MÉLANCOLIE
Génie et folie en Occident
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais
until January 16
Jean Clair, editor
MÉLANCOLIE
Génie et folie en Occident
504pp. Éditions de la Réunion des
Musées Nationaux/Gallimard. 59euros.
2 07 0111831 2
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl
SATURNE ET LA MÉLANCOLIE
738pp. Paris: Gallimard. 79euros.
2 07 071566 3
Hélène Prigent
MÉLANCOLIE
Les métamorphoses de la dépression
160pp. Gallimard. 13.90euros.
2 07 0305996
Among the nearly 300 works on show in Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident, the complex and hugely ambitious exhibition currently running at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, is a copy of Robert Burton’s miscellaneous masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Littered with Bible quotations, Latin tags and allusions to everything from Chinese jugglers to the diversity of meteors, this promiscuous leviathan of a book is a good example of the dangers that lie in store for the student of melancholy. Originally designed as a medical treatise, it had grown, by the time Burton had seen it through its fifth and final edition, to half a million words and touched on virtually everything under the sun: literature, religion, philosophy, climatology, cosmography, folklore, politics, love, social reform. Burton even gives us a blueprint for Utopia. There is, it seems, no area of human activity that is not, in some shape or form, subject to the baneful influence of black bile, no nook or cranny of the mind into which this “roving humour” has not insinuated itself. It is “inbred in every one of us”, an infirmity of body and soul that dogs our every step.
Burton’s genial masterpiece is also a good illustration of one of the more puzzling features of melancholy. That reclusive clergyman may have “lived and died in melancholy”, as his epitaph in Christ Church says, but, paradoxically, this doesn’t seem to have hampered his genius in any way. On the contrary, we may find ourselves wondering whether the good-natured gusto with which he gives himself up to his task, the ferment apparent on every page, isn’t connected in some mysterious way with the very nature of his theme.
This fundamental ambivalence is what the Paris exhibition sets out to explore. That a condition which we would today class as an acute form of depression might, under certain conditions, not merely have a constructive role to play in the life of the mind, but be the main driving force behind creative inspiration, is an idea that first gained widespread currency in the Renaissance and was to have profound implications for the development of every aspect – literature, painting, science, medicine, technology – of intellectual life in the West.
To understand how this revolutionary transformation came about, we need to turn to a book – long out of print in English, but reissued in French to coincide with the exhibition – in which three distinguished scholars, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, set out to examine the subject, and from which all subsequent interpretations, including many of the essays in the exhibition’s bulky catalogue, take their cue. According to the authors of Saturne et la mélancolie, this reappraisal of the notion of melancholy was first effected very early on in the history of medicine, sometime in the fourth century bc when the doctrine of the Four Humours recently formulated by Hippocrates came under the influence of the portrayals of madness in Greek tragedy and the Platonic notion of “divine frenzy”. The text in which this new conception of melancholy is introduced for the first time is known as “Problem XXX, I”, and is reproduced, along with a detailed commentary, at the beginning of their book; attributed by the Greeks to Aristotle, it is probably, we are told, the work of Theophrastus.
The question posed by “Problem XXX, I” is in the opening sentence: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics . . . ?”. By way of example, the text cites not only tragic heroes such as Herakcules, Bellerophon and Ajax, but philosophers (Empedocles, Plato and Socrates) “and almost everyone in the realm of poetry”. For the author of “Problem XXX, I”, that is, the sufferings of the philosopher and the frenzy that led Ajax to slay a flock of sheep in the belief that he was actually slaying his enemies can alike be attributed to the influence of black bile. What makes this text so important, Klibansky and his colleagues argue, is that in distinguishing between melancholy as a sickness, or medical pathology, and melancholy as a disposition characteristic of the outstanding individual, it opens the way not only for the transformation of an essentially pathological taxonomy (the classical doctrine of the Four Humours) into a psychological one (the medieval theory of the Four Temperaments), but also for the Renaissance rehabilitation of melancholy that was to prove so influential in so many spheres.
There was nothing inevitable about this. Tucked away in a relatively minor text from the “Aristotelian” corpus, the new conception of melancholy could easily have passed unnoticed, and, according to these authors, this is precisely what happened. For 1,200 years, the idea of the gifted melancholic was forgotten, and it wasn’t until the medieval schoolmen began their rehabilitation of Aristotle that any attempt was made to integrate the ideas set out in the Problems with a Western perspective. Even then, they tell us, what references there were to the Problems were little more than scholarly allusions, with no serious bearing on science or philosophy. It was only when the humanists of the Quattrocento turned their attentions to his work that the decisive shift occurred,
due largely to the efforts of one man, the
great Italian philosopher and scholar, father of Renaissance Platonism, Marsilio Ficino.
In De vita triplici (1489), the first book to treat of melancholy at any length, Ficino not only rehabilitated the “Aristotelian” notion of the gifted melancholic, but expressly tied it in with the Platonic notion of “divine frenzy”, thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a new type of man, the “homo literatus” or tortured genius, pitched back and forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair. The book, Klibansky tells us, is “a marvel of its kind”, elegantly binding in hermeticism and Neoplatonism with classical and Christian themes, and offsetting the negative influence exercised by Saturn/Kronos in medieval astronomy against the healing power of Jove/Jupiter. The book was hugely influential throughout Europe, particularly in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and without it there would probably have been no Burton, no “Il Penseroso”, no “Ode to Melancholy”, and, very likely, no Doctor Faustus either.
For the visitor to the exhibition, it is important to know something of the scholarly background, for while some of the works on show – Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”, say, or Rodin’s “Thinker” – can be taken at face value, so to speak, there are many whose connection with melancholy is by no means evident. This is true not only of the early part of the exhibition, which follows closely the iconographic scheme outlined in Saturne et la mélancolie (the first room contains a series of works made between the sixth and the fourth century bc, including a black-figure amphora of “Ajax Preparing His Suicide” and a red-figure one of “Medea Slaying Her Child”, then leads straight on into the late Middle Ages), but true also of some of the later sections as well, which carry on the work begun by Panofsky and his colleagues – whose book basically stops with Dürer’s “Melencolia I” – down to the present day. The English-speaking visitor is at something of a disadvantage here, for, though the exhibition is impeccably laid out, it is the kind of show that can only be fully understood by sitting down and reading the catalogue edited by Jean Clair. If you want to know what Antoine Chintreuil’s luminous little “Silver Birch” is doing in a show on melancholy, or how David Nebreda’s horrific self-portrait photographs fit into the overall argument, you will need to consult the catalogue; which, unfortunately, is only available in French and German (the exhibition will be going on to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in February 2006).
The key exhibit in the early part of the exhibition is, of course, Dürer’s “Melencolia I”, and the various works on show to either side of it chronologically – from Gérard de Saint-Jean’s “St John the Baptist in the Wilderness” (c1480–85) to Cranach the Elder’s 1532 version of “Melancholy” – all bear in one form or other on the dilemma which first finds expression there. Dürer’s engraving is not simply the first great representation of melancholy, the first in which it takes on a life of its own, but the work on which the whole argument of Saturne et la mélancolie – and, by extension, the exhibition – turns.
The picture is at once immediately legible and deeply ambiguous. Seated on a step outside a narrow building with a ladder leaning against it is a winged angel. Her right arm rests on a book in her lap, the hand holding a compass; her left hand supports her head. Hanging from the belt of her long, rumpled skirt is a set of keys and a purse. Seated on a millstone to her right is a plump little putto bent studiously over a slate, and, curled up asleep next to the millstone, a scrawny-looking dog. Strewn about the ground are a variety of tools and instruments – a self-feeding furnace, or athanor, a polyhedron with a hammer lying beside it, a sphere, a set square, a pair of pincers, a plane, a handsaw, a ruler, three nails, and some sort of syringe. Fixed to the wall of the building are a set of scales, their pans exactly balanced, an hourglass with equal amounts of sand in each bulb, a bell at rest, and a “magic square” composed of sixteen smaller squares, each inscribed with a number so that whichever way you read the numbers (vertically, horizontally, diagonally) they always add up to thirty-four. In the background is a stretch of coastline overlooking an alarmingly calm lake or sea, and in the sky a comet, a rainbow and a batlike figure brandishing a streamer with the inscription “Melencolia I”. The scene is steeped in a lugubrious grey twilight.
What makes Dürer’s picture so enigmatic is precisely this superabundance of objects: it is “overdetermined” – has too many clues and signposts pointing in similar but not quite identical directions. What do the comet and the rainbow signify? Why does the ladder appear to change plane halfway up? Why are there three nails, one with a double tine? Are they an allusion to the Crucifixion? (Jean Clair thinks they are.) After reviewing in great detail the positive and negative associations of the various symbols and motifs (the purse, the keys and the clenched fist, for example, are all associated with avarice, one of the vices attributed to melancholy in the medieval period; the crown of watercress and waterparsley around the angel’s brow are an antidote to the dry humour of the melancholic; the magic square is designed to invoke the healing influence of Jupiter, and so on), Panofsky concludes that Dürer’s angel is a personification of Geometry overcome with Melancholy (or Melancholy giving herself up to Geometry) and was in all likelihood inspired by a follower of Ficino, the German philosopher Agrippa devon Nettesheim, whose book, De Occulta Philosophia, draws heavily on the Italian’s work, and a draft of which was sent to Dürer’s friend Johannes Trithemius, in 1510, just four years before the engraving was made.
Panofsky’s argument is persuasive, not least because it affords an explanation for one of the many riddles posed by the engraving: the number attached to the title. In De Occulta Philosophia, Agrippa distinguishes three kinds of melancholy: melancholia imaginationis,
melancholia rationis and melancholia mentis, arranged in an ascending hierarchy. The first holds sway over the untutored, a category that includes architects and painters; the second, over philosophers, physicians and orators; the third, over contemplatives to whom God’s mysteries have been revealed. Panofsky concludes from this, not unreasonably, that Dürer’s angel is a portrayal of the first of these, melancholia imaginationis, surrounded by her instruments but sunk in gloom at the thought of having accomplished nothing.
This is not the only way of reading the picture, of course, and in Mélancolie: Les métamorphoses de la dépression, the author Hélène Prigent shrewdly observes that Dürer could very well have included objects associated with melancholia rationis (books, instruments for weighing and measuring) to indicate the direction in which the first stage of melancholy was moving. This is perfectly plausible, since not only are the rainbow and the comet associated with both categories in Agrippa’s system, but the system itself, unlike Ficino’s, was fluid, not fixed, with the individual soul free to move up or down the hierarchy. In the catalogue, the curator of the German leg of the exhibition, Peter-Klaus Schuster, also takes issue with Panofsky’s interpretation, arguing that Dürer’s angel is an allegory, not of geometry but of astronomy, a “noble” art, and cannot possibly be taken as a symbol of Faust-like despair. Schuster then proposes a reading of his own, based on a division of the picture into two halves, the right side embodying virtù, the left side fortuna. I happen to find his interpretation unconvincing, in part because it involves seeing the sphere as a symbol of instability and the figure “I” in the title as a symbol of divine unity. There is nothing to prevent us putting a more positive gloss on the picture, however. As Schuster points out, Burton thought Dürer’s “sad angel . . . judicious, wise and witty”, and Aby Warburg saw her as Melancholy triumphing over the madness that threatens to engulf her. Nor, we should remember, was Dürer himself given to romanticizing melancholy: among the guidelines he sets out for the young apprentice in his Outline of a General Treatise on Painting we find, “Sixth, if the child works too hard, whereby melancholy might superabound in him, that he be drawn away therefrom by merry lute-play to the pleasuring of his blood”.
In a sense, the precise interpretation we put on the picture is not important. What matters is the intimate bond it establishes between the rational imagination and the black waters of despair. As Jean Clair remarks a little further on in the catalogue, “‘Melencolia I’ marks that fleeting and remarkable moment in the history of western thought when the artist believes he has become a polymath, an engineer, a geometer, a botanist and a physician, capable of taking the knowledge and measure of all things, numero et pondere, even as he discovers, with a start, that no mathesis universalis can re-order and gather together the disjecta membra of the real”. And it is this outlook or belief, Clair suggests, that lays the foundations for the growth of science and, ultimately, for the domination of the world by technology.
This is an intriguing thesis, and one that, because it touches on so many different fields, the works on show can only go so far towards illustrating. Even with the aid of wall texts, there is a limit to how much a painting or sculpture can be made to say. Both the Mélancolie exhibition and the catalogue grapple with this problem, not always successfully, and the solution they adopt is a mixed one, part iconographic, part chronological. Broadly speaking, the shifting attitudes to melancholy are treated century by century, but within that scheme, works from a different period may be interpolated to point up echoes or affinities. The section on the late Middle Ages, for example, also includes one of Max Ernst’s most powerful and disturbing paintings, the large, “flying” version of “The Angel of the Hearth”, in which the somewhat pantomime-like monster of the smaller canvas (mistakenly reproduced in its stead in the catalogue) has been replaced by a truly hideous and altogether more ominous-looking angel, “part bat, part witch”, lurching menacingly towards the viewer over a deserted landscape. The reason it has been placed there is not only for the echoes it contains of various late medieval paintings of the Temptation of St Anthony (one of the themes explored in the section), but, as Werner Spies remarkssays in the catalogue, for the historical pessimism it implies: as though, with the horrors of the twentieth century, the West had finally come full circle. Painted in 1937 after the defeat of the Spanish Republicans, it was almost certainly inspired by “Guernica” and, impressively, bears comparison with Picasso’s famous icon.
Achronological juxtapositions of this kind can be found all through the exhibition. Picasso’s “Death’s Head”, for example, modelled during the Occupation, appears among a group of grisly seventeenth-century works on the theme of vanitas, while Giacometti’s so-called “Cube” – a twelve-sided polyhedron made after visiting a Dürer exhibition in Paris in 1937 – has been installed in the middle of the exhibition’sMélancolie’s “cabinet of curiosities”, a room given over to the instruments and emblems of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science. The objects and works in this room – which include a planispheric astrolabe, a gilded bronze heavenly globe, a bat’s skeleton, a unicorn’s horn (that is, a narwhal’s tusk) and an anonymous, sixteenth-century copy of a Dürer watercolour of blue columbine – are particularly well chosen, and all, of course, are linked in one way or another to the theme of the exhibition: unicorn’s horn, for instance, was widely believed to be a remedy for melancholy, and blue columbine had been associated with the affliction ever since the fifteenth century.
