This article presents an overall view of two historical periods of the study of the interface between art, religion and psychopathology. Here we intend to review the texts: “The primitive art of the insane” (Osório Cezar, 1924) and “Painting, madness and culture” (Roger Bastide and Osório Cezar, 1956).
Osório Cezar, a physician at the Juquery Hospital in São Paulo, was Brazil’s first researcher to analyze art produced by mentally ill persons.
Roger Bastide, a prolific French intellectual who lived in Brazil, contributed greatly to the theoretical progress of the sociology of mental illness and ethnopsychiatry.
Art and madness; religion and psychopathology; Roger Bastide; Osório Cezar