Veterinarska stanica, Vol. 52 No. 1, 2021.
Pregledni rad
https://doi.org/10.46419/vs.52.1.13
History of tuberculosis: Tuberculosis and art (Part IV)
Željko Cvetnić
; Hrvatski veterinarski institut - podružnica Veterinarski zavod Križevci, Križevci, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Tuberculosis has had an immeasurable impact on the history of mankind, including art. What would an artistic genius have brought into the world of books, music or painting had they not died very young? The influence of tuberculosis on artistic activity and artists suffering from it are presented. During the period of Romanticism, there was the myth that tuberculosis increased creative abilities among the afflicted. Writers suffering from tuberculosis included the renowned German writers Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg. Lord Gordon Byron wrote about tuberculosis, while Edgar Allan Poe lost his parents to tuberculosis as a child, and later himself died of it. The English poet John Keats perished from the disease, together with his entire family, as did Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. The Brontë family is one of the most tragic but also the most talented literary families, with all its members dying of tuberculosis at a very young age. Antun Branko Simic, one of Croatia’s greatest poets, died of tuberculosis at the age of 27. Despite his short life, he left an extraordinary literary legacy. Ivo Andric, writer and Nobel Prize laureate for literature suffered from the disease for a long time, while his father and brothers died of it. The operas La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi and La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini were met with a great problem at the time, tuberculosis. Frederic Chopin is the incarnation of a Romantic artist, not only because he belongs to the stylistic period of Romanticism, but also because of his life marked with personal and social suffering. He died at the age of 39 from tuberculosis and was interred with great honours at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, while his heart was secretly transferred to Warsaw, where it was built into a column in the Church of the Holy Cross. Tuberculosis is widely represented in the fine arts. An example is Italian painter Amadeo Modigliani, who initially wanted to become a sculptor. However, the physical effort involved in stonemasonry, dust and cough eventually distracted him from sculpting and brought him back to painting. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 36. Ferdinand Hodler, a Swiss painter, lost his parents and all of his siblings to tuberculosis. This great experience of illness and death in his youth was reflected in his painting. Edvard Munch, a self-taught Norwegian painter, was deeply affected by the death of loved family members, reflected by the dark moods of anxiety and despair in his paintings. Many Croatian painters also suffered from the disease, and some died, such as Slava Raškaj, who died at the age of
29, then Miroslav Kraljevic, at the age of 28, Milan Steiner at the age of 25, or Tomislav Kolombar, at the age of 20. Despite their short life spans, each of these artists achieved an exceptional, complete and significant opus.
Ključne riječi
history; tuberculosis; literature; music; painting
Hrčak ID:
247913
URI
Datum izdavanja:
25.11.2020.
Posjeta: 1.768 *