HYDERABAD: Experts assert that art and illness are associated with each other given the physical limitations of the geniuses and the way they mentally adapt the diseases; medicines also can be participatory agents in this. Most of the works of these geniuses are tainted with melancholia that somehow or the other succeeds in giving a clue to the links between depressive conditions of the intelligent minds and their unprecedented oeuvres. And this is not merely to tessellate two different facts, the works and the background of these artists, writers or scientists bear testimony to it. Geniuses in various fields like Virginia Woolf, Michelangelo, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, William Blake, Stephen Hawking, Vincent Van Gogh, John Constable and Claude Monet fought with their diseases that helped them walk the roads less travelled and rise as colossal figures.
The maladies affecting them were as varied as schizophrenia, myopia, autism, chronic depression, epilepsy among others. Yet, these conditions seemingly affected their works what we better know as their magnum opuses. The famous British writer Virginia Woolf suffered from persistent nervous depression for many years that ultimately resulted in her suicide. Writing was truly a courageous effort from her side. She was deeply attracted by to-and-fro activities of inner consciousness that helped her develop the ‘stream of consciousness’ method of which her novels ‘To The Lighthouse’ and ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ are classic examples.
Even the post-modernist poet Sylvia Plath’s moving poems that she herself called ‘Cries of the Heart’ have their roots in the suicidal tendencies she had. Her father’s early death and her failed marriage with Ted Hughes sums up her mental trauma in her ‘fascination with death’ that she often shared with the fellow poet Anne Sexton. Even the Romantic poet William Blake is said to have seen visions of God and angels given his strongly visual mind that gave shape to whatever he imagined. This rare gift of visions made him see a rose or a tiger as symbols pertaining spiritual connotations. And researchers claim he was suffering from schizophrenia symptoms of which are hallucinations. Italian sculptor and painter Michelangelo was suffering from manic-depressive mental illness.
The fresco called ‘The Last Judgement’ comprising figures of nudes that he painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City reflects his depressive moods. It shows an agitated composition, tortured poses, violent moods, peculiarly elongated muscular limbs holding skin of other human beings in a space sans any form. While discussing artists’ brush with illnesses it is not just the mental illness that seeped in their works there were other physical ailments also that influenced the creativity of many painters and sculptors giving a faint glimpse of what they were suffering from.
Cases of myopia and cataracts in painters have rendered influences in many of their works. The French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s cataract affected his serial paintings of the Bridge at Giverny making it slowly fade. Even his water lilies under the bridge give an ambiguous appearance of misty colours. The painting ‘Hampstead Heath’ by the Romantic painter John Constable shows the interplay between sunlight and clouds over the spacious landscapes in tones of yellow and brown with so faint hints of blue and green that these two colours are hardly noticeable which, the researchers say, is because of his blue-green colour blindness that put limitations to his choice of colours even when the painting so demanded.
Another example is of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh whose famous painting ‘Starry Night’ shows haloes around the stars which was a result of the medicines that he used to cure his epileptic conditions. Physicist Einstein is said to have suffered from Asperger’s syndrome with symptoms such as extreme focussed attention, routine-obsession and perfectionism which obviously can be said to have amounted to his research and findings.
Similarly Stephen Hawking, the British Physicist and Cosmologist had a neuro-muscular dystrophy that left him completely paralysed and he could speak only with the help of a computer generated voice synthesizer. His book entitled ‘The Grand Design’ discussed the creation of universe in relation to Bing Bang theory. His other phenomenal bestseller in 1988 was ‘A Brief History of Time’ where he presented before a layman quantum gravity, cosmology and mystery of black holes in simple language.
The relation between genius and illness can be explained by neurology as hemispheres of brain undergo certain changes making creative instincts to develop perhaps in a way quite different and unique. Would records of history have been deprived of the masterpieces of these geniuses if they were without their ailments or if they were treated (Let’s assume it hypothetically) with today’s medicines? This raises more questions than it answers. And perhaps unanswered questions are sometimes better than straight answers. Or else how could we have felt the pain of death and disease as Keats must have felt in his life shortened by tuberculosis when he poured in his verse, “The agonies, the strife Of human hearts…”