The formal problem of art reflects the paradoxical situation of Renaissance melancholics. The individual strove for infinite autonomy, but his reward was resignation, the insight that attaining the sole desirable human state would prove to be impossible. They wished to be omnipotent, but despair got the better of them: no one sees the limitations of human existence as well as those who wish to step over these limits. Renaissance melancholics were characterized at once by heroic effort and resignation, will and insight, an all-destructive denial and an all-accepting acquiescence. Melancholics were characterized by a Socratic all-or-nothing basic position — as is the art of the modern age, which creates an autonomous world, only to press it into form and, while asserting its right to be regarded as the exclusive reality, proclaim with masochistic pleasure its own illusory artistic being.21 Presumably, a similar consideration prompted Thomas Mann to make the following observation: “Irony is always aimed in two directions: at life and at the spirit alike: that determines its behavior, making one melancholic and modest. Art, too, is melancholic and modest, insofar as it is ironic — or rather, the artist is that” (Essays, 2:45). The hallmarks of Renaissance melancholia may be discerned in art; for the first time in history, melancholia was the subject and predicate, the content and formal principle of art. On the one hand, there are works that deal with melancholia, either thematically (Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Jacob de Gheyn, etc.) or in their outlook (portraits, van Eyck), and on the other hand, melancholia lurks in the background of modern art as a whole, though it does not necessarily burst to the surface. The aim of art in the modern age is individual world creation — that is why artworks are utopian, in the original sense of the word. Instead of being led to a place existing somewhere, the viewer is instructed that the world created by an artwork exists nowhere (
). The world-creating intention of the work of art draws attention to failure and futility, to the nothing that entrenches itself in existence. Every significant piece of art is utopian because it lays out the nothing latent in the here and now, hence the sorrow and inconsolability that emerges from every major work of the modern age.22 A closed work points at nothing, and it thereby opens. We are free to enter. Yet the dazzling wealth and diversity begin to disintegrate somewhere, at the most unexpected moment, and all the things that had seemed so captivating are gradually swathed in indissoluble grief.
The intimate link between modern art and Renaissance melancholia explains not only why, following the Middle Ages, the concept of melancholia had a fundamentally favorable ring to it, but also why representative melancholic figures appeared, mostly and understandably artists. The melancholics of the Middle Ages were anonymous, mentally sick people who were stuck outside the kingdom of God, who had ceased to exist, and therefore were remembered by nobody. During the Renaissance, however, melancholics showed the way; they were the ones most zealously obeying the command of the age, to build one’s own world — and artists were the first in submitting themselves to the divine and destructive might of melancholia. It was during the process of artistic composition that the endless creative power and boundless capacities of the personality became truly obvious, but this was also when its limitations, vulnerability, and unreliability came to light. Works of art with capricious claims came into being; behind finished works, however, stood the torsos of unfinished compositions, which often, and by no accident, emerged from the workshops of the greatest artists. The more powerful the demand, the stronger the imperilment; the apparent assurance and solidity of the greatest works were the product of the most precarious balancing: perfect works were always haunted by the possibility of annihilation. Indeed, it may be that it is precisely in creations of the greatest reputation and fame that one perceives death, which simultaneously threatens the work, the creator, and us. That annihilation is not symbolic; it is an evocation of death, in the strict sense of that word, that has to be confronted by every solitary person. And since we are mortal, loneliness, whether bashfully or defiantly, threatens everybody. The person at the center of the universe — and with the loss, or even just the dimming, of religious belief who doesn’t consider himself a center? — has to reckon solely with death; and anyone who fails to give up being the lord of creation is condemned to irresolvable solitude.23 Creative genius-melancholics are famed for their solitariness, and the silence that surrounds them is also well known: if I cannot exchange my own world, my view of the world, with anyone else, then it is even less conceivable in the case of someone who, even at the price of his own perdition, wishes to create a world of his own, one that differs fundamentally from anyone else’s. The aristocratic nature of art is a manifestation not of pride but of searching. Those who long for absolute autonomy are surrounded by solitude and silence (not chosen by themselves), and it is the price of creativity that they cannot take notice of anything else. The work of art is an offspring of the aforementioned imperilment — and what would be more irrational than to make that imperiled state and its result, the work, accessible to everyone. Art, from the Renaissance onward, was aristocratic, and it preserved that shield right down to the mid-twentieth century: it is just as difficult for the uninitiated to step into the world of Renaissance portraits as into the world of twentieth-century artworks that are supposedly hard to comprehend. No one should be permitted to confront death and annihilation — and the danger of such a confrontation makes a work great; to put this more sharply: the less a society occupies itself with art, the more viable it will be. Melancholia relates to the art of the modern age as it did to the mysteries in antiquity. As it was with the mysteries, art is ambiguous: it is democratic because anyone can enter, but it is aristocratic all the same because only a few can make use of that possibility, and even fewer can pass to the very end, where, like the protagonist of Schiller’s poem “The Veiled Image at Sais,” drawing aside the veil concealing the truth inherent in poetry, they glimpse the nothingness that threatens them. It is these few who open up to melancholia — and just as a society cannot be, on the whole, melancholic, not everyone can be equally receptive to art. Art is “dangerous,” at least in the modern age, when one of its main tasks is to smuggle solitude and the ultimate silence summoned by Hamlet’s last words into the world of others. Great works disconcert one almost as much as does love: they abduct one from one’s everyday life only to confuse everything for one. They are promising and yet offer nothing. One would most gladly identify with them, one would love to gobble them up, but instead they spurn us, and they provoke a nostalgia that, because of its aimlessness, cannot be assuaged. One might call art immoral, yet on coming face-to-face with the works, it turns out that “morality” and “immorality” are ridiculously puffed-up words that lose their ordinary meaning in art. We are helpless against art; we feel that we should not expose ourselves to the works; we know beforehand that we will fall short and go astray; we fear the incomprehension that will burst on us; yet we stubbornly go ahead, just as we stubbornly scratch open our wounds again and again.