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CARLO FRANZA

A whole catalogue of books and a series of investigations fluorished around the problem of “melancholy” from the time of Michelangelo who wrote: “I live of my death and, if I look carefully, I live happy with a sad fate”. It was a self-portrait of his condition of artist, which mirrored what was already felt by Marsilio Ficino, when he described the figure of an artist: melancholic, which means “black of mood”, like the best-loved sons of Saturn, creative more than the sanguine, phlegmatic and bilious temperaments, but damned to the unhappiness of their own genius. The term “melancholy” is charged of suggestions and evocations and from its etymology it means the dark bile, natural mood responsible for the melancholic constitution, so that the melancholic path crosses all the concerned knowledge of pain and human nature, where medical needs, literary topics, philosphical hints converge, capable to develop the double enigma of the natural constitution of mankind and its world fate. Many were the artists and literary men mediated via melancholy. The concept of the melancholic man besides the genius which we find in the French text “L’homme de génie et la melancholie”, edited by J. Pigeaud, Rivages, 1988, clears how the black bile could induce a series of

manifestations even reaching the pathology, depending on the variations of his state. Poetry and art, the poetical gift, become the fruit of the humoral composition, while the psychic states become linked to physical states, with an inter-relationship between pathophysiology and behaviours, which will become a critical concept of the Western society, a true physiology of passions, which makes us to lie passively. Some authors studied this topic and wrote a “History of the Treatment of Melancholy from the Origins to 1900”, namely Starobinski, with a text published by Gierini e Associati, in 1990. This book contains a history of the theories of melancholy with their therapeutic efficacy.
Therefore, melancholic man is the object of care more than knowledge, well evidencing that the core problem is in the relationship between mind and body.
However, the melancholic man, in the opinion of Starobinski, is a symbol of being inaccessible. In the melancholic climate we also find a love passion, the “most melancholic”, in the opinion of Starobinski, is a symbol of being inaccessible. In the melancholic climate we also find a love passion, the "most melancholic", in the opinion of Ferrand, who, with his medical treatise "Erotic Melancholy. A Treatise on the Love Passion", published by Marsilio in 1991, suggests and discovers the rich literature of the XVI century about this topic. This is why erotic melancholy is a true disease, which later will disappear from psychiatric nosography.

A recent book by Borgna, "Malinconia" (Melancholy) published by Feltrinelli in 1992, introduces us into the core of pathologic experience, into the psychotic depressive condition. For Borgna psychotic melancholy is rooted in the depth of human condition, till the roots of live in itself, becoming also a literary and philosophic experience. Borgna in his book seized the unitariety of the various forms of clinical melancholy and of melancholic "Stimmung" (mood) of the creative experience in the identity of thematic developments.
Here is the melancholic, the fascinating creative artist, who lives inside before outside; here is the concepts of that essay of Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl made reference to the marginal note of the genius, which fascinated Albrecht Durer, contemporary of Michelangelo and permeated with the Italian culture he received from a fascination which ground and precedes Winckelmann and Goethe. We also could mention an infinite series of artists and works compete in that notion of "melancholy". Here not only the XIX century, with its romantic climate, but still early in the centuries, From Greek age to Piero della Francesca, in XVII century, and not last on our days, not to close with that climate of dismay which is drawn from the art of XX century, of the "magic realism" and of the "Roman school". To-day even the new schools of painting, from the American ones with Hochney, to Salvo, here in Italy, and to the recent possession of the total figuration which trembles for anxiety which the anguished and sad soul discharges onto the faces and bodies. Still to-day, melancholy is in the belief of mankind, in the drawers of the body, it is read in the eyes open wide on the universe.

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