We have seen the ambiguity of the position of melancholics of the Renaissance, their striving for absolute autonomy against both the heavenly and the earthly realm. Their melancholia was rooted in this situation, extraordinarily limited in both space and time, as well as in recognition of the situation’s exceptionality and its being bound to the moment. The Renaissance personality endeavored to create a world out of his own resources, whereas melancholics of the Renaissance realized the fallibility of that world, its condemnation to failure. They knew they were damned to a solitary creation of the world, and they knew that failure would be unbearable: even if they remained alive, neither heaven nor earth would appreciate their experiment. Renaissance melancholics set a trap for existence, but they were the ones who fell into it: being alone as they were, they had to make the world habitable and bearable by their own effort — but the world so created differed from everyone else’s world. There were as many brand-new worlds as there were personalities; since those were not in touch with one another, not only was it difficult to speak of a world that was shared by everyone (Jan van Eyck’s mirror suggests as much), but each individual world became “worldless,” point-like: rather than being universal, they were shackled by each individual’s point of view and sense experience (
). If God is in hiding, then the world will appear differently to everyone by day, not just in their dreams, as Heraclitus thought.19 Although it is the same world in its materiality, everyone is linked with it in a different manner, and in the case of each individual, the construction of its intellectual dimensions results in a new world of his own, differing from every previous one. Nihil novum dicere—“There is nothing new to say,” says Petrarch, still in the medieval spirit. The new human image, however, was attended by a new interpretation of being. “Of all writers under the Sun, the poet is the least liar,” says Sir Philip Sidney in his apology for poetry (The Defence of Poesy, 1583). That assertion was based on the recognition that there is room for all things in reality, and the richness of reality depends on one’s creative capabilities and imagination (which is no liar!). We encounter an extreme expression of the notion of the medieval personality in Averroës, according to whom the true subject of thinking is not the individual, the “self,” but rather a nonpersonal, substantial being whose connection with the individual ego is external and accidental (see Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 127). This idea was considered extreme also in that age, but even those who attempted to defend the rights of the ego (St. Thomas Aquinas) denied that individual souls differed from one another, because of their distinct principia essentialis. An individual was part of a deeper context, body and soul, and could lay no claim to either originality or creativity. And what does the Renaissance approach, with its insistence on the autonomy of the personality, have to say about this? Nicolaus Cusanus defended just as extreme a standpoint:
Just as an identity of proportion is not replicable, neither is an identity of mind. Without a corresponding proportion the mind cannot enliven a body. For example, your eye’s seeing could not be anyone else’s seeing (even if it were separated from your eye and were joined to another’s eye), because it could not find in another’s eye the proper proportion that it finds in your eye. Similarly, the discriminating that is present in your seeing could not be the discriminating in another’s seeing. Likewise, your understanding of that discrimination could not be someone else’s understanding of it. Hence, I deem the following not at all to be possible: that a single intellect be present in all men.
(Idiota de mente, bk. 12, in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, 1:579)
There is no
common
intellect, no
common
judgment of the world, and therefore no commonly shared world can exist. The world breaks up into worlds with separate entrances that are fragile and fallible to begin with and serve as a trap for those who wish seriously to take them into account.
In the view of Pico della Mirandola, people should follow their own genius and natural attraction; in other words, they should trust and believe in their own powers of creation. If Renaissance personalities had obeyed the diabolical injunction to “be yourself,” they would have had to turn into creators; the world was not “natural” and not given from the outset, but had to be created like a work of art or a piece of work. If they stepped onto the life-giving and yet ultimately fatal path of perfect autonomy, they had to turn into artists, in the broadest sense of the word. Departing from the analyses of melancholia in antiquity and the Middle Ages, anyone investigating the defining features of melancholia in the Renaissance and the modern era can remarkably often take examples from art. The literature of art criticism and theory, which awakened and then proliferated in the Renaissance, and the birth of a philosophy of art (later to be called aesthetics), indicate the changed position of art — the individual genres were not derivable from an existing, given culture, and the creations of individuals became arbitrary, artistic. (One sign of this was that, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, artists started to sign their paintings.) The religious and metaphysical ties that guaranteed the confinement of culture gradually started to loosen, and a work of art sought to represent, to depict, to reflect (those were the basic categories of Renaissance art theory), that is, it attempted to create out of itself ties able to bind culture together as a whole, creating a new world.20 However, individual effort directed at creating a world of general validity indicates the contradiction that not only characterizes the Renaissance mentality but is also the source of melancholia in the modern age. Art previously had reflected on universality and all things in a fraction of the life, feelings, and adventures of an individual, but this could not be said at all about the art of the modern age. In cultures defined by religion and metaphysics there was no break between the individual phenomenon and the general worldview: the foliation winding endlessly above the gateway of a Gothic church is inseparable from the saints surrounding the gate, from which there is a similarly unbroken transition to the barely visible grotesque figures of the gargoyles placed high up — the Gothic church does not just represent and symbolize Christian culture but is identical with it. Christian art is a natural unfolding of an already-existing world — that is why the criteria of present-day art criticism can be applied to it only with difficulty. It is so far from being the product of individual endeavor that one discovers the same pathos and faith in every work of art, irrespective of the quality of technical execution. One would look in vain for traces of melancholia in the art of the Middle Ages. Separation made melancholics so, whereas the art of the period stands for precisely the opposite of separation and introduces people into a world common for everyone. In the Middle Ages, melancholia was madness; art was sober and pious faith. The positions of the art of the Renaissance and modern times are contrary to this; we might even venture to say that from then on the boundaries of art have been demarcated by melancholia. Those boundaries are a claim to complete autonomy, a concomitant individual creativity, and a realization of the contradictoriness of the notion of individual omnipotence, which, as the Arnolfini picture demonstrates, is latent in every major work. (In the art of the Renaissance, of course, awareness of that contradiction was present only in embryonic form; however, it “blossomed” from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, when the fracture between individual endeavor and “objective” validity was the most determining mark of art.) The dilemma of art in modern times is identical with the dilemma of melancholia in modern times: is the work of art a closed formation that can be decoded exclusively on its own terms, not being determined by outside forces but much rather dictating rules to the “outside” world — or a mirror image that is supposed to depict and represent “external” conditions and, for that reason, can be explained by factors external to it? This is a typically modern problem, and whether one emphasizes the transition between world and artwork, or the chasm that yawns between the two, one divides the culture into poles between which, for all the subtlest dialectic, a connection can be created only externally. The formal problem of art in modern times is rooted in this. The world is reduced to what the work of art maintains about it (which accords with the notion of the autonomy of the work), or the work can be examined from the viewpoint of what it communicates about the world (this corresponds to the modern, empirical notion).