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| Cavaliere d'Arpino Figure throwing stones ca. 1590 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Cavaliere d'Arpino Allegorical figure of Fame ca. 1590 drawing (in Mariette mount) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| attributed to Cherubino Alberti Two studies of seated figures seen from the back ca. 1596 drawing (fresco study) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
quoted passages are from Susan Sontag's essay, Approaching Artaud –
"This nostalgia for a past often so eclectic as to be quite unlocatable historically is a facet of the modernist sensibility which has seemed increasingly suspect in recent decades. It is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist outlook . . . To that criticism there is no convincing reply. But to the criticism that the quest for "another form of civilization" refuses to submit to the disillusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models and are available as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mysteries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the ground that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering. It consciously opposes such sensitivity. This nostalgia forms part of a view that is deliberately not political . . . "
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| Giambattista Zelotti Seated warrior flanked by female figures before 1578 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Aurelio Luini Martyrdom of St Lawrence ca. 1580-90 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giovanni Baglione Group of figures standing and kneeling in supplication ca. 1598 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| attributed to Giovanni Battista Naldini Kneeling figure with outstretched arms before 1591 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Annibale Carracci Crawling figure (study for Cacus) 1593 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"The Gnostic project is a search for wisdom, but a wisdom that cancels itself out in unintelligibility, loquacity, and silence. As Artaud's life suggests, all schemes for ending dualism, for a unified consciousness at the Gnostic level of intensity, are eventually bound to fail – that is, their practitioners collapse into what society calls madness or into silence or suicide. (Another example: the vision of a totally unified consciousness expressed in the gnomic messages Nietzsche sent to friends in the weeks before his complete mental collapse in Turin in 1889.) The project transcends the limits of the mind. Thus, while Artaud still desperately reaffirms his effort to unify his flesh and his mind, the terms of his thinking imply the annihilation of consciousness. . . . "
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| Agostino Carracci Seated figure ca. 1590-93 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Annibale Carracci Triton sounding conch ca. 1597 drawing on blue paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Jacopo Zucchi Jupiter subduing the Giants before 1596 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| attributed to Jacopo Zucchi Two standing figures before 1596 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"In a letter to Jacqueline Breton from the hospital in Ville-Evrard in April 1939, after a year and a half of what was to be nine years of confinement, he wrote, "I am a fanatic, I am not a madman." But any fanaticism that is not a group fanaticism is precisely what society understands as madness. Madness is the logical conclusion of the commitment to individuality when that commitment is pushed far enough. As Artaud puts it in the "Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums" in 1925, "all individual acts are anti-social." It is an unpalatable truth, perhaps quite irreconcilable with the humanist ideology of capitalist democracy or of social democracy or of liberal socialism – but Artaud was right. Whenever behavior becomes sufficiently individual, it will become objectively anti-social and will seem, to other people, mad. All human societies agree on this point. They differ only on how the standard of madness is applied, and on who are protected or partly exempted (for reasons of economic, social, sexual, or cultural privilege) from the penalty . . . "
– Susan Sontag's essay on Artaud originally appeared in The New Yorker (May 19, 1973)
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| Andrea Schiavone Two seated figures within spandrels before 1563 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Andrea Schiavone Mars and Cupid before 1563 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |