His face is framed by the darkness of his hat, his clothes, and the background, which seems to move over him in a black mist. In an anonymous portrait from around 1595, the English Metaphysical poet John Donne looks abstractedly yet intensely away from the viewer. They were often found to stare into space, their eyes fixed. ![]() Those afflicted were supposed to be pale (caused by blood rushing away from the head to the heart, a belief promoted by the English physician Thomas Willis). While it was often considered a serious malady, for the most part, melancholy became a desirable, romantic disposition for a young man. During this time, suicide rates were at an all-time high. England-never flush with sun-was even grayer and colder than usual, with shorter days. In the middle of the 16th century, Europe underwent a period of cooling now called the Little Ice Age. Seasonal Affective Disorder was certainly a factor. Now we are inclined to see melancholy as a catch-all for various types of mental health issues, along with the states of everyday sadness that permeate especially bleak times.ĭuring the Renaissance, mortality rates were high and plagues frequent constant religious wars caused internal as well as civil unrest. It was an excess of black bile from the spleen that led to a person becoming melancholic in temperament, though sometimes vapors from certain organs were also blamed, as was planetary alignment. How did melancholy become so chic? In Elizabethan times, illnesses and one’s own personality were thought to be determined by the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. He was also known for writing despondent poetry that cast him as particularly unfortunate and lamented his frequent falls from royal favor and affection. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth, Essex was considered the most fashionable man in England-and for a time, the most powerful. The sitter is thought by many to be Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex. His pose, situation, and expression evince a poised, possibly self-imposed loneliness. This flamboyantly dressed man rests a hand on his heart in a display of fidelity as he leans, smolderingly, against a tree, thorny rose vines climbing them both. One of the most familiar and characteristic images of fragile Elizabethan masculinity is Hilliard’s portrait miniature Young Man among Roses (ca. A distant couple walks through the hedge mazes. In the background is a stately home with a cultivated Elizabethan garden-genteel but also restrictive. His face is serious, conveying both the intensity of his mental state and his desolation. In Oliver’s A Young Man Seated Under a Tree (1590–95), a young gentleman dressed predominantly in black, like Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, slouches against a tree. Their sitters’ intensity is heightened by the intimate medium of the miniature, small paintings meant to be seen by only a few eyes. They stare out at us from paintings by the English artist Nicholas Hilliard and his French-born pupil Isaac Oliver. Aristocratic sitters who once sought to appear respectable, collected, and straight-backed now let their emotions affect their expressions and demeanors. In addition to verse and song, fashionable, powerful men wanted their vulnerability captured in paint. His self-given motto was Semper Dowland semper dolens: “Always Dowland, always grieving.” In one piece, Dowland describes being locked in a dark prison of his dejection. ![]() His lyrics frequently relate his sadness. The English composer John Dowland, famous throughout the continent, is remembered as the first tortured singer-songwriter. Male poets including Sidney wrote large bodies of work about their feelings of alienation, isolation, and rejection in love. This was doubly the case in England other nations would come to refer to the phenomenon of male melancholy as “the English malady” or “the Elizabethan malady.” “Generally the world, as a settled thing, is pleased to grace with a particular esteem,” wrote the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in his aptly titled article “Of Sorrow” (1580). In 16th century Europe, it was fashionable for men to be sad and thoughtful. All that remains of their meeting, however, is the testimony of French diplomat Hubert Languet, who found the depiction of his friend too “sad and thoughtful.” The now-lost painting would have been an invaluable record of a commingling between two giants of the Renaissance. In 1574, when archetypal Renaissance man Sir Philip Sidney-an English scholar, soldier, aristocrat, diplomat, and prominent Elizabethan poet-was traveling in Italy, he sat for a portrait by the Venetian artist Paolo Veronese.
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