Melancholy: The Enigma of Kiefer and Dürer

Anselm Kiefer, Der Rhein (Melancholia), 1982-2013. Collage of woodcut on canvas with acrylic and shellac, 374 x 330 cm. Private collection

Anselm Kiefer is a star in today’s international art scene. He started his production fifty years ago with photographic records of actions referring to Germany's memory, questioning whether the Nazi obsession with myths was an identity character of Germanic peoples. Kiefer's art comprises paintings, sculptures, and installations having subjects such as irreconcilable traumas, collective lamentations, and evocations of different cultures' spiritual hermeticism. Melancholy is intrinsic to his work, as is the way he transforms it into a kind of spiritual asceticism.

Several works by Kiefer include the word "melancholy" in their titles. One of them, his oldest, is Der Rhein (Melancholia), 1982-2013, a woodcut-large-dimension-painting hybrid in which we see the structure of a polyhedron, a recurring shape in the various Melancholia works Kiefer created later. This polyhedron is one of the most intriguing elements in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) engraving.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving, 24.1 x 19.1 cm. The Met, NYC

Melencolia I is a mystery. This engraving has been subject of speculation for centuries. Famous iconographers such as Warburg, Saxl, and Panofsky were truly obsessed by it. It is impossible to know how many people tried to decipher the hidden senses of Melencolia I. I do not know whether Kiefer has ever tried, but one thing is certain: his name is on the list of those who are mesmerized by the mystery of this engraving.

My name does not figure on the list of interpreters of Melencolia I, but it is a fact that this engraving has always piqued my interest. The articles I have read about it focus on analyzing symbolism in its elements, particularly the polyhedron, the magic square, the angel, and the dog. Even though different authors do not agree about the meaning of these symbols, they are unanimous in associating melancholy to the influence of the planet Saturn, or Chronos—which was how the Greek called Time. This association is suggested by the Neoplatonist approach to melancholy by philosopher Marsilio Ficino, whose thought was widely spread outside his native Florence in the early 1500s, when Dürer created his enigmatic Melencolia I.

This historical period, conventionally called the Renaissance, is lavish in essays dealing with the mind's imbalances. Bosch's Ship of Fools is a byproduct of these essays, as I discussed in a recent article. Among these Renaissance authors are Robert Burton, Henri More, Jacques Ferrand, the alchemist Paracelsus, and the German occultist Cornelius Agrippa, who is probably the most familiar to Dürer.

For these authors, melancholy is opposed to enthusiasm, just as we, today, in the 21st century, oppose depression and euphoria. Both in the 16th century and now, these opposing feelings are related to a certain perception of time. With melancholy, time does not seem to pass, intensifying the anguish of waiting for an outcome, whatever it may be. With euphoria, time is perceived as insufficient to immediately fulfill one’s desire. Both stem from the same emotion—so well-known and unfortunately increasingly common in the world we live in: Anxiety.

In my college days, professor Marilena Chauí used to talk about affects and affections in memorable lectures on Spinoza’s ethics. I learned from her that melancholy and enthusiasm had not always been considered diseases that needed medication. I also learned that enthusiasm—called mania or furor by Plato—produced drunks, fools, and lunatics, and that melancholy was not just a paralyzing feeling, but an invitation to body and soul exercises involving rationality, humility, and temperance. Accepting this invitation was like being inoculated against the anguish caused by melancholy itself.

Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514. Engraving, 24.6 x 18.9 cm. The Met, NYC

In the first volume of her monumental Nervura do real [Rib of the Real, 1999], in which Ms. Chauí demonstrates that accepting natural laws is a condition for the true freedom of beings, Melencolia I is mentioned as an announcement of antidotes to be utilized in the event of melancholic intoxication, antidotes highlighted by Dürer in another 1514 print, Saint Jerome in His Study. It is a pity Ms. Chauí did not expand on the subject. In any case, when I mused about her propositions, it seemed to me that the difference between these announced and highlighted antidotes was in the relationship between the characters represented and the objects surrounding them in each engraving. Melencolia I shows an inert, bored subject among objects that should attract his attention, while Jerome presents an active figure, focused on performing a single task.

We live in melancholic times. The cause of this emotion is known and common to all mankind. Our anguish no longer needs to be expressed through symbols such as Dürer’s polyhedron, which Kiefer greatly associated both to a fighter jet—in a 1990 work that may express his skepticism about the end of the Cold War—and to an apocalyptic explosion. The end of the world is also evoked in Lars von Trier’s movie Melancholia (2011), in which the growing anguish of the characters completely paralyzes them before the inevitable collision between the planet Melancholia and Earth. Note that in Melencolia I Dürer alludes to a threat from space, figured as a celestial body emerging from the background.

The cause of today’s melancholy is no different from that affecting people five hundred or a thousand years ago, or always: Fear of death, frustration of seeing projects interrupted, repression of basic desires, material damage, encounters with misery. The effects of this on individuals are as much of a mystery as Dürer's Melencolia I and the aesthetic melancholy of Kiefer and Trier. 

When faced with paralysis, why not try these antidotes suggested by philosophers?

I myself prefer the sublime Descartes, who I admire so much. In The Passions of the Soul (1649), he proposes to seek body balance through a frugal diet—I remain confident that I will get there one day. He says it is necessary to accept nature's impositions—I have been doing this for a long time—and to abandon a desire for prestige, a “delusion of singularity”—I am far from that, unfortunately. Finally, Descartes recommends mental composure so that our rational faculties know what to accept and what to reject, instead of being carried away by fantasy. This is what I bet on.

Anselm Kiefer, Melancholia,1990-1991. Lead and crystal. Courtesy of SFMoMA