7. Genius, Madness and Melancholy. Plato not only
opened up for all times the concept of divine rapture,
but was indirectly also responsible for the entrenched
alliance between genius and madness. Seneca's often
quoted dictum “There never has been great talent
without a touch of madness” which referred to the
Platonic fire of divine inspiration, was usually misun-
derstood. Dryden's “Great wits are sure to madness
near allied,/ And thin partitions do their bounds di-
vide,” and even Schopenhauer's “Genius is nearer to
madness than the average intelligence” echo the mis-
interpreted line from Seneca. But the myth of a close
alliance between genius and madness was not but-
tressed until the nineteenth century by professional
psychologists (such as J. Moreau, C. Lombroso, P. J.
Moebius, W. Lange-Eichbaum) and pseudo-clinical
evidence, so that many great nineteenth-century minds
such as Balzac, Rimbaud, and Taine took the supposed
connection between mental illness and artistic genius
for granted, and the belief in this connection has spread
so widely that it has become, in Lionel Trilling's phrase,
“one of the characteristic notions of our culture.” The
catchword “mad artist” of the
vox populi, however,
does not refer simply to lack of mental or emotional
stability. The notion nowadays implies “a mythical
picture of the creative man: inspired, rebellious, dedi-
cated, obsessive, alienated, as well as neurotic” (Philips,
1957).
For an understanding of the idea of the mad artist
before the nineteenth century, familiarity with Aris-
totle's doctrine of the Saturnine temperament is neces-
sary. Developing the Hippocratian humoral pathology,
Aristotle postulated a connection between the melan-
cholic humor and outstanding talent in the arts and
sciences. “All extraordinary men distinguished in phi-
losophy, politics, poetry, and the arts,” he maintained,
“are evidently melancholic.” But the melancholy of
such men is a precarious gift for, although only the
homo melancholicus can rise to the loftiest heights, he
is also prone to conditions bordering on insanity. It
was Marsilio Ficino who, in his De vita triplici
(1482-89), revived Aristotle's half-forgotten doctrine.
Moreover, he took the important step of reconciling
Aristotle's and Plato's views by maintaining that mel-
ancholy, the ambivalent temperament of those born
under the equally ambivalent planet Saturn was simply
a metonymy for Plato's divine mania (Klibansky,
Panofsky, and Saxl, 1964). Ficino's conclusion was
widely accepted: only the melancholic temperament
was capable of Plato's enthusiasm.
From then on gifted men were categorized as
saturnine and, conversely, no outstanding intellectual
or artistic achievement was believed possible unless its
author was melancholic. In the sixteenth century a
veritable wave of “melancholic behavior” swept across
Europe (Babb, 1951). Many great artists—and not only
they—were described as melancholic, among them
Dürer, Raphael, and Michelangelo (Wittkower, Born
Under Saturn, p. 104). Michelangelo's use of the terms
“madness” and “melancholy” in reference to himself
will now be more readily understood. They echo
Ficino's uniting of Platonic “madness” and Aristotelian
“melancholy,” and there is reason to assume that it
was this alliance that many a Renaissance artist re-
garded as essential for his own creativity.
But even at the height of the vogue of melancholy,
doubts were voiced, and eventually the Renaissance
concept of the melancholicus was supplanted by the
new image of the conforming artist. None of the great
seventeenth-century masters—Rubens and Bernini,
Rembrandt and Velázquez—was ever described as
melancholic and, indeed, showed any traces of the
affliction. It was not until the romantic era, with artists
such as Caspar David Friedrich (Hartlaub, 1951), that
melancholy appears once again as a condition of men
tal and emotional catharsis. Nevertheless, the Greek
humoral pathology was forever dethroned as early as
1697 with the publication of G. E. Stahl's Lehre von
den Temperamenten.
