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History of Madness is a text marked by the same critique of the dialectical tradition defended by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. This becomes clear when Foucault differentiates two types of “experiences” of madness in the frontier between Medievalism and Renaissance: a tragic experience of madness, which reigns on the pictorial arts by Bosch and Bruegel, opposed to a critical experience, majorly expressed in comical and moral literary texts by Brant and Erasmus. Based on this distinction, Foucault asserts that the difference between the tragic and the critical experiences of madness occurs when Bosch reveals the limits of verbal language, historical fact acknowledged by Foucault as “the decay of Gothic symbolism”. The aim of this essay is to reveal the anachronism of Foucault’s historical interpretation, stressing how Nietzsche’s critique of the dialectical tradition of Plato and Hegel contributed to the formulation of a hypothesis without historiographic rigor.