Dr. Laurinda Dixon

"Feeling blue?", "Down in the dumps?", or "In a bad humour?" Most people have expressed these sentiments at one time or another in their lives. But these words once described a real medical disorder, "melancholia," ruled by the planet Saturn and the element of earth. Aristotle was the first to associate the physical and psychological symptoms of melancholia (depression, sociopathy, pallor, dark ringed eyes, etc.) with intellectual geniuses. But he left artists out of the equation. It was the German polymath Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), who added creative artists to the mix, uniting manual skill, creative genius, and social alienation in a new paradigm of privilege and passion. His famous engraving Melencolia 1(1514) became a model for centuries thereafter for artists wishing to present themselves as gifted, erudite, and tortured by the dark side of genius. In the following centuries, Dürer’s model prevailed, as artists continued to define and refine a new elite identity in which self-worth did not depend on noble blood or material wealth, but rather on talent and intellect. They expressed this concept in their own self-portraits, which appealed to an audience whose gaze was trained to discern the invisible internal self by means of external appearances. Though the term “melancholia” has all but vanished from psychological discourse, the condition persists in disorders like depression and bi-polarism. Today, the troubled persona of the artist-genius continues to embody the alienating and depersonalizing forces of civilization.