2023-05-25 14:19:28
This Friday a letter was published in the medical journal The Lancet Neurology where the assignment of a new monomania of the genius of French Romanticism is presented, Theodore Gericaultthe author of The Raft of the Medusa.
The painter created a famous series of ten portraits of mental patients around 1823, who were interned in Parisian psychiatric hospitals, and which is known as the Monomanias. Of those ten portraits, until 2021 only five were preservedwhich correspond to the monomanias of envy, gambling, obsessive fixation, kleptomania and child kidnapping.
The other five portraits had been hidden since they were painted in the early 19th century, although they are known to have existed for a letter published in 1863 by a famous art dealer who discovered the first five paintings in an attic in Baden-Baden (Germany).
Researcher Javier Burgos identified the first of the five works lost in 2021
In January 2021, the Spanish researcher javier burgos unveiled the sixth of Géricault’s monomania portraits, religious melancholy, identified in a private Italian collection. A year later, the same researcher identified the seventh, monomania of the drunkennessin a gallery in the city of Versailles (France).
Burgos, who continues with the investigations, has identified the eighth monomania, the of political events. This painting, known as Portrait of a man, called the Vendeanis on display at the Louvre Museum, but until now it has not been correlated with the texts of French psychiatrists from the early 19th century, where they describe this specific clinical case, conclusively associating it with the series.
With this discovery, three of the five lost paintings come to light, and more and more progress is being made in identifying the complete series.
Reference:
Burgos, J. “Monomania of political strife by Géricault” The Lancet Neurology (2023)
Rights: Creative Commons.
#Identified #lost #painting #Géricaults #monomanias