The Artistic Connection

Agrippa's manuscript circulated among clubs of occultists in France and Germany, as Agrippa himself traveled and made contact with kindred spirits. Among these associates was a man named Trithemius in Würzburg, one of whose friends was Albrecht Dürer. Dürer's 1514 etching Melencholia I echoes this Agrippan taxonomy, and explains the otherwise mysterious numbering (no Melencholia II or higher has ever been found). This study of a stocky, brooding angel, obviously stuck in the middle of an architectural vision, with tools strewn about and magical symbols surrounding her, was widely distributed and is known to have undergone at least two different printings. At least one copy of the etching made it to England, as Robert Burton specifically mentions it in his Anatomy of Melancholy [Burt, p.451]. It was imitated, in general theme and often specific detail, by artists into the Seventeenth Century. That this imagery should have been important to Dürer is not surprising. Dürer himself was a melancholic, a man who at the age of 30 had thought the new theory of art he had learned from Jacopo de' Barbari would enable him to define true universal beauty with a compass and straightedge; ten years later he would give up in considerable despair. In 1512 he wrote, "But what beauty is, I do not know." [KPS, p.364] Thus, Melencholia I can be seen as another of his sternly reflective self-portraits, perhaps the most telling of them.

The thread between Renaissance and Baroque idiom is much clearer in the visual arts than the aural ones, perhaps because the change in musical forms was so consciously contrived, as opposed to naturally flowing. And Dürer's footprints are unmistakable. In music, the neo-Platonist theorists were in agreement with the Aristotelians with respect to the modes and ethical effects of music, but they differed diametrically on the existence of universal harmony. Ficino wrote:

"But the soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music which may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is two-fold: One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make marvelous harmony." [Fic1, p.110]

Music was a fundamental part of Ficino's Orphic magic. He is said to have sung Orphic songs--which he believed to have been written by Orpheus himself in extreme antiquity--to invoke the powers of the planets and focus their influences. Thus the neo-Platonist theorists came down squarely on the side of Pythagoras, whose scalar ratios reflected this universal harmony, just as that system of tuning was going out of style. Tellingly, few of them were actually musicians. Pico della Mirandola, a contemporary and student of Ficino, "studied music as a boy and is said to have composed in his youth. A nephew later wrote that he 'accompanied his verses with song and instrumental sound'. Although he possessed a number of important Greek musical sources, his writings do not give any evidence of his having read them." [Pal2, p.30]

And vice versa--few of the scientists of music in the Renaissance specifically advanced the axioms of neo-Platonism. Among the more widely read were Franchino Gaffurio, whose 1492 treatise Theorica musice presents analyses of all the major Classical sources with little attempt to reconcile them, and Gioseffo Zarlino, who although more sympathetic to Plato than Aristotle presents in his Le institutione harmoniche of 1558 an entirely rational explanation for musical aesthetics. The former makes brief mention of the divine frenzy, and the latter presents a magically numerological explanation of consonances and dissonances, but neither wrestles with the human condition and its humors. [Pal2, p.230ff] Thus, we follow for the moment the artistic trail, which mirrors, and perhaps in some manner focused, the change in musical expression from the intellectually contemplative to the emotionally pathetic.

There are mid-sixteenth century paintings that echo the same intellectual passions as Melencholia I. Vasari's Melancholy, surrounded by a number of mathematical instruments, on a fresco done in 1553 in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and Doni's Disegno are obvious imitations.

"The Melancholy painted by Francesco Morandini, called Poppi, as one of four temperaments on the wall of the studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio is distinguished from her northern sisters by her marked pathetic expression of sorrow, agitated almost to the weeping point; and in Marmi another work by Doni, which appeared in 1552, we find another woodcut which, though very ordinary, exercised a most powerful influence, and shows the sublime profundity of the main figure of Melencholia I transformed into the elegiac sadness of a 'feminetta tutta malinconosa, sola, abandonata, mesta, et aflitta' mourning on a lonely rock." [KPS, p.387]

Doni, known to have owned a copy of the Dürer engraving [KPS, p.387], presaged a central theme of the Baroque, the integration of the Platonic image of melancholy with that of vanity. His and other Italian etchings share Dürer's conception of melancholy as despair arising from an emotional state, but they add a focus, a sharp edge to it. Superseding diffused grief appears a definite object (in the Feti work, a skull). The human dream is folly; man has become divorced from the cosmos. This sentiment was no mere affectation--it reflected the reality of an uneasily evolving understanding of that cosmos.