madhouse-cell

Updated: May 28, 2025

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great age.

Walter Pater - The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry