Mercy, madness, pestilence and hope

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The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals

By Richard Cork

Richard Cork’s book stretches across a broad canvas of encounters between art and medicine so that, in addition to art’s physical locations in hospital buildings, depictions of anatomy demonstrations and operations, satires on doctors and their long suffering patients are included.  Cases of artists who suffered various degrees of physical or mental affliction, such as Richard Dadd, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Frida Kahlo and Antonin Artaud, are also brought to light and their art examined.

A brief reflection on the memorable schemes of decoration from Renaissance and Baroque Europe reminds us of how many were located in hospitals. These institutions incorporated the roles of hospices, homes for orphans or abandoned children (foundlings), nursing homes for childbirth, and homes for old soldiers and sailors, as much as the role of healing sickness and injury. They were established within the fundamental culture of Christian piety; it was incumbent on all to show charity and compassion, which encouraged rich patrons to build and maintain hospitals and to employ leading architects, sculptors and painters to enhance them.   

The universal devastation brought on by the Black Death ensured urgency in the minds of the survivors to secure their salvation through acts of mercy and charity. In the small Italian town of Sansepolcro, Piero della Francesca was asked to paint what has since become one of the most revered paintings of the Renaissance, in which the grave and commanding  Madonna of Mercy  embraces the kneeling figures within the protective folds of her cloak.

The overriding view in the middle ages was that the recovery or demise of the patient lay absolutely in the hand of God rather than any doctor, so the necessity of preparation for death was generally seen as the guiding function of painting in hospitals.  The graphic scenes of demented, naked figures, tumbling unstoppably into the eternal fires of hell, by Rogier van der Weyden in Beaune in France, were prominently displayed before the suffering patients.  Equally unflinching was the imagery of Grnewald’s  Isenheim Altarpiece,  before which the afflicted were directed to contemplate the miraculous power of faith.

The subject of the anatomy demonstration has long attracted artists and viewers alike. The practice was surrounded by legal and religious ambiguity. The cadavers employed were usually those of criminals, for whom this was considered another element of punishment.  Rembrandt’s most disturbing example must surely be the full frontal view of the dissection of the brain conducted by Dr Deyman. Even as recently as 1875, when the American surgeon, Dr Gross, was operating with anaesthetic on a patient’s thigh bone, Thomas Eakins employed the dramatic lighting and anguished figure of a woman spectator from the painting conventions of an earlier time.   

Van Gogh, at the age of 36, spent a year as a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint Rémy, where he continued to work on subjects such as garden scenes in the grounds and the sweeps of Provençal landscape, which can be endlessly analysed and found to reveal either symptoms of intense psychological disturbance or an ecstatic response to nature, depending on how much the viewer is swayed by prior knowledge of his condition.

Richard Cork has produced an impressive compendium of examples of buildings, sculptures and mural schemes that reflect, through 25 chapters and over six centuries, the variety of relations that have coexisted between the worlds of art and of healing.  Whilst not exactly a history of the subject, it will stand as a work of reference for some time.  It is fully illustrated and provides a rewarding exposure to a range of often unfamiliar imagery.

The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals by Richard Cork is published by Yale University Press  2012. 460 pp., 240 colour & 200 mono illus. ISBN 978-0-300-17036-8