Let us stay with art. “The greater part of the craftsmen who had lived up to that time [the time of Michelangelo],” Vasari writes in the “Life of Raphael,” “had received from nature a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that make men immortal” (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 4:209). A sixteenth-century writer encouraged Michelangelo’s apprentice Raffaele da Montelupo as follows: “Since you are a sculptor, you have the privilege of any extravagance.” Paulucci, an envoy of Ferrara, wrote about the great Raphaeclass="underline" “He is inclined to melancholy like all men of such exceptional talent” (quoted in Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 104). But melancholia did not just lie dormant; not a few artists were regarded as patently melancholic. According to Boccaccio, Dante was melancholic, and so were, according to Vasari, Michelangelo,24 Parri Spinelli, and Lorenzo Vecchietta; also melancholic were Raphael, Annibale Caracci, Guido Reni, and Carlo Dolci; among northern Europeans, Dürer, Hugo van der Goes, and Adam Elsheimer, who was active in Rome. The names proliferate, and it is not long before the average person comes to recognize artists primarily through their eccentricity.25 One might add that the more the civil polity of Europe is consolidated, the more condemnable eccentricity will be perceived. Eccentricity (which, like antique ecstasy, denotes stepping out of oneself) is a sign of the frequent melancholia among Renaissance artists, a concomitant of loneliness and creativity — of an introversion without which it was impossible not only to create a new world but also to become an autonomous person. (That “turning inward” was for a long time a symbolic gesture, of course: the heroic determination with which Renaissance intellectuals realized themselves made them turn toward the world, but since that was tantamount to ignoring the given framework and rules of the existing world, the use of the phrase “turning inward” is justified.) In 1585, Romano Alberti explained the frequent melancholia of painters in the following manner: “Painters become melancholic because, wanting to imitate, they must retain visions fixed in their minds so that later they may reproduce them as they have seen them in reality. And this not only once but continuously, such being their task in life. In this way they keep their minds so abstracted and detached from reality, that in consequence they become melancholic” (quoted in Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 105). Alberti obviously saw this paradox as the most natural thing in the world, which sounds astonishing only to the empirically minded public opinion of our day: to copy reality, artists have to disregard it. This was a matter not just of the Platonism so much alive in the Renaissance, but also of the world-generating function of art in general. An artist has to create a new world — not from nothing, but from a set of things awaiting composition and arrangement. Material has to be taken from the sensory world, but earthly sensuality has to be left behind, in the manner of a god, in order to be able to create a new sensuality. Mimesis, as mentioned in speaking about Sidney, is not the mechanical reproduction of what exists but the representation of ideas or, as Shakespeare avows, the imitation of the divine act of creation. That makes it absolute, unique, and unparalleled, and its product, the work of art, incomparable and absolutely self-referential. Leon Battista Alberti, in the mid-fifteenth century, called the artist an alter deus, an alternative god, and although this echoed the belief of the Middle Ages according to which God was the supreme artist, it was not hard to spot the profanation of God as artist.26 In Alberti’s opinion, painting was not a handicraft but “a divine force.” In a letter addressed to Peregrino Agli (De divino furore, 1 December 1457), Ficino links art to divine frenzy, and the holy madness that, according to St. Bernard, characterizes saints, pertains in Renaissance public opinion to artists — those who try to become God in God’s stead and who do not hark back to a distant center but are themselves the centers of the universe. In the Middle Ages, ecstasy was an entrance into God’s innermost circle. From the Renaissance onward, it regained its original meaning: ecstatic artists step out of the constraints of the world to create new worlds from their own resources, and ecstatic melancholics, who were identified with bloodthirsty despots on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, annihilate everything in order to step out of themselves, thereby preparing their own downfall.
Melancholics thus gradually became creators, and melancholia became a source of imagination (already in the fourteenth century, the French poet Eustache Deschamps declared in speaking about a repugnant matter: no single artist was sufficiently melancholic to be able to paint it, that is, it surpassed all the powers of imagination), and a manifestation of genius. This was an age of a rebirth of Aristotle’s concept of melancholia: once again it became the distinguishing mark of outstanding people. In the Middle Ages there existed just one creator, God, and the notion of a genius who is a creature was unknown. The word “genius,” which originally denoted begetting, bringing into being (