Generous melancholy: Saturn, genius and Dürer

Why are all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts melancholic? The question opens the thirtieth book of the Problemata, a collection of questions attributed to Aristotle but probably composed in his school. From that page springs one of the most fascinating ideas of European culture: that melancholy, considered by physicians a dangerous excess of black bile, could also be the sign of an exceptional intelligence. The Renaissance turned it into a true doctrine of genius.

Black bile in ancient medicine

According to the theory of the four humours, developed by Hippocratic medicine and systematised by Galen, the human body is governed by blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The predominance of one or another determines the temperament: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic. Black bile, melaina chole in Greek, was associated with earth, autumn and old age, and its excess was held to cause sadness, fear and disease.

The text of the Problemata introduces a decisive distinction. Black bile, the author observes, is unstable like wine: when it is too hot or too cold it produces madness or dejection, but when it is tempered in the right measure it makes men excellent. The melancholic thus becomes an ambivalent figure, suspended between illness and greatness, between despondency and inspiration.

Ficino, Saturn and scholars

Marsilio Ficino, who considered himself born under the sign of Saturn, took up the theme in the first book of De vita, published in 1489 and devoted to the health of men of letters. Saturn, the slowest and most distant planet, was traditionally considered baleful, lord of solitude and melancholy. Ficino proposed a new reading: the same Saturn that oppresses ordinary people favours contemplation and the search for hidden things.

In studies of this subject the noble melancholy, distinct from the morbid kind, is often referred to as “generous melancholy”. Ficino advised intellectuals to temper it with the influence of benign planets, such as Jupiter and Venus, through a balanced life, music and friendships: recommendations that belong to the medicine of his time and should be read as historical documents.

Agrippa and Dürer's Melencolia I

Cornelius Agrippa developed the theory in the first book of De occulta philosophia, distinguishing three degrees of melancholic frenzy. In the first, inspired imagination produces excellent artists and craftsmen; in the second, illuminated reason produces philosophers, physicians and orators; in the third, the elevated mind knows divine things. Melancholy thus becomes a ladder of talent, consistent with the structure of the three worlds.

In 1514 Albrecht Dürer engraved Melencolia I, a winged figure seated among geometrical instruments, an hourglass and a magic square. Erwin Panofsky, together with Fritz Saxl and Raymond Klibansky in the book Saturn and Melancholy, proposed reading it in the light of Agrippa's doctrine, which Dürer might have known through the manuscript version of 1510. The hypothesis is suggestive but remains debated, because there is no direct documentary evidence.

Generous melancholy united medicine, astrology and philosophy in an image destined to last. From the Renaissance onwards, the solitary and thoughtful artist, marked by a fruitful sadness and an inexhaustible curiosity, became a familiar figure of European culture. Romanticism made it one of its favourite emblems, often forgetting the medical and astrological roots of the idea.