 1665 and the great fire of 1666. These associations would only have increased when, as Roy Porter has observed, it became commonplace after the Restoration to regard "the Cromwellian years as an era of lunacy."98 While the sculpture's actual links to the historical porter are only legendary, the persistent view that Raving Madness, figuratively the porter or doorkeeper of Bethlem, was connected with the chaos and disorder wrought by civil war, plague, and fire added a considerable socio-political charge to the statue's cautionary significance in the community. Connotations of admonishment and repentance occupy a major place in Gibber's conception in more concrete ways as well. The general disposition of paired, semi-recumbent figures was a prominent arrangement for funerary monuments since the Renaissance, when such demi-gisant characters were adapted to the curving surfaces of sarcophagus lids, as in Michelangelo's Medici tomb. By the seventeenth century, the practice was widely diffused, and there were many instances of it in England, such as Nicholas Stone's Bodley Monument in Merton College Chapel, Oxford. Even the rope mattresses upon which the madmen recline have particular funerary connotations: in commemorative symbolism, these mats signify humility and repentance." "Perpetually recumbent," as Wordsworth proclaimed them in The Prelude (Book VII). With their muscular potency blunted, Gibber's figures offered, albeit at a less than engaging distance from the spectator, a didactic lesson on the defeated status of the madman's mopishness and the ineffectual threat of his mania. The sepulchral elements, along with the political gloss on the maniac's identity, enabled both figures of disorder to be propitiary recollections of chaos past. By the end of the seventeenth century, the gestures and expressions identified with maniacal disorder came to dominate the category of asylum sculpture. This new orientation compressed and repositioned what throughout the century had appeared to be an erratic, capricious, yet highly visible phenomenon. To a great extent, however, the earlier perception persisted, and was even called upon to support and justify the necessity of institutional intervention. Mania continued to be regarded as a protean problem whose various forms were unified in the way they posed a threat to public order and social decorum. The disruptive, aggressive, or belligerent tendency of the displaced and disestablished was anticipated with apprehension by the higher ranks of society. Consistent elements recognized as maniacal included noisiness, agitation, writhing, threatening speech and behavior, powerful but senseless and misdirected displays of muscular prowess, often in the form of sudden, unanticipated actions encountered abroad. Partial or full nudity, torn or shabby

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clothing, disheveled or pulled hair, and exposed legs, torso, or breasts all contributed to the impression that an aggressive rebuke was thereby being leveled against sexual and social mores and manners, and against public order generally. All or some of these symptoms could be encountered in angry cavaliers and ex-soldiers, vagrants or masterless men and Toms of Bedlam, assertive patrician women, witches, scolds, and the possessed. Each of these different manifestations of maniacal behavior could erupt from within the community or invade from its margins, and thus attain a status of spectacle by becoming uncanny objects of curiosity and scrutiny. The majority of those who refused to accept the constraints of society and responded to them with displays of maniacal furor were represented primarily as poor, lower-class, displaced, and aggressive people. In a small but significant subset, those in a higher social position, notably kings, queens, and noblewomen, had a more privileged access to abuse power in various ways. While statistical figures and descriptive accounts of aggressive onslaughts indicate that men were more active and visible in the maniacal category, the impact of women's frenzy was more startling and shocking, the quality of the furor regarded here as more violent and sensational. Mania was consistently referred to as the most extreme and excessive form of madness, and women with this disorder were considered to exhibit a more extreme form than their male counterparts. Paradoxically then, a condition defined especially in terms of male behavior and displays of masculine prowess received its most representative and excessive form when these features were transferred to women. Most symptoms of mania, in fact, derived from assumptions about male human nature that construed virility and the exhibitionistic demands made upon it by anger, immaturity, or confusion as causing dishonorable, precipitous forms of belligerence that had to be proscribed and delimited. These symptoms of masculinity gone awry endangered others to the extent that they materialized in acts of violence like fighting, theft, and arson. Disorderly virility in women in which social aggression and sexual promiscuity were intense and intermingled was comparatively less frequent and therefore provoked more sensational acts of public intervention and representation, as in Lambertsz.'s Frenzy. Visual depictions of mania manipulated the gendered arguments underlying the condition's symptomology, revealing how clear, explicit, and visibly significant these connotations were to contemporaries. Even in the latter half of the century, when the threat of virile male maniacs in representation was reduced in scale or in degree, as in the sculptures by van Coeverden, Xavery, and Gibber, "reining in" mania did little to mask the visual presence of its agitated, unbridled character. Restrained, disarmed, yet still figured as excessive, turbulent energy, maniacal madness continued to be identified with the dynamics of social and sexual anarchy. In the eighteenth century, from social satire to sensibility, mania would retain these anarchical associations and figure prominently in representations of public and private disorder.

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Notes 1 Among the many works on this topic, see especially Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and David Howarth, Images of Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 2 Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 158-62. 3 For the negative reception of the exposed breast motif in France, see Geraldine A. Johnson, "Pictures Fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de' Medici Cycle," Art History 16, 3 (September, 1993): 452. 4 Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 145, 165; Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 143. 5 Walter Gibson, Peter Bruegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 107. 6 Johnson, "Pictures Fit for a Queen," 453. 7 Burke, Fabrication of Louis XIV, 7. 8 Laurence Guilmard-Geddes, "Les Noces de Pelee et Thetis. Costumes de Ballet," Bulletin du Musee Carnavalet 30, 2 (1977): 5-9; Mark Franko, "The King Cross-dressed. Power and Force in the Royal Ballets," in Sara Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, eds, From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 64-84. A similar set of drawings in the Bibliotheque de L'Institut identifies the roles' players. 9 His lectures on the subject were first given in 1668, and they were subsequently published in 1698. See Henri Jouin, Charles LeBrun et les arts sous Louis XIV (Paris: Imprimarie Nationale, 1889); Jacques Thuillier, Exposition Charles LeBrun (Versailles: Musee National, 1963); Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles LeBrun s "Conference sur {'expression generate et particuliere" (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 10 LeBrun, 41, as translated by Montagu, The Expression of the Passions, 138. 11 Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). 12 Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children, 126, 128, 332-3; Vivian Green, The Madness of Kings (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), pp. 44, 61-4, 70-4. For the madness of German Renaissance princes, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994). 13 For the Rembrandt, see A. B. deVries, Magda Toth-Ubbens, and W. Froentjes, Rembrandt in the Mauritshuis (The Hague: Sijthoff and Noordhoff, 1978), pp. 159-60; Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt, His Life, His Paintings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 321. That the emphasis in this painting is not on Saul as a melancholic, see deVries et al., Rembrandt in the Mauritshuis, 160. Like Hercules, Saul is sometimes regarded as possessed or epileptic; for an example of this interpretation in painting, see G. B. Spinelli, David Playing the Harp to Soothe the Frenzy of Saul (c. 1640s, private collection). 14 There are works attributed to the workshop of Peter Lastman, to Leonart Bramer, Jan Lievens, Rembrandt, Willem van der Laeuw, Salomon

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15

16 17

18

19

20

21

22 23

24

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Konninck, Jan van Hoek, Nicolaes Kupfer, Erasmus II Quellinus, and Aert de Gelder. On David as a political symbol in Italian Renaissance art, see Frederick Hartt, "Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence," in Lucy Freeman Sandier, ed., Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann (New York: New York University Press, 1964), pp. 114-31; Charles Sperling, "Donatello's Bronze David and the Demands of Medici Politics," Burlington Magazine 143 (1992): 218-24; Janet Cox-Rearick, "Sacred to Profane: Diplomatic Gifts of the Medici to Francis I," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1994): 239-58. Ger Luijten, Ariane Van Suchtelen, and Michael Hoyle, eds, Dawn of the Golden Age (Amsterdam: The Rijksmuseum, 1993), pp. 24, 88. I thank my colleague Wayne te Brake for sharing his expertise on the political events of these decades. For a more detailed discussion of these events, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 14771806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). On the moral imperative of Dutch art, see Peter C. Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984); Bob Haak, The Golden Age (New York: Abrams, 1984); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987). For England, see Antony Griffiths with Robert Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603-1689 (London: British Museum, 1998). The present location of the painting (Bode, 75) is unknown. See C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten Hollandischen Maler (Esslingen: Neff, 1910), III, p. 592, no. 7. Pieter J. J. Thiel, "For Instruction and Betterment: Samuel Ampzing's Mirror of Vanity and Unrestrainedness of Our Age," Simiolus 24, 2/3 (1996): 182— 200; Ger Luijten, "Frills and Furbelows: Satires on Fashion and Pride around 1600," Simiolus 24, 2/3 (1996): 140-60. See Henri Hymans, Lucas Vorsterman: catalogue raisonne de son oeuvre (Brussels: Christophe, 1893), no. 118, p. 137; Horst Scholz, Brouwer Invenit: Druckgraphische Reproduktionen des 17—19 Jahrhunderts nach Gemalden und Zeichnungen Adrian Brouwers (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1985), no. 86, pp. 37^0, 146-7. Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 74; Julius Held, "Rubens and Vorsterman," Art Quarterly 32, 2 (Summer, 1969): 11 Iff. For soldiers in prints from the 1580s, see Luijten et al., Golden Age, 348-52. On the relation of depictions of soldiers to current events, see Richard Helgerson, "Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650-1672," Representations 58 (Spring, 1997): 49-87; on conflicts between the militia and mercenary troops, see Israel, 442-511. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985); David Underdown, Revel, Rtot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Jean-Pierre Gutton, La Societe et les pauvres en Europe, XVI-XVIII siecles (Vendome: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974); Gutton, "Les pauvres face a leur pauvrete: le cas francais 1500-1800," in Thomas Riis, ed., Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe, II (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986), pp. 89-104.

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25 Cited in Arthur Judges, ed., The Elizabethan Underworld (London: Routledge, 1930), p. 21. 26 Beier, Masterless Men, 4, 8, 39^2, 76-80; Gutton, "La societe et les pauvres," 23—9. 27 Beier, Masterless Men, 6; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 183. 28 Annliese Plokker, Adrian Petersz. Van de Venne 1589-1662 (Amersfoort: Acco, 1984), cat. no. 1, pp. 23^. 29 Plokker, Van de Venne, cat. no. 58, 155—6; James Welu, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting: Raising the Curtain on New England Private Collections (Worcester: Worcester Art Museum, 1979), cat. no. 33, pp. 113-15. See also Martin Royallton-Kisch, "Politics in Miniature: Adrian van de Venne's Album," Apollo 129 (July, 1988): 23-6. 30 A. L. Beier, "The Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town: Warwick 1580—90," in Peter Clark, ed., Country Towns in Pre-industrial England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), p. 58; Beier, Masterless Men, xxi, 9; Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of England and Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), pp. 91, 97, 157. 31 Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), pp. 237—9; Judges, Elizabethan Underworld, 371-2. 32 William Chappell, ed., Roxburghe Ballads (Hertford, NC: Austin, 1874), II, pp. 259-61. 33 Attributed to Humphrey Crouch; Chappell, Roxburghe Ballads, II, 479. 34 Joy Wiltenburg, "Madness and Society in the Street Ballads of Early Modern England," Journal of Popular Culture 21, 4 (Spring, 1988): 103. 35 Alan Fessler, "The Management of Lunacy in Seventeenth-Century England: An Investigation of Quarter Sessions Records," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 49 (April, 1956): 902; Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 157-8; Peter Rushton, "Lunatics and Idiots: Mental Disability, the Community, and the Poor Laws in Northeast England 1600-1900," Medical History 32, 1 (January 1988): 40. For the similar circumstances in Europe, see Peter Spierenburg, "The Sociogenesis of Confinement and Its Development in Early Modern Europe," in Spierenburg, ed., The Emergence of Carceral Institutions: Prisons, Galleys, and Lunatic Asylums 1550-1900 (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit Press, 1984). 36 Clarke, Mental Disorder, 56, 165, 280-1; Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1968/73), I, pp. 30, 43. 37 Jonathan Andrews, "The Politics of Committal in Early Modern Bethlem," in Roy Porter, ed., Medicine in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1995), p. 17. 38 Rushton, "Lunatics and Idiots," 40; Fessler, "Management of Lunacy," 903, 904. 39 Andrews, "Politics of Committal," 17. 40 Walker, Crime and Insanity, I, 184; Andrews, "Politics of Committal," 16; Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 278. 41 The image is by O. Gatti, in Maccio's Emblemata (n. pi: Bononiae, 1628), p. 293. 42 On this general development away from physical violence, see Norbert Elias, The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

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43 Andrews, "Politics of Committal," 12; and Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penn Tucker, and Keir Waddington, The History of Bethlem (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 116-24, 335-50. 44 Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, 117, 124, 350-2. 45 For the revolt, see Peter Burke, "The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello," Past and Present 99 (May, 1983): 3-21; Rosario Villari, The Revolt of Naples, tr. James Newell and John Marino (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 46 Fritz Saxl, "The Battle Scene Without a Hero: Aniello Falcone and His Patrons," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3, 1-2 (OctoberJanuary, 1939-40): 70-87; Katia Fiorentino, "La rivolta di Masaniello del 1647," in Civilta del Seicento a Napoli, 2 vols. (Naples. Museo di Capodimonte), II, pp. 43-9; Wendy Roworth, "The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello's Revolt and Other Disasters in Seventeenth Century Naples," Art Bulletin 75, 2 (1993): 219-34; Christopher Marshall, "Casa di Stravaganze: Order and Anarchy in Domenico Gargiulo's Revolt of Masaniello^ Art Bulletin 80, 3 (1998): 478-97. 47 Roworth, "History Painting," 230; Villari, Revolt of Naples, 166. 48 Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 105. 49 Glover worked in England from around 1634 to 1652 and approximately sixty-eight works by him are extant; most are portraits, but there are also book illustrations and five sets of genre figures. See Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 108-10. 50 See, for example, Peter BruegePs Dulle Griet (Antwerp: Museum Mayer van der Bergh); on the shrewish tradition in the iconography of anger, see Walter Gibson, Bruegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 104—7; and Margaret A. Sullivan, "Madness and Folly: Peter Bruegel the Elder's Dulle Griet," Art Bulletin 59, 1 (March, 1977): 55-9. 51 David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 116-36; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500—1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Martin Ingram, "Scolding Women Cucked or Washed: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern F,ngland?" in Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker, eds, Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 48-80. 52 Wiltenburg discusses the unruly female tongue as a phallic equivalent to male forms of violence (Disorderly Women, 106, 141). 53 Walker, Crime and Insanity, I, 48. The ducking stool as a punishment for scolds was common in the Tudor period; previously it had served to punish those in violation of fair weights and measures in the brewing and baking trades, occupations in which women figured. See Underdown, "Taming," 123; Ingram, "Scolding Women," 58. 54 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Vintage, 1927) I, 1, p. 172. The discussion of hysteria is separate from the bulk of the treatise and was added to the fifth edition of the Anatomy in 1638, as "Symptoms of Maids', Nuns', and Widows' Melancholy," 414-19. Only the sexual preoccupation connects this ailment to mania, scolds, etc., because, while

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55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

The Art of Frenzy there are occasional fits, most symptoms of hysteria were of the listless and inactive variety. On hysteria in early modern Europe, see Laurinda Dixon, Perilous Chastity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Underdown, "Taming," 125, 134; Ingram, "Scolding Women," 56, 67, 72; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 156. This variant is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Seymour Slive, "On the Meaning of Frans Hals' 'Malle Babbe'," Burlington Magazine 105 (October, 1963): 435. On ballads about madness in which social overreaching is the primary misstep, see Wiltenburg, "Madness and Society," 119-22. Cited in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 541. Among the vast literature on witchcraft, see especially Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witchhunting in Southwestern Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Pieter Spierenburg, The Broken Spell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and W. Frijhoff, Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth-Twentieth Century, tr. Rachel van der Wilden-Fall (Rotterdam: Universitaire Pers, 1991). John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches, cited in Thomas, Decline of Magic, 677. In this sense, see especially the witchcraft scenes of Adrian van de Venne and David Teniers the Younger. See also Jane Davidson, The Witch in European Art 1470-1750 (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1987). Johannes Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum (Binghamton: Binghamton University Press, 1991), pp. 217, 571. D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar, 1981), pp. 3, 6; H. C. Erik Midelfort, "Sin, Melancholy, Obsession: Insanity and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany," in Steven L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture (Berlin: Moutan, 1984), pp. 115, 134. Midelfort, "Sin, Melancholy, and Obsession," 139; Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 34, n. 82; Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 53. Midelfort, "Sin, Melancholy, and Obsession," 141; Michel du Certeau, La Possession de Loudun (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 134; Midelfort, Witchhunting, passim. du Certeau, La Possession, 68, 131; Midelfort, Witchhunting, 135-6; Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 62; Walker, Unclean Spirits, 6; Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 175. Joachim du Bellay, Les Regrets (Paris: La Connaissance, 1925), sonnet XCVII, p. 65. On the inclusion of sibyls in the Problemata, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 108. Cited in du Certeau, La Possession, 188. Jacques Lieure, Jacques Callot, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions Gazette des BeauxArts, 1924-7), II, pp. 50-1. The print is inscribed to Cristofano Bronzino, standard bearer for Cardinal Medici. The event was evidently witnessed by the artist in Florence some years earlier.

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70 Hans Vlieghe, Saints, 2 vols., Corpus Rubenianum L. Burchard VIII (New York: Phaidon, 1973), II, pp. 73ff.; Graham Smith, "Rubens' Altargemalde des HI. Ignatius von Loyola und des Hi. Franz Xavier fur die Jesuitenkirche in Antwerpen," Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien LXV (1969): 39-60; Julius Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Milton Lewine, "The Sources of Rubens' Miracles of St. Ignatius," Art Bulletin 45 (June, 1963): 143-7; Ribadeneira (1622 edn), pp. 221, 231-5. 71 Other images of possessed women by Rubens, including another of St. Ignatius from 1620 and now in Genoa, and several of St. Francis of Paolo around 1630, do not have as much pathological detail as the first Ignatian series bound for the Jesuits' most important religious building in Antwerp. The later works present a more generic form of female possession as a physical struggle created by a disorderly state of uncontrollable movements, although the shamefulness caused by the resultant dishevelment remains constant. 72 Vlieghe, Saints, II, 77—8. The drawing is in the Louvre. 73 Spierenburg, Broken Spell, 184. 74 On the charitable motivation behind institutions in The Netherlands, see Sheila Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985); for London's Bethlem Hospital, see Jonathan Andrews, "'Hardly a Hospital, but a Charity for Pauper Lunatics?' Therapeutics at Bethlem in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century," in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones, eds, Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 63-81; Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 22; and Christine Stevenson, "Robert Hooke's Bethlem," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, 33 (September, 1996): 254—75. For the iconography favored in French institutions, see Y. Sainte-Geours, N. Sainte-Fare Garnot, and N. Simon, eds, Musee de ['Assistance Publique (Alencon: Firmin-Didot, 1981). 75 Katherine Fremantle, The Baroque Town Hall of Amsterdam (Utrecht: Haenjens, Dekker, and Gumbert, 1959), p. 13; Spierenburg, Carceral Institutions, 25, 33; Muller, Charity, passim. 76 Cynthia Lawrence, "The Monument of Elisabeth Morgan: Issues and Problems in Late-Renaissance Sculptural Art," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 45 (1994): 325; K. A. Esdaile, "The Interaction of English and Low Country Sculpture in the Sixteenth Century," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1944): 80-8; Elisabeth Neurdenburg, Hendrik de Keyser (Amsterdam: Scheltma and Holkema, 1930), pp. 104-6; Thorsten Sellin, Pioneering in Penology: The Amsterdam Houses of Correction in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944). 77 Cited and translated by Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 16. 78 Cited in Spierenburg, Broken Spell, 184. 79 Spierenburg, Broken Spell, 186. On the practice of asylum visiting at Bethlem, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978); Patricia Allderidge, "Bedlam: Fact or Fantasy," in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness, II (London: Tavistock, 1985); Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem, ch.

98

80

81

82 83

84 85

86 87 88

89

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The Art of Frenzy 13, "Visiting," pp. 178-99. On the theatrical conception of madness in this period, see Natsu Hattori, "The Pleasure of Your Bedlam: The Theatre of Madness in the Renaissance," History of Psychiatry 6 (1995): 283-308. Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in Zyne Opdomst, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Isaak Tirion, 1765), II, pp. 307-11; C. A. L. Sander, "Het Dolhuys of Dolhuis Ande Vesten of de Kloveniersburgwal," Maanblad Amstelodamum 45 (1958): 229-40. Elisabeth Neurdenburg Hendrik de Keyser suggested a date after 1617, citing the influence of Rubens' studies of the possessed (128). Most recently, 1620 has been put forward; see In Beeld gebracht Beeldouwkunst Uit de Collectie van het Amsterdam Historisch Museum (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1995), pp. 188-9; cat. no. 659. Wagenaar, Amsterdam, 308, 310. The gesture of hair-pulling was associated with female mourners in classical funerary art. See Christine Havelock, "Mourners on Greek Vases: Remarks on the Social History of Women," in Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, eds, Feminism and Art History (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 45-61. Rombout Verhulst also used this gesture in his Pesthuis relief of 1660 for the plague hospital in Leiden, in which an allegorical female figure represents the plague as a wrathful fury. A. Staring, "De beeldhouwer Pieter Xavery," Oud Holland 44 (1927): 1-15; E. Pelinck, "Nieuws over den beeldhouwer Pieter Xavery," Oud Holland 59 (1942): 102—9. Xavery worked in Leiden from 1670 to 1674 on monumental stone groups for house facades and on small terracotta figures. H. W. Janson, "The Right Hand of Michelangelo's Moses," in Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, 2 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), I, p. 243. Staring, Pieter Xavery, 12; Jaap Leeuwenberg and Willy Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1973), p. 246. M. I. Batten, "The Architecture of Robert Hooke," Annual Volume of the Walpole Society 25 (1936-7): 83-133; Margaret Espinasse, Robert Hooke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956); Stevenson, "Robert Hooke's Bethlem," 254-75. White's image was ambitious: it was printed on three sheets and accompanied with a Latin inscription aimed at an elite audience that included Charles II and the hospital governors and commemorated the building's completion. See Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603-1689 (London: British Museum, 1998), cat. no. 186, pp. 269-70. For the most thorough discussion of all aspects of this design, see Stevenson, "Robert Hooke's Bethlem," 254—76, and Stevenson, "The Architecture of Bethlem at Moorfields," in Andrews et ai, The History of Bethlem, pp. 230-59. Sir John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830, fifth edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 256; Stevenson, "The Architecture of Bethlem," 231. Georges Guillain and P. Mathieu, La Salpetriere (Paris: Masson, 1925), pp. 23-5; Louis Hautecoeur, Histoire de /''architecture classique en France, 7 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1948), II, pt. 1, p. 252. The first engravings of this building were available c. 1668; Hooke was an avid collector of French architectural prints and so was likely to have been aware of the design. Patricia Allderidge, Gibber's Statues from.the Gates of Bedlam: Victoria and

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96 97 98 99

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Albert Museum Masterpieces (London: V &. A, n.d.). Hooke's diary is peppered with references to Thomas Cartwright as the author of statues for Bethlem. Cartwright, like Gibber, received many city commissions after the fire, including work for Bridewell and St. Thomas' Hospital. For Cartwright, see Henry Robinson and Walter Adams, eds, The Diary of Robert Hooke (London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), pp. 16, 173, 177, 179, 183; Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, The London Mason in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935). Harald Faber, Caius Gabriel Cibber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926). Faber, Cibber, 42-3. Allderidge suggests other influential works, including the slaves from Pietro Tacca's statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand at Leghorn, and Bernini's river gods from the fountain in the Piazza Navona, and Lambertsz.'s Razernij (V & A Masterpieces}. On head shaving, see Levius Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (London, 1576). MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 120. Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 28; Edward O'Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital (New York: Dutton, 1915), pp. 183ff. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (New York: Abrams, 1964); Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 108, 111; Lawrence, "Monument of Elisabeth Morgan," 331; Henriette s'Jacob, Idealism and Realism: A Study of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden: Brill, 1954), p. 54.

3

The politics of mania In the last decade of the seventeenth century, the motif of a confined maniac symbolizing martial excess entered the field of political satire as a device for criticizing a country's aggressive policies. Positive endorsements of belligerence continued to lose ground over the next century, and men of action representing power were demoted as emblematic elements in favor of female allegorical figures. In medical developments, mania ceded importance and some symptoms to melancholia and to the modish phenomenon of the vapors. Mania itself was increasingly associated with more diffuse claims about disorder, and did not even warrant a niche in the new critiques of material excess. Renewed interest in the passions also did little to improve mania's standing, because its source in the negative emotions of anger and rage undermined its status. In depictions of asylum interiors and asylum visits, maniacs begin the century in the institution's foreground, but soon move into the distant spaces of remote cells as delusional melancholies and "projectors" proliferated in their stead. Eventually, female abstractions also displace maniacal rulers: in England, an afflicted, sometimes confined, Britannia is invoked in debates over royal prerogative and the loss of traditional liberties; in France, the belligerence of La Guerre is disconnected from contemporary rule and the warrior code is revisited on the distant plain of the classical past, though not in the context of Hercules' child-killing, but Medea's. Under the influence of sensibility's re-evaluation of emotion and behavior, aggressive maniacal tendencies associated with masculinity were mooted in favor of more sensitive, gentleman-like displays. Women, however, were thought susceptible to unsafe degrees of emotionalism that brought them closer to excessive mental states like furor. These developments complicated the female allegorical motifs of mania, and those devised to serve protests from below rather than policies from above were especially unstable and vulnerable to contradictory interpretations. By the last third of the eighteenth century, female characterizations of mania were both more common and more problematic. Characters embroiled in excessive wrath and furor as caricatures of contemporary political figures first appear in Dutch broadsheets produced between 1688 and 1713. Following years of French military aggression initiated by a monarch identified with excess, maniacal features, from the vantage of international politics, were perfectly suited to the waning image of Louis XIV.1 In several works by Romeyn de Hooghe that

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support the coalition between England and The Netherlands against France, Louis is shown in the grip of a maniacal furor that is more than a temporary role in a royal ballet. Many of de Hooghe's prints supported the policies of William III through attacks on the authoritarian extremes of his enemies, especially Louis and James II, singling out for special censure religious differences, but also expansive, autocratic notions of monarchy. 2 The artist's compositions in these broadsheets are complex and densely referential, their indebtedness to the emblem tradition evident in similar strategies of accumulation and pluralism that are calculated here to attract the widest range of viewers. A mixture of allegorical and classical elements alongside genre features and verbal inscriptions in Latin, Dutch, English, and French attest to the varied, international audience for whom the works were intended. On a less sophisticated level, these prints paraphrased and recycled familiar motifs, even whole compositions, adapting them to a variety of circumstances and personalities. De Hooghe's engravings were issued in satirical series or almanachs between 1689 and 1701, and individual sheets were simultaneously distributed separately until 1713, usually showing a fictitious name and location for the engraver, and with verses in Dutch and French or English. Several of de Hooghe's four prints on the maniacal pitch of Louis XIV's behavior were themselves recast and reissued, adjusted to fit more recent developments in the international political climate.3 Louis appears variously as an enraged Harlequin, a bellicose soldier, a sinister Don Quixote, and a king of the Spinhuis. 4 In The Flight of Popedom out of England (1689), the French ruler is shown fully suited in armor and making a frantic effort to unsheath his sword and launch an attack. The print's inscription describes him as an "Antick Soldier ... much troubled and in distress [who] pulls in wrath his poor sword needless." Louis attempts the same maneuver in Arlequin Deodat, et Pamirge Hypocbondriaques (1688), but here the king is confined in an institution described as both a workhouse and a hospital for the insane. With minimal changes in the image, the print was reissued in 1713 with some inscriptions altered in anticipation of a peaceful conclusion to the War of the Spanish Succession (Figure 3.1). Assembled in the ward of a hospital well outfitted with curtained beds, a milling crowd of patients, visitors, keepers, and doctors conveys a sense of commotion and confusion. The impressive structure boasts airy proportions and classical elements from which didactic decorative elements jostle for the viewer's attention. A central arch, inscribed "The Hypochondrias," springs from the bust of a jester representing "Folly," and the bust of a woman pulling her hair identified as "Rage." Medallions and reliefs critical of Louis XIV and the Jesuits surmount the arch. In the center foreground, Louis XIV or Arlequin Deodat, acting under the conjoined influences of folly and rage, is restrained in his sudden excess of fury by the interference of William III. Behind them, Louis is

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Figure 3.1 Anon., after Romeyn de Hooghe, 't Verbeter-huis der Torys, onder de cure van de Whigse Doctor, 1713. © Rijksmuseum-Stichtung, Amsterdam.

shown again as an agitated man with a fanciful headdress of ships and smoke who is assisted by two turbaned Algerians.5 The scene is bracketed at the left by a man depicted from the rear, purportedly the Bishop of Strasbourg, who sits atop a chamberpot and awaits an enema, and at the right by a complicated lying-in episode. In front of the "Rage" side of the arch, a book-toting Dutch physician examines a flask of urine. All of the principal occupants of the asylum are there because they exemplify the abuse of authority and power. Louis is obviously enraged, and there are other references to the iconography of ira, including the furious expressions of the king's double characterization, as well as the action of the foreground Louis, whose impetuous sword-drawing was a leitmotiv for the passion of anger. These familiar elements from popular psychological theory and pictorial tradition combine to substantiate de Hooghe's satirical theme that Louis XIV's behavior belonged to the furioso tradition of belligerence taken to an insane degree. The inscription repeats the idea of folly and rage as over-determined causes of Louis' condition just as the central arch does, by specifying that the asylum is for both the foolish (dol) and the insane (gecken). The doctor's cure, his

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ability to constrain belligerent rage, is tantamount to bringing order and peace for all: "Away cried the doctor, such a rabble must go to the madhouse; I have many cures to perform, before everything is back in good order." Louis' reputation for conquest and tyranny occurred within a broad context of international political affiliations, and this allowed the model of an insane monarch who fuels upheaval to be a relevant motif for other constituencies. Such an extension is clearly established through the print's revised title of 1713: From the Correction House of the Torys under the Cure of the Sage Doctor; The Hospital for Insane Torys under the Cure of the Whig Doctors. The alteration relates the Tories to French and monarchical causes, and links the war's conclusion to the ascendency of the Whigs. In this version, the image is unchanged, but the Dutch and French verses below indicate that the identities of some of the key figures have been adjusted to bring the print closer to recent events. The Dutch doctor is now a Whig doctor, the enraged Louis XIV restrained by Algerians is the czar contained by Turks, the Bishop of Strasbourg is a cardinal, and the lady in bed represents peace suffering from melancholia. Of the principal foreground pair, the combative sword-drawer remains "Louis insense" who is described as dazed with war, but his companion is no longer a restraining William III. The figure is now identified as a Tory who colludes with Louis' aggressive program, a change that adjusts the meaning of their conjoined hands on Louis' sword to suggest affiliation and complicity rather than the thrust and counterthrust of the original. The significant propensities linking Louis with the Tories were the support of divine right and extended royal prerogative, along with their sympathetic regard for Roman Catholicism and the Jacobite cause. If Louis' persistent, extensive battles motivated by dynastic interests were regarded as excessive and insane, then containing these campaigns amounted to a just war, and one which Whig political aspirations favored.6 On another level, the king's rage seemed to evade suppression, and being contagious, it could be said to have spread to his sympathizers in other countries. This logic of prerogative-as-furor facilitated equating Louis' overpowering strategies with the political interests of the Tory party, and rage could even be argued as inhering in the Tory position itself. The fact that Bethlem was identified as a Tory institution whose governors were known to favor Tory policies only enriched the satirical edge of this adaptation. Following the wars and the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the royalist Tory position declined, and so did the high-pitched rivalry, known as the "rage of party," associated with it.7 But since British national identity, as Linda Colley has argued, was formed in response to the successive wars with France, it is not surprising that the aggressive furor thought to have been the instigating force behind these conflicts remained an important feature in figuring British rights and liberty. 8

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Visiting the asylum to view inmates whose symptoms called attention to occupational and national stereotypes that brought out the similarities shared by the mad and the lucid was a well-known device of Jacobean drama.9 De Hooghe's pictorialization of this standard theme, the first since the s'Hertogenbosch relief to depict a group of inmates arrayed for show in the asylum milieu, altered the pre-existent dramatic device in small but auspicious ways. The principal adjustment, one destined to become ubiquitous among British writers around the turn of the century, was to envision the inmates as incarcerated heads of state and church, and particularly to see in the madhouse location an ideal setting for political machination and dissension. (Of course, a small but notable group of seditious types had, in fact, been sent to Bethlem by city or crown authorities.) In the popular writing of this period, Ned Ward's London Spy of 1699 includes a typical tour through Bethlem in which inmates mouth a range of improbably grandiose claims. 10 Tom Brown's Amusements Serious and Comical (1700) also dutifully acknowledges standard types, such as a mad bishop and scholar-musician afflicted with love melancholy, but his group boasts new partisan coinages, including an ailing Jacobite and a melancholy Whig.11 If party membership or opposition affiliation can establish new delusional types, then, as Richard Steele suggested in a Taller essay of 1709 (no. 125), politicians and freethinkers should be at home in the asylum along with the duchesses, earls, emperors, and prophets already ensconced there. This fine confusion of real affiliation with imaginary delusion was grounded in John Locke's influential redefinition of madness. Locke emphasized in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that madness did not consist in passion overruling reason, but in a flawed process in which reasoned thoughts were built up from false premises. Misconceptions and false claims then, whether of status or of politics, lie at the heart of the disorder thus redefined: a madman is one who draws a just inference from false principles ... A madman fancies himself a prince: but upon his mistake, he acts suitable to that character; and though he is out in supposing he had principalities, while he drinks his gruel, and lies in straw, yet you shall see him keep the port of a distressed monarch in all his words and actions.12

The actions may be suitable, reasoned, and correct, but the position is delusional to the extent that it is premised on a factually false foundation. Locke's emphasis on false premises and de Hooghe's strategy of exposing the madness of national leaders were combined and elaborated by Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub (1704). In the Tale's "Digression on Madness," Swift sees the actions of the mad and sane as occupying the same continuum, and suggests that the difference between the two conditions is primarily circumstantial: This one Man chusing a proper Junction, leaps into a Gulph, from thence proceeds a hero, and is called the Saver of his Country; Another atchieves

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the same Enterprise, but unluckily timing it, has left the Brand of Madness, fixt as a Reproach upon his Memory; 13

More reliable than circumstance or timing is the fact that, in Swift's analysis of the furioso dynamic, any "Redundancy of Vapour" or other "sort of Phrenzy" is "never in its right Element, till you take it up in Business of the State" (174, 175). This premise is central to the digression, which proceeds, as does the entire Tale, in a rambling and pluralistic exposition that parodies medical treatises and especially The Anatomy of Melancholy.^4 Principles and their examples are over-cited, and the result is as ambiguous as a broadsheet's profuse, even contradictory, allusions and inscriptions. Swift keeps to a humoral model, remarking on the gaseous interaction of vapors and the catalyzing impact of the passions. He observes the distinction between natural and unnatural melancholy, in which the latter becomes burnt (adust) and turns into choler, thereby producing a situation conducive to the onset of mania. Humoral references pepper the digression's three-part argument in which the truth about heroism and madness is revealed in three distinct areas of endeavor: "The Establishment of New Empires by Conquest; The Advance and Progress of new Schemes in Philosophy; and the contriving, as well as the propagating of new religions" (162). The case for government and imperialism is made through the example of two French kings, Henri IV and Louis XIV, along with Alexander the Great, all of whom are presented as leaders whose campaigns and policies were enacted by a frenzy in the service of the state. In the case of Henri IV, he "raised a mighty army, filled his Coffers with infinite Treasure, provided an invincible Fleet, and all this, without giving the least Part of his Design to his greatest Ministers, or his nearest Favourites" (163). A widespread fear resulted from the secrecy of Henri's motivations, and some proposed that the king intended to establish universal monarchy, or to substitute the Reformed religion for the Roman Catholic, or to launch another Crusade for the purpose of restoring Palestine. In the end, these fears of absolutism, prerogative, and religious tolerance were rendered groundless, when a "State-Surgeon," (alias the assassin Ravillac) killed Henri IV, thus allowing the accumulated vapors that had inspired these plans to disperse, and so bringing the king's secret preparations to an end. These vapors, Swift explains in a parody of humoral metamorphosis, arose from the retention and accumulation of semen which, becoming adust, turned into choler. The king's ailment is therefore like a maniacal frenzy, brought on by excessive lust and anger not unlike that behind most aggressive outbursts: "The very same Principle that influences a Bully to break the Windows of a Whore, who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a Great Prince to raise mighty Armies, and dream nothing but Sieges, Battles, and Victories" (165). Imperial conquest is also an excuse for the random exercise of berserk belligerence demonstrated by France's reigning king, Louis XIV:

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who for the space of above thirty years, amused himself to take and lose Towns; beat Armies, and be beaten; drive Princes out of their Dominions; fright Children from their bread and Butter; burn, lay waste, plunder, dragoon, massacre Subject and Stranger, Friend and Foe, Male and Female. (165) The cause of his hectic skirmishing behavior is the perpetual circulation or agitation of the vapors or spirits. As with the disorder of Henri IV, this diagnosis also attributes Louis' aggression to the workings of mania, understood in eighteenth century terms as excessive movement of spirits or particles.15 Swift illustrates the path of this general principle in both directions: if agitated spirits ascend within the body, they result in the conquering of kingdoms, but when they descend, the result is an anal fistula. After proving that the great contributions to philosophy and religion were made by madmen, Swift proposes a committee be formed to inspect the inmates of Bethlem, and specifically to look for those whose symptoms would, if placed in the service of the state, precipitate acts of greatness similar to those of kings, philosophers, and prophets. There follows a tour of one of Bethlem's wards, during which six madmen are discovered to have the talents to succeed respectively as colonel, lawyer, city merchant, courtier, physician, and bishop. When the fifth edition of the Tale was published in 1710, the tour episode was illustrated with a print designed by Bernard Lens the Elder and engraved by John Sturt (Figure 3.2).16 Numerous subsequent printings included this image, and so did the French edition, Le Conte du tonneau, published in The Netherlands in 1721 and 1741.17 The engraving shows a long room pitched in steep perspective occupied by six inmates. They engage in various endeavors before visitors seen through the "cell" windows that line one wall, a device that effectively, if inaccurately, evokes a Bethlem ward at the height of the touring season. Dominating the foreground while pointedly at some remove from his comrades is the first inmate described in Swift's tour: Is any Student tearing his straw in piece-meal, Swearing and Blaspheming, biting his Grate, foaming at the Mouth, and emptying his Pispot in the spectator's Faces: Let the Right worshipful, the Commissioners of Inspection, give him a regiment of Dragoons, and send him into Flanders among the Rest. (176) Continuing the digression's focus on military aggression, the soldier/ colonel maniac dominates the composition as well as the exposition. He not only occupies the leading role but also, among all the figures, represents the only clear match between Swift's text and Lens' image. This handling establishes the aggressor-maniac as a mad type critical to the Tale's design, and shows some confidence in the type's legibility for readers and viewers alike. Swift connects the maniacal to the same historical events satirized in the de Hooghe broadsheets - the French wars

Figure 3.2 Bernard Lens and John Sturt, 'Digression on Madness,' from Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1710. By permission of the British Library, (1077g2).

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in which the British and Dutch were allies - for this conflict is identified as the inmate's future scene of combat. Another distinctive feature of this particular inmate is that he is the only one for whom no delusional ideas are developed: swearing, foaming, biting, and throwing urine are the mindless aggressive actions that define his disorder. This distinguishes the maniac from his comrades through an absence of delusional thinking which is something they all have in clever abundance. Swift here acknowledges the recent Lockean emphasis on delusion on the one hand, and, on the other, confirms that the attention given to delusional thinking at this time did not affect the clinical or theoretical picture of mania. 18 The maniac's presence is instead defined through his antisocial, regressively brutish actions, like straw-tearing, grate-biting, and pisspotthrowing. For the image, Lens focused on the last activity, the most audacious and confrontational, and combined it with the prototype for raving well known from Gibber's sculpture atop Bethlem's gates. There are the obvious similarities in the reclining pose, draped semi-nudity, roaring expression, chains, and straw padding. By cueing the image to Bethlem, Lens, of course, underwrites the digression's connection to that specific institution. More importantly, however, the borrowing demonstrates how appropriate raving madness as rendered by Gibber was to Swift's satirical recasting of military aggression and imperial belligerence. As the credibility of brute metaphors for madness waned, many historians have emphasized that they were replaced by more sympathetic models.19 Here is evidence that the animal-like ferocity in mania was not totally rehabilitated: it was absorbed back into the aggressive dynamics of conquest, militarism, and factionalism, a development facilitated by its roots in the chivalric and emblematic traditions. Louis XIV's dogged pursuit of extensive military engagements incited controversy beyond the camps of his Dutch and English enemies. Negative reactions to the king's policies were increasingly articulated in France as well. Foreign opposition pamphlets critical of the king's activities were smuggled into the country; satirical expositions like Swift's became available in French translations published in The Netherlands. Many were persuaded that the king had involved the country in consuming wars that were dynastically motivated without regard for the good of the nation. Louis' exalted absolutism appeared now to be dependent on policies that overvalued, and then depended upon, an idea of war as glorification. In the face of mounting losses incurred during the War of the Spanish Succession, an insistence on the valor and heroics of combat rang pathetically hollow. This reaction intensified after a series of natural and military disasters from 1708 to 1710, and was especially strong following battles like that at Malplaquet (1709), in which casualties were excessive to an unparalleled degree.20 Katie Scott has convincingly argued that this sequence of events, catalyzed by a crisis in absolutist ideology and articulated by invalidating traditional military glory, produced the taste

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for motifs in French art of the early eighteenth century that revelled in ridiculing the military and heroic code.21 This change led to a decline in war-derived iconographies for decorative projects, and a preference for imagery that seemed more politely and elegantly gallant. Its most common articulation was the French pictorial focus on Don Quixote as a charming and anti-heroic character far removed from the rough type of earlier broadsheets and French editions of the book.22 The new trend is usually identified with the twenty-eight tapestries designed by Charles-Antoine Coypel from 1714 to 1751 and well known from engraved reproductions, but the first French artist of the eighteenth century to turn to Don Quixote as a subject was Claude Gillot (1673-1722). Gillot arrived in Paris around 1691, and there his activities show him in pursuit of the reputable career that always eluded him. He had a significant impact on the major artists of the century, including Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard, whose careers largely overshadowed the more humble trajectory of his own. Many of the talented artists of this era passed through his atelier, Watteau from 1704/5 to 1708/9, and Nicholas Lancret after 1708, and the comings and goings give the impression of a lively, even controversial, creative environment. Gillot specialized in the more modest, less bureaucratically dependent artistic projects of designs for engravings and small cabinet paintings. His topics likewise indicate a taste for the margins of culture. Perhaps influenced by the example of his relatives, illustrators of books on empirics and chiromancy, Gillot favored subjects that were at once high and low, learned and demotic. Many of these works could be traced to the popular acting companies of the Paris street fairs. His brief ownership of a marionette theater at a time when puppets were used by actors to circumvent censorship shows his inclination for creative projects associated with protest and opposition. 2 ^ Among Gillot's various non-conforming projects, there are three works or series that take a subversive position on the topic of military glory and the martial hero. His first submission to the Academic royale in 1710 was a genre scene of military life, The Night Watch of Don Quixote, a subject that conveyed both the lighter side of the knight's narrative and also pointedly avoided the heroics of military life. From 1710 to 1720, Gillot worked on over 100 illustrations for two planned editions of Houdar de la Motte's fables. 24 One fable, "Les Fous," describes a scene in an asylum courtyard in which the histories of its four inmates are offered to convey a satirical view of the world at large. One inmate is a soldier, "un chevalier errant de la manie," whom Gillot depicts in a shabby uniform with discarded shield and a single plume remaining in his helmet. Though grievously injured and aged, the soldier still only thinks of opportunities to display his military skills. Gillot's third project to combine the anti-heroic with emotional instability is a series of four prints, Les Passions des hommes exprimees par des satyres. The artist worked on the designs for these engravings

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from 1710 to 1720, in between trips to The Netherlands, and while also engaged in the fable illustrations, genre paintings and engravings of theatrical subjects, bacchanalias, and witches' sabbaths. The passions series was engraved in 1727 after Gillot's death by Jean Audran, who presented them to the Academic that same year. The set does not follow the usual format for representing the passions in which seven core emotions were cast in terms of sin. Gillot's group consists instead of four passion-driven pursuits - love, wealth, gambling, and war - that are not portrayed as the weaknesses of individuals, but as social activities that seem to legitimize insatiable behavior.25 La Passion de la guerre, exprimee par des satyres guerriers shows a regiment of satyrs in Roman military gear in a forest setting (Figure 3.3).26 Mars is positioned in the center of the composition as an armless herm statue, and the satyrs occupy a twolevel, stage-like clearing. On the mounded upper platform, a band of satyrs playing brass and percussion instruments perform their music posed above the bodies of dead and wounded satyrs. At the right, the corpses have been brutally mutilated, and one triumphant satyr lifts a decapitated head into the air. There is little respect for the living or the dead demonstrated among the fanfare-performing group on this bandstand. Across the foreground below, grunting combatants paired like gladiators in an arena fight with shields and swords, their brutish character exposed in expressions of grimacing furor or in the complete absorptive state of the "berserker" fanatic. Triumphant conquerors returning with the spoils of war (carts of prisoners in the background), the satyrs enact an

Figure 3.3 Jean Audran, after Claude Gillot, The Passion for War, 1727. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Elisha Whittesley Collection. The Elisha Whittesley Fund, 1957 (57.581.39 [3]).

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explicitly feral incarnation of all the brutality and destructiveness that military pomp was calculated to disguise. Like the military arabesques and singeries of Watteau, this particular work might look like a merely frivolous response to the cynicism surrounding Louis' military machine.27 Yet the vehemence with which the satyrs pursue their belligerent ends and the verses below the image suggest a more serious commentary. In the accompanying lines, individual acts of heroism are reduced to the level of selfish vainglory that has disastrous effects on citizen, property, and countryside. In fact, it is heroes en masse who are the scourge of civilization, because their belligerence always spreads beyond the battlefield. Gillot's extension of this passion from an individual to a group, and from an ad hoc to an institutionalized phenomenon, follows logically from the seventeenth-century French adaptations of Brouwer's passion series which introduced the notion that ira was responsible for full-scale war. In keeping with this aspect of the passion, Gillot relies less on the genre imagery of ira, and more on the classical, emblematic aspects of ira and furor, in which frenzy was regarded as maniacally dangerous or useful to the service of the state. Gillot's conflating these alternatives parallels Swift's plan of transferring maniacal asylum inmates to a regiment. Beyond the usual details of shield and sword, the artist added to these associations by emphasizing the ways in which military spectacle and ceremony further encourage and justify a frenzied pursuit of destruction. When the point is made that ceremonial apparatus derived from classical martial motifs is being flaunted as an excuse for the outrageous pursuit of destructiveness, then an implicit criticism of the final years of Louis' reign is unavoidable. Gillot's composition, designed during the concluding years of the war, was not published during his or the king's lifetime, a circumstance for which there is no documented explanation, but which certainly suggests that the dissemination of the passions series was somehow problematic. To have suggested that war was a passion, and one on a par with gambling, financial greed, and venery, to have in fact equated these pursuits as the principal contemporary sins of the era, and thereby impute to all of them parallel degrees of excess, gave Gillot's prints more of an oppositional edge than was acceptable at a time when the military defeats engineered by Louis were a particularly controversial issue at home and abroad. When the series was finally published, war campaigns had ceased, and there was a wave of nostalgia for what came to be viewed as the patriotic motifs of Louis XIV's reign, developments which supplied Gillot's prints with a new context that obscured the seditious undercurrents of their original design.28 Building a series around the dangers of indulging the passions and casting it, as Gillot had done, with reference to the social practices that actively encouraged and even institutionalized them were also the principal motivations behind William Hogarth's modern moral subjects

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of the 1730s and 1740s. Gillot's work, his engravings and prints after his paintings, were available to Hogarth, and we know that he borrowed directly from the French artist for one of his Rake's Progress scenes.29 Hogarth adapted the popular but polite format of the conversation piece to the mordant idea of a moral progress, and in 1731 painted his first such series, The Harlot's Progress. The paintings were part of a larger process that included encouraging subscriptions for moderately priced engravings based on the painted prototype, which was calculated to extend both the artist's market and his influence. Anchoring his imagery to the important sites and institutions of London through astute citations was a strategy Hogarth devised to sharpen his social commentary and to draw in his audience. Thus, the misbehavior and social decline of the series' protagonists take place in recognizable locales, including Bridewell, the Fleet prison, and Bethlem Hospital, making his images some of the bestknown eighteenth-century depictions of these settings. For the last scene of The Rake's Progress (1732; engraving 1735), Hogarth aligned the now familiar notion of Bethlem as the country's mirror image with the condemnation of selfish, passion-driven pursuits that, in England, were associated with the behavior of rakes (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4 William Hogarth, "Rake in Bedlam," The Rake's Progress, pi. 8, 1735. The Wellcome Library, London.

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The suitability of the rake figure for such an exposition can be traced to many literary sources.30 Sometimes these emphasize the rake as a misguided youth who aspires to the flaws of aristocratic behavior. But many show the rake deteriorating from the same psychological tendencies found in maniacs. Describing the rake's condition in a Tatler essay of 1709, Steele located it in the "strong passions and appetites, which are in youth too violent for the curb of reason, good sense, good manners, and good nature" (no. 127). It is this logic of his excessive inclinations that made satirical sense out of Hogarth's positioning the rake's final deterioration in Bethlem's ward for dangerous maniacs, whose violent passions necessitated the asylum's most restrictive accommodations of cells and chains. In the engraving, an oblique view along the cell-lined corridor organizes the chaotic scene of madmen, visitors, and keepers. The principal group consists of his jilted servant and two attendants who assist the collapsed rake; his semi-prone position and regressive contortions, clenched hands, and scalp-gouging produce an ambiguous combination of disorganized energy and inanition. Behind and beside this group are more madmen engaged in actions with a single-minded occupational or obsessive focus, including a geographer, astronomer, tailor, musician, pope, and lovesick fop. The most seriously disturbed inmates, regressively nude and wallowing in straw, are visible inside their cells. Prints of saints and a rude cross decorate the cell of a writhing man who is a religious fanatic. The other, a would-be king apparently urinating in the course of his levee, recalls Locke's exemplary madman persisting in his royal prerogative despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Pausing by his door, the young women, along with the two bewigged men visible beyond the grating, refer to the popular pastime of visiting Bethlem, but in a way emphasizing the illicit solicitation that was allowed to flourish there. The king's regressed nude condition and public expulsion of bodily fluid in the presence of asylum visitors are distinctive recollections of Swift's principal madman. 31 All of the inmates except the rake act on their delusions. Those in the gallery space display the limited range of error associated in contemporary treatises with melancholia and defined by the pursuit of endeavors linked to pride. The Roman Catholic fanatic and monarchist evidence the extreme regression and agitation associated with mania in past and current thinking, and their position inside the cells rather than in the gallery, which was reserved for the less offensive, supports this diagnosis. Both also continue the politicized discourse of mania in its broadsheet characterization as a French disease grounded in religion and absolutism. By distancing these figures from the more industrious inmates and the rake himself, Hogarth relies on the maniacal for trenchant background commentary. The primary focus is, of course, the rake, and Hogarth has taken pains to give the figure an innovative combination of familiar features. Many are derived from the lore or theory of mania: these include

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the self-harming impulses and the chains, the grimacing expression and shaved head, the disheveled clothing, and the aggressive register of tensed muscles and clenched hands. The sum total of these movements, however, is yet so disorganized and ineffectual as to diffuse the impact of mania's purposive aggression. This counter-maniacal effect is furthered by the figure's general outline that summarizes the pose as a reclining one with arm to head, along with the down-turned visage, both keynotes of melancholia. An additional clue suggesting that Hogarth wanted to combine elements of both conditions is his inclusion of references to both of Gibber's statues, Raving Madness and Melancholy Madness, and his avoidance of copying either sculpture more closely than the other. While the details of the depiction suggest mania, the major contours tend to favor melancholia, and the poem printed below the image mixes references to the conditions as well. Composed for Hogarth by Rev. John Hoadley, the verses begin with the invocation of mania as a madness that is chaotic and tyrannical: Madness, Thou Chaos of ye Brain, What art? That Pleasure giv'st, and Pain? Tyranny of Fancy's Reign! Thereafter, the language of melancholia is invoked in the "Mechanic Fancy" of the partial, limited delusions associated with that disorder, and in its traditional organic site, "the shaking sides of Spleen." The poem concludes with the similarly melancholic "Behold Death grappling with Despair." In this way, both the depiction and the versification favor an ambiguous, compound construction that accommodates elements of both disorders. That the viewing public experienced difficulties in grasping the subtle complexity of Hogarth's rake, with his maniacal and melancholic characteristics along with his imminent demise, is evident in all the plagiarized versions of the series.32 The plagiarized sets of The Rake's Progress, as had been the case earlier with those of The Harlot's Progress, were produced by Hogarth's competitor printmakers and sellers on the basis of tips provided for them by spies sent to the artist's studio to view the paintings. A composite scene was developed on the basis of the spies' recollections of the original painting, which was, of course, less detailed than the subsequent print, apparently not even completely finished, and showed the rake in a more melancholic-like pose with an empty expression. Yet the plagiaries show him struggling actively against the keepers, who appear to be fixing his chains and holding him down, rather than releasing him, and his face exhibits an expression of fierce anger (Figure 3.5). He is nude except for a drape, a feature common to Gibber's Raving Madness and Lens' engraving for the Tale, but in this instance, it has the look of a fur pelt, bringing the feature closer to the bestial connotations which were part of the maniacal tradition. Verses attached to the various plagiarized versions similarly emphasize the most

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Figure 3.5 Overtoil, King, Bowles, after William Hogarth, "Rake in Bedlam," 1735. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. belligerent and furious forms of mania, from the direct claims that the rake is "raving mad," and "frenzy wrecks his Mind," to "His mind [is] by jarring Passions tost," and so "he raves and foams and shakes his chain."33 Even a copy of the series by Thomas Bakewell that was authorized by Hogarth declares "he is here raving mad in Bedlam: and is being chained to prevent self-harm." The plagiarized versions offer ample evidence of how most viewers assumed that the figure belonged to the pictorial tradition of bellicose mania known from emblems and political satire. Consequently, his copyists reverted to the familiar iconographies of furor, ira, and physical violence for the rake figure by showing the effects of strong anger and agitated struggle against others. In so doing, they failed to take into account features of Hogarth's delineation that looked forward to future developments. In particular, the other printsellers did not take note of the newer paradigm, in which mania and melancholia were thought to occur in mixed or sequential, rather than entirely distinguishable, forms, an adjustment that is one of the notable theoretical changes in eighteenthcentury writings on madness. As well as this oversight, they also missed the significant fact that Hogarth actually demoted the status of mania in two important ways. First, by declining to show the rake as a

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predominately raving character, he displaced mania from its position as the principal outcome of excess passion, even though this position was still completely acceptable in medical theory and practice. Second, Hogarth demoted, doubtless because it was no longer relevant, the particular significance that mania had achieved in the anti-French propaganda of the early eighteenth century when Louis XIV was repeatedly cast as maniacal or berserk. He accomplished this by not offering up any specific identities for his Catholic and sovereign maniacs, diffusing rather than concentrating their effect, and by placing them in the periphery of his Bethlem scene. Through these maneuvers, he avoided the anti-Louis, anti-war connotations while retaining the anti-French meaning, and he gave precedence to the newer, non-maniacal, typically English "projectors" of the image's middle ground. Usually, the plagiaries simply mixed these mad types all together in the gallery walkways. Either way, the bulk of the inmates are leveled to a more mundane plane of antisocial commentary without any specific political causes being underwritten beyond the general thrust that both city and court interests were equal targets for satire. While it is understandable that the plagiarists would make the assumption that Hogarth's Bethlem rake belonged to a familiar stereotype of that kind of madness associated with asylums and recently celebrated in the context of social and political satire, it is less immediately clear why Hogarth should have offered such a complicated, even ambiguous, prototype instead. He would certainly have wanted to distinguish his composition from the earlier, more crude work by Lens for Swift's Tale, and he succeeded here by differentiating the nude madmen with greater skill through more symptomatic elaborations, and by giving more room to the occupational schemers, their apparel, and attributes. These adjustments signal a change in the representation of madness from predominately furious or raving forms to more delusional types in which reasoning from false premises is in much greater evidence. The larger significance of these alterations is that the dominance of mania in asylum scenes was losing ground to melancholia, and contemporary writings on madness offer additional evidence of this shift. Hogarth's many contacts with members of London's medical community, and his own election as governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1735, assured his exposure to the specialized interests of those who also sometimes bore the brunt of the artist's satire.34 For most writers on the subject, the humoral tradition's hegemonic position slipped in the eighteenth century, and understanding mental disturbance as bodily fluids in disproportionate amounts was replaced with other scientific models then enjoying greater currency, especially those derived from iatrochemistry and a mechanistic conception of the nervous system. Thomas Try on, in A Treatise of Dreams and Visions (2nd edn., 1695), was one of the last to repeat the key themes of the waning model, emphasizing the different complexions and the pivotal role of extreme passions in causing madness. Tryon followed the familiar

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etiology of adust or burnt choler in the development of mania and frenzy, wherein choler is both a substance and a passionate, belligerent inclination: "if the Martial Property be superior in the Complexion, such when deprived of sense and Reason, become furious, blasphemous, apt to all mischief and violence, great Swearers, and very unruly, fierce, turbulent, and raging" (271). Just a short time later, in his Treatise on Vapours, or Hysterick Fits (1707), Dr. John Purcell traced back the same agitated outcome to different origins, although he did not give up the humoral model of flux: Raving is produced by a mixture of heterogeneous particles with the Spirits, which fermenting with them, make their Motion violent and irregular in the Emporium of the Brain, where they do at once irritate a great many little Nervous Fibres, and renew many confus'd Ideas of things past.^

The newer models of fibers and particles coincided with efforts to retheorize the relationship of mania to melancholia. Some would see the two disorders as mixed and barely discernible from each other, and this was especially the case when additional ailments like hypochondria and hysteria were considered as potential diagnoses. Richard Blakemore freely admitted the difficulties of differential diagnosis here: Indeed the Limits and Partitions that bound and discriminate the highest Hypochondriak and Hysterick Disorders, and Melancholy, Lunacy, and Phrenzy are so nice, that it is not easy to distinguish them, and set the Boundaries where one Lnds and the other Begins." 6

But the majority willingly mapped out a more clear-cut conceptualization of their relationship. Most agreed that mania and melancholia were interconnected in some way, and, as it had in the past, melancholia was usually accorded a distinctive degree of higher status.'" Mania was typically seen as an augmented stage arising from a baseline of melancholia, and so was viewed as subsequent or secondary to it. The melancholic outlook was regarded as limited, partial, and not overtaking the person entirely, whereas mania did just that, emerging with the more inclusive set of symptoms and preoccupations. This made mania both an occasional symptom of the other illness, as well as the more serious disturbance, an extreme case of a milder condition that was steadily differentiated from it. Dr. Robert James' A Medicinal Dictionary of 1743-5 was an influential source in England and on the continent that argued for most of these points. James insisted that mania and melancholia needed to be grasped "from one joint view 1 ' with melancholy "the primary disorder" and mania, here also referred to as madness, as its "augmentation." 38 Melancholia was thereby distinguished from madness just as mania was identified with it. James relied on classical writers to build his picture of maniacal excess, and so some continuity with seventeenth-century commentators who cited earlier sources on mania was sustained.

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Following Aretaeus, James describes maniacs as those who "when provoked to Anger, become raging mad. Some ... wander from home: some cry out in a hideous manner: . . . Others tear and mangle their bodies ... [others] are inclined to venery, so that they caress publicly without either dread or shame." It is important to James to distinguish that melancholia is caused by blood congested in the brain, while mania is the result of the violent movement of this thickened blood, bringing on symptoms of red eyes, prideful countenance, teeth grinding, incredible strength, tolerance of cold, and in women, breasts filled with blood. Virgins in love without access to intercourse and men with an excessive loss of semen caused by too much intercourse are likely candidates for mania. Anger is an important precipitating factor, causing raving among maniacs and mania among melancholies. James subdivides melancholia into hysterical and hypochondriacal variants, and sees the principal symptom of melancholia as a fixation on a single object. Certain types of people tend more toward one condition than the other: not only dull, stupid, and forgetful Persons, but also, and that more frequently, ingenius men, Poets, Philosophers, and those charmed with the more deep parts of Mathematics and Algebra, are subject to Melancholy. And we find, from Experience, that persons of melancholico-choleric Temperaments, lean habits of Body, rigid and tense Fibers, and a quick pulse, as also those who, being prone to anger, are daily and easily provoked by Family altercations, especially at meals, are above all others subject to madness.

A major development embedded in James' catalog of symptoms is the growing prominence of delusional thinking. Locke's concentration on errors in judgment and the false notions upon which reasoned statements could be built had given delusional thinking a pivotal role as one of the more distinctive features of madness. Once it became customary to regard mania as a universal form of madness over against melancholia, the partial form in which disturbed thinking was limited to a few objects or issues, then delusion assumed an even more critical position in discriminating between the two disorders. Eventually, delusions came to dominate thinking about symptoms, and, having already obscured mania, delusional phenomena also began to overshadow the other attributes of melancholia.39 The prominence of delusional constructs contributed to a declining interest in mania, and to a relative indifference to the prototype of angry bully or mindlessly furious brute, such that the most discussed as well as most satirized madmen increasingly tended to be the projectors and professionals identified by their schemes. The distinctiveness of mania was further weakened through the influential ideas of George Cheyne, whose The English Malady of 1733 emphasized diet and lifestyle as the principal causes of mental instability, and thus significantly shifted attention away from relying on entirely organic causal schemas. In particular, Cheyne indicted the newly

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fashionable social practices that were devoted to the pursuit of excess and luxury. Despite the fact that mania was the condition traditionally regarded as synonymous with excess, Cheyne ironically barely mentions the disorder. As a discrete condition, he merely notes that mania may be caused by bad diet, liver problems, or choler.40 But in a more general form, he sees mania as the highest degree of agitation or furor, extrapolating it as a theoretical nth-degree of four disorders - vapors, hysteria, hypochondria, or epilepsy. Through this combination of simplification and diffusion, mania continued to lose its identity as a separate category of illness, and another stage in its lowering estimation was thereby achieved. An official acknowledgment that mania was no longer as important as it had previously been occurred in the decade following the publication of Cheyne's treatise. When the Vagrancy Act, which since 1714 had authorized the incarceration of persons "who, by Lunacy, or otherwise, were furiously Mad, and dangerous to be permitted to go Abroad," was revised in 1744, the phrase "furiously Mad," which commonly meant mania, was replaced by the more general description, "so far disordered in their senses."41 But certain key features of mania remained constant even in the face of these new developments. These included the highest degree of agitation or commotion, even to the extent of anarchy, and a close relation to the passions, especially in excessive amounts, and to choler or anger, sometimes lust, in particular. While, in the newer treatises on madness, the passions assumed less importance generally, they retained their key position as predisposing and precipitating causes of mania. This reliance on the passions in turn helped to shift the disorder's gender associations from the primarily male-dominant construct of brutish, militaristic belligerence, to a mainly female-dominant stereotype grounded in the notion of excessive emotionalism. Women's weaker physical make-up justified the claims, like that made by George Baglivi in The Practice of Physick of 1704, that "Women are more subject than men to Diseases arising from the Passions of the Mind, and more violently affected with them."42 Once mania was construed primarily as excess passion, and women were thought particularly susceptible to disorders caused by the passions, then mania's constituency altered, and the disorder became identified as a principal affliction of women. This transformation occurred at the same time that the new focus on delusional thinking, so redolent of education as well as judgment, lent more support to the development of masculine stereotypes for madness. After all, neither Swift nor Hogarth included madwomen in their Bethlem episodes, and although Hogarth's plagiarists did include one, they merely misconstrued the identity of the prostitute-tourists, substituting for them an ugly old woman looking into a cracked mirror, a well-worn symbol for the sin of pride. On the other hand, some commentary on mania continued to support its more manly associations, and this was especially true whenever the

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condition was linked to anarchic or oppositional behavior in the public sphere. We have already seen this tendency called into service by opposing parties, with Tories satirizing Whigs as mad, and vice versa. Whenever madness was connected to the idea of a physical threat to another's safety, it was recognized by reference to raving or furiousness, the terms of maniacal symptomology thought to justify confinement. Consequently, scenarios of incarceration tended to include those with threatening stances and dissident claims. Bethlem was still at this time the usual destination for those referred from military, legal, and court jurisdictions for having made threats to various authorities, and this established a perceptible link between the seditious threat of public disorder and the institution's maniacal inmates. Hogarth's Rake in Bethlem, then, registered the preferential role still accorded to the partial kind of delusional thinking associated with melancholia, and marked a corresponding inattention to mania that contemporary medical writings likewise demonstrated. The image achieved this by elaborating on the existing satirical standard, in which delusional thinking was understood in occupational terms, and by inventing a multilayered prototype for the rake, with his raving relegated to the recent past and his present a post-maniacal decline into death. The artist also retained but set apart the madmen who, in recent political satire, had stood for the idea that the official religion and absolutist government of the French were in effect the severest form of manias. It being no longer pertinent to invoke the name of Louis XIV in making this connection, Hogarth instead, at a time when tensions between the two countries were again rising, relegated the raving Roman Catholic enthusiast and the deluded monarch to isolated cells. Here, they experience the highest degree of confinement that the asylum offered, while the British projectors enjoy the relative liberty of the gallery. In 1763, Hogarth invested the image with a timely and more precise political meaning when he added a dated halfpenny with the figure of Britannia on it to the asylum wall (Figure 3.6). Positioned between the two cells of the raving religious enthusiast and the mad king, overlaying the astronomer's graffiti and linked by a chain to the fanatic's door, the medallion shows Britannia seated in profile with branch, staff, and shield. She is not depicted in the sedate demeanor of official iconography, but instead is shown in disheveled draperies that expose her legs, and with loosened hair streaming wildly around her head. The anarchic dishevelment of hair and apparel are familiar as attributes of mania in women, indicating that Britannia is depicted here in a raving condition. Most commentators on this addition see it as a reassertion of the artist's initial motivation to cast Bethlem as a microcosm for society at large. For example, David Bindman claims that the adjustment strengthens the notion that "forms of madness are treated essentially as comments on the follies of the world," and Ronald Paulson suggests it means that "Bedlam ... is England as of 1763."43 Although both these interpretations are in the

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William Hogarth, "Rake in Bedlam," 1763. (') The British Museum.

spirit of the print's broader message, they assume that the figure of Britannia is representative of English society rather than something more political, like the nation's identity or the government's stability. In fact, Hogarth's device is a variant of the iconographic type, "Britannia capta," in which the chained or suffering allegorical figure represented government or government policy enslaving the nation or abrogating the constitution.44 Certainly, the 1760s, which saw the beginning of George Ill's reign as well as the Seven Years War (1757-63), were notable for their volatility, and were widely regarded by contemporaries as particularly unstable. Many thought the war had been ended too abruptly, and that too many concessions had been made to the defeated French. It was a decade that witnessed increases in oppositionalism and radicalism, more threats to the constitution, and an escalation in crowd activity, all of which readily combined to give the impression of a persuasive, politically induced state of disorder. 45 But not just anybody and everybody was mad: as Y. Z. described it in the Gazetteer of July 8, 1763, the real malaise was the phenomenon of factionalism, which consisted of the "madness of many for the gain of a few."46 Hogarth was himself drawn into these controversies from the late

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1750s, when he sought greater advantages at court, and was appointed Serjeant-Painter to the king in 1757. Despite this pursuit of royal favor, however, he remained opposed to the efforts of the king, or the king's circle, that aimed to extend the royal prerogative to a more absolutist standard reminiscent of the Stuart model. At the same time, he might defend the king's favorites: in The Times, Pt. 1 of 1762, Hogarth produced a partisan print attacking William Pitt and favoring George Ill's inept minister, Lord Bute. The artist was in turn attacked by those against the ministry, and most embarrassingly, the radical John Wilkes published an insulting assessment of Hogarth's career in the North Briton. It was in the wake of these contentious partisan battles that Hogarth added the figure of Britannia raving to his Rake in Bedlam. By positioning her medallion on the wall between the cells holding those tyrannical manias with longstanding political associations, the artist reinforced the notion that it was the immoderate pursuit of power that posed the most serious threat to sanity, and here it threatened the health of the nation to the extent that even British liberties were at stake, a "Tyranny of Fancy's Reign," as Hoadley had phrased it in the print's original verses. In fact, Hogarth was not alone in characterizing the upheaval of the 1760s through the device of an insane allegorical figure: the political satire of this decade witnessed a proliferation of distressed and demented Britannias.47 The first images of Britannia date from the Roman occupation and cast her in the mold of an Athena-like goddess of war, with the traditional martial apparatus of armour, shield, and scepter. In imperial coinage, she soon acquired a sedate and official personification with classical drapery, plumed helmet, and a calm demeanor signifying that Roman order would prevail over barbarian martiality. 48 There are two notable exceptions to this dignified characterization: the motif of Britannia-as-amazon shows her as a breast-baring warrior of vigorous strength; while that of "Britannia capta" portrays a defeated woman seated in dejection on a rock, her clothing and hair in disorder, her shield and spear discarded on the ground. In contrast to the calmer prototype subsequently favored as a staid figure of officialdom by those in power, the latter motifs were open to more ambiguous readings, and so can be found later in both loyalist, pro-government and opposition calls to patriotism and civic duty, as well as in foreign anti-British propaganda.49 After the Roman period, the image resurfaced during the reign of James I (1603-25) in the wake of renewed interest in classicism and antiquities, and was deployed to articulate the monarch's unifying efforts and his assumption of the title "King of Great Britain."50 Images of Britannia decorate the frontispieces of William Camden's Britain or a Chorlogical Description (1610) and Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion of 1613. Henry Peacham's collection of emblems, Minerva Britannia (1612), includes the entry "Ad Britanniam," which describes her past and present demeanor (Figure 3.7). Standing on the shore, her bare foot pushing away a ship (a possible reference to the defeat of the Armada), Britannia as a warrior-

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Figure 3.7 Henry Peacham, "Ad Britanniam," emblem from Minerva Britannia, 1612. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

queen raises her scepter. Her long hair falls in disarray behind her, and her costume exposes her breasts and thigh. Accompanying verses explain that this resurgent Britannia recalls the dejected captive of antique coinage, but with the difference that she has overcome usurping Rome. These warriorqueen qualities with their amazonian overtones resembled those associated with the legendary figure of Boadicea, the British queen who rallied her troops against the Romans, but who was ultimately defeated. Classical sources emphasized her fierceness, and subsequent writers, like Milton, described her behavior as "the wild hurry of a Distracted Woman." 51 Gradually, Britannia's physical disarray that originally had signified her conquered status was interwoven, through the link to the highly mythologized figure of Boadicea, with traits akin to ira and frenzy. Against such images of the wilder warrior-queen, the more sedate, seated figure was favored in official medals celebrating the Restoration, while Dutch prints of the 1670s revived the "Britannia capta" motif and showed an insultingly prostrate Britannia whose supine position was typically exploited to accentuate the sexual connotations of conquest. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Hanoverians favored medals that demonstrated Britannia's support for their efforts just when James Stuart, the Old Pretender, was rallying the Jacobite cause with a medal of Britannia grief-stricken. 52 At this point, the iconography of Britannia was drawn into the service of a developing sense of modern nationalism, and entered the contested terrain of factionalized national allegiances.

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In 1729, the motif emerged in the context of attempts to influence parliamentary debate and ministerial policy when James Thomson anonymously published his first political poem, "Britannia." Timed to coincide with the opening of Parliament on January 21, 1729, the poem addressed a major concern of the 1720s, which was the mounting tension over making an appropriate response to Spanish interference with the British Navy. The minister, Sir Robert Walpole, advocated maintaining peace at any price, but a rising opposition argued for war.53 Thomson's sympathies were with this latter group, and so in his verses, Britannia both laments and protests her forced inaction: As on the sea-beat shore Britannia sat, of her degenerate sons the faded fame Deep in her anxious heart revolving sad Bare was her throbbing bosom to the Gale, That, hoarse and hollow, from the bleak surge blew; Loose flowed her tresses, rent her azure robe. Hung o'er the deep from her majestic brow She tore the laurel, and she tore the bay. (1-8)54 Her condition, conveyed by the disheveled, storm-tossed qualities of torn robe, bare breast, loosened tresses, and discarded tribute garlands, is one of marked aggression. As the poem was printed repeatedly throughout the century, and often in combination with his more celebrated The Seasons, Thomson's distraught Britannia enjoyed a wide circulation.55 For the poet's inclusion in Bell's series of 1777-9, Britannia was depicted by John Hamilton Mortimer with the full complement of distracted traits, the torn clothes, exposed breasts, and wild hair (Figure 3.8). Mortimer was one of a group of radical and anti-royalist artists whose interest in politically charged renderings of a disheveled, even distracted, Britannia, were critical to the motif's evolution throughout the 1760s and 1770s. The figure of Britannia was increasingly invoked when a marked upsurge of interest in issues of nationalism and patriotic expression emerged at mid-century. Following the example of Thomson and others, an ailing, distraught, or victimized Britannia typically signified a criticism of government as the cause of a constitutional affliction. In this configuration, Britannia might be said, for example, to suffer from "so many cruel distempers" such that she is an "Unhappy Patient, humbly submitted to the Consideration and Care of the Septennial Physicians of the Kingdom" [e.g. Parliament]. 56 Sometimes Britannia's attributes were mixed with those of Liberty, and a cap on a pole or broken fetters might be combined with the conventional shield and lance. This compounding of attributes resulted from changes in the iconography of Liberty provoked by the Seven Years War, the tensions with the American colonies, and the pro-liberty political strategies engineered by John Wilkes. In some images, when the manacles and chains were intact and

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Figure 3.8 John Hamilton Mortimer, Britannia, 1777, Bell's Poets. The New York Public Library.

binding, the reference to Liberty reverted to the "Britannia capta" variant motif, conveying a newly modified sense of liberties taken away. Hence, the fettered Britannia in this variation did not represent a conquered country, as it had in Roman coinage. Instead, it represented a patriotic exhortation that tyrannical and abusive power infringed on basic rights and so must be opposed.

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Alterations made to the "Britannia capta" prototype in the 1760s are a significant aspect of the era's political satire, and three caricatures in particular exemplify critical stages in the motif's use. These prints retain the disordered distress of Thomson's poetic figure but reject the setting. The new situation is one of an impending institutional confinement that signifies freedoms lost, and usually implicates those governmental structures or functionaries which, in collaboration, sought such sequestration. Published on November 15, 1763, in the same year as Hogarth's revision, the anonymous The Execution depicts Lord Holland watching as the Earl of Sandwich drags away a disheveled and now manacled Britannia (Figure 3.9). The Earl had collaborated in Wilkes' arrest following the printing of the North Briton, (no. 45), which had criticized George Ill's focus on royal prerogative at the expense of constitutional rights. A paper extruding from Lord Sandwich's pocket with "Blasphemy" inscribed on it is a reference to Wilkes' writings, while the Earl's comment that he has betrayed his friend acknowledges his treachery. More importantly, the Earl's rough handling of the half-naked national emblem is deployed as the visual equivalent of his opposition to the pro-liberty, anti-royalist stance of Wilkes. Another print against those who endeavored to block Wilkes' proliberty stratagems, and especially his tactics aimed at establishing a more public, out-of-doors, form of politics, is the anonymous Britannia in Fetters published in reaction to the St. George's Fields riot of May 10, 1768 (Figure 3.10). A subsequent impression of the print appeared later in John Almon's radical journal, The Political Register, in August, 1769.57 The setting is urban and architectural, suggesting a London parliamentary

Figure 3.9 Anon., The Execution, 1763. © The British Museum.

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Anon., Britannia in Fetters, 1769. (C) The British Museum.

venue, in which a group of officials encroach upon the dais of an Athenalike enthroned Britannia. The Secretary of State, Viscount Weymouth, places manacles on her wrists, while a prelate does the same with her ankles. Britannia's shield and lance, the sole elements of her armory, have just been removed by the guards. Here ordered by Weymouth, the manacling operation represents his authorizing the use of soldiers to quell mob activities associated with Wilkes' movement that had produced three weeks of chaos in London, and had ended with the May 10 riot in which

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five or six participants were killed. Once more, the manacling of Britannia with the intent to remove, confine, or otherwise sequester her is the device deployed by the opposition on behalf of Wilkes and his cause to criticize the civil restrictions resorted to by a government that was expected to honor its citizens' political rights. Finally, in the anonymous Britannia in Distress of January, 1770, the controversy over the people's right to petition the government to redress encroachments upon those rights has induced in Britannia a state of distressed insanity (Figure 3.11). The print appeared in the Oxford Magazine issue of February, 1770, along with a letter to the editor from one S. L.: I am frequently reflecting on the distresses of poor Britannia: I cannot behold her children thus deprived of their freedom, without the most excruciating pangs; these thoughts await me day and night. My dreams are of nothing else. Last night, in particular, I had a very extraordinary dream of Britannia in Distress, of which I have made a drawing, and request an engraving from it in your next number .. ,58

In the left foreground, a man approaches Britannia with a petition from all England against Parliament. Shown enthroned with her attributes as well as those of Liberty, the ailing Britannia appears to be coming around after fainting or suffering some kind of fit, her torn bodice and disheveled gown suggesting recent physical agitation. Two groups of statesmen attend her: on the left, the Duke of Grafton manacles her hand, claiming, "She is mad and must be confined in chains!" Behind him others attest to the view that petitions are the cause of her distress, because, aimed against every form of institutional authority, they are libellous, irreligious, and a sure sign of rebellion. By contrast, the Marquess of Rockingham, Earl Temple, and the Earl of Chatham console and defend her, blaming the others for undermining Britannia's constitution, and insisting that the right to petition government was one of Britain's great democratic strengths. The print's message relies on Britannia's madness being legible in both directions - as a dangerous rebellion against authority and as an illness brought on by abrogated rights. Images of the 1760s depicting a disabled or distraught Britannia articulated concerns about the course of government, typically focusing on both the ministry's and the king's inclination to abuse power by curtailing traditional liberties. As a way of voicing this oppositional concern, political satirists combined the motifs of Britannia in distress and in captivity, creating a new figure that retained the psychological distress of Thomson's verses, but was drawn as a more disordered, even disorderly, female in chains. No longer distraught on the nation's shore, this Britannia suffers from the curtailment of freedoms represented by asylum paraphernalia. By combining the debate over citizens' prerogatives with the discourse on madness in confinement, this variant of Britannia revived the classical arguments in which liberty and freedom were read

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Anon., Britannia in Distress, 1770. © The British Museum.

alongside mental status. The motif accommodated the usual sense that too much freedom (power) fuels anarchic, maniacal forms of insanity, as well as the more contemporary notion that abrogated rights and too little liberty can also result in the same disorder. This cause-effect ambiguity is inherent to the madness analogy, and its reception insured that Britannia in distress, shown as insane with maniacal traits and chained, could be effectively deployed by those on opposite sides of the debates on liberty, citizens' rights, and the abuses of government power. Within a very short

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period of time, the variant was called into service by both antimonarchical, pro-opposition interests (the Oxford Magazine in 1770) and those distanced from, and even victimized by, those interests (Hogarth in 1763). Just as a disordered national symbol was being mounted by those critical of opposition tactics as well as national policy, the first British images reifying the confined madwoman as their principal subject appeared in the work of the anti-monarchical, pro-opposition artist, Robert Edge Pine. Pine's father, an engraver and printseller, had been a close friend and artistic associate of Hogarth's, and much of the younger artist's work was similarly calculated as commentary on contemporary issues. Pine's affiliations, his pursuit of politically incisive subject matter, and his dedication to depicting events from British history in relation to the controversies of his own day, are inclinations that make a compelling case for seeing his portrayals of confined madwomen within the context of a radical political iconography. John Sunderland has demonstrated that from 1760 to 1780, Pine, along with his former pupil and illustrator of Thomson's "Britannia," Mortimer, worked on history paintings whose subjects had serious moral implications for events unfolding in the early decades of George Ill's reign. These historical narratives celebrated the protection of liberty and democratic values against the encroachments of monarchical prerogative. Their source was Rapin's popular History of England, the work most often cited by eighteenth-century artists as the preferred guide for their historical subjects.59 Conceived as a survey of English liberties maintained and defended, Rapin's work assumed particular importance for those of a radical or Whig persuasion in the face of the absolutist intentions of the "King's Friends." History paintings by Pine and Mortimer made their anti-monarchical inclinations known either by leveling the status of kingship or by highlighting the unscrupulous and unfair behavior of past kings toward their subjects. During this period, both artists exhibited with, and received prizes from, the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and the Society of Artists for compositions critical of royal prerogatives and derived from Rapin's history.60 Studied individually, each of these paintings might merely shed light on the more obscure subjects pursued by eighteenth-century history painters. Yet when taken together and with a sensitivity to the more general principles they espoused, the series makes a convincing brief for Sunderland's contention that they were the calculated oppositional efforts of two artists known at the time for their radical inclinations. Pine in fact was a friend of Wilkes, and according to David Solkin, "Among Britain's leading painters, Pine was unique in the degree of support he openly gave to the Wilkite cause."61 In 1763, the year Pine was awarded second prize for a history painting on an anti-monarchical topic, he also began the portrait of Wilkes that became the politician's best-known image. It was shown in the 1771 exhibition held by the Society of Artists, along with

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Pine's portraits of two of Wilkes' supporters, Brass Crosby and Richard Oliver, then in the Tower of London for protecting a printer of opposition material.62 Both Pine and Mortimer were active in the more democratic artists' societies, such as the Society of Artists and the Free Society of Artists, whose defenders adopted the terminology of Wilkite radicalism, and, probably with Sir Johsua Reynolds' approval, both were excluded from the founding membership of the Royal Academy. That institution was frequently criticized for its elitist leanings, as when the pseudonymous art writer, Fresnoy, for example, accused it of encouraging factionalism and of exercising power arbitrarily. These were charges leveled regularly in Wilkite rhetoric to condemn the exclusive practices identified with absolutist, hierarchical associations. Artists denied Academy membership were therefore likely to regard this exclusion in the language of radical politics. Pine and Reynolds had started their careers as artistic equals, and observers had anticipated the same degree of greatness for both of them. It is perhaps a measure of Reynolds' recollection of this shared competitive beginning that drove him to so thoroughly outmaneuver the other more radical and risk-taking artist. Support for the claim that Pine's career was engaged by the radical, pro-liberty forces that escalated during the 1760s can thus be found in the subjects chosen for his history paintings, in his associations with Wilkes, and in his feisty engagement with the egalitarian artistic societies that grouped and regrouped throughout the decade.63 Pine's two images of madwomen were produced at each end of this hectic period, serving as framing devices for his oppositional orientation. The first of these two paintings, A Madwoman, was shown at the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Artists in 1760. This new group, consisting of artists seeking greater freedom and fewer hierarchical regulations, had just splintered off from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, which that year had awarded first prize to one of Pine's implicitly anti-monarchical history paintings. The work Pine chose to exhibit with the more radical group was later destroyed, and is now known only from a mezzotint engraved by James McArdell and published that same year (Figure 3.12).64 It shows a young woman in a carceral interior with a single, iron-grated window piercing the thick stone wall. Her clothing, which appears to consist of a loose robe or shift, is in such disarray that a significant portion of her upper torso is exposed. Her hair is dressed with strands of straw and falls loosely across her shoulder. She holds her crossed arms close to her body in a manner resembling the effect of a straitjacket, although she is clearly not constrained by one. The raised brows and exophthalmic eyes likewise convey the sense of a barely containable belligerence; they are also the well-known signs of the kind of mania that is precipitated by the passion of anger. Similarly, the disheveled clothing and disordered hair became the traditional marks of mania and furor when these conditions were adapted to the female figure. Straw had appeared along with a range of natural ornaments, including

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Figure 3.12 Robert Edge Pine, engraving by James McArdell, A Madwoman, 1760. Harvey Gushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.

weeds and feathers, traditionally given to roaming fools in continental art, and was adapted to the incarcerated madman over the course of the seventeenth century in Jacobean plays such as John Fletcher's The Pilgrim (1621). In these circumstances, straw was a coded reference to the inmate's confined and regressed status, because loose straw was the only bedding used in Bethlem or other establishments for such extreme cases. The association with straw was also widely regarded as a clear sign of maniacal agitation, and Swift's description of the mad soldier in "The Digression on Madness" reinforced this connection. Both the institutional element and the concentration on straw differentiate this usage from the situation of Ophelia, whose flower-entwined hair called attention to her past distracted wandering and preoccupation with natural and sexual imagery, and who, of course, never suffered from a combative form of mania.65 But confined madwomen, like the one in the Rake plagiaries and in Pine's depiction, wear their hair dressed in straw in a motif that combines incarceration with female vanity. When Fletcher's playscript was published in 1711, its frontispiece by Francois Boitard gave

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prominence to straw as a floor covering and hair ornamentation for the regressed inmates, in particular for the play's "Mad Englishman," while the mad scholar and mad parson are identified by the paraphernalia of their respective professions (Figure 3.13).66 The disheveled Englishman's frenzy is set off by drink and beef, or the mere mention of these items, which provoke his raving belligerence: "Beef! Ye Gods! Beef! . . . — lead me

Figure 3.13 Francois Boitard, frontispiece for John Fletcher, The Pilgrim, 1711. By permission of the British Library (1171 m l ) .

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to the French camp" (IV, 2). The play's performance history accentuates these ties between mania and national identity formed in the context of French aggression: Fletcher's play, as adapted by Sir John Vanbrugh, was performed in London every two years in the 1740s and at the beginning of the 1750s and 1760s.67 In 1748, an actress who did not appear in the play followed the performance with two songs, "Come Ever Smiling Liberty" and '"Tis Liberty Alone." Following the performance of February 15, 1761, an actress sang the traditional folk ballad of female institutional confinement, the "Song of Mad Bess." The significant feature of these afterpieces is the way they complement the script's predominately male cohort of inmates with finales that associate the play with female figures of liberty and incarceration. Pine's second painting of a madwoman was exhibited in 1772 at the Royal Academy just after his angry resignation from the Society of Artists. He then left abruptly for Bath, where he hoped to transform himself into a fashionable portrait painter. He returned to London in 1780, but his work was greeted with little enthusiasm, largely because of his politics and in particular his support of the American colonies. He sold his engraving plates to John Boydell, and took his paintings to America in 1784. After Pine's death, his works were acquired by Daniel Bowen, who exhibited them in his Columbian Museum in New York and Boston. The museum and its contents were destroyed by fire in 1803, and the two madness paintings, which Bowen listed as "A Mad Woman, in Prison" (no. 47) and "A Mad Woman in Chains" (no. 35), were lost along with all of Pine's other paintings, including his large allegorical work, America (1778). A mezzotint of Madness was published the year it was exhibited, and while the composition follows the general format of its predecessor, it is not a mere copy of the earlier work (Figure 3.14). In this version, an irregularly shaped and barred window admits shafts of light into an asylum cell where a mad woman shown half-length is chained to an iron ring clamped to a thick stone wall. The degree of distress exhibited by Pine's later figure is more acute: her clothing is in greater disarray, her hair is more wildly disordered and dramatically arranged with band and straw, and the exophthalmic eyes swell with belligerence. Her clenched fist straining against the chain is a further sign of anger and rebelliousness. Like the previous image, the majority of the displayed symptoms are maniacal with elements derived from anger. Contemporary writers on anger and mania continued to call attention to the truth claims of these expressive features. For example, Aaron Hill in The Art of Acting (1746) advised the actor that to demonstrate anger: Bid the face redd'ning, warm'd idea take, Strait, the Soul's wildfires all obstruction break: Stung by Inflicted thoughts imagined Pain, Hard heave the muscles - rolling eyeballs strain: 'Twixt the clos'd Teeth, indignantly suppresst,

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Robert Edge Pine, Madness, c. 1772. © The British Museum.

Or, stormlike, loud, out pours th'unguarded breast Clash'd looks, 'gainst movements, paint Internal Fight, .. ,68 James' medical dictionary had, of course, also emphasized the role of anger in making maniacs raving mad and melancholies maniacal, with typical behavior running to the tearing and mangling of self, others and objects, venery, violence with temerity and unusual strength. The more violent movements were credited to blood congested in the brain (men), or in the breasts (women). Pine's second figure displays more of these features than his comparatively demure initial characterization. This madwoman is much less feminine, with her strong arm, evident heft, animal-skin cloak, and exposed breast recalling the bestial and amazonian undercurrents of furor. These features give the figure a more belligerent air, but also greater allegorical potential, allowing the later image to evoke a warrior-queen like Boadicea or the rebellious, confined variants of Britannia who were protectors of liberty. Pine even used these same features later in 1778 for his personification of America lamenting the

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damage suffered by her land and people.69 As representations of insanity, Pine's engravings display the familiar effects of maniacal anger, excess, and exposure reconstituted as a female disorder. On the allegorical level, which the images' abstract titles reinforce, as does their similarity to the distraught Britannia type, Pine's image equates belligerence in confinement with the anti-monarchical position that feared the encroachment of traditional rights through the extension of royal prerogatives. Mortimer, who had worked with Pine in 1759, followed in the footsteps of his mentor by also painting prize-winning, anti-monarchical subjects in the 1760s, and by participating actively in the Society of Artists.70 When he was vice-president and then president of the antiroyalist Society in the 1770s, and around the time that he designed the frontispiece for Thomson's "Britannia," Mortimer was also working on a painting now known as Head with Expression of Insanity (Figure 3.15, c. 1775-8). As a close study of the effects of passion on the face, Mortimer's contribution to this type adopts the classicizing, banded-head format which LeBrun used to accentuate the expressive studies' suitability for

Figure 3.15 John Hamilton Mortimer, Head with Expression of Insanity, 1775-8. © 2000 Kunsthaus Zurich. All rights reserved.

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characters in history paintings, and combines elements from the academician's templates for fear and anger. The expressive extreme denoted by the glaring, exophthalmic eyes and open mouth come from LeBrun's Anger Mixed with Rage. Mortimer, in a maneuver similar to Pine's, has transposed this extreme passion to a female figure, thus breaking with LeBrun's template which always illustrated the expression in a masculine character. Positioned behind a circular opening with a suggestively stormy effect all around her, this madwoman's excess of mania can be adduced from the bulging eyes and contracted brows of rage or furor. The bands across the forehead and around the hair, along with the generic cloak, are non-specific, timeless accoutrements that mark the figure's allegorical status. Both the expressive features and the personifying attributes relate the image to Pine's madwoman and to Mortimer's Britannia, and suggest that the image was not just an expressive study, but part of the artists' interest in the imagery of political opposition. One result of this politicized art practice was that the hortatory madwoman emblematic of radical, pro-liberty sentiments made the female characterization of madness more common in the last third of the century, and also more problematic. Unstable as an allegorical figure, the madwoman or mad Britannia motif was particularly susceptible to contradictory meanings, appearing to some as the endangered victim of monarchical aggrandizement, but to others as a personification of the dangerous malevolence of radicalism. Regardless of the interpretative stance of the viewer, the motif also promoted the idea that the stereotypical features of mania were the essential characteristics of madness in women, and that these characteristics were aggressive and combative, rebellious and angry. Such behavior in women was traditionally thought to be troublesome, but at this moment there was again a particular concern that obstreperous women were becoming a more acute problem, both out of doors in public venues, and in the private spaces infused with the new emotional standards of sensibility. Certain allegorical figures in French art followed a development similar to that of Britannia, and they likewise underwent subtle adjustments in relation to national policies and conflicts of the 1750s and 1760s. Throughout the second and third quarters of the century, the imagery of national patriotism and royal power was diverted away from contemporary intervention and subsumed under a nostalgic preference for seventeenth-century precedents, particularly the battle scenes of LeBrun and depictions of Louis XIV which flourished in engraved reproductions.71 What taste there was for a patriotic esthetic among artisans, merchants, and the urban upper bourgeoisie was also satisfied by this retrospective iconography. In the 1750s, the Paris Parlement repeatedly appealed for an expansion of liberties and the curtailment of tyrannical practice, but their oppositional imagery was couched in the same distant classicism fostered by state initiatives. At the same time, the French government was not in any position to initiate major projects in the area

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of serious history painting at this time. The cancellation of funding for the Academic during the Seven Years War made the production of new works on historical subjects through which current political meanings might be read extremely unlikely. Even as the war was approaching, historical and allegorical themes associated with traditional images of power and conquest were liable to look more like cynicism than gloire, and redolent of the inversion of values represented earlier by Gillot's warring satyrs. After the conclusion of the Seven Years War, martial and warrior subjects remained troublesome topics, such that a state-sponsored commission in 1764 for a series of history paintings destined for the royal chateau at Choisy rejected the proposal that the series consist of battle scenes from the Iliad, because "we have so often celebrated warlike actions which have led only to the destruction of the human species."72 Such calls to remain distant from traditional warrior virtues resulted in an avoidance of scenes depicting war and martial culture, and in their absence, the female personification traditionally associated with that culture — the allegorical figure of war — became the preferred motif. This displacement can be traced through the work of Carle van Loo, Academic professor since 1737, and its director and Premier Peintre du Roi from 1763 to his death in 1765. Van Loo had a triumphant official career, enjoying an immense popularity, and he was widely considered the dominant painter by mid-century. At his death, Diderot's eulogy praised van Loo not just as first painter to the king, but as first painter to the nation. In several works of the 1740s and 1750s, van Loo concentrated on the imagery of aggression and its control, adopting yet also modifying its representational traditions. The first of these, Reason Restraining Force (Nice: Musee Cheret), was exhibited in the salon of 1742, and it follows the guidelines set by Ripa and popularized for French audiences by Baudouin: reason is an armed, helmeted Athena-like figure who holds the reins of a subdued lion. In 1753, van Loo participated in the redecoration of the Cabinet du Conseil for the palace at Fontainebleau, executing ten panels representing allegories and elements. The allegorical pairs selected for this room by Ange-Jacques Gabriel that were painted by van Loo include truth and history, war and peace, and fame and bravery. La Guerre shows a seated female figure, similarly modeled on Athena, with armor, helmet, and lance, whose Medusa-decorated shield rests atop the traditional motifs of conquest, an empty cuirass, helmet, and abandoned sword, arranged not just to suggest defeat but also to intimate dismemberment. By avoiding the more bellicose elements for the representation of war, and by giving the only male allegorical figure included in the program an exceptionally quiet, almost feminized handling, van Loo was able to exclude all the usual references to a conquest-guided warrior culture for the royal palace's council chamber. Van Loo's softening of the traditional iconographies here is a measure of the mid-century sensitivity to the reception of images of aggression and belligerence.73

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At the same time that he was at work on this commission, van Loo produced another allegorical pairing of war and peace, and here he ventured even further from traditional precedents, yet also evaded the official mandate that the visual effects of pacifism be increased whenever war-related topics were represented. In the Allegorie de la guerre of 17535, van Loo transformed the personification into an impetuous female ira shown actively charging in the forefront of an engagement in progress on the battlefield behind her (Figure 3.16). The cropped composition, drawn sword, raised shield, and direct, purposive regard all insinuate the viewer's proximity to the fray. This depiction takes its subject out of the non-specific allegorical setting, and situates the personification in the thick of battle, an adjustment that gives the imprimatur of history painting to the motif. At the same time, the tactical connection with the viewer reinforces a pictorial dynamics more common to the genre treatment of ira. Whereas the allegorical form of war concentrated on the female figure at rest, and the history painting form focused on men in battle, this genre composite of male and female presents the aggressive engagement as female-orchestrated and confrontational. Thus, the enticement to rivalry acknowledged by the warrior code as residing in such drawn-sword challenges is once more distanced from its traditionally male representational field. Here, the bellicosity of war is not softened into male pacifism, it is transferred to an aggressive female figure in action and in context. In France, this did not lead at first to re-tailoring the national figure for political purposes, but to re-situating the conflicts created by dynastic power struggles to the classical past, and specifically

Figure 3.16 Carle van Loo, Allegory of War, 1753-5. Gema'ldegalerie dcr Akademie der bildendcn Ktinste, Vienna.

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to the dramatic persona whose circumstances, character, and behavior placed her precisely at this juncture of private relationships and public dynastic strategies - Medea. The esteemed actress, Mile Clairon, had made this part her own in performances during the 1750s, and beginning in 1757, van Loo undertook a series of images that show her exemplary portrayal of the passion and action associated with this role. Like his series on war, van Loo combined in these works the pictorial dynamics of history painting and the personification of belligerence with the particular vehemence and aggressive action of a single female character. Van Loo first undertook an expressive study of Clairon, concentrating on the most celebrated aspect of the actress' work in this tragic role, her persuasive handling of the forceful and fiery passion of anger that the part demanded (Comedie Francaise, Paris). In his composition showing an entire scene from the play, van Loo depicts Medea in her magisterial, dramatic exit at the play's conclusion (Figure 3.17). The artist eventually produced three versions of this scene, one of which was exhibited in the salon of 1759, and the composition was engraved by Cars and Beauvarlet in 1764.74 Still focusing on Medea as solitary and unvanquishable, van Loo depicts her rising skyward in a chariot surrounded by swirling, smoky clouds, a dagger in one hand and flaming torch in the other. Her two children whom she has just murdered lie in the center foreground, and Jason enters from the left, ineffectually drawing his sword and looking up at Medea's magical chariot. The steep, worm's eye perspective and the ineffectual characterization of Jason accentuate Medea's much greater power, with her avenging knife positioned commandingly at the composition's center. Dissatisfaction with Clairon's head resulted in the artist altering her expression from one of anger to a stern calmness that presents a striking contrast to the screaming Medusa embroidered on her bodice.75 While ostensibly a private work commissioned by a friend of the actress, van Loo orchestrated the principal version's reception as if it were a project of considerable public importance. With state support for official commissions a thing of the past, van Loo resorted to a series of enterprising steps calculated to excite interest in his painting. The insertion of such entrepreneurial behavior into the academy protocol for salon entries was one way artists criticized the state art apparatus throughout the century. First, van Loo exhibited the work in his studio, inviting tout Paris to see the painting prior to the salon opening. Word of its popularity with the public prompted Louis XV to have the canvas brought to Versailles for his inspection: he demonstrated his satisfaction with the work by commissioning and paying for its frame. When the salon opened in August, the painting was still at Versailles, and its absence was noted with annoyance by most salon-goers. Once installed, Mile Clairon en Medee proved to be immensely successful with the public, but the composition provoked a mixed response from critics.76 Many saluted the work as the return of history painting to the salon, and most admired its

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Figure 3.17 Laurent Cars and J. F. Beauvarlet, after Carle van Loo, Mile Clairon in the Role of Medea, 1764. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Elisha Whittesley Collection. The Elisha Whittesley Fund, 1950 (50.567.2).

formal qualities and the dignified nobility of Medea. It was the figure of Jason that was the principal target of negative criticism, and complaints focused on the absence of heroic attributes in van Loo's portrayal. Both the painting's history and its critical reception suggest that van Loo's representations of Medea, along with his more straightforward depiction of war, demonstrate the renegotiation of traditional warrior rhetoric characteristic of France at mid-century and that became critical during the period of the Seven Years War. The critical responses contributed to the picture's notoriety by demonstrating an intriguing combination of oversights and obsessive concerns. There is little attention given to Clairon's fiery and impassioned style of acting which made her so

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well suited to this role, and there is no discussion of any of the play's critical themes in light of van Loo's interpretation of them. In fact, there is no real focus on the character of Medea herself, but instead, a concentration on flaws in the portrayal of Jason. We know that in van Loo's thinking, Jason was a wholly subordinate character: the artist first portrayed him from the rear, and revised the figure before it reached the salon in response to complaints already registered about Jason's relative insignificance. It was in H.-B. Longepierre's version of the play that Mile Clairon excelled with her portrayal of Medea, and, like all the dramatic variants of the story, this one similarly queries the definition of heroic behavior and virtue in juxtaposed male and female characters.77 While Jason is unheroic, acting with shabby self-interest and a disregard for the effects of his behavior, Medea's justifiably angry, retaliatory seriousness makes her more representative of the warrior code in action. An ambivalence about or discomfort with this situation, in which warrior virtues are denied to the leading male character and transposed to the leading female role, is evident both within Longepierre's text and in responses to van Loo's relative handling of the two characters in his paintings. In the text, Medea's behavior is allowed to seem honorable and justified, even though its source is a furious anger roused into maniacal violence. She calls this a "just furor" provoked by Jason's disloyal ingratitude, but he calls it monstrous and barbaric in the play's very last moments. In the painting, the discomfort with the image's portrayal of belligerence and gender focused more on concerns that Jason was shown in an insufficiently manly manner and that he did not look as heroic as he should. A similar reconsideration of gender roles in light of traditional warrior virtues, and concern about the implications these changes posed for public and private conduct, characterized the repositioning of furor and mania in the context of mid-century medical writing and in the new discourses of sensibility. While van Loo was reworking the problematic visual conventions for war, heroism, and Medea's "just furor," the first edition of Diderot's Encyclopedic was being printed (1751ff.). Between 1753 and 1755, several volumes were published that contained entries, including colere, delire, envie, fureur, manie, phrenesie, and rage, relevant to understanding the conditions of belligerence and mental instability. These entries crossreference each other, letting the reader know, for example, that colere and delire overlap to the extent that both can lead to manie, or that fureur resembles delire and strong colere. Entries typically conclude with the charge "voyez," so that, with fureur, for example, the reader is advised to "Voyez Manie. Voyez aussi Delire, Phrenesie, Rage, .. ,"78 Diderot and his authors were here following the format and in some cases the medical content of Robert James' highly influential dictionary that had appeared only a decade before. But while manie receives only a medical definition, colere is discussed in its moral as well as medical dimensions, and fureur is described as a medical, moral, and mythological phenomenon. Eviden-

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tiary material includes classical authors and figures, citations from the Galenic tradition in medical writing, and, from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, various medical authors, Montaigne, and the iconologist, Ripa. In addition to their medical meanings, manie, and the passions associated with it, colere, fureur, rage, and envie, are all discussed as root causes of injustice, civil disorder, and civil war. The Encyclopedic defines rage in medical terms as an excess of any number of violent passions, among which anger (colere) figures prominently. The term enrage, a common French expression for madness, accentuates the connection between rage and insanity, and the entry emphasizes that men in a state of anger resemble those who are "enrages." Delire, derived etymologically from the sense of being "out of line" in plowing, is also discussed primarily in medical terms: there are two types of delire, universal and particular, in which fibers are overstretched to varying degrees, a situation similar to that of phrenesie or manie (IV, 785-8). Phrenesie's solely medical description defines it as a delire with fever in which an inflammation of the brain is brought on by pain, grief, or the hot passions like anger and furor (XII, 530—1). Symptoms include flashing eyes, grinding teeth, and furious agitation, and in prolonged cases, delire degenerates into manie and melancolie. Rage developing out of anger is thus a significant contributing factor in the development of insanity, while delire and phrenesie present the familiar symptomology of mania, spreading its effects across several discrete and separable conditions. Among the passions, both anger, furor, and to a lesser extent, envy, can escalate into agitated conditions like mania. One of Diderot's principal assistants, the Protestant doctor Louis de Jaucourt, wrote the entry for anger. As a medical condition, anger is known by violent physical movements caused when the passion agitates the nervous system, constricting the muscles, vessels, and fibers (III, 614-15). Several humoral points remain, including digestive connections and the traditional external symptoms of facial reddening and swelling, flashing eyes, racing pulse, and rapid breathing. In contrast to rage, delirium, and frenzy, however, a good part of the front matter in the entry on anger treats of the passion in what is called its moral sense. Acknowledging Locke as his source, Jaucourt recapitulates a chain of events in which past resentments fuel the desire for revenge. This kind of anger overrides all other affections, and the result is a shackling or fettering of the self, terms explicitly derived from the chivalric art of falconry. Anger in women is especially violent and complete, and is often connected to thwarted sexual desire. Most of the moral discussion, however, relates anger to justice and the laws of human society. Jaucourt takes issue with Aristotle's contention that anger is justifiable when arms are taken up in the pursuit of a just cause. This position is rebutted with the support of other, equally authoritative references. Montaigne's truism is cited that whenever anger is present, it is in control of us, with the reverse - that we can control anger - never being

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true in practice. Following Horace, Jaucourt concludes that usually anger is a provocation to injustice and evil rather than a precipitant to acts of virtue or valor. For his definition of furor, Jaucourt surveys the condition in all three moral, mythological, and medical senses (VII, 377-81). In its moral dimension, furor, the source of creative inspiration, is a completely separate and distinct phenomenon, and the reader is advised to consult the entry on enthusiasm to find out more about it. In the mythological sense, furor is derived from the Roman allegorical tradition, and described as a male figure who, following Ripa's guidelines, is typically bloody, with a reddened visage and multiple wounds. During peace time, he is chained quivering with rage and seated on a pile of arms, while in war, he breaks through the chains, indiscriminately ravaging all before him. The civil war between Caesar and Pompey is cited as further evidence of this passion's Roman pedigree and central position in times of combat and disorder. In its medical sense, furor is a symptom of several closely related conditions: found in various kinds of delirium, its effects are very close to those of anger, and, to the degree that it mimics the ferocity of an animal, it resembles rage. Furor is also the main characteristic and principal symptom of mania; in fact, there can be no mania without furor, and mania is, in essence, the durable form of furor. The bulk of the entry goes on to elucidate a type of furor not identified by warlike behavior in men, but found primarily in women whose exceptional aggressiveness is caused by an excessive and unsatisfied sexual appetite. This is fureur uterine, the traditional designation for hysteria, in which women characteristically pursue men through indecent and immodest acts. It is a kind of furor, as well as a kind of delirium, a kind of mania, and over time it can degenerate into rage. Men can suffer from this type of furor, but it is extremely rare, most probably because their circumstances facilitate the achievement of sexual satisfaction. Women are particularly susceptible both to the degree that they are more delicate and weak generally, but also because the achievement of sexual satisfaction is more socially problematic for them. Maintaining the theme of Roman precedents, the famous historical cases of uterine furor cited are Messalina, Semiramis, and Coelia. In the entries under discussion here, these are the only individuals outside the military context who are mentioned by name. The last of the three passions linked to mania is that of envy, and it is also Jaucourt who defines it in its different senses. Like furor, envy is often the cause of civic disorder, and in the classical tradition, it has been "la mine des republiques" (V, 735). Envy begins with a resentment that is predominantly sad, and develops only gradually into a condition of anger and ferocity. It is at this point that the envious person becomes a danger to others, just as the melancholic form of delirium can develop the same effects as that of mania. Mania is introduced through its Greek meaning, "I am in furor," and this brief indication of the condition's classical origins is followed by an

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entirely medical definition authored by Jean-Joseph Menuret de Chambaud, a doctor from Montpellier (X, 31-4). Menuret explains that mania occurs where there is a delirium without fever and it is of universal extent, often accompanied by furor and anger. If only one or two fixed ideas surface in the delirium, it is regarded as melancholia rather than mania, relating the latter to the former primarily in terms of excess. In addition to this tenet of extensiveness or universality, mania is further distinguished by actions that are bizarre or without motive. Symptoms at full onset are confusing or contradictory: there may be dazzled eyes, immoderate sexual appetite, laughing or crying without apparent reason, red urine, constant speech or profound silence or a furious, menacing, wild looking appearance. Sufferers are typically against themselves, others, and their environment, as they tend to bite, tear, and hit anything around them. They are often indecently exposed, having torn their clothes into pieces and fragments. Despite this exposure, they are not susceptible to cold or discomfort, and are often in robust physical condition. Venturing a further link to the classical tradition, Menuret adds that representations of sibyls and soothsayers confirm the similarity of their furor to the condition of mania. Mania's causes and origins are as wide-ranging as its symptoms. The passions are a primary cause, but so are forced study and deep meditation, as well as the retention or expulsion of certain excretions. Menuret accepts, along with Robert James and following Hippocrates and others, that mania follows a suppression of the menses, and can be foretold by an accumulation of blood in the breasts. In men, the problem more often takes the form of semen loss, and the well-known, often-cited case of a young man who married in summer, becoming maniacal from excessive intercourse in a hot season, is produced as evidence. Although dissections of the brain had yet to yield any definitive theory of mania's origins, Menuret expressed confidence that a problem with the condition of brain fibers would eventually be identified. Those susceptible to mania include ponderous, stupid people, but also poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and those passionate about analytic algebra. 79 With the latter group of susceptible people, mania seemed to be moving closer to melancholia, but Menuret hastened to reinforce the distinguishing factors: in mania, irrational ideas are universal or extensive rather than delimited, with furor and audacity present, such that the more quiet and focused features of melancholia were contradicted. Mania was also difficult to cure, with a tendency to last a long time and become chronic. In fact, cured maniacs were thought to be essentially melancholic. Obtaining a cure was made problematic by the tendency for maniacs to develop an aversion to their doctors, and to regard prescribed medicines as poison. Mania was in fact very hard on doctors, because it was one of the illnesses in which they usually failed while charlatans succeeded. Because of these handicaps, the record of cures for mania is not consistent, but Menuret mentions some notable treatments: unexpected submersion in cold water, invoking terror

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as the antidote passion to furor, treatments of expulsion to counteract the tendency to retention, and castration, are all described as potentially curative treatments. While a great deal of this material is familiar, the Encyclopedic entries indicate that mania and its affiliates were in a process of re-evaluation at mid-century. Eminently authoritative and comparatively concise, the Encyclopedic established a new benchmark for the integration of modern, medical thinking with older traditions of moral philosophy and classical exemplars. The newer medical discourse of nerves, fibers, and pathways of excitation appear alongside the remnants of a waning humoral tradition without actually displacing the older model's well-worn truisms. More surprising, perhaps, is the strong position retained by the passions in the thinking about causes and cures evident in the various entries and in their repeated interrelationships. Mania itself is still most identifiable through the characteristics of excess and agitation, and by the insistence on the state's condition of totality or universality. Any evidence of focus or limitation contradicts the mania diagnosis, which seems in danger of being everywhere and nowhere, as its discrete identity is diffused across a range of purportedly related phenomena. Mania appears to be unique primarily in its rough handling of physicians, whose curative efforts are met with failure or hostility, and who often must acknowledge with chagrin the successful treatments achieved by charlatans. Mania was thus one of the ailments that consistently threatened to undermine the professional status of medicine. The entries pertinent to furor and mania are attentive to gender distinctions to an impressive degree, with men and women regarded differently in every category. Most belligerence is seen as a masculine affair that underlies warfare and civil disorder, armies, and major battles, bringing about the ruin of republics. Women's belligerence is mainly sexual, and women's furor is entirely uterine, and here, Jaucourt's practice of retrospective diagnosis allows him to name Messalina, Semiramis, and Coelia as famous sufferers of the ailment in the past. In British medical writing after 1750, mania was also discussed in terms of the new model as excited nerves and fibers, yet the condition remained related to notions of excess and the passions, with anger continuing to be the leading provocative agent. William Battie, for example, continued to see in mania the "tumultuous and visibly spasmodic," and William Cullen, too, writing in 1790, emphasized the familiar maniacal traits of sudden movements ending in violent actions: Maniacal persons are in general very irascible; but what more particularly produces their angry emotions is, that their false judgments lead to some action which is always pushed with impetuosity and violence; when this is interrupted or restrained, they break out into violent anger and furious violence against every person near them, and upon everything that stands in the way of their impetuous will.80

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Cullen also reinforced mania's position as a more universal and extensive form of madness than melancholia, and in his nosology of diseases, claimed that this tendency toward diffusion was, in fact, mania's critical distinguishing feature. 81 The increasingly popular position that saw intellectual delusions as essential to true madness, a position espoused by Battie and others, contributed further to the isolation of mania from other forms of mental disorder, as did the insistence that mania's differential characteristic was that of a total, nonspecific excessive state. Treatment regimens for mania were also undergoing re-evaluation at mid-century, and important new therapies appeared first as cures for the symptoms of agitation and furor. While John Wesley, in his Primitive Physick (1747), would continue to advocate traditional treatments for mania, such as binding, head shaving, and water dousing (and many like Cullen would still embrace these techniques at the century's end), Battie and other post-1750 writers introduced new regimens based on the idea that the strong passions precipitating madness could be stifled by inducing the opposing passion, which would in turn result in a cure.82 Battie observed that the anger of mania could be quelled by inducing anger's opposite passion, fear. In fact, it was thought that many of mania's symptoms - aggression, agitation, anger, excitation, defiance, and violence — could, by inducing fear through a variety of means, be coerced into docility. Most famously, Francis Willis used his transfixing gaze to overmaster George III, and William Pargeter likewise testified to an ability to gain control over the most threatening of maniacs with his fear-inspiring look.83 Through such devices, which became known as "moral treatment," the therapeutic situation replicated the hierarchical structure mandated by an ordered society and made even more appealing in the context of latecentury patterns of social upheaval. And, most importantly, doctors did so by usurping, through various means, the traditional heroic values which mania and the warrior ethic had shared. In so doing, the dynamics of conquest were transferred to the therapeutic relation. As new therapies were being instituted with optimism, a fear that mania and raving forms of madness could not be controlled effectively was actually on the increase. William Rowley commented in 1788 that insanity appeared to be on the rise and was creating a state of alarm among the British populace, but statistics do not support this observation. 84 Also alarming were remarks like those of William Perfect, whose Annals of Insanity warned repeatedly against the early release of maniacs from professional care. Perfect advised caution in readmitting maniacs to society even when they seemed to have recovered. His evidence consists of three cases in which a family member, having apparently gained a state of docility, was returned home purportedly cured, only to murder a parent or sibling suddenly and without warning. A rather unsettling picture thus emerges of violent insanity apparently on the increase generally as a threat to public welfare, and yet also constituting a new and particularly acute threat to the family at home.

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A heightened sense of mania's invasiveness at home and abroad was sustainable in part through the relatively lax theoretical handling the condition received in the major treatises of the period. Most did little to modify mania's bloated profile as the universal degree of madness that was synonymous with excess and difficult to cure. If anything, mania's ubiquity was actually enhanced, as an inadvertent by-product perhaps, by the new paradigm of nerves and agitated fibers, in which manic-like fits were a logically plausible stage within any number of discrete diagnoses whenever overexcitation and over-agitation were present. Against this backdrop of a widening range for permissible maniacal occurrences, the rise of sensibility acknowledged mania's inherent dangerousness in yet another way. Here, mania's venerable characteristic, its origin in an excess of the passions or an indulgence in them, gave the diagnosis a newly critical, if problematic, role in the heightened emotionalism sought out by sensibility's devotees. In novels, plays, and in polite society, advocates of sensibility cultivated the virtuous display of feeling, and argued that the passions were superior to reason as a moral standard. 85 This new valuation of the emotions had a significant effect on attitudes toward insanity and the insane: empathy displaced the entertainment previously associated with asylum visiting, and inmates were apt to be viewed as victims rather than desperados. But at the same time that sensibility moderated the traditional rough handling of the mad in the course of redefining the position of emotions in normal psychological life, it also distanced emotionalism as much as possible from madness. Sensibility's apologists repeatedly asserted that the kind of emotional volubility and lability deemed desirable in sensibility was far different from the chaotic feelings of insanity, and most discussions of emotionalism had to consider its relation to the exaggerated feelings conventionally regarded as akin to madness. The crux of these deliberations was the necessity of differentiating "a finely tuned sensibility" from negative excessiveness. In the hierarchy of sensibility, the irony here was that the highest degree of sensitive nerves and exquisite emotions could be an index of acute feeling as well as mental disorder. The logical implication of these deliberations was that, among mental disorders, it was mania that posed a special problem for the defenders of sensibility. Mania was, in fact, the eminence grise of sensibility, because the latter's language of strong emotions was coterminous with the conventional territory of mania, when indulged passions and powerful feelings were the prelude to full-blown chaos, and when sensitive vibrations turned into agitation and thence into continuous turmoil. The discourse of excess that had increasingly grounded mania in eighteenth century definitions of the diagnosis could easily be used by sensibility's detractors to derail the movement's pretense of monopolizing a higher moral plane. Sensibility and mania were also implicated in each other's arguments whenever the former insisted that a realignment of gender roles was mandated by the new prerogatives of feeling. Rakes or libertines who had

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been public nuisances or even public threats were now exhorted to moderate their aggression and become sensitive men of feeling. They were advised to behave with less violence and to forgo displays of masculinity that were permissible before sensibility demoted the male culture of aggression and its affiliated warrior virtues. The discomfort with representations of aggressive military and royal heroics that had steadily been building over the century was now extended to a wider field of social interactions and behavior. Such prohibitions reinforced the avoidance of these already problematic iconographies of male mania associated with military furor. At the other extreme, worries about the effeminacy implicit in sensibility's new guidelines for men's behavior could easily escalate against the backdrop of mania's treatments: the Encyclopedic's recommendation that excessive virility in male mania could be cured by castration only intensified the taboos that masculine forms of mania had been accumulating. It is therefore not surprising that when John Soane submitted his designs for the new St. Luke's Hospital for lunatics in 1777, he chose two female figures reminiscent of Lambertsz.'s frenzy from Amsterdam's asylum to surmount the asylum's central bay (Figure 3.18).86 By selecting the nude, hair-tearing female maniac for his pendants of madness in extremis, Soane updated the newly problematic, musclebound maniacal and mopish male inmates Gibber had devised for Bethlem a century before. Soane's particular design was not followed in the subsequent building of St. Luke's, and that structure never received any didactic or expressive sculptural decoration. Nevertheless, Soane's reconceptualization of the exterior asylum statuary as the female variation for furor articulated the current thinking about gender and disorder that the tenets of sensibility did so much to popularize. In fact, the cult of sensibility is widely regarded as having effectively feminized mental disorder for the modern era, although it is more accurate to say that sensibility disseminated a psycho-dynamic template that had already been advanced by British and French allegories of the 1750s and 1760s.87 With sensibility, the weaker endowment of women was conceived now as a sensitive nervousness that made them better equipped to produce the requisite displays of feeling, but that also left them more vulnerable to serious disorder when emotions overwhelmed reason. This development had the effect of admitting larger numbers of women into the previously mostly male ranks of melancholia. Representations of these women tended toward aimlessly wandering waifs or lovelorn maidens in the traditional pose of melancholia. Gauged to catalyze the feelings of viewer or reader, they became sensibility's standard depiction for women's mental disorder. 88 Even features previously deemed maniacal gravitated over to this depressive side of sensibility: for example, the vapors that in Swift's formulation had been responsible for fits that were evidence of madness tended now, as in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Clementina, to produce states of lingering, listless melancholic sadness. At the same time, confined madwomen could exemplify this transmutation

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Figure 3.18 Sir John Soane, St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, 1777 (detail). By courtesy of the trustees of Sir John Soane's Museum.

of agitated fits into depression. Female lunatics in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), in Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman (1798), and in Thomas Lawrence's pastel drawing Mad Girl (1786) all exhibit mixed symptoms of agitation and melancholia (Figure 3.19). Lawrence produced the first works of his career in Bath while Pine was pursuing his portrait business there.89 Like Pine, the younger artist concentrated on portraits, depictions of actresses in role, and single figures of gypsies, vestals, and girls with flowers. Mad Girl fits comfortably into this group of imaginary characterizations, but, in contrast to Pine's works on similar topics, Lawrence's rendition lacks their confrontational brand of pictorial and social tension. And although he pursued the goals of the grand style, Lawrence never attempted the politically charged historical subjects that had grounded the older artist's career. In Mad Girl, the beautiful young lunatic (whose appearance is in

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Figure 3.19 Thomas Lawrence, Mad Girl, 1786. The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased by the Smith Kline Beecham Corporation Fund.

no way spoilt by her condition) looks upward with a gesture of mild protest, her tearful eyes and expression a mixture of anger and despair. The wild hair crowned with straw, the breast-revealing disarray of clothing, the presence of manacles and an institutional setting all attest to a recently elevated degree of agitation. Lawrence has grafted on to these traditional markers of disorder the more delicate features of a feminine complaint in the softened contours of face and body, the dainty wrists braceleted with slender cuffs, and the passivity imprinted on the rather timid gesture of remonstrance directed toward a spiritual rather than a human authority. The result approximates the genre of a tamed, melodramatic abstraction similar to the attitudes struck by Emma Hamilton in her fashionable tableaux, which artists like Lawrence and George Romney captured in drawings and paintings. Not only is the impact of maniacal agitation reduced to an assumed role, but the condition's traditional symptomology, the threat to personal or public safety, is thereby rendered inconsequential. Maniacal imagery's traditional links to social and/or political references are considerably

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weakened as well. The proliferation of figures of this ilk, at first catalyzed by the tenets of sensibility, tended to reinforce the movement's position that women were by nature more disposed toward disorder, irrespective of context and circumstance, than were men. Thus, the impact of sensibility on the iconography of mania disconnected its relevance to delimited, specific social circumstances, and reified instead a stereotype of feminine disorder around which the viewer's sensitivities might be demonstrated and admired. As gender considerations were central to the underpinnings of sensibility, any suggestions that gender distinctions were being obscured or overridden in the pursuit of true feeling were met with concern, if not censure. Effeminacy was a considerable worry, and amazonian tendencies in women likewise became the focus of rising social anxiety. Accusations of amazonian leanings accrued to women who tried to negotiate a more assertive role in private or in public, or who exhibited the notably unfeminine strong emotions. Even the serious pursuit of a writing career, a mere partiality for the convenience of a masculine riding habit, or anything else that might look like an act of presumptive authority could also be the basis for such charges. At this point in the deliberations about suitable gender alignments launched through the cult of sensibility, the amazonian template refocused attention on that point in the maniacal trajectory where vigorous physicality and impetuous assertiveness could escalate into warrior-like behavior. And it is here that Medea qualifies as a particularly apt example of the dangers attendant upon the model that strong feelings provided a sound base for moral action, having taken upon herself the traditional warrior virtues, and transposed them from the public domain into a uniquely gender-inverting and private field of conquest. Perhaps even more than treatises on nerves and agitation, the impact of sensibility on the constructs of madness was shaped by those key texts that were widely regarded as articulating the movement's ideals. In these works, there is generally more interest in delineating the condition of madwomen rather than madmen, and less interest in relating any detailed account of maniacal, as opposed to melancholic, disorders. Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey of 1768 showcases the wandering lovelorn melancholic, Maria, who is often encountered seated on the ground, tearful, hand to head in the traditional pose of that humor. Her exposed emotions affect the other characters, especially Yorick, by eliciting from them similar displays of tearful, and therefore heartfelt, concern. Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, which transformed the satirical asylum tour motif into an exercise better suited to sensibility's more refined program, focuses on Harley's similar encounter with a lovelorn madwoman. Harley and his friends undertake a visit to Bethlem, and upon arrival, are first shown the quarters housing the incurable. The most disordered lunatics, and those suffering from mania would be included in this group, engage in stereotypical fashion in clanking chains, screaming, and shouting. Harley and his companions are shocked, and ask to leave

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this section immediately, finding that the sights and sounds here provoked only unease and repulsion. Their guide then leads them to the asylum's section for the more harmless male inmates, and it is here that those with the delimited delusions of melancholia are encountered: there is a mathematician, a stock speculator, and a schoolmaster, a threesome reminiscent of the professionals skewered in conventional asylum satires. The group then proceeds to the women's quarters, and this is when Harley's concentrated attention falls on the beautiful lovelorn melancholic whose weeping and singing moves him to tears and philanthropy. In this way, Mackenzie's text not only relocates this sad damsel motif to the confines of a specialized institution, it also reinforces the difference and distance between the delicate conditions of nervous agitation and madness: the unacceptably provocative sights of effusive insanity and mania are virtually eliminated from the asylum tour itinerary under sensibility. Perhaps the most influential text that exemplified sensibility's project of differentiating degrees of nervous agitation and their moral consequences is Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). This popular novel, influenced by the advice-giving precepts of the conduct book genre, itself served as an important reference point for the evaluation of manners and behavior. 90 In a more extensive exposition of mental states than either Sterne or Mackenzie were to attempt, Richardson, who was familiar with Cheyne's theories, mounted a hierarchical ranking of ailments to an unprecedented degree, and treated these almost entirely within the private sphere of polite society. As did most contemporary writers on the subject, Richardson also relegated mania and maniacal symptoms to the status of least desirable disorder. The way Richardson achieved this demotion was, however, quite different: he demonstrated this development, not by a visit to Bethlem or through the device of a wandering maiden, but by contrasting the feminine lovelorn melancholic women central to his plot with an amazonian maniac, a virtual "warrior in the house," modeled on the worst offenders among his male characters. These offensive types acted upon their angry feelings in antisocial ways, viewing kidnapping, ambushing, and dueling as acceptable means for securing their social interests. Dueling, which the sensitive Sir Charles abhorred as "choleric excess," is regularly condemned by him, while repeatedly attempted by them. Sir Hargreave, one of the novel's several dejected suitors who pursue that traditional means of obtaining satisfaction for affronts, is unable to control his anger; after failing in his attempt to abduct the good Harriet, he is judged by her to be both "a tyrant and a madman" (I, 97). Lady Olivia, one of the several female characters who are in love with Sir Charles, reacts to his lack of interest in her by showing that the violent and imperious elements in her temper are more than equal to those of the dangerous Sir Hargreave. Unlike the similarly rebuffed Clementina, whose shades of melancholy are only briefly interrupted by an episode of

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maniacal agitation, Lady Olivia resorts to both impetuous actions and premeditated schemes of revenge, revealing "herself to be vindictive, even to a criminal degree" (II, 364). Thwarted once too often by Sir Charles' unwillingness to cede to her demands, Lady Olivia, who was often "hurried ... into measures too impetuous," when they were alone, proceeded to "pullfed] out of her stay, in fury, a poniard, and vowed to plunge it into his heart" (III, 646; II, 380). Sir Charles is able to disarm her, but, among all the novel's belligerent antagonists, she alone comes closest to actually harming the sensitive hero. Her waywardness outside the rules of engagement and civility justify her profile as distracted, raving, and threatening, and earn her the mythological epithet of a "Medusa" whose "eyes dart fierce rays at Sir Charles" (II, 388). The ever-considerate gentleman's response to Olivia is eminently constructive: he regards her as an object lesson for the position that women's passions must be controlled, emphasizing that strong emotions, and rage in particular, deform the features of even the most beautiful, and enslave them. Too free in her speech, impetuous to the point of violence, ready to take up "offensive steel," Lady Olivia does not act out the tenets of sensibility, but rather exhibits the conventional symptoms of mania, from excessive anger to impetuousness to violence, wielding them as weapons in the unprotected precincts of an upper-class drawing room. This "warrior in the house" episode was selected as a subject for one of the novel's twenty-eight engravings when an illustrated version of the book was published in 1782-3 (Figure 3.20).91 Thomas Stothard was commissioned by James Harrison to produce illustrations that would highlight the lengthy novel's dramatic moments of greatest contemporary appeal. In the sequence of illustrations, the scene with Lady Olivia occurs approximately at the novel's midpoint, and is the only depiction of a woman's unruliness in the entire suite. Stothard's image shows Sir Charles gently restraining the incensed Olivia in an interior whose elegance effectively contrasts with the scorned woman's impetuous action: the pair are framed by a room whose proportions and fittings display the measured restraints of classical moderation. The different moral weighting of the two figures is evident within the composition's details: Sir Charles has the light and windows on his side, while the darkly dressed Lady Olivia is flanked by an exotic, foreign landscape, inhabited by a migratory heron. The familiar features of furor, clenched fists, raised weapon, and fierce, angry look, are ceremoniously linked together by the turbulent lines of her headscarf. Lady Olivia's stance at the height of her aggression is redolent of features familiar to viewers from the great deadly women in the contemporary repertory, especially Medea and Lady Macbeth, who were recognizable principally by their fierce looks, raised knives, and threatening poses. But Lady Olivia differs in significant ways from these over-the-top, tragic inventions, in which excessive emotion and unruly behavior were played out on a public and other-worldly field of dynastic conflicts. With Olivia, the knife-wielding fury is transposed to a

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Figure 3.20 Thomas Stothard, "She Pulled out a Poniard and Vowed to Plunge it into His Heart," Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 1783. The New York Public Library.

private sphere redefined under the auspices of sensibility. 92 Jean-Baptiste Greuze's sentimental genre images, such as The Angry Woman of 1785, similarly display the family discord and chaotic domestic scenarios associated with the bourgeois drama spawned by sensibility in France. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the visual culture of mania, based on its martial elements and associations, developed and expanded in the service of political satires that targeted the excessively aggressive goals of various state powers. Endorsements of martial

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belligerence attenuated over the century, so that "men of action' were demoted as central elements in decorative programs, and were even passed over in favor of female allegorical figures. The latter could sometimes exhibit the traditional effects of furor as signs of protest against government tactics regarded as curtailments of traditional prerogatives, but maniacal configurations in the service of protests from below were susceptible to ambiguous and contradictory readings. In medical theory and practice, mania ceded importance and some symptomology to melancholia and vapors, becoming associated increasingly with diffuse, nonspecific, universalizing formulations, and eventually becoming immured in the negative discourses of excess. Even the renewed interest in the passions failed to find any apologists for mania, as the latter's origins in anger and rage were widely regarded as a significant limitation. Under the influence of sensibility's re-evaluation of emotion and behavior, the maniacal features normatively weighted as masculine were to be avoided by men, who now sought the more sensitive roles conventionally denied them. At the same time, features of furor were increasingly feared in women, who, anxious to embrace the new standard of greater emotionalism, seemed to usurp the impetuous actions thought to be amazonian and unnatural. Whereas the exercise of masculine furor had been primarily associated with the field of battle and was hence largely a phenomenon of the public sphere, in women these features were configured within the private sphere of domestic obligation. Inextricable by tradition from contemporary discourses of governance and obligation, maniacal symptoms, whether externalized by Britannia, La Guerre, Medea, or Lady Olivia, communicated the idea that women were destabilizing agents capable of subverting both private and public order. In an era of revolution, this understanding of mania would assume an even greater degree of hectic visibility.

Notes 1 On the deteriorating, anti-heroic image of Louis XIV after 1680, see Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 22-3, 195; Mark Jones, "The Medal as an Instrument of Propaganda in Late SeventeenthCentury and Early Eighteenth-Century Europe, I," Numismatic Quarterly 142 (1982): 118; Katie Scott, "D'une siecle a Pautre," in Colin Bailey, ed., The Loves of the Gods (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), pp. 32-5; Kenneth H. D. Haley, "International Affairs," in Robert Maccubbin and Martha HamiltonPhilips, eds, The Age of William III and Mary II (Williamsburg: College of William and Mary, 1989), pp. 35-48. 2 M. Dorothy George, English Political Satire to 1792, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), I, p. 62; Klaits, Printed Propaganda, 22; John Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe the Etcher (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1973). 3 George, English Political Satire, I, 8, 17, 62; Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George 111 (New Haven, CT: Yale

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5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17

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University Press, 1996), pp. 44—7; W. A. Speck, "Political Propaganda in Augustan England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 22 (1972): 18; Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe, 15; Frederick Muller, De Nederlandsche Geschiedenis in Platen (Amsterdam: F. Muller, 1863-70), 4 vols., I, p. 420; A. Van Stolk and G. Van Rijn, Atlas van Stolk: Katalogus der historie-Spot-en-Zinneprenten Betrekkelijk de Geschiedenis van Nederland, 10 vols. (Amsterdam: F. Muller, 1897), IV, no. 3162. These prints are Arlequin Deodat, et Pamirge [sic] Hypochondriaques (1688, 1713); The Flight of Popedom out of England (1689); La Belle Constance Dragonee par Harlequin Deodat (1689, 1706); Alarm at Versailles, Alarm at Spinhuis (1701). For La Belle Constance, see Johannes Hartau, "Don Quixote in Broadsheets of the Seventeenth Century and Early Eighteenth Century," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 234-8. Van Stolk identifies the figure as Louis XIV, and disputes Stephen's description in the British Museum catalogue of this figure as James II (1157). Speck, "Political Propaganda," 24, 29; H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 192; John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George 111 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 41; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 47-8; John B. Owen, The Eighteenth Century, 1714-1815 (New York: Norton, 1974), p. xiiii. Brewer, Party Ideology, 41; Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 29 (1983): 35-50. Colley, Britons, 4-5, 53, 364ff. Kromm, "Hogarth's Madmen," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 238-42; Robert Rentoul Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952); Natsu Hattori, "The Pleasure of Your Bedlam: The Theatre of Madness in the Renaissance," History of Psychiatry 6 (1995): 285-8. Edward Ward, The London Spy (London: Cassell, 1927), p. 52. Tom Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical, ed. Arthur L. Hay ward (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), p. 27. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), II, 35.5. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, eds. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 175. Angus Ross, "The Anatomy of Melancholy and Swift," in John Fischer, Hermann Real, and James Wooley, eds, Swift and His Contexts, AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, no. 14 (New York: AMS, 1989), p. 152; Dustin Griffin, "Venting Spleen," Essays in Criticism 40, 2 (April, 1990): 125. Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 47; John Purcell, Treatise on Vapours, or Hysterick Fits (London, 1707), pp. 103^; Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary, 3 vols. (London: Osborne, 1743-5), II, n.p. Of Anglo-Flemish origin, Lens (1659-1725) often collaborated with Sturt and together they started a drawing school in London in 1697. Lens was best known for his reproductive engravings after old masters, but he also did landscape engravings. The edition was translated by Justus van Effen and published by Henri Scheurleer, The Hague. Most of the English editions include the Lens-Sturt

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19 20

21 22

23 24

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26 27 28 29

The Art of Frenzy illustrations with the exception of the 1754 edition of Swift's collected works published by Bathurst in London. These engravings are by Johann Sebastian Muller. Michael MacDonald, "Popular Beliefs about Mental Disorder in Early Modern England," in W. Eckert and J. Geyer-kordesch, eds, Heiberufe und Kranke in 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts (Munster: Burgverlag, 1982), p. 164; Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 191-2. Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 191-2. Klaits, Printed Propaganda, 23; Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 249; William F. Church, "France," in Orest Ranum, ed., National Consciousness, History and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 61-82; Scott, "D'une siecle a 1'autre," 35. Scott, "D'une siecle a 1'autre," 32-35. Scott, "D'une siecle a 1'autre," 35; Jean Seznec, "Don Quixote and His French Illustrators," Gazette des Beaux Arts ser. 6, 34 (September, 1948): 171-92. Seventeenth-century examples, including a set of prints produced by Jacques Laguiet in 1640 and the illustrated 1665 edition of Cervantes' text, emphasize the crude, most grotesque episodes (Seznac, 176). Bernard Populus, Claude Gillot: catalogue de I'oeuvre grave (Paris: Rousseau, 1930); Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Emile Dacier, "Le premier livre illustre du XVIII siecle. Les Fables de la Motte et les vignettes de Claude Gillot," in E. Dacier and M. R. Cantinelli, Les Tresors des bibliotheques de France, 2 vols. (Paris: Van Oest, 1929), II, pp. 1-14. "Les Fous" appears in the 1754 edition of la Motte's collected works, Oeuvres de Monsieur Houdar de la Motte (Paris: Prault, 1754), pp. 335-7. A 1719 edition of fables was published in Amsterdam in 1727, but it does not include this fable, nor any other of the second group of Gillot's illustrations (Dacier, "Le premier livre," 9—12). In addition to the widespread disillusion with heroic behavior, anxieties about a new level of ruthlessness in the pursuit of wealth, and the related excessive interest in gambling, were on the increase. See Porter, MindForg'd, 81-3; David Solkin, Painting for Money (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 81; G. S. Rousseau, '"?A Strange Pathology': Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800," in Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 158ff. Populus, Claude Gillot, cat. no. 229. Scott, "D'une siecle a 1'autre," 35; Crow, Painters in Public Life, 61. Scott, "D'une siecle a 1'autre," 47; Crow, Painters in Public Life, 42, 59. On Hogarth, see especially Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 2 vols., rev. edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970); David Bindman, Hogarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Solkin, Painting for Money, 78-81. For Hogarth's relation to Gillot, see Frederic Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 60, 61, 105, 235, n. 14. The borrowing is Gillot's Quarrel of the Cabmen, which Hogarth adapted to the scene of the rake's arrest in The Rake's Progress.

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30 For the rake as a critical figure through which excess and luxury were critiqued, see Solkin, Painting for Money, 81; Paulson, Hogarth, I, 292; Antal, Hogarth, 9; Michael Deporte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974), p. 4; Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), p. 43. 31 On the notion that the king is masturbating, see Christine Stevenson, "Hogarth's Mad King and His Audiences," History Workshop Journal 49 (2000): 23-43. 32 David Kunzle, "Plagiaries-by-Memory of The Rake's Progress and the Genesis of Hogarth's Second Picture Story," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1966): 311-43. 33 This compilation of verses is taken from the collection of plagiaries after Hogarth in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The last excerpt is an adaptation from Nathaniel Lee's Cesare Borgia. 34 Paulson, Hogarth, I, 379; Shearer West, "Polemic and the Passions: Dr. James Parsons' Human Physiognomy Explained and Hogarth's Aspirations for British History Painting," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 13, 1 (Spring, 1990): 73-4. 35 Cited in Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 47. 36 Richard Blakemore, A Treatise on Dreams and Visions, 2nd edn (London: Sowle, 1695), p. 271. 37 Porter, Mind-Forgd, 43, 88; Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 257. 38 Robert James, Medicinal Dictionary, II, n.p., entry on "Mania, Madness," which is followed by four columns on melancholia. 39 Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 191-2; MacDonald, "Popular Beliefs about Mental Disorder," 164. 40 George Cheyne, The English Malady (New York: Scholars Facsimile Press, 1976), p. 129. 41 Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 118, 312, n. 33. 42 Cited in Rousseau, "?A Strange Pathology," 148. 43 Bindman, Hogarth, 71; Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic, I, 168. 44 On the captive Britannia, see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens (New York: Atheneum, 1985), p. 46. 45 Dickinson, Politics of Eighteenth-Century Britain, 223; Owen, Eighteenth Century, 169, 175; Colley, Britons, 240. 46 Cited in Brewer, Party Ideology, 57. 47 Bindman, Hogarth, 202-3; Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic, I, 252-7. Hogarth subsequently did a blistering caricature of Wilkes. Georg Lichtenberg, in his commentaries on Hogarth's prints from the 1790s, thought that the artist was perhaps one of those who felt the war should have been more aggressively waged, and that Britannia was added to protest a precipitous, inglorious end to the Seven Years War (The World of Hogarth: Lichtenberg s Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings, tr. Innes and Gustav Herdar [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966], p. 270). However, internal evidence from Hogarth's The Times, Pt. 1 shows him to have been pro-Bute, and hence pro-peace. 48 Warner, Monuments and Maidens, xxi, 46, 103, 110; Herbert Atherton,

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Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 89. 49 Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 46-8, 124, 341; Atherton, Political Prints, 89-91; George, English Political Satire, I, 45 n. 3, 49. 50 Atherton, Political Prints, 90; Madge Dresser, "Britannia," in Raphael Samuels, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 3, National Fictions (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 30. 51 "History of Britain," in Complete Prose Works (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), V, p. 80. 52 Atherton, Political Prints, 90-1; Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 45. On Dutch prints of this type, see George, English Political Satire, I, 49. See Dresser, "Britannia," on the way in which Britannia on a farthing coin minted for Charles II in 1672 followed the country-house ethos of ownership (pp. 34-5). 53 Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 341, n. 27; Hilbert Campbell, James Thomson 1700-1748: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Editions (New York: Garland, 1976), pp. 11-15; Campbell, James Thomson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), pp. 122ff.; James Edwin Wells, "Thomson's 'Britannia': Issues, Attributions, Dates," Studies in Philology 40, 1 (1942): 43-56. 54 James Thomson, in James Logue Robertson, ed., Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 471. 55 Campbell, James Thompson, 11-15; Thomson also wrote the pro-conquest, pro-freedom lyrics for Thomas Arne's "Rule, Britannia," of 1740, which was commissioned by the Prince of Wales (Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 46; Colley, Britons, 11). 56 Colley, Britons, 85; Atherton, Political Prints, 91; Oxford Magazine I (October, 1768), p. 149. 57 The Political Register, 5 (August, 1769), opp. p. 55. 58 Oxford Magazine, IV (February, 1770), p. 64. In fact, the print's publication itself provoked the presentation of similar petitions to George III. 59 John Sunderland, "Mortimer, Pine, and Some Political Aspects of English History Painting," Burlington Magazine 116, 855 (June, 1974): 317-26; Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, Histoire d'Angleterre depuis ['invasion de Jules Cesar ... jusqu'a I'avenement de George II a la couronne, 13 vols. (The Hague, 172436); the first English edition is The History of England ... Done into English with Additional Notes ... by N. Tindall, 15 vols. (London, 1725-31). 60 In 1760, Pine exhibited The Surrender of Calais to Edward III; in 1763, Canute the Great Reproving His Courtiers for Their Impious Flattery; and in 1771, Earl Warren Making Reply to the Writ Commonly Called Quo Warranto in the Reign of Edward I. Mortimer's prize-winning work of 1763 was Edward the Confessor Stripping His Mother of Her Effects. 61 Solkin, Painting for Money, 300, n. 35. 62 Wilkes' portrait in the House of Commons is signed and dated 1768, but evidence from reproductive engravings proves that it was done around 1763 (Sunderland, "Mortimer, Pine," 322, n. 23). On the Crosby and Oliver portraits, see Sunderland, "Mortimer, Pine," 322, and Solkin, Painting for Money, 300, n. 35. On the more general tendency in the late 1760s for portraits of public figures to generate political discussion, see Solkin, Painting for Money, 264. 63 Sunderland, "Mortimer, Pine," 322; Robert G. Stewart, Robert Edge Pine: A British Portrait Painter in America 1784-88 (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 1979), p. 15.

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64 John Chaloner Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits (London: Sothcran, 1883), no. 196. 65 Ophelia's unspecified but disconcerting appearance, her singing, and her ambiguous language are all included in the text of Hamlet, but the stage directions in the "bad" quarto and subsequent performance tradition have focused on the disarray of her hair as the key visual feature of her madness. See Elaine Showalter, "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 82ff.; Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney, "The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists," Signs 3 (Winter, 1977): 451-60; Bridget Lyons, "The Iconography of Ophelia," English Literary History 44 (Spring, 1977): 60-74; and Jane Kromm, "The Feminization of Madness in Visual Representation," Feminist Studies 20, 3 (Fall, 1994): 507-35. Although Ophelia's madness is not the same as Mortimer's disturbed Britannia or Pine's madwoman, visual representations of Ophelia mad do appear for the first time in their work. Mortimer's drawings of portrait heads after Shakespearian characters were executed in 1775—6 and subsequently engraved. The group includes an image of Ophelia with weeds and flowers entwined in her hair. Pine's engraving of the flower distribution scene (IV, 5) was designed and published in 1784. There is also a drawing by Mary Hoare, c. 1781, of Ophelia just before she falls into the stream (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art). 66 For a discussion of this play and its illustrations, see Kromm, "Hogarth's Madmen." 67 G. W. Stone, ed., The London Stage 1660-1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), pt. 4, I, pp. 47, 216-17, 219, 229, 313; pt. 4, II, pp. 917-18, 995. 68 Aaron Hill, The Art of Acting (London: Osborne, 1746), pp. 14-15. 69 In the engraving by John Strutt of this lost painting in 1781, America wears a headdress and clothing resembling those in Madness. 70 Sunderland, "Mortimer, Pine," 317, 321; Benedict Nicholson, John Hamilton Mortimer, ARA (Fastbourne: Towner Art Gallery, 1968), pp. 5-7. Following a dispute with this organization, Mortimer joined the Academy in 1778. 71 Crow, Painters and Public Life, 42, 80. 72 Letter from C. N. Cochin, the dominant artist-administrator at this time, to Marigny, the Directeur-General des Batiments; cited in Crow, Painters and Public Life, 155. 73 Denis Sutton, France in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd rev. edn (London: Royal Academy of Art, 1968); Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700-1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 173-4; MarieCatherine Sahut and Pierre Rosenberg, Carle van Loo: premier peintre du roi (Nice: Musee des Beaux-Arts, 1977). 74 The paintings are in the collections of Sanssouci, Potsdam, and the Sanssouci Bildergalerie, Potsdam; there is a grisaille version in a private collection. 75 See Sutton, France in the Eighteenth Century, 96; the face was changed by Cochin and the engraver, Beauvarlet (Sahut and Rosenberg, Carle van Loo, 81-2). 76 Marmontel's review appeared in the Mercure de France of October, 1759;

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80 81 82 83 84 85

86

87 88 89

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The Art of Frenzy Freron's in L'Annee litteraire, lettre 10, 1759; and Diderot's in Les Salons de Diderot, 1759. The Medee of Hilaire-Bernard de Rocqueluyne Longepierre (1659-1721) was first performed at the Comedie Francaise in 1694 and was first published in 1695. Denis Diderot, Encyclopedic ou dictionnaire raissonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers (Paris: Briasson, David, LeBreton, Durant, 1755), VII, p. 377. The inclusion of intellectuals among those susceptible to mania rather than melancholia is extremely rare, and might be the result of a misreading of very similar passages in James' dictionary, in which the same list of professionals is given as tending toward melancholia. Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 178; William Battie, A Treatise on Madness [1758] (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1969), p. 53; William Cullen, The First Lines of the Practice of Physic, 3 vols. (Worcester: Thomas, 1790), III, pp. 193-4. Willian Cullen, Synopsis and Nosology (Hartford, CT: Patten, 1792), genus 66, 67. For Wesley, see Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 30; Cullen, First Lines, III, 202-4; Battie, Treatise on Madness, 84. For Willis, see Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 206; Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969); for Pargeter, see Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 210. Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 159-61. There is a large body of literature on sensibility, but see especially Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Rousseau, "?A Strange Pathology," 158ff. Soane produced two sets of designs in the competition for a second, enlarged, St. Luke's asylum. Sculptural decoration for the facade is found in the first design only. Both designs include slightly more accommodation for female inmates. The architect who eventually designed the new building was George Dance the Younger. For an analysis of the competition and Soane's designs, see Pierre du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 39-51. Du Prey describes the sculptures as "a pair of reclining statues tearing at their long tresses of hair" (51). On sensibility's feminizing features, see Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 244; BarkerBenfield, Culture of Sensibility, 27; Rousseau, "?A Strange Pathology," 160, 182. For more on these stereotypes, see Kromm, "The Feminization of Madness." On Lawrence, see T. S. R. Boase, English Art 1800-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 7-14; Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), pp. 12-13; Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence: Portraits of an Age 1790-1830 (Alexandria: Art Service International, 1993), pp. 9-10, 60-1; Shearer West, "Thomas Lawrence's 'Half-History' Portraits and the Politics of the Theatre," Art History 14, 2 (June, 1991): 225-49. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. with intro. by Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), I, pp. xi, xii, xviii; Rousseau, "?A Strange Pathology," 152; Barker-Benfield, 7, 80; Porter, Mind-Forg'd, 106.

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The engravings appeared first in James Harrison's The Novelist's Magazine from November 1, 1782, to May 17, 1783; a subsequent two-volume edition was published in 1783. See T. C. Duncan Eaves, "Graphic Illustration of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, 1740-1810," Huntington Library Quarterly 14 (1951): 349-83. 92 Critical and wary of the didactic potential in this lesson, certain women writers incorporated critiques about women and mania into their works of the 1780s and 1790s. Of particular importance here is Fanny Burney's Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), Jane Austen's Love and Freindship [sic] (1790), and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman (1798).

4

Mania, riot, and revolution The recasting of Britannia as an allegory of madness took place during the 1760s and 1770s in anonymous political caricatures and in the politicized engravings of Hogarth and Pine. In contrast to such maniacal agents of misrule as Louis XIV and La Guerre, this distressed Britannia was a frenzied victim of absolutism's encroachments on traditional rights, and as such articulated the opposition stance associated with both the petitioning and "Wilkes and Liberty" movements. The sheer volume and effectiveness of political caricature had increased dramatically in the 1760s, and would do so again in the 1780s. This development was aided in part by the ostentatious, spectacle-inventing tactics that Wilkes had devised as a way of controlling political maneuvering "out-of-doors" in the public arena.1 Strategies of civic turbulence in turn fostered the increasingly common perception that politics itself was a species of public disorder that encouraged and excused behavior which was implicitly maniacal. Rioting at Bethlem during the holiday touring seasons of 1764 and 1766 did much to reinforce a rising fear of maniacal mob behavior, and, after the 1780s, most public demonstrations were regarded as potentially serious upheavals. Against this expanded field of vehement agitation, the emblem of a mad Britannia victimized by misguided royal and ministerial policies was soon overshadowed by depictions of political participants transformed into frenzied agents of disorder, as the focus in political satire shifted to notable personalities flaunting the traits of mania. Those aspects of furor embedded in the nature of tyranny developed on several fronts, with the attempted act of regicide by Margaret Nicholson provoked by maniacal claims of rights and status, and with George Ill's own illness. The king and his ministers continued to pursue a policy of extended royal prerogatives just as his own symptoms of excess were becoming apparent, and a flurry of caricatures show those around the king as maniacal sufferers, but never the king himself. Protests against oppressive authoritarian figures had long been the common currency of popular imagery, but in the 1790s, these motifs became critical in elite visual culture as well when William Blake, Henry Fuseli, and Francisco Goya called attention anew to the despotic themes that Pine and Mortimer had developed in the 1770s. From the other direction, the unfolding events of the French Revolution accelerated fears that maniacal behavior and mindless anarchy were the inevitable result of political disorder and

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affronts to traditional authority. Prints of the 1790s form the largest body of images linking revolutionary activities and goals to mania, and in the surviving depictions (primarily British royalist reactions), flagrantly insane female personifications and female revolutionaries finally overtake the earlier motifs of raving ministers and opposition leaders. Throughout the 1760s, the exhibitionistic political maneuvering of John Wilkes was widely regarded as the precipitating factor in acts of violence extending from personal attacks to widespread rioting both for and against his cause. We have already seen how Wilkes' comments in the North Briton could generate angry, satirical responses from his targets or their supporters. In December, 1762, a Scotsman named Alexander Dunn, infuriated by the "Scottophobic" remarks Wilkes had printed in his journal, gained access to the politician's home and attempted to murder him with a penknife. The Scotch Damien, published by Mary Darly within a month of the event, shows the threatening, unhinged Dunn in a confrontational stance with clenched fist and drawn knife (Figure 4.1).2 Wild-eyed, he explains that Scotsmen will feign friendship, all the while nursing their grievances and planning revenge. Bearing this vindictiveness out, a scroll inscribed with the names of previous Scots assassins extends from the pocket of his fashionable waistcoat. The anonymous artist has given Dunn a much larger, more predatory weapon than the penknife that accounts claim he actually carried, and similar strategic overstatements characterize the hypercharged delineation of Dunn's angry, maniacal traits. The electrified, enervated hair, the furious and glaring eye, and the agitated garments suffused with the movement of belligerent attack all show Dunn to have been a dangerous maniac of the most extreme and threatening sort. Mary and Matthew Darly, the print's publishers, were supporters of Wilkes' cause, and issued numerous satires like this one that were designed to bolster his position. As an instrument of Opposition policy, the print reinforced the claims Wilkes voiced in the North Briton that the Scots tended toward the most violent forms of tyranny and abusive power. Visually, the engraving takes the wayward act of a relatively ineffectual and disorganized individual, and transforms it into a coherent, assaultive capacity that is both maniacal and insurrectionary. The depiction of Dunn's attack thus provided the opportunity for introducing the image of a maniac into Wilkes' incendiary platform to prop up his theme that the advances of erratic and unruly Scotsmen were a serious threat to British civic order. More importantly, the image scored the point yet again that political activity like Wilkes' was provocative in the extreme, and thus a fair target for the dangerous volatility of an enraged madman. From the opposite side of the political debate, Wilkes' detractors typically argued that it was among his followers rather than his enemies that observers would find the seeds of imminent disorder and social upheaval. Prints of Wilkes' supporters engaging in raucous rallies and high-spirited marches were abundant, and these out-of-doors spectacles

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The Art of Frenzy

Figure 4.1 Anon., The Scotch Damien, 1763. © The British Museum.

that he orchestrated occasionally could seem like sanctions for public disorder. Even pro-Wilkes satires acknowledged this element by emphasizing the people's pleasure in such demonstrations, and by clearly marking the inclusiveness of his appeal across class and gender lines. In The Female Politicians of 1770 (New York: Morgan Library), a group of women supporters of Wilkes who display every well-known gesture and expression of furor bring their partisan, out-of-doors fervor into a drawing room, which they proceed to disrupt. Prints and printsellers themselves could be implicated in the charge that Wilkes and his supporters caused emotional distress and unfairly manipulated the fortunes of others. In the anonymous Ecce Homo of 1775, a man, supposedly the drawing-master William Austin, attacks Matthew Darly's

Mania, riot, and revolution

Figure 4.2

16:

Anon., Ecc