Frenzy or the ‘Madhouse Woman’, from the Amsterdam Madhouse

Entry

The so-called Madhouse Woman – a personfication of Frenzy – originates from the inner courtyard of the Amsterdam Dolhuys (madhouse) on the Kloveniersburgwal, where this life-size statue stood at the heart of the flower garden (fig. a). Nothing is known of the statue’s origin. Given the provenance, however, one must assume the statue and its accompanying pedestal were created specifically for this purpose and place.⁵ The earliest description of the statue standing in the flower garden dates from 1662: ‘From within is a large, square place and Garden, a naked Woman statue stands there in the middle on a Pedestal depicting fury or madness the hair hangs there over the naked body she tugs and pulls at the hair like a mad person’.⁶ The earliest engraving of the inner courtyard in which the statue can be seen dates from 1663.⁷ This image also shows the characteristic pedestal, adorned on each of its four sides with a shallow rectangular niche from which the heads of mentally ill patients – both men and women – peer out. Two of these figures appear rather tame, whereas the other two display fear and are screaming. The heads likely corresponded to the four different departments in the Dolhuys, reflecting the building layout around the interior courtyard, with two departments for the more sedate patients and two departments for the less sedate patients.⁸ The pedestal niches recall the cell door hatches – the patients’ sole means of access to the outside world.⁹ With the demolition of the Dolhuys in 1792, the inhabitants of the madhouse were moved to the Buitengasthuis (the former Pesthuis) on the Overtoom canal in Amsterdam. The present statue and pedestal were also moved to the new location, placed in front of an exterior wall of this complex. Removed from its original context, the pedestal’s decoration was rendered meaningless.¹⁰

The statue’s sculptor, Artus Quellinus I (1609-1668), devised a stirring image of a mentally tortured woman lost in an apparent fit of hysteria. Seated on a hay-covered stump (in fact, the material covering the floors in the actual patient’s cells) with her body writhing in a twisted pose, the Madhouse Woman screams out her fear or anger. Her tongue emerges from her gaping mouth, with the top row of teeth visible. Clasped in each hand are two large locks of hair on which she tugs in two directions, as if attempting to pull her hair out. The rest of the hear is woven at the back of the head in a knotted braid. This manner of wearing the hair occurs quite commonly on sculpture inspired by classical works of antiquity. Yet it also corresponds to hair fashion around 1650, where part of the hair hangs down loose over the ears, with the rest woven into an artful chignon at the back of the head. In sculptural terms, the madwoman’s pose is a mirror-image variant of the dying Laocoön, a statue with which Quellinus was undoubtedly familiar via countless copies and variants, in painting and sculpture, long before traveling to Rome. One example close to home, for instance, today in the Sint-Carolus Borromeuskerk in Antwerp, appeared in Rubens’s painted altarpiece of 1617-18 entitled The Vision of St Ignatius Loyola. The painting includes a female figure derived from the Laocoön that in its form and pose displays a clear agreement with the Madhouse Woman (fig. b).¹¹ Valentiner brought the same statue in connection with a marble relief of the Dream of Joseph by Tribolo (1500-1550) in the portal of the San Petronio in Bologna. ¹² The pose of one of the figures on this relief is similarly inspired by the Laocoön and is virtually identical to that of the Madhouse Woman.

Over the years, the Madhouse Woman has been attributed to Artus Quellinus I or a sculptor from his circle (possibly after a design by the architect Jacob van Campen), but also Hendrick de Keyser (1565-1621) and his master apprentice Gerrit Lambertsen van Cuilenburgh (1597-1657) after a design by De Keyser.¹³ An important argument for rejecting the attribution to De Keyser and/or Lambertsen is that the statue fails to appear on Balthasar Florisz’s extremely detailed map of Amsterdam from 1625, on which even the linen out drying on the bleaching green of the Dolhuys’ inner courtyard can clearly be distinguished.¹⁴ Were it to have been sculpted by De Keyser himself, then this would had to have occurred in or prior to 1621, the year of his death. Theoretically, Lambertsen could very well have carved the sandstone statue at a later date, based on an earlier model of his master’s conception. This is improbable, however, when examining the further course of his career.¹⁵ Another factor to be considered is that the statue’s first mention occurs no earlier than 1662 (more than forty years after De Keyser's death), whereas the asylum had long been open to paying visitors prior to this time. Such a unique and remarkable statue is certain to have drawn the attention of onlookers and prompted commentary of some sort.

Stylistically, the attribution to De Keyser and/or Lambertsz proves equally untenable. Their idealized, late-mannerist nudes profess an entirely different artistic thinking than the highly realistic and broadly interpreted Madhouse Woman, which fully reflects the baroque style. Gabriels previously observed a stylistic agreement between the rendering of the woman’s back on the present work and that of the nymph lower left of the Maid of Amsterdam on Quellinus’s east tympanum of the former Amsterdam town hall (cf. BK-AM-51-2).¹⁶ The same soft modelling, the dough-like treatment of the flesh, the flaccid stomach, high rib cage and square jawline of the Madhouse Woman can also be observed on the nymphs to the right of the Civic Virgin on this tympanum,¹⁷ and for example, the Icarus relief above the door of one room in the city hall’s interior, the Desolate Boedelkamer (Desolate Holdings Chamber). Neurdenburg supported her attribution to De Keyser/Lambertsen in part on a purported formal resemblance between the pedestal of the Madhouse Woman and that of Hendrick de Keyser’s Erasmus in Rotterdam.¹⁸ Gabriëls, however, noted that Quellinus’s monumental tombs designed around 1660 also incorporate the same architectural elements (presumably influenced by the classicist architecture of Jacob van Campen).¹⁹ Scholten rejects the form of the pedestal as an attributional criterion in either case based on the generality of the overall form; with respect to the Erasmus, he even questions the originality of the existing pedestal.²⁰

The bas-relief above the portal of the former Pesthuis in Leiden, dated 1660, lends further support to an association with Quellinus (fig. c).²¹ This relief was carved by Rombout Verhulst, Quellinus’s talented assistant who worked for more than four years on the decoration of the former Amsterdam city hall in the mid-1650s. Here the plague is personified by a woman furiously tugging at her hair, whose pose is akin to that of the Madhouse Woman. The scene’s intense drama – heightened by the despair of the old woman and two children – directly echoes that of the present statue. Various aspects suggest that Verhulst was at least familiar with the statue and possibly even involved in its execution.

As far as can be ascertained, no copies of the present statue exist in the Northern Netherlands. In Germany, however, two works must be cited. First, a whitewashed, sandstone garden statue from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century that today stands in the national park Schloss Herrenhausen near Hanover displays such a marked degree of similarity to the Madhouse Woman that one may reasonably conclude its maker had the Amsterdam statue in mind.²² A second work likely inspired by the Madhouse Woman – particularly with respect to the rendering of the upper torso – is a niche statue, entitled Frenzy, carved by the sculptor Franz Biener (1681/2-1742) on the building facade of the Kanitz-Kyawsche Gruft in Hainewalde (Saxony).²³

Titia de Haseth Möller, 2024