You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Apart from their interest in melancholy, the authors have used this study as an illustration or prototype of the richness and complexity of the history of ideas and of the transmission of knowledge. According to the introduction it grew out of an earlier monograph by Panofsky and Saxl, Dürer's Melencolia I, which aimed to elucidate the meaning of Dürer's famous engraving. This task is still prominent in this volume and forms one of the two nodal points of the work. The other is the discussion of a work written some eighteen hundred years before Dürer, the section of Aristotle's Problems that begins, 'Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or in the arts are clearly melancholics …?'.
The history of medical, philosophical, poetic, theological, and artistic activity connecting these two works forms the subject matter of this volume. Such a history must exclude discussion of other important aspects of melancholia that are peripheral to its main task. For instance, the authors regretfully pay homage to, but exclude, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and have little material about melancholy in Shakespeare.
Aside from the general cultural importance of this book, what is its particular interest for psychiatry and psychoanalysis? The question first raised by Aristotle and elaborated in pictorial form by Dürer might be restated: what is the relationship between talent, genius, creativity, and a particular condition, melancholy, which sometimes verges on madness? This problem organizes the vast bulk of material in the book. In order to approach the problem several other questions must be raised. The following list seems to be a fair summary of the major psychological issues involved in exploring the relationship between genius and melancholy. 1. The definition of melancholy. 2. What is temperament or character? 3.