COVER TO COVER
MELANCHOLIA: A SORROWFUL MUSE
VIVIAN HART
December 13, 2024
During the darker days of the year, the shadow of melancholia, as ancient as humanity itself, haunts the human soul more than during any other season. Our understanding of this enigmatic phenomenon has evolved through the centuries in dramatically diverse avenues of inquiry—medical, philosophical, literary, artistic, and beyond. From its origins in Greek antiquity, to its medieval and Renaissance interpretations, to its contemporary guise as depression, melancholia has been regarded as simultaneously a fascinating and alluring personal quality, and a malady to treat or heal.
Robert Burton’s monumental work The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in England in 1621, stands as a towering beacon on the subject. This labyrinthine text, vast and sprawling, straddles disciplines and eras with ease, weaving together threads from medicine, theology, philosophy, and literature. Burton’s opus is a kaleidoscope of melancholia, refracting the condition through multiple lenses and offering insights that transcend time. Drawing deeply from ancient sources such as Aristotle and Galen, and merging them with Renaissance occultism, theological musings, and his own observations, Burton’s textual tapestry is as intricate as it is profound.
Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), a Renaissance masterpiece, serves as a visual counterpart to Burton’s intellectual exploration. The engraving portrays an angel, weary and brooding, surrounded by cryptic tools and a desolate landscape—a scene heavy with the weight of the intellect’s burden. This image, steeped in symbolism, encapsulates the complex relationship between creativity and melancholia, where the mind’s fertile depths are shadowed by sorrow.
Burton’s exploration of melancholia reflected the intellectual currents of its time, but it was hardly a mere academic exercise; it was a profound journey into the very fabric of early modern thinking, connecting the ancient with the contemporary, the physical with the metaphysical, empirical observation with philosophical speculation. It was a window into past definitions, yet it resonated with its own present and anticipated developments in the centuries that would follow, foreshadowing our modern understanding of melancholia.
The earliest known treatments for melancholia were steeped in the wisdom of antiquity. Aristotle, in his Problemata (ca. 4th century BCE), offered a vision of the malady that was both physiological and philosophical. Mostly he attributed it to an excess of black bile, per Hippocratic medicine. The balance of the four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—was a key concept of Galan’s De locis affectis (ca. 176–78 CE), and supposedly determined a person’s health, both bodily and mental. Aristotle’s inquiry into why so many people gifted in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts were afflicted with melancholia suggested that this condition, while a physical ailment, was fundamentally associated with heightened intellectual or creative potential. This conception fused melancholia with genius, a notion that would echo through time, influencing not just medical theory but artistic expression as well.
This ancient understanding finds a modern resonance in the works of artists like Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose painting Rest (1905) captures the quiet introspection of the melancholic soul. The solitary figure, lost in thought, mirrors the brooding contemplation that Aristotle keenly observed—a meditation on the solitude that often accompanies creative genius.
During the medieval period, melancholia remained primarily understood through the lens of humoral theory inherited from ancient Greece. The philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (ca. 970–1037), known in the West as Avicenna, whose reputation flourished during the Islamic Golden Age (lasting from the eighth to the thirteenth century), expanded on these ideas. He viewed melancholia not only as a physical condition but also as a spiritual and moral one, and associated it with contemplation and intellectual pursuits, particularly among scholars, whose deep thinking was believed to predispose them to melancholic states. This dual regard of melancholia as both a (treatable) physical ailment and a (more numinous) temperament intertwined medicine, philosophy, and spirituality.
Through the Renaissance and early modern periods, popular and scientific understandings of melancholia further interwove with ideas of creativity and intellectual power. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533) exemplified this transformation, linking melancholia with both physical ailment and the pursuit of esoteric knowledge and magical insight. For Agrippa, melancholia was a gateway—a state of being that could unlock the hidden mysteries of the universe. His vision of it as both curse and blessing would influence generations of thinkers who followed, inspiring a vision of the melancholic as one who walks the razor’s edge between despair and transcendence.
This mystical interpretation finds its visual echo in the work of contemporary artists like Michaël Borremans and Marlene Dumas. Borremans’s One (2003) presents a solitary figure, isolated and introspective, embodying the Renaissance ideal of the melancholic genius. Similarly, Dumas’s Gelijkenis I & II (2002) portrays figures that hover between reality and a more introspective world, capturing the liminal space where melancholia and creativity meet.
While melancholia in the Renaissance was often celebrated as a mark of genius, the nineteenth century saw it subjected to scientific scrutiny within the burgeoning field of psychiatry. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la folie (1838) was among the first to classify melancholia as a specific mental illness, coining the term “lypemania” to describe its symptoms of intense sadness and despondency. Esquirol’s work marked a significant shift toward a clinical understanding of melancholia, presaging the future of psychiatric medicine.
Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (1891) continued the Renaissance association between melancholia and creativity but introduced a new emphasis on pathological aspects. For Lombroso, the close association between melancholia and genius readily lent itself to madness, a tragic consequence of the artist’s heightened sensitivity. This idea of the “mad genius” proceeded to permeate the cultural imagination, influencing figures like Sigmund Freud, whose seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) distinguished between the two titular subjects. Freud’s exploration of melancholia as a form of self-destructive grief, rooted in unconscious identification with a lost object, added new layers to this complex condition.
In Freud’s work we see echoes of Burton’s insights, particularly the idea of melancholia as tied to personal and existential loss. But whereas Burton saw melancholia as a condition of both body and soul, Freud leaned harder on the psyche, offering a framework that would inform much of the twentieth century’s conception of mental illness. As psychiatric medicine developed, melancholia transitioned further from its humoral roots toward a more nuanced consideration of brain chemistry and neurology.
But even as melancholia became more clinically understood, it continued to haunt the artistic imagination. Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath and Small Dog (1941–46) delicately captures an intimate, personal scene of melancholia, reflecting the era’s growing regard of the condition as deeply individual and intimately tied to everyday life. Here, melancholia is not grand or dramatic but quiet, personal, almost ordinary—a reflection of the human condition itself.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen melancholia examined through ever more diverse lenses, from the sociocultural to the psychoanalytic. Wolf Lepenies’s book Melancholy and Society (1969) explored it as a cultural phenomenon, tracing its influence on intellectual and artistic movements like Expressionism and Surrealism. Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele portrayed the angst and existential dread of the modern world, often through melancholic subjects and moods. Surrealism, with its exploration of dreams and the unconscious, delved into themes of loss, longing, and deep sadness, with artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte creating works that evoke unresolved tensions via a melancholic undercurrent.
Postmodernism, emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century, might be seen as a form of cultural melancholia marked by skepticism and disillusionment over narratives of progress and enlightenment—a kind of doubt and questioning that mourns lost certainties. Lepenies argues that melancholia is not merely an individual experience but one deeply embedded in the social and cultural fabric, a notion that echoes Burton’s work, which itself reflected the cultural anxieties of early modern England.
Julia Kristeva’s book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) offers a psychoanalytic and feminist reading of melancholia, linking it with language, desire, and creativity. Kristeva moves beyond Freud to explore melancholia’s role in artistic expression and its connection to the maternal and symbolic orders. For Kristeva, melancholia is not just a psychological disorder but a profound existential despair that can also be a source of creativity and insight. Her interpretation of melancholia as a force that both destroys and creates bridges the psychoanalytic and the sociocultural.
In the visual arts, this is epitomized in works like Elizabeth Peyton’s painting Jarvis (1996), an intimate and personal depiction of Jarvis Cocker, the often-mournful singer-songwriter from the British band Pulp. Peyton’s work captures the melancholic essence of a figure lost in thought, highlighting the ongoing cultural fascination with the hopelessness of life as well as themes of loss and introspection.
Andrew Solomon’s book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001) brought the discussion of melancholia into the twenty-first century, framing it against contemporary understandings of depression. A blend of memoir, scientific inquiry, and cultural study, the text reflects melancholia’s redefinition in modern psychiatry. Solomon traces the historical roots of depression back to melancholia, drawing connections between Burton’s work and the ways in which we conceptualize and treat mental illness today.
From its ancient roots in Aristotle and Galen through the medieval synthesis of Avicenna and the Renaissance conceptions of Agrippa and Burton, melancholia has remained a persistent and multifaceted concept. Yet as the dialogue around it has expanded to incorporate psychoanalytic, sociocultural, and medical perspectives, The Anatomy of Melancholy maintains its relevance. Burton’s comprehensive examination of melancholia through diverse lenses highlighted the complexity of human emotions and their deep interconnection with cultural, philosophical, and medical contexts, and provided a rich foundation for subsequent thinkers.
The evolution of melancholia into the modern concept of depression illustrates the transformation of medical and psychological understandings over time. Today’s psychiatric approaches, which focus on biochemical imbalances and treatments, arguably echo the humoral theories discussed by Burton, albeit in a vastly different scientific framework. The enduring interest in linking melancholia with creativity and genius also continues to influence contemporary discussions, bridging medical pathology and artistic temperament.
Burton’s analysis remains a testament to the enduring human struggle to articulate the depths of emotional suffering. It connects internal individual experiences with broader existential questions, offering a rich tapestry of insights that still resonate. Burton’s method—encyclopedic, intertextual, and deeply humanistic—embodies a holistic approach to mental conditions that feels intensely contemporary, advocating as it does for the integration of medical, psychological, and social dimensions in mental health treatment.
Vivian Hart, born in the northern darkness of Kiruna, Sweden, on a cold and gloomy December day, is a writer who can turn an existential crisis into a quirky afternoon pastime, all while excelling at the deeply unexciting sport of competitive ice fishing. A devoted student of the grumpiest philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, Hart delves into life’s inevitable sorrows with an air of philosophical humor. Known for staring at dust motes while writing, she approaches her bouts of sadness with a raised eyebrow. Her essays invite laughter at life’s absurdities, proving that even in the depths of melancholy, a well-timed joke can brighten the dreariest moment.
Cover image: Elisabeth Peyton, Jarvis, 1996. Oil on panel, 27.9 x 35.6 cm
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