Vincent van Gogh once said “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process”. This statement seems to sum up his entire career, where genius and mental instability were one and the same. But van Gogh was not alone, and the same could be said for many other famous figures of art history. 

The ancients used to say Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit, that is, ‘there is no genius without a grain of madness’. This combination has been studied since antiquity. Aristotle himself identified a correlation between exceptional minds and a melancholic temperament, going so far as to speak of the melancholy in the man of genius.

In the Renaissance, madness (though still considered a mental illness) took on the role of a ‘revealing force’. Similarly, the declamation In Praise of Madness, a humorous thesis written in Latin in a deliberately scholarly manner by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1509, was one of the most influential works in the literature of the Western world and remains an iconic work today. Since Romanticism, which rejected the rationality of the Enlightenment in favor of a greater irrationality mixed with creative genius, the concept has evolved with artists such as Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet is a representative of Art Brut in the twentieth century (also known as ‘alienated’ or ‘raw art’), and of spontaneous works of art produced mainly inside asylums and prisons and on the edges of aesthetic conventions. 

More recently, researchers have found a link between mental illness and creativity at the neurological level, identifying similar characteristics between ‘creative’ psychic processes and mental pathologies.With that in mind, it’s no surprise some artists have revolutionized the history of art while being plagued by psychological disorders. Here are ten examples. 

Read more at: 10 Artists Between Genius and Madness