...what he saw, so that for him, to take one example, numbers have shapes: 6, he says, for example, is "a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a moustache; 8 a very stout woman—a sack within a sack" (1987:31). That Van Gogh himself experienced a similarly distinctive...

...green, a green flowerpot appears; with the word red l see a man in a red shirt coming towards me ... Even numbers remind me of images. Take the number...2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person (why l don't know); 6 a man with a swollen foot . . . (Record of September 1936) (Luria, 1968, p. 30) These...