Literally melancholy or melancholy means “black bile”. The Bloc Notes of Michael the Great
The word melancholy or melancholy derives from the Greek μελαγχολία (melancholia) composed of μέλας (black) and χολή (bile). Literally, therefore, melancholy or melancholy means “black bile”.
According to the theories of medicine of ancient Greece spread with the school of Hippocrates, the characters and the consequent human behaviors are determined by the combination of the four basic humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood (red mood).
Therefore, melancholy indicates that state of mind that derives from a mixture of sadness, restlessness, moodiness, boredom, gloom. The most archaic forms, melancholy and melancholy, no longer used in current language, are used in literature or in medicine to indicate the pathological state very close to what we now identify with the term depression.
Aristotle argued that all exceptional men – in philosophical or political, artistic or literary activity – have a melancholy temperament. But the Greek philosopher, as the neurologist Paolo Berruti wrote in a golden essay in the magazine PsicoArt (September 2014), is certainly not responsible for the urban legend, widespread in environments between the bohemian and the neurotic, according to which to be “artists” it is necessary to be depressed.
Bad literature has helped cultivate this misconception. Hence the myth of depression as a distinctive trait of the cultural elites and the upper middle classes, while today’s epidemiological studies show that it affects all social classes. In this confusion the very essence of it has been lost sight of. Fundamental – says Berruti – and therefore to keep firm the distinction between melancholy temperament and illness.
To simplify, they can represent the category of melancholy Giacomo Leopardi and also Cesare Pavese, who took his own life in 1950 with a lucid rational motivation, just as Seneca did in 65 AD Different, and representative of the category of disease, and instead suicide , in 1961, by Ernest Hemingway overwhelmed by a manic-depressive psychosis. Fortunately, suicide is not the obligatory conclusion of a pathology which in the most serious cases has the characteristics of a biological and totalizing imbalance of the mind.
It is an anguished and profound suffering whose end cannot be imagined, a dense labyrinth of which the sick person does not see or seeks the way out. While the schizophrenic has no awareness of the disease, the endogenously depressed has no confidence in therapy. Nothing can change. Nothing can help. True depression, Berruti warns with an effective image, and like a sea without lights, without horizons, without beaches (psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy do not always work miracles). That hope that fortunately today smiles even to those suffering from a tumor, is denied to the depressed. It is therefore evident that “in the presence of true depression there is no creative-artistic possibility”. What exists, however, in the phase of approaching these depressive “maximum depths”, but above all in the phases of ascent.
In this sense, a famous symbolic work comes to mind: “Melencolia” by Albrecht Durer, perhaps the only truly Renaissance German artist. Dated 1514, and a “burin”, that is a print obtained with a steel point capable of engraving the copper plate – then inked – with a very clear and eloquent sign. A complex work, evidently thought for a long time, which has different interpretations, and which does not coincidentally coincide with the year of death of the painter’s mother. The solemn figure, half-closed wings and gaze into space, seated on a stone step, with the head supported by an arm propped up by the knee, perfectly represents the inertia of the folding, typical of the depressed person. And a feminine image, which alludes to the prevalence of depression in women. Even the dog, a faithful friend, lies motionless and curled up in itself. Only a small winged genius appears active and writes, as if to testify to a modicum of vitality not entirely lost. The tools of work abandoned on the ground indicate the lack of meaning and use, in this situation of ghostly light, in which life is immobile and crystallized.
In a dark sky, on a sea that we imagine cold and still, the word Melencolia is carried in flight by a bat, an ambiguous animal that fears the light, with wings iconographically similar to those of the devil, a fallen angel. This is the work of the inability to find a connection with life, and everything is abandonment. The essence of depression, as Berruti (who is also an art collector) keenly observes here beautifully understood. The presence of the rainbow also means, with the bright light of the comet, hope or the re-emergence of vitality. And the “return to the light”. And this tells us that here we see represented, with great ingenuity, the melancholy temperament and not the endogenous depression, which hopes for nothing in the acute phase.
In more recent times, “The Scream” (1893), the masterpiece of Edvard Munch, deserves to be mentioned. And a tempera and pastel on paper, in dark, typically depressive shades: the portrayed subject, leaving the world behind, goes towards the observer, screaming all his anguish, with his head in his hands. The representation is of an exceptional and engaging or, more precisely, shocking icastic force. Like the painter’s experience: “I heard a scream through nature […], the colors were screaming”. The artist painted “Melancholia” the year before, and there too there is the gesture of turning one’s back on nature and the surrounding world, that is, on life. The two works almost seem to presage his hospitalization in a psychiatric clinic. In confirmation, a confession from him: “my paintings are my diary”.
And finally, to close with a closer example, which is linked to psychopathology: “Painting is a way of making one’s despair more bearable by transferring it to the canvas”. Word of the English painter Francis Bacon, who died in 1992.
