Privileged Piety: Melancholia and the Herbal Tradition

Rembrandt van Rijn,  Saint Jerome Beside a Pollard Willow, 1648, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This article is concerned with melancholia, a disease of fashion in the early modern era, which was associated with qualities of genius, privilege, and piety. Focusing on melancholia’s contradictory humoral qualities, which instigated both heightened inspiration (heat) and depressed spirits (cold), this study maintains that artists exercised calculated iconographical choices in depictions of hermits and scholars, both melancholic archetypes. Specifically, painters reinforced medical tradition by the knowing use of botanical imagery to suggest melancholia’s ambivalent nature and the necessity of achieving humoral balance in its cure.

DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2009.1.2.1

Acknowledgements

Research for this article, which is related to my book-length study The Dark Side of Genius: Art and the Melancholic Persona, 1500-1700, was made possible through the assistance of the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I also thank Wayne Franits for his generous bibliographic assistance. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

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Review: Peer Review (Double Blind)
DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2009.1.2.1
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation:
Laurinda S. Dixon, "Privileged Piety: Melancholia and the Herbal Tradition," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 1:2 (Summer 2009) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2009.1.2.1