Individuals, who previously had not the remotest idea of art, are impelled by disease to paint, especially at the periods of strongest excitement. B----, a mason, became a painter while in the Pesaro asylum. His attacks of mania were always announced by an outbreak of his tendency to draw caricatures of the hospital staff, whom he condemned, in effigy, to the strangest punishments. For instance, he painted the cook, a stout and ruddy man, in the attitude of an _Ecce Homo_, behind a grating which prevented him from touching the most appetising viands. This was the penalty for having refused B---- one of his favourite dishes. The grotesque apotheosis of himself, painted by the pederast and megalomaniac, R----, in which he excretes and fecundates eggs which symbolise worlds, is characteristic of the boundless vanity and unbridled imagination of megalomaniacs and paralytics. Among the pictures executed by the patients at San Servolo, the most curious is one by a lunatic who, in his lucid intervals, paints fairly well, though with excessive minuteness of detail; but during his attacks this minuteness is so far exaggerated as to become grotesque. Nothing but an intense religious monomania could have inspired the singular self-crucifixion of the Venetian shoemaker, Matteo Lovat. I have been able to procure an authentic picture of this strange performance which is reproduced below. Shortly afterwards Lovat died in an asylum.[316] [Illustration] One patient, G----, was a poor peasant woman, utterly uneducated, in whose family _pellagra_ and insanity were both hereditary. In the long isolation required by her state, she developed great skill (quite unknown before her illness) in embroidering on linen, with coloured threads pulled from her clothing, an extraordinary number of figures, which were faithful representations of her delusions. Her autobiography is, so to speak, traced in this embroidery; in every piece of work she has represented herself, sometimes struggling with the nurses or the nuns, sometimes herding cows, or occupied with other rustic work. Elsewhere she would depict tables spread for meals, with an infinite variety of accessories. But the most singular thing is that the outlines are drawn with a clearness which would be the envy of a professional caricaturist; no shading whatever, four stitches, representing nose, eyes, and mouth, were arranged with so much artistic judgment as to show clearly the individual expression of each face. Another artist in the same line, though of less striking gifts, is a certain I----, suffering from moral insanity, who shows numerous degenerative symptoms. She, too, embroiders figures of men and women with considerable skill, but always in harmony with her perverted sexual tendencies.[317]