21 May - 3 October 2010 ‘The Glass Delusion’ was the name given
in the late Middle Ages and Baroque times to a form of
depression. Sufferers were obsessive, compulsive, driven by
irrational fears, and imagined themselves to be made of glass,
hence brittle and fragile. So pervasive was the condition that
it entered world literature, philosophy and history. Cervantes
wrote the novel The Glass Licentiate, Descartes mentions it as a
premise to his syllogism I think therefore I am, and Charles VI
of France had iron ribs sewn into his clothes to protect himself
from breaking. Victims allegedly travelled padded in straw and
refused to sit down fearing their body weight would fracture
their buttocks. The syndrome evokes a psychological separation
between reality and imagination, between a strength and a
vulnerability that we all experience at times. Glass is a
barrier, yet allows light to pass through it; it magnifies and
shrinks; it can be delicate as well as deadly. Its attributes
are appropriated in symbolic ways: