8. Sanity of Genius. In 1826, at a time when the
conviction of the abnormality of genius was widely
shared, Charles Lamb raised the voice of common sense
in his essay on “The Sanity of True Genius” (1826).
Not only did he deny any connection between genius
and madness, but even maintained that genius “mani-
fests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties.”
Lamb had some following among psychologists and
psychiatrists even in the twentieth century (Wittkower,
Born Under Saturn, pp. 100f.), and what is perhaps
more remarkable, took up and continued—maybe
unknowingly—ideas well established before him.
Indeed, Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth cen-
tury, Vasari, the Venetian Paolo Pini, and others in the
sixteenth had a clear vision of the many accom-
plishments with which talent must be endowed, and
even when the modern conception of genius began to
make its entry, it was first the exalted, lofty, and har-
monious qualities that were regarded as characteristic
of the very greatest. In his Réflexions critiques sur la
poésie et sur la peinture (1719) the Abbé Du Bos spoke
of the nobility of the heart and mind of genius, of the
vivacity and delicacy of feeling inseparable from it,
and said that the artist of genius must have “much more
exquisite sensibility than normal people.” Even much
later, reasonableness and perfect balance appear as the
touchstone of true genius. Thus James Northcote (1818)
left the following character sketch of his master
Reynolds:
He had none of those eccentric bursts of action, those fiery
impetuosities which are supposed by the vulgar to charac-
terize genius, and which frequently are found to accompany
a secondary rank of talent, but are never conjoined with
the first. His incessant industry was never wearied into
despondency by miscarriage, nor elated into negligence by
success....
The concept of the sanity of genius is linked with
the idea that exceptional work can only be accom-
plished by exceptional characters and, moreover, that
there is a kind of mirror-image relationship between
personality and work. As Vasari informs his readers,
the lofty art of Raphael could only result from a lofty
soul.
