Madness of an Artist/ Methods of a Historian

Along with a corpus of beautiful paintings, the 15thC painter Hugo van der Goes left behind a peculiar legacy. After entering a monastery in the middle of his career, the artist was plagued by spells of madness, and even attempted suicide. Did the disturbances to the artist's mental state influence the style of his painting? Shira Brisman's talk explores the way that a historians consider the evidence of Hugo's madness, drawing on what x-ray and infrared photography reveal about his painting.