Experts find out the person who scribbled on Edvard Munch's famous painting 'The Scream'

Almost everyone has encountered Edvard Munch's "The Scream." The painting elicits deep emotions, so much so that someone scribbled in Norwegian on the top left corner, "Could only have been painted by a madman!" This mystery has fascinated people since the words were first discovered in 1904, eleven years after the painting's creation in 1893. The National Museum of Norway recently revealed who actually wrote these words, surprising many.

Surprisingly, the hidden message wasn't written by a critic or a visitor disturbed by the artwork. It wasn't vandalism either. The painter himself wrote those words. According to the museum, the sentence in the sky was not widely known. Mai Britt Guleng, a curator at the National Museum, has studied Munch and "The Scream" extensively. She identified the artist's handwriting using an infrared camera, which revealed the sentence without harming the painting.

"You have to get quite close to see the inscription. We seldom find such inscriptions on paintings, particularly not on one of the world's most famous ones. Given that it's such an important work in the history of international art, the inscription has received remarkably little attention," Guleng said. "The writing is without a doubt Munch's own. The handwriting itself as well as events that happened in 1895, when Munch showed the painting in Norway for the first time, all point in the same direction," the curator told BBC. The handwriting was compared to Munch's diaries and letters of the time, as reported by CBS News and researchers have interpreted that it is the same. 

"The theory is that Munch wrote this after hearing Scharffenberg's judgment on his mental health sometime in or after 1895. It is reasonable to assume that he did it quite soon after, either during or following the exhibition in Kristiania," Guleng stated. The artist was deeply affected by people's perception of him and his painting and the harsh criticism it drew from art critics and the public. "It was very important for him to take control of his own self-understanding and also how others understood him. This was maybe an act of taking control because others had said that he was mad, but saying, 'I can make a joke about that,'" the curator told The Guardian.

"Munch was also generally concerned about the idea of hereditary disease in the family. Both his father and grandfather suffered from what was then referred to as melancholy and his sister Laura Munch had been admitted to Gaustad Psychiatric Hospital," Guleng pointed out. "The inscription can be read as an ironic comment, but at the same time as an expression of the artist's vulnerability. Writing on the finished painting shows that creating for Munch was a continuous process." Munch even went as far as to write, "For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without this anxiety and illness, I would have been like a ship without a rudder," as per BBC.