Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness

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6 min readNov 7, 2017

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figure 1. Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I (1514)

Melancholy as we understand it today, as differing from from depression or sadness, includes a special kind of thoughtfulness, contemplation, and introspection that makes it something desirable and admired in others. The range that exists between the negative and positive poles of melancholy lends itself to complex and refined reflection, and the pleasures that might come from indulging in such a state. We are comfortable with turns of phrase such as “Mozart’s exquisitely melancholy clarinet concerto”, while “Mozart’s exquisitely depressing clarinet concerto” fails to hit the right chord. But this has not always been so. Before melancholy could be understood in this way, could be so pervasive through contemporary human experience, artists, like Albrecht Dürer, had to create it as such. Before people could acknowledge this aspect of their experience of the self, older notions of melancholy, as an illness, had to be revised. This process can be observed in the works of Dürer, in the the Renaissance. Here lies also the significance of melancholy within these works. Melancholy is, within these works, being created, through the expression of the persona of the artist, and it was understood. It was so well understood, and so seized upon, that it has taken over, until the point by which no one questions its role. It is now not only the domain of visual artists but also, critically, making the leap between disciplines including music ranging from Radiohead to The Smashing Pumpkins and taken for granted.

figure 2. Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo (1534)

Popularised by Greek thinkers around 400 BC, melancholy was included as one of the four temperaments aligned with the ancient medical and protoscientific concept of humourism. Like other contemporaneous quadralities, such as “earth, fire, water, air”, the four seasons of the weather, and the ages of man, the four temperaments of humourism shoehorned the complexity of the human condition into four misleadingly neat categories. These ideas were both debated and revived in the Renaissance, when it was also expanded through the addition of astrology and medicine. Melancholy translates directly as “black bile” and in humourism was associated with earth, autumn, adulthood, the gallbladder, and of being dry and cold. It was considered at the time to be not only an emotional state but also a physical condition that could be altered with medicine.

figure 3. Auguste Rodin, The thinker (Le Penseur) (1881)

It was not until Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, 1514 (figure 1) that we were able to see a positive portrayal of melancholy. In the background of the picture top left, the arc we see is actually a rainbow haloing a comet which is supposed to depict the “twilight of melancholy”. The prominent angel in the foreground rests head heavy upon hand, face overcome with a pensive gloom. This is not only the first time these motifs are used in the portrayal of the mood of melancholy but is the work that established them. We can easily see examples of this in Michelangelo’s Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici, 1534 (figure 2), and Rodin’s The Thinker, 1902 (figure 3). This is also the first time we see an artist willingly aligning themselves with the melancholic temperament as a positive addition to their practice. Dürer has also incorporated many medieval symbols, symbols of the occult, Saturn, and astrology in the image. Also worth noting is that the angel is the embodiment of geometry. By her feet rest her tools as if suddenly stilled by this melancholia. The geometric solid sitting to her left is a truncated triangular trapezohedron, which was to become known as “Durer’s solid”. However, it is perhaps the angel’s eyes which are the standout feature. In renaissance artwork great emphasis is often placed on the eyes. In medieval paintings this is usually achieved by directing a brightly illuminated gaze directly at the viewer. In Melancholia I while the gaze is still brightly illuminated, it is averted towards Dürer’s solid, all of this assisting in the portrayal of an inward illumination and reflection. Melancholy was, for Dürer at least, the mode of genius.

figure 4. Cover art for 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness', John Craig (1995)

500 years later, the path forged by Dürer has enabled different art forms to work with a positive melancholy with an intent indistinguishable from that of Melancholia I but without the burden of the establishment of it’s meaning. In 1995, alternative-rock band The Smashing Pumpkins released the double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and for lead signer Billy Corgan and his bandmates it was to be the pinnacle of their commercial and creative success. The cover artwork (figure 4) was created by collage artist John Craig and features two famous paintings. Craig is on record stating that “anybody familiar with art history will tell you what those pieces are; for that reason only, I guess I can’t.” The two works are The Souvenir (Fidelity), 1787–1789 by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1507. The music itself, of which there is over 2 hours, finds plenty of riffs and ballads that can be called melancholic. While the The Pumpkin’s distorted guitar resonates differently to the melancholia of the Renaissance, the mood of the Renaissance is not completely absent; Sylvia Plath is quoted in the single Zero, reading: “Intoxicated with the madness, I’m in love with my sadness”. Apart from it’s homophonic namesake the album owes a great debt to Dürer’s transformation of melancholia into a positive component to art making. The two artworks are also connected in another way, Melancholia I was designed as product for mass production, and the success of this and other engravings afforded Dürer the freedom to publish and sell his own works with creative freedom. Dürer was able to find commercial success in the Renaissance by showing people something that they had never been able to articulate before, the Smashing Pumpkins were able to sell 10 million albums by translating this into teenage cool.

Due to the explicit nature of eyesight and the way in which we use it to verify our reality, it is the visual arts that are inherently disadvantaged when it comes to conveying emotional content. We will resist fiction in a painting. Music on the other hand is very often devoid of objective content and is the easiest art in which to put forward and draw out a particular mood. While a painting or drawing presents itself at once to be judged and is vanished once we look away, music is inescapable for its duration. Music transmits through the air like a spectre, and is composed of individual sounds often much harder to pinpoint than the hand of the artist amongst brushstrokes or draftsmanship. If it was Dürer who first gave birth to the melancholic artist in a positive light, it has surely been the musicians who have profited the most from the long standing and indelible marriage of melancholia and the artist that persists to this day.

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Bibliography

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