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| Albrecht Dürer The Insane before 1528 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"I come now to the facts. The bright light of electricity served, at first, to illuminate the subterranean galleries of mines; after that, public squares and streets; then factories, workshops, stores, theaters, military barracks; finally, the domestic interior. The eyes, initially, put up rather well with this penetrating new enemy; but, by degrees, they were dazzled. Blindness began as something temporary, soon became periodic, and ended as a chronic problem. This, then, was the first result – sufficiently comprehensible, I believe; but what about the insanity lately visited on our leaders? – Our great heads of finance, industry, big business have seen fit to send their thoughts around the world, while they themselves remain at rest. To this end, each of them has nailed up, in a corner of his office, electric wires connecting his executive desk with our colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Comfortably seated before his schedules and account books, he can communicate directly over tremendous distances; at a touch of the finger, he can receive reports from all his far-flung agents on a startling variety of matters. One branch-correspondent tells him, at ten in the morning of a shipwrecked vessel worth over a million; another, at five after ten, of the unexpected sale of the most prosperous house in the two Americas; a third, at ten after ten, of the glorious entrance, into the port of Marseilles, of a freighter carrying the fruits of a Northern California harvest. All this in rapid succession. The poor brains of these men, robust as they were, have simply given way, just as the shoulders of some Hercules of the marketplace would give way if he ventured to load them with ten sacks of wheat instead of one. And this was the second result."
– from Paris en songe (1863) by Jacques Fabien, published in English as Paris in a Dream (1864), quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)
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| Alexander Ver Huell The Insane in an interior 1856 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Caspar Luyken Insane man riding horse backwards 1704 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Caspar Luyken Don Clarazel attacked in Marseilles by the landlord's insane brother 1697 etching (book illustration) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Gesina ter Borch The madness of merry companions feasting with Death 1660 watercolor Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"From time immemorial this enigmatic need for sensation has found satisfaction in fashion. But in its ground it will be reached at last only by theological inquiry, for such inquiry bespeaks a deep affective attitude toward historical process on the part of the human being. It is tempting to connect this need for sensation to one of the seven deadly sins, and it is not surprising that a chronicler adds apocalyptic prophecies to this connection and foretells a time when people will have been blinded by the effects of too much electric light and maddened by the tempo of news reporting (Jacques Fabien, Paris en songe, 1863)."
– Walter Benjamin, from the section on Fashion in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)
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| Odilon Redon Madman in somber landscape 1885 lithograph Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| William Sharp after Benjamin West King Lear's Madness on the Heath 1793 etching, engraving Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Self-portrait - "Collapse with Lamp" - Zakopane ca. 1913 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Taddeus Langier, Zakopane ca. 1912-13 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Charles Nègre Imperial Asylum at Vincennes Games Room 1858-59 albumen silver print from glass negative Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Charles Nègre Imperial Asylum at Vincennes Refectory 1858-59 salted paper print from glass negative Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Hugh Welch Diamond Patient at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum ca. 1850-58 albumen silver print from glass negative Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Hugh Welch Diamond Patient at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (with dead bird) ca. 1855 albumen silver print from glass negative Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Anonymous Photographer (France) "Lottery to Benefit Originals" ca. 1852 daguerreotypes Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Daguerreotypes of the inmates of a local French insane asylum are used in the early 1850s on a poster promoting a public lottery to raise funds for the asylum, a lottery promoting its intention to "benefit" the authentic "originals" in the photographs.