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The portrayal of paralysis in some masterpieces by European painters

1990; Springer Nature; Volume: 28; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/sc.1990.65

1476-5624

Karin Ohry-Kossoy, A Ohry,

History of Medicine Studies

It is widely known that the survival rate of spinal injury victims was very low until the middle of the twentieth century.Those spinal patients who did survive in earlier times had low or incomplete lesions mainly caused by syphilis, spina bifida, leprosy, tuberculosis of the spine or other infectious diseases, and hysteria.There is little written documentation about these cases over the past centuries, but they are sometimes portrayed in works of art, some of them by famous painters.By observing these figures we can achieve a better understanding of the pictures they appear in, and obtain valuable information on the fate of the paralysed in the distant past.We discuss a small selection of works of art, all of them by great European masters, and all of them showing disabled figures in a particularly clear manner.The earliest are from the fifteenth and the latest from the eighteenth century.The first painting is at the Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, a fresco from about 1427 by Masaccio: St Peter healing the Sick with his Shadow while going to the Temple with St John.St Peter is a stern, stately figure who passes by the sick men, neither touching them, nor even looking at them, healing them through the mere projection of his shadow (Clark, 1969).The crouching figure at the feet of the saint is a lame young man, probably paralysed, seated on a mat or some other support.Both his legs are thin, contracted, and bare.His elbows rest on two small wooden crutches with which he pushes himself forward.His well developed arms indicate that he makes much use of this form of locomotion.All the people represented in Masacio's fresco are realistic figures, each carefully depicted.Yet a social hierarchy is evident from their respective positions: a monumental St Peter is at the center, and those standing around him come next.Then the observer's eye travels downward to the sick men, finally resting on the paralytic figure, whose head reaches the height of the saint's knee.Still, although the disabled man is at the lowest point in the painting, he is not grotesque, and has his share of the human dignity that Masaccio highlighted in his art.About 20 years later, Fra Angelico painted a somewhat similar scene for the Chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican: St Lawrence distributing the Treasures of the