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The Persistence of Melancholia
in Arts and Culture

This book explores the history and continuing relevance of melancholia as an amorphous
but richly suggestive theme in literature, music, and visual culture, as well as philosophy
and the history of ideas. Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514)—the
first visual representation of artistic melancholy—this volume brings together contributions
by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Topics include Melencolia I and its reception;
how melancholia inhabits landscapes, soundscapes, figures, and objects; melancholia in
medical and psychological contexts; how melancholia both enables and troubles artistic
creation; and Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917).

Andrea Bubenik is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland,

Australia.
Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of
art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering
areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus
on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By
making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims
to promote quality art history research.

Pop Art and Popular Music

Jukebox Modernism
Melissa Mednicov

Globalizing East European Art Histories

Past and Present
Edited by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas

Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary

Local Contexts and Global Practices
Edited by Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich

Cultural Mobility in the Interwar Avant-Garde Art Network

Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands
Michał Wenderski

New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America

Edited Mariola V. Alvarez and Ana M. Franco

René Magritte and the Art of Thinking

Lisa Lipinski

The Paragone in Nineteenth-Century Art

Sarah Jordan Lippert

The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture

Edited by Andrea Bubenik

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-

in-Art-History/book-series/RRAH
The Persistence of Melancholia
in Arts and Culture

Edited by
Andrea Bubenik
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Andrea Bubenik to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bubenik, Andrea, 1975– editor.
Title: The persistence of melancholia in arts and culture / edited by
Andrea Bubenik.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge research in
art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Most of the
papers were presented at a symposium and public lecture series organized
in conjunction with the 2014 exhibition, Five Centuries of Melancholia,
held at The University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane, Australia.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005444 | ISBN 9781138604490 (hardback : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9780429468469 (ebook : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Melancholy in art. | Dèurer, Albrecht, 1471–1528.
Melencolia I.
Classification: LCC N8224.M44 P47 2019 | DDC 701/.17—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005444
ISBN: 978-1-138-60449-0
ISBN: 978-0-429-46846-9
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of Colour Plates vii

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xii
List of Contributors xiii

Introduction: The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture 1

A N D R E A B U B E N IK

1 Hearts on Fire: Renaissance Portraiture and Erotic Melancholy 13

L A U R I N D A S. DIXO N

2 Between the Angel and the Dog: Dürer’s Melancholy Community 29

DREW DANIEL

3 Dürer, Music, and Melencolia I 49

D E N I S C O L L IN S

4 The Shape of Things to Come: Dürer’s Polyhedron 68

A N D R E A B U B E N IK

5 On Vanishing Land (2013): The Eerie, W. G. Sebald, and

English Hauntology 94
R E X B U TL E R

6 After the End: The Temporality of Melancholia 107

A M E L I A B A R IKIN

7 The Melancholy Art 122

M I C H A E L A N N H O L LY

8 Temporal Turbulence: In Praise of Anachronism 144

MIEKE BAL
vi Contents
9 Facing Melancholia: Racial Implications of the Disengaged Gaze 163
S A L LY B U T L E R

10 The Melancholic Horizon in Australian Landscape Art 176

A L L I S O N H O L L AN D

11 Against a Melancholic Art History: The Afterlife of Images 193

C H A R I L A R SSO N

Index 204
Colour Plates

1 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving (second state), 24.3 × 18.9 cm.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fletcher Fund, 1919. Accession
Number: 19.73.85.
2 Nicholas Hilliard, Unknown Man Against a Background of Flames, ca. 1600.
Tempera on vellum, 66 × 51.5 mm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
3 Isaac Oliver, A Man Consumed by Flames, ca. 1600. Tempera on vellum, 52 ×
44 mm. Surrey, Ham House. © National Trust/Christopher Warleigh-Lack.
4 Albrecht Dürer, Angel with Lute, 1497. Silverpoint on dark paper with white
highlights, 26.8 × 19.5 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. © bpk-Bildagentur/
Kupferstichkabinett, SMB/Jörg P. Anders.
5 Attributed to Jacopo de’ Barbari, Fra Luca Pacioli and an Unknown Young
Man, ca. 1495. Oil on panel, 99 × 120 cm. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte,
Naples. © Bridgeman Images.
6 Anselm Kiefer, Hypatia (from Women of Antiquity series), 2002. Painted
bronze, glass, iron, ash, 202 × 118 × 117 cm. Sydney, Art Gallery of New South
Wales. © Anselm Kiefer
7 Fabien Mérelle, Mélancolie 1, 2011. Ink and watercolour on paper, 18 × 13 cm.
Collection of Sunny Sun, Chengdu, China. Reproduced courtesy of the artist
and Edouard Malignue Gallery, Hong Kong.
8 Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land (#1), 2013. Documentation
of production of audio-essay On Vanishing Land, photograph. Photo: Mark
Fisher. © Mark Fisher.
9 William Yang, Lake George #2, from A Story Only I Can Tell performance, 2014.
Digital ink jet print, 34 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
10 Hans Op de Beeck, Location 7 (#1), 2011. Sculptural installation, mixed
media, sound, light, 18 × 8.5 × 5 m. Courtesy of the artist.
11 Hans Op de Beeck, Location 7 (#4), 2011. Sculptural installation, mixed
media, sound, light, 18 × 8.5 × 5 m. Courtesy of the artist.
12 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm. Paris, Musée
d’Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt/Paris, Orsay Museum.
13 Kerry James Marshall, Nude (Spotlight), 2009. Acrylic on pvc, 155.3 ×
185.1 cm. New York, Jack Shainman Gallery. © Kerry James Marshall.
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
14 Russell Drysdale, Figures in a Landscape, 1964. Lithograph on paper, edition
27/75, 56.7 × 80 cm. Janet Dawson (Printer) Gallery A Print Workshop.
viii Colour Plates
Brisbane, The University of Queensland Art Museum. Collection of The
University of Queensland Art Museum, purchased 1965. Photo Carl Warner.
1965.05
15 Pascal Convert, Pietà du Kosovo, 1999–2000. Wax sculpture, resin, copper,
224 × 278 × 4 cm. Luxembourg, Collection Musée d’Art Moderne Grand Duc
Jean. Photography by Frédéric Delpech. Courtesy Pascal Convert and Galerie
Eric Dupont, Paris.
16 Pascal Convert, Madone de Bentalha, 2001–2002. Polychrome wax sculpture,
235 × 15 × 16 cm. Luxembourg, Collection Musée d’Art Moderne Grand Duc
Jean. Photography by Frédéric Delpech. Courtesy Pascal Convert and Galerie
Eric Dupont, Paris.
Illustrations

1.1 Robert Burton, Frontispiece: The Anatomy of Melancholy

(Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1628). Engraving, 10 × 28 × 23 cm.
Wellcome Collection. CC-BY 16
1.2 Hieronymous Brunschwig, Cell Doctrine of Brain Anatomy,
from The Noble Experyence of the Vertuous Handy Warke of
Surgeri (London: Petrus Treveris, 1525), 156. Wellcome
Collection. CC-BY 18
1.3 Robert Fludd, The Mind’s Eye (Imagination). Utriusque cosmi
maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica
historia. 2 vols. (Oppenheim: De Bry, 1619), 2: 327. Wellcome
Collection. CC-BY 20
2.1 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Dog, 1514. 29
2.2 Ramon Llull, De Nova Logica. De correllativis. Necnon et de
Ascensu et descensu intellectus, Valencia, 1512. Woodcut from
book. Cordelia Molloy/SCIENCE SOURCE 33
2.3 Charles de Bovelles, Liber de intellectu, 1510. Ex Officina Henrici
Stephani, Paris Cordelia Molloy/SCIENCE SOURCE 35
3.1 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Bell and Square, 1514. 49
3.2 Albrecht Dürer, Man Drawing a Lute, 1525. Woodcut, 13.2 × 18.3 cm.
From Albrecht Dürer, ‘Underweysung der Messung’, published 1525.
© bpk-Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Volker-H. Schneider 50
3.3 Albrecht Dürer, Das Männerbad (Men’s Bath), ca. 1496–97.
Woodcut, 38.7 × 28.1 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Gift of Felix M. Warburg and his family, 1941. 51
3.4 Albrecht Dürer, Fragments of Instrumental Music in Tablature Notation,
nd Merkel Hs 2° 1a, fol. 7v. © Germanisches National
Museum. On loan from the Paul Wolfgang Merkel Family Foundation. 53
3.5 Dürer, Fragments of Instrumental Music in Tablature
Notation, transcribed by the author. 54
3.6 Franchino Gaffurio (1451–1522), Frontispiece from Theorica
Musicae, 1492. Woodcut, from book, 205 × 137 mm. Philippus
de Mantegatiis, for Johannes Petrus de Lomatio / University of
Glasgow Library By permission of University of Glasgow Library,
Special Collections. 55
3.7 Pythagorean and Just intonation intervals within the octave. Table
by the author. 57
x Illustrations
3.8 Musical notes derived from Dürer’s number square in Johann
Nepomuk David’s Magische Quadrate, mvt 2: “Melancholia.”
Transcribed by the author after Sievers, 1960. 60
4.1 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Polyhedron, 1514. 68
4.2 Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Nikolaus Kratzer, 1528.
Tempera on oak, 83 × 67 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand
Palais/Tony Querrec/Musée du Louvre. 71
4.3 Albrecht Dürer, “Netz” for a Cuboctahedron—1525. Albrecht Dürer,
‘Underweysung der Messung’, published 1525. SLUB Dresden / Digital
Collections / S.B.616. 74
4.4 Johannes Kepler, The Thirteen Archimedean Solids, published
in Mysterium Cosmographicum, 1607. (first published 1596). Courtesy
of the Smithsonian Libraries, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/
ioanniskepplerih00kepl 75
4.5 Virgil Solis after Georg Pencz, Melancholicus (From the Four
Temperaments), 1530–62. Engraving, 8 × 5.3 cm. Hollstein 434
Bartsch IX 266.181 Everett Collection / Bridgeman Images 78
4.6 Hans Sebald Beham, Melencolia, 1539, (German, Nuremberg
1500–1550 Frankfurt). Engraving, 7.9 × 5.2 cm. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection,
The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966. 82
4.7 Alberto Giacometti, Head Skull, 1933–34. Plaster, 18.5 × 20 × 22.5 cm.
New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Fractional and promised
gift of Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis. Acc. n.: 237.2005.© 2018.
Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. 84
4.8 Anselm Kiefer, Melancholia, 1990–91. Lead, glass, steel, ash,
167.01 × 441.96 × 320.04 cm. San Francisco, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. © Anselm Kiefer 85
5.1 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Bat and Seascape, 1514. 94
5.2 Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land (#2), 2013.
Documentation of production of audio-essay On Vanishing Land,
photograph. Photo: Mark Fisher. ©Mark Fisher. 97
5.3 Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land (#3), 2013.
Documentation of production of audio-essay On Vanishing Land,
photograph. Photo: Mark Fisher. ©Mark Fisher. 97
5.4 Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land (#4), 2013.
Documentation of production of audio-essay On Vanishing Land,
photograph. Photo: Mark Fisher. ©Mark Fisher. 98
6.1 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I, Hourglass, 1514. 107
6.2 Hans Op de Beeck, Location 7 (#2), 2011. Sculptural installation,
mixed media, sound, light, 18 × 8.5 × 5 m. Courtesy of the artist. 115
6.3 Hans Op de Beeck, Location 7 (#5), 2011. Sculptural installation,
mixed media, sound, light, 18 × 8.5 × 5 m. Courtesy of the artist. 115
6.4 Hans Op de Beeck, drawing of Location 7, 2011. Sculptural
installation, 2011. Mixed media, sound, light, 18 × 8.5 × 5 m. in height. 116
8.1 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Angel, 1514. 150
8.2 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: “Skull” in Polyhedron, 1514. 151
8.3 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Angel’s Wings, 1514. 156
8.4 Albrecht Dürer, detail from Melencolia I: Saw, 1514. 157
 Illustrations xi
9.1 Margaret Olley, Susan with Flowers, 1962. Oil on canvas,
127.4 × 102.3 cm. Gift of Finney Isles and Co. Ltd. 1964.
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. 165
9.2 Robert Dowling, Werrat Kuyuut and the Mopor People, Spring
Creek, Victoria, 1856. Oil on canvas, 52 × 108.5 cm. Brisbane,
The University of Queensland Art Museum. Gift of Marjorie
Dowling through the UQ Anthropology Museum, 1953. UQ Art
Museum. Photo Carl Warner 2010. 167
10.1 Louis Buvelot, Waterpool Near Coleraine (Sunset), 1869. Oil on
canvas, 107.4 × 153 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Purchased 1870. 179
10.2 Henry James Johnstone, Evening Shadows, Backwater of the
Murray, South Australia, 1880. Oil on canvas, 120.6 × 184.1 cm.
Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia. Gift of Mr Henry Yorke
Sparks 1881, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. 182
10.3 Tom Nicholson, Evening Shadows: Installation at Art Gallery
of South Australia, 2012. 183
10.4 Hiraki Sawa, O (Installation View #1, “The 6th Asia Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art”), 2009. Multi-channel video and
sound installation. Dimensions variable. Edition of 5. Brisbane,
Queensland Gallery of Art. Purchased 2010. Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
© Hiraki Sawa. Photograph: QAGOMA, Natasha Harth. 185
10.5 William Yang, Lake George #1, from A The Story Only I Can
Tell performance, 2014. Digital ink jet print, 34 × 50 cm.
Courtesy of the artist. 188
11.1 Pascal Convert, Mohamed Al Dura, vendredi 29 septembre 2000.
Netzarim Gaza, wax sculpture. 1.60 × 2.33 × 0.40 m. Collection
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand Duc Jean, Luxembourg. Courtesy
Pascal Convert and Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris. 198
Acknowledgements

Research for this study was undertaken while the editor was an Associate Investigator
at the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
in Europe (1100–1800). The support of the centre, and especially Professor Peter Hol-
brook, are gratefully acknowledged. The University of Queensland Art Museum and
its director, Dr. Campbell Gray, provided an intellectual home and resources for the
exhibition and symposium during which this book was conceived. Special thanks are
due to the individuals who contributed at various stages to the editorial process: Har-
riet McAtee and especially Emily Poore; the three anonymous peer reviewers whose
reports were invaluable during the revisions; and the Routledge visual studies editor,
Isabella Vitti. Finally, sincere thanks to all the contributors for their commitment,
enthusiasm, and patience as the book edged toward publication.
Contributors

Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist, and occasional curator; her work
spans gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis, and the critique of capitalism.
Mieke was the co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and its
first director. As a professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
she taught literary theory and cultural analysis, and was awarded an honorary
appointment at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books
include A Mieke Bal Reader, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Narratology,
and a quartet on political art: Endless Andness, Thinking in Film, Of What One
Cannot Speak, and In Medias Res. Her video projects Madame B, with Michelle
Williams Gamaker, and Reasonable Doubt have been exhibited widely.
Amelia Barikin is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the School of Communication
and Arts at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research often focuses on
the relation between art and time. Publications include Parallel Presents: The Art
of Pierre Huyghe and Robert Smithson: Time Crystals (co-authored with Chris
McAuliffe), as well as the co-edited books Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction
and Tom Nicholson: Lines Towards Another.
Andrea Bubenik is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland,
Australia. Her books include Reframing Albrecht Dürer, 1528–1700 and Perspec-
tives on Wenceslaus Hollar (co-edited with Anne Thackray). She was the curator of
the exhibitions Five Centuries of Melancholia and Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond,
both held at the University of Queensland Art Museum. She is an associate inves-
tigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History
of Emotions in Europe (1100–1800).
Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
His current research projects include A History of UnAustralian Art (with A. D.
S. Donaldson), a critical biography of Colin McCahon (with Laurence Simmons),
and a book on Stanley Cavell. He has recently published on Deleuze and Guattari’s
What Is Philosophy? and edited a dictionary on Slavoj Žižek.
Sally Butler is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Queensland,
Australia. Her recent publications include “Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art
and Cultural Diplomacy” in International Political Sociology; “Indigeneity” in
Visual Global Politics (ed. R. Bleiker); “Australian Indigenous Art and Litera-
ture” in Worldmaking, Literature, Language, Culture (ed. Tom Clark, et al.). Her
xiv Contributors
exhibitions include Our Way: Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Lockhart River
and Before Time Today: Reinventing Tradition in Aurukun Aboriginal Art.
Denis Collins is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Queensland School
of Music, Australia. His research interests are in the history of music theory from
the late medieval period to the mid-eighteenth century. He has published articles
in this area in international journals, most recently in Acta Musicologica, Music
Analysis, Music Theory Online, and Musica Disciplina.
Drew Daniel is Associate Professor in English at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He
has published numerous articles on Renaissance literature, emotion, politics, and
contemporary aesthetics in journals such as Social Text, Shakespeare Quarterly,
Film Quarterly, Criticism, Journal of English Studies, Early Modern Culture, The
WIRE, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Opera Quarterly, and others.
He is the author of two books: The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemol-
ogy in the English Renaissance and Twenty Jazz Funk Greats.
Laurinda S. Dixon is Professor Emerita of Art History in the Department of Art and
Music Histories at Syracuse University, USA. Her scholarly specialty is the rela-
tionship of art and science before the Enlightenment, and she lectures widely on
the subject at universities and museums throughout the world. She is the editor
of In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom
and the author of The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca.
1500–1700.
Allison Holland is a curator at the Australian Centre for Photography. She has held
various positions as an academic, curator, and conservator in national institutions,
and currently curates and publishes on lens-based artists. Her research interests
include Australian colonial art and contemporary art, with a special focus on
works on paper. She has published in Photofile and the Art Bulletin of Victoria,
and was the curator of Love, Loss and Intimacy and Shared Sky, both exhibited at
the National Gallery of Victoria.
Michael Ann Holly is the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at
the Clark Art Institute and teaches in the graduate program in the History of Art at
Williams College, USA. Her books include Past Looking: Historical Imagination
and the Rhetoric of the Image and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History,
and most recently The Melancholy Art.
Chari Larsson is Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Queensland College of Art,
Griffith University, Australia. Her PhD thesis, Didi-Huberman’s Ghosts, examines
the work of French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. She
has published in emaj and Artlink; her research focuses on theories of images and
representation, specifically in the areas of art historiography.
Introduction
The Persistence of Melancholia in
Arts and Culture
Andrea Bubenik

One way to characterize melancholia is as a survivor. Of the four classical tempera-

ments, only the melancholic persists, having long eclipsed the choleric, the phleg-
matic, and the sanguine in contemporary culture. Such resilience may be attributed, at
least in part, to the concept’s flexibility: melancholia has been both cursed as a cause
of inactivity and illness, and celebrated as a source of intellectual and artistic creativ-
ity. Melancholia has evolved from humanist pathology to psychological condition,
has become a mood and aesthetic, ubiquitous and adaptable to new contexts. Melan-
cholia persists both as a private emotion and an intellectual and artistic mode—a way
of framing and understanding experience—and is poised for renewed contemplation.
The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture explores the history and con-
tinuing relevance of melancholia as an amorphous but richly suggestive theme in art
history, literature, music, and the history of ideas. Most of the chapters included in
this volume result from papers that were presented at a symposium and public lecture
series organized in conjunction with the 2014 exhibition Five Centuries of Melancho-
lia held at the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum in Brisbane, Australia.
The symposium, lecture series, and exhibition were all sponsored by the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) to com-
memorate the five hundredth anniversary of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I
(1514).1 Only one other museum similarly marked the occasion that year—the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art in New York.2
Further emboldening and invigorating melancholia for the twenty-first century are
publications such as The Melancholy Art (2012) by Michael Ann Holly, The Dark
Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art (2013) by Laurinda S. Dixon, and
The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance
(2013) by Drew Daniel. These distinguished scholars all participated in the events at
the UQ Art Museum exhibition, and have generously contributed to the present vol-
ume. The chapter by Mieke Bal is based on her lecture delivered at the Power Institute
in Sydney in 2014, another significant commemoration of the Dürer quincentenary.
Subsequent (and unrelated) to these events is the publication of Mitchell B. Merback’s
Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (2017), which has
since become one of the most important interpretations of Dürer’s engraving.3
The aforementioned books are less in competition with each other than standing
in constellation, with radically differing historiographic and theoretical stakes, again
highlighting melancholia’s amorphous qualities and capacity for slippage between
disciplinary lines and neat categorization. To consider the work of these scholars is
to discern palpable differences. Similarly, it will not take the reader long to discover
2 Andrea Bubenik
that the methodologies in the pages of the present volume vary considerably. For the
editor, several attempts to circumscribe the chapters into various categories failed,
and the three differing proposals for categorization by the anonymous peer reviews
only complicated matters. A conscious decision was made to allow contrasting histo-
riographies to be brought together and even juxtaposed, and the result is a seemingly
unlikely gathering of historicism and anachronism, humoral theory and psychoanaly-
sis, all weaving in and out of the proceedings to varying degrees.
It is the purpose of this introduction to suggest some productive convergences and
contrasts for the chapters that follow. Two principal touchstones do emerge. The first
cluster of chapters focuse in some way on Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I
(1514), not only as the major expression of the melancholic temperament but as a
generative source for later artists, musicians, and writers. The second set of chap-
ters invoke, in varying degrees, Sigmund Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia
(1917), with themes ranging from nostalgia and grief, to the politics of nationalism
and racism, all from a melancholic perspective.4 The lines between Dürer and Freud
are not strictly demarcated and some contributors, notably Michael Ann Holly and
Mieke Bal, seek to bring them together (hence their positioning of Holly and Bal at
the centre of the book, bridging as it were between the two clusters of chapters). To
read The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture is to be struck by how Dürer
and Freud lace backwards and forwards, with Freud’s essay emerging as a generative
concept as much as Dürer’s engraving. Of course Dürer’s engraving stems from an
entirely different historical context than Freud’s essay just over four centuries later
with the birth of modern psychology.5 Yet, for some, in spite (or perhaps because) of
their differences, Dürer and Freud have become tidy bookends: Giorgio Agamben has
described the time elapsed between the fourteenth century and the “end” of modern-
ism in the twentieth as representing the era of melancholy; for Julia Schiesari melan-
cholia was “inaugurated by the Renaissance, refined by the Enlightenment, flaunted
by Romanticism, fetishized by the Dec[a]edents [sic], and theorized by Freud,” before
its reappearance in postmodern critical theory.6 Although not specific to one disci-
pline or historical circumstance, melancholia usually tends to be compartmentalized
as such, be it as humanist pathology, romantic mood, or Freudian condition. In The
Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture the ways in which Dürer and Freud
are wielded (or not), and the juxtaposing of diverging approaches and methodologies,
enable (it is hoped) some productive new dialogues, and the need for a shift away
from rigid compartmentalization.
One need only consider the major recent contributions by Laurinda S. Dixon,
The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art (2013), and Michael Ann
Holly, The Melancholy Art (2012) in order to see how divergent current thinking on
melancholia can be. These books have little in common apart from the invocations
of their titles. On the one hand, Dixon analyzes melancholia as a humanist pathol-
ogy, an early modern medical condition with two millennia of thinking behind it
by the time Dürer created his engraving. Dixon carefully characterizes the unwieldy
doctrine of the four humours, and melancholia’s place therein, in order to con-
sider from a historical perspective how melancholia was manifest in early modern
visual culture. With this rich context in place, she evokes a series of early modern
melancholic personae, including lovers, hermits, and scholars. Dixon’s approach is
historical and contained to pre-Enlightenment examples. Her contribution to the
present volume expands on the theme of lovesickness, perceived in the early modern
 Introduction 3
era as an aspect of melancholia in need of a cure. In the early modern “love lockets”
that she examines, portrait miniatures of young aristocrats against flames of passion
are a visual manifestations of amor heroes or erotomania: burning lovers intended
to “captivate, fascinate, and enslave by manipulating both the body and will. They
allowed the lover’s image, imprinted on the imagination, to be continually nourished
and refreshed” (see Chapter 1). Dixon carefully circumscribes her study as demar-
cated from Freudian psychology as follows:

Historians explain the striking immediacy of English miniature portraits as

reflecting the “psychology” of their subjects, and interpret them as delicate and
wistful evocations of romantic love. Today, we glorify the state of being “in love”
as a sublime human experience, and a large and burgeoning scholarly literature
in many fields addresses the theme of the somber, yet sublime lover. However,
when applied to portraiture, this approach is anachronistic and, as we shall see,
ultimately reductive. The discipline of “psychology”—the modern science of the
mind—was unknown before the Freudian revolution of the nineteenth century.
(see Chapter 1)

On the other hand Holly begins with twentieth-century psychoanalysis in order to

consider how art historical method might be linked to the thematics of melancholy and
mourning. Holly’s The Melancholy Art pivots in part on a reading of Freud: she is less
interested in melancholia as Renaissance humour or pathology and more interested in
deploying melancholia as a trope that can explain or characterize scholarly activity. Holly
asks, “How might melancholy, not as a medieval or Renaissance ‘humour’ but as both a
metaphor and an explanatory concept in the twenty-first century, help us as practitioners
to acknowledge the elegiac nature of our disciplinary transactions with the past?” (Holly,
The Melancholy Art, p. 6). For Holly, melancholia is deeply relevant to the activities of
the contemporary art historian and their objects of study, and as she continues:

I take it as axiomatic that all written histories are narratives of desire, full of both
latent and manifest needs that exceed the professional mandate to find out what
happened and when. Given that the focus of the history of art’s labors is always
toward recovering that which is almost gone, this primal desire must be labeled
melancholic.
(see Holly, The Melancholy Art, p. 6)

As characterized by Holly, the art historian is unsettled by remnants and fragments

of the past, objects that are replete with memory and marked absences, all of which
make historical scholarship and creative commitment to writing history challenging.
For Holly, “melancholy is the source of creative interpretation, maybe even the cre-
ative principle that gives both soul and substance to the history of art” (unpublished
quote). Melancholic self-reflection is central to both her book and her contribution
to the present volume (which is a reprint of the first chapter of The Melancholy Art).
The readers of The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture will likely find
themselves more inclined toward either Dixon or Holly. Or—and this is an inherent
proposal and hope of this introduction—they will be able to see the value of and need
for both. Analogous to Dixon and Holly, the scope and methodologies of the contrib-
utors to The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture vary considerably. Hence
4 Andrea Bubenik
the placement of more historical approaches with those that present forceful theoreti-
cal stakes, and the insistence on drawing together early modern art with the contem-
porary. Tensions and contradictions will be perceived. Yet this is appropriate for a
volume that is keen to do more than commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of
Dürer’s engraving, and seeks to present a moment in which the humanities are replete
with radically differing and sometimes contradictory approaches, and the critical val-
ues of disciplines such as art history and literature are constantly being reassessed. In
the following brief summation of the chapters featured in this book, Dürer and Freud
are positioned as emblematic of the continued persistence of melancholia in arts and
culture, with the contributors and their myriad pursuits and methods weaved within.

I. Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514)

Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) is amongst the most analyzed images in the his-
tory of art; to introduce it yet again can feel reductive. It is an image that is almost
numbingly familiar—and yet five centuries after its creation, it continues to be debated
and discussed, enabling new theories and much creative speculation, a lively recep-
tion that shows no signs of abating. It is a reception marked by perpetual return and
increasing complexities; the dizzying and erudite scholarship is referenced by many of
the contributors.7 Here, mention shall only be made of Mitchell B. Merback’s Perfec-
tion’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I in which Merback histo-
ricizes Dürer’s engraving as a type of contemplative image that aided those afflicted
with the disease. Merback argues that Melencolia I is “singularly equipped to perform
a particular task: To stimulate a certain kind of receptive process in the beholder,” a
receptive process that is therapeutic in nature.8
Receptive processes are at the heart of many of the chapters included in the pres-
ent volume. Dürer’s engraving is not only the emblem for melancholia, but also a
powerfully enabling image that ceaselessly inspires new ways of thinking and seeing
for artists, writers, and musicians. The contributors who deal directly with Dürer’s
engraving do not historicize the print, but rather seek to position it as forward-
looking, a productive and accessible work that is generative for other discourses
and interpretations, as much as conceptualizing and thinking about other works of
art. Even the most historically driven essays deal with the impact of earlier works
on the present, and to some extent set examples of how Dürer’s print can itself serve
as an interpretive model or even a contrast for works that come after it. In no way
does the present volume seek to be a go-to guide for any continued attempts to deci-
pher the engraving, attempt to upend any previous interpretations, or investigate
the meaning and function of the print solely in its time. Rather, many of the essays
that deal with Dürer are more firmly aligned with Keith Moxey’s efforts to wrest
works of art from teleological categorization, by which each work of art influences
that which follows it.9 The engraving has been positioned as relevant to entirely new
contexts from eerie English landscapes to the rugged Australian bush; its improb-
able and diverse range of respondents, including the Japanese Hikikomori, sound
artists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and (inadver-
tently) Sigmund Freud himself.
In his chapter entitled “Between the Angel and the Dog: Dürer’s Melancholy Com-
munity,” literary scholar Drew Daniel explores the relationship between the angelic
figure and the array of objects found in the engraving. In shifting Melencolia I away
 Introduction 5
from its more usual characterization of a solitary and suffering self, Daniel suggests
instead that what is presented is a community, or an emotionally resonant melan-
cholic assemblage, one that unites disparate elements of weather systems, objects,
animals, and persons. He notes the various pulls and pushes inherent in the engrav-
ing: “the angel’s body aspires to the marmoreal solidity of the polyhedron” and “the
sleeping dog aspires to the sphericity of the perfectly spherical geometric stone” (see
Chapter 2). Daniel concludes that rather than presenting a solitary suffering being,
the engraving in fact introduces melancholy as a way of feeling and being connected
to others, a purposeful and connected assemblage that is related to Erasmus of Rot-
terdam’s historical concept of copia as described in his 1511 humanist writing man-
ual. At the same time, Daniel propels the print forward when he sees it in relation
to the Japanese phenomenon of the Hikikomori, a form of social withdrawal that
often involves surrounding oneself with a multitude of objects. In Daniel’s reading,
Melencolia I is not a meditation upon solitude, rather it presents an intricate living
community.
Another plea for recognition of a community is presented by musicologist Denis
Collins in his chapter entitled “Dürer, Music, and Melencolia I.” Collins takes stock
of Dürer’s own considerable knowledge of music and music theory, and also consid-
ers the composers and musicians who have responded to Dürer’s engraving. Music is
one of the most communal of acts, and by linking the engraving to various historical
and contemporary composers Collins activates another (lesser known) grouping that
Dürer, and his engraving, participate in. Just as mathematicians have puzzled over the
polyhedron in Dürer’s engraving, musicologists have long sought to understand the
bell and the magic square, both of which have connections to the process of determin-
ing ratios between consonant and dissonant musical intervals. Collins also, remark-
ably, transposes Dürer’s own musical score from its original setting in tablature into
legible modern notation. He also discusses more recent compositions that bear the
title Melencolia I, including the 2013 composition by South African composer James
Wilding—a trio scored for piano, horn, and tuba—in which the tuba player also
strikes a bell. Wilding’s notes (generously shared with Collins) reveal that he envi-
sioned the composition as a musical equivalent of Dürer’s magic square. Again, the
engraving’s contemporary presence is striking.
Similar to Collins’ interest in the singular aspects of the bell and the square, art
historian Andrea Bubenik focuses her enquiry on one particular feature of Dürer’s
engraving: the looming polyhedron which continues to beguile and perplex com-
mentators. This strange geometrical construct, entirely of Dürer’s invention, contin-
ues to resist mathematical nomenclature and analysis, and as Bubenik discusses in
her chapter “The Shape of Things to Come: Dürer’s Polyhedron,” the polyhedron
has also been the subject of numerous artistic appropriations in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Bubenik considers first how the Melencolia I polyhedron is
at odds with Dürer’s more ordered and regular forays into geometry, especially his
pedagogical manual for geometry Underweysung der Messung (1525), and also the
role of regular polyhedra more generally in early modern visual culture. This serves
as a contrast for the decidedly peculiar qualities of the Melencolia I polyhedron—
melancholia had long been associated with the cube as representative of the element
of earth—why did Dürer invent this strange object? Basically left unremarked until
the twentieth century, the polyhedron was central to an entire mathematical confer-
ence at New York University, and also makes marked appearances in the works
6 Andrea Bubenik
of modern and contemporary artists. Bubenik argues that the polyhedron in and of
itself radiates melancholia.
The literary reception of Dürer’s engraving is a starting point for art critic Rex
Butler in his chapter “On Vanishing Land (2013): The Eerie, W. G. Sebald, and
English Hauntology.” W. G. Sebald has not readily been associated with Dürer yet,
and his evocation of Melencolia I in the opening pages of his Rings of Saturn has
largely gone unnoticed. As its title suggests, Rings of Saturn evokes the humour and
mood of melancholy: its nameless narrator goes on a walking tour of Suffolk, and
ruminates on topics ranging from Dürer’s engraving, to why the planet Saturn is asso-
ciated with the temperament, to the fate of the skull of Sir Thomas Brown (author of
Urn Burial) after his death. As detailed by Butler, Rings of Saturn is also a generative
source for the audio-essay On Vanishing Land (2012–13) by the sound artist Justin
Barton and theorist Mark Fisher. Barton and Fisher retrace almost exactly Sebald’s
walk, visiting the same sites (the once-luxury hotel at Lowestoft that now stands
empty) and even recording similar incidents (such as Dunwich falling into the sea).
Yet for all their similarities, for Butler there is a vital distinction to be drawn between
the melancholy of Sebald and the more timely and productive sense of the eerie of
Barton and Fisher. Butler describes Sebald’s melancholia as “the always failed and yet
always resumed attempt to impose an order on the world, haunted by the sense of an
underlying pattern or explanation that remains just out of reach” (see chapter 5). By
contrast Barton and Fisher

do not form an external transcendent limit that is inaccessible to us—which is the

melancholy—but an internal inherent limitation—which is the eerie. In the eerie,
that is, we make a reflexive move to understand that the ceaseless overcoming of
each finite entity is itself the infinity we have been seeking.
(see chapter 5)

In drawing on sources as diverse as Fisher’s own writings on melancholy and the

eerie, Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Slavoj Žižek’s Absolute Recoil,
Butler further develops this distinction between melancholy and the eerie, concluding
that it allows for a crucial move away from “Dürer’s engraving being about some lost
object or past to being itself this loss and open to the future” (see chapter 5). In this
sense, Butler has anticipated the aims of many of the chapters included in the first
section of the present volume.
The eerie in its relationship to futurity brings forth the issue of temporality, which
is the subject of art historian Amelia Barikin’s chapter. In “After the End: The Tem-
porality of Melancholia,” Barikin pays particular attention to the idea of the mel-
ancholic as a figure outside of time with no assurances of narrative, and investigates
whether the political potential of melancholia might be located in this status or
“anti-presentist” affect. Seeing Dürer’s figure as being in a state of suspended action,
Barikin’s exegesis invokes an allegorical reading of the print through a lens of tem-
poral suspension, and sees in the engraving a refusal of futurity. She then considers
works by modern and contemporary artists, including Paul Klee, Anselm Kiefer, and
especially the installation Location 7 (2011) by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck,
where affective dimensions of melancholia are given spatial and durational form.
For Barikin, de Beeck’s immersive environments play with the idea of finitude and
 Introduction 7
infinitude, “of time without becoming.” According to Barikin, as both an aesthetic
and state of mind,

melancholia throws out a challenge to re-draw temporal horizons, and to con-

sider the possibility of a subjectivity no longer realized only through awareness of
its inalienable transience.
(see chapter 6)

Again, it is striking how Dürer’s engraving has been drawn into a reciprocal dialogue
with a contemporary artist, a dialogue that allows for no less than a reflection on pos-
sibilities of enacting temporal suspension.

II. Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917)

Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) marks the scientific
grounding of melancholia and its role in modern psychoanalysis. In moving mel-
ancholia way from the doctrine of the four humours, its links to black bile and
creative genius, Freud sought to distinguish the condition of melancholia from
that of mourning, asserting that “the complex of melancholia behaves like an
open wound.”10 This phrase is taken by several of the contributors to be espe-
cially evocative. While different readings of Freud’s essay do abound—even within
the contributions included here—one summation could be that Freud seeks to
understand how humans respond to loss by comparing and contrasting mourning
and melancholia. For Freud, mourning occurs in the conscious mind as a healthy
grieving process, and ultimately allows for acceptance of loss, while melancholia
is marked by lack of comprehension or acceptance with no end in sight, a time-
less quality for a decidedly unconscious condition. Some of the contributors—
especially Michael Ann Holly and Mieke Bal—have previously and extensively
written about the relationship between psychoanalysis and the methods of art his-
tory, and the longstanding relationship between the two fields cannot be rehearsed
in all its complexity here, it must be sufficient to note and point to the pervasive-
ness of this dialogue.11 In the second cluster of chapters that follow Holly and
Bal, there is a frequent distinction between mourning and melancholia, and the
development of a further field of related terms, including depression, nostalgia,
trauma, and the racial gaze.
Michael Ann Holly’s discussion of melancholia as a privileged aspect of Freudian
and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and its relationship to art historical research and
writing, has already been mentioned at some length in the first section of this intro-
duction. Here it will do well to reiterate a claim from her chapter The Melancholy Art
regarding how the discipline of art history is predicated by objects that occupy two
temporal zones, the past and the present, when she reminds us that the afterlives of
objects are “as rich and dense as our own”:12

Most everybody knows what it feels like to be unsettled by a remnant, a fragment

of the past: something that is so replete with memory and meaning that we almost
cannot bear the absence of which it so eloquently speaks. Not all these felt recol-
lections, of course, need reside in objects, but most do.13
8 Andrea Bubenik
The art historian understands that such objects, or works of art, will extend well
beyond its beholders, and have multiple lives. Lacing backward, Holly references
Dürer’s engraving, seeing it as significant for its evocation of creative liberation, rather
than lethargy or depression. For Holly Dürer’s print “animates our world, on the one
hand, because it ‘lives,’ and, on the other, because it is long ‘dead.’”14
Mieke Bal also engages with both Freud and Dürer: indeed, she seeks to establish
a concerted dialogue between them. In her chapter “Temporal Turbulence: In Praise
of Anachronism,” Bal argues that Dürer’s image is one of “fundamental contempo-
raneity”, a theoretical object in and of itself, and able to “trigger thought so strongly
that it is as if it is the image itself that thinks” (see Chapter 8). As such it seems to
demand an anachronistic thought experiment, a “preposterous” approach in which
Bal suggests that we look at the engraving as responding to Freud’s essay rather than
the other way around:

I am not suggesting that Dürer did Freud’s bidding; he couldn’t have. But if we
compare, Freud’s comparison between mourning and melancholia resonates in
Dürer’s image, not as a unified representation of melancholia but rather as an
internal dialogue between, or a pondering of the difference between mourning
(indifference to the world) and melancholia (an empty self; she does not look at
her own reflection). The engraving thus undercuts the binary opposition Freud
put forward.
(see chapter 8)

With exemplary rigor, Bal carefully considers the ambiguous gaze of the angel, the
direction of which has long been debated—toward the horizon? the polyhedron?
somewhere in between?—as much as the possibility of a skull or reflection lurking in
the stone polyhedron. She of course understands that with Freud come the notions
of unconscious and repression, notions that would have been utterly alien to Dürer,
and yet:

This does not mean that the emotional states these concepts theorize did not exist;
the historian’s horror towards anachronism must not come with a demeaning
condescension towards humans of an earlier time, as if a psyche we cannot know
was not a full psyche; hence, humans not fully human.
(see chapter 8)

Bal also probes further to consider the infinite loop of looking at Melencolia I again
and again and comes back full circle to Freud’s description of melancholia as “an
open wound.” For Bal, the cut between present and past, word and image, allow a
concerted and focused gaze to consider what the engraving can tell us about Freud.
A gaze of another kind is the focus for art historian Sally Butler, who brings Dürer
and Freud into yet another dialogue in her chapter “Facing Melancholia: Racial
Implications of the Disengaged Gaze.” Butler interrogates racial melancholia and
what she describes as the persistence of “the disengaged gaze” of Aboriginal subjects
in Australian art in the 1950s and 1960s. She draws attention to the dying years
of assimilation policies governing the Aboriginal population, a time of radical self-
reflection regarding national identity. Her starting point is Melencolia I, which Butler
describes as
 Introduction 9
the study of a gaze, an enigmatically disengaged gaze that withholds more than it
gives. Representation of a withholding in art, an act of revealing a concealing, is
a psychological affect that directs attention to something suppressed. Memories,
fears, and desires that Sigmund Freud identified as primary drivers of our uncon-
scious gain more attention within this act of representation, if ever so fleeting.
Like Dürer, today’s clinical and social psychologists understand facial expression
as a canvas of psychological cues but remain divided about how to interpret it.
(see chapter 9)

Again, Dürer and Freud are brought into a dialogue, here deployed in a discussion
about the many contradiction and tensions abound in the visual culture that attempts
to discern the place of Aboriginal Australians in the national imagination. Butler
hones in on the “ghostly presence” in many of these works,

The description of racial melancholia’s image as a ghostly presence resonates pow-

erfully with the representation of Aboriginal subjects in mid-twentieth-century
Australian art, particularly in terms of melancholy’s expression through abject
and manic forms.
(see chapter 9)

For Butler, the “disengaged gaze” allows for reflection on melancholy enacted on a
national scale, and a political unconscious fraught with instabilities of identity as dis-
cerned in the disengaged gaze of displaced citizens. This study of loss, emptiness, and
grief has decidedly contemporary implications.
Moving from the people to its land, Allison Holland considers the melancholia
of the Australian landscape in a chapter (“The Melancholic Horizon in Australian
Landscape Art”) that ranges through colonial and postcolonial art to more contem-
porary works by Tom Nicholason, Hiraki Sawa, and William Yang. For Holland,
the mise en scène of Dürer’s muse is essential to understanding the historiography
of Australian landscape art, and she also considers how Dürer’s “cosmic dualism”
“invigorates the concept of time within the composition” (see chapter 10). Crucial to
Holland’s analysis is the Freudian definition of melancholia as a perpetual and unre-
solvable state that oscillates between stasis and revitalization, with a ripe potential
as an aesthetic of emotion that can also allow for “the pleasure of self-reflection or
reminiscence on people and places loved and longed for” (see chapter 10). Just as the
Australian art historian Bernard Smith long ago identified Australia’s landscape as
imbued with a “weird melancholy,” Holland also argues that there is a whole series
of melancholic artists who engaged in a charged and emotional love-hate relationship
with Australian nature.
Further polarizing the views on the potential (or lack thereof) for a melancholic
persona, Chari Larsson proposes an “anti-melancholic” reading of the discipline of
art history in her chapter, “Against a Melancholic Art History.” To this end, Larsson
considers in detail the work of two seminal art historians, Michael Ann Holly and
Georges Didi-Huberman. First, she examines Holly’s exegesis of Freud’s theorization
of melancholia, and proposes a different reading of Freud’s melancholic ego and its
obsessions. She then proposes an “anti-melancholic reading” of the work of the art
historian discipline by drawing on French art historian Didi-Huberman’s arguments
concerning anachronism, through close attention to Pascal Convert’s series of wax
10 Andrea Bubenik
sculptures. Larsson concludes that what is at stake in art history is precisely the
opposite of melancholy, and suggests instead that the joyful affirmation of the return
is at hand.

Conclusion
To move between the chapters included in The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and
Culture is to oscillate between Dürer and Freud, between pathology and psychology,
historical context and contemporaneity, political consciousness and nostalgia, non-lin-
ear temporalities and preposterous histories. Dürer’s Melencolia I has been propelled
forward to its later reception, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” tapped backward
as generative for what has come before. Commentators have alternated between indi-
vidual details or the image as a whole, an isolated figure or an assembled community;
melancholia has been likened to and distinguished from mourning, and positioned as
an archaic humanist condition to be overcome in favour of the eerie.
Traditionally, it has been argued that Dürer positions the figure of Melencolia I
as inert, with the engraving’s most renowned contributors characterizing it as a por-
trayal of frustrated creativity. Yet as the chapters here show, both the engraving and
the perpetually evolving concept of melancholia have been extremely productive as
objects of assessment in critical discourse. “Melancholy effectively is the beginning of
philosophy,” says Slavoj Žižek in a book that was published in 2014, the same year as
the quincentennary of Dürer’s engraving.15 Just as Dürer’s engraving persists, so too
does melancholia, both as a private emotion and as an intellectual and artistic mode—
a way of framing and understanding experience and emergent aesthetic. Because of,
its enigmatic qualities, Melencolia I has been appropriated for countless purposes,
ranging from aesthetic to literary to political to physiological, in a pronounced and
emphatic global reception that continues unabated.
There is no reason to doubt this continued resilience. For as has been noted through-
out, melancholia has a unique capacity to hold within itself varying and even contra-
dictory interpretations. Günter Grass also recognized this when writing in his Diary
of a Snail about Saturn, the god of melancholy:

Here I shall speak of his two fold rule. Of how melancholy and utopia preclude
one another. How they fertilize one another. The area between the vanishing
points. Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next. Of Freud
and Marx, who should have sat for a double portrait by Dürer. Of superabun-
dance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and
utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.16

Melancholia continues to morph, adapt, and occupy seemingly contradictory spaces,

holding within itself a myriad of productive possibilities. There is no reason to doubt
its continued persistence.

Notes
1. For the exhibition catalogue, see Andrea Bubenik, ed., Five Centuries of Melancholia (Bris-
bane: UQ Art Museum, 2014). Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the
History of Emotions (Project number CE110001011).
 Introduction 11
2. Lecture series, Spotlight on a Masterpiece: Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, May 18, 2014,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Lectures by Susan Dackerman, Mitchell B. Mer-
back, Angela B. Campbell, Laurinda Dixon.
3. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012);
Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renais-
sance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Laurinda Dixon, The Dark Side of
Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2013); Mitchell B. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s
Melencolia I (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” [1917], On Murder, Mourning and Melancho-
lia, trans. Shaun Whiteside, introduction by Maud Ellmann (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
5. For surveys of the development of the concept from a humoral disorder to a psychological
one, see Arthur Kleinman and Bryan Good, eds., Culture and Depression: Studies in the
Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985); Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholy and Depression from Hippo-
cratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
6. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L.
Martinez. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 69 (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1993), 14, fn.3; Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism,
Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 3–4.
7. Just some of these include Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Dürers Melencolia I: Eine
quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1923);
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in
the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); Peter-Klaus
Schuster, “Das Bild der Bilder. Zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Dürers Melencolie-Kupfer-
stich,” Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 (1982): 72–134; Jan Białostocki, Dürer
and His Critics (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1986); Peter-Klaus Schuster, Melencolia
I: Dürers Denkbild, 2 vols. (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991). For a survey of literature on the
engraving see Martin Büchsel, Albrecht Dürers stich Melencolia I (München: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, 2010).
8. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy, 28.
9. Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
10. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 212.
11. Some of the many publications attesting to this relationship include Norman Bryson,
Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), which includes chapters by Holly and
Bal; Griselda Pollock, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
(Malden: Blackwell Pub, 2004), which includes chapters by both Pollock and Bal; Julia
Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1989).
12. Holly, The Melancholy Art, xiv.
13. Holly, The Melancholy Art, xii.
14. Michael Ann Holly, from unpublished lecture delivered at the UQ Art Museum, Brisbane,
Australia, 29 August 2014.
15. Slavoj Žižek, Event (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 24.
16. Günter Grass, From the Diary of a Snail, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Penguin,1973), 252.

References
Arthur Kleinman and Bryan Good, eds. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology
and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985.
Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L.
Martinez. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993.
12 Andrea Bubenik
Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1999.
Białostocki, Jan. Dürer and His Critics 1500–1971: Chapters in the History of Ideas Including
a Collection of Texts. Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1986.
Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. Visual Culture: Images and Inter-
pretations. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Bubenik, Andrea. Reframing Albrecht Dürer: The Appropriation of Art. Farnham: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2013.
Bubenik, Andrea, ed. Five Centuries of Melancholia. Brisbane: UQ Art Museum, 2014.
Büchsel, Martin. Albrecht Dürers stich Melencolia I. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010.
Daniel, Drew. The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renais-
sance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
Dixon, Laurinda S. The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art. University Park:
Pennsylvania University Press, 2013.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” [1917], in On Murder, Mourning and Melan-
cholia. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Introduction by Maud Ellmann. London: Penguin
Books, 2005.
Grass, Günter. From the Diary of a Snail. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: Penguin,
1973.
Holly, Michael Ann. The Melancholy Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Iversen, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville. Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholy and Depression From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the
History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. London: Nelson, 1964.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancolia. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989.
Merback, Mitchell B. Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. New
York: MIT Press, 2017.
Moxey, Keith. Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Panofsky, Erwin and Fritz Saxl. Dürers Melencolia I: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche
Untersuchung. Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1923.
Griselda Pollock, ed. Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Malden:
Blackwell Pub, 2004.
Ross, Christine. The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics
of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Schuster, Peter-Klaus. Melencolia I: Dürers Denkbild, 2 vols. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991.
Schuster, Peter-Klaus. “Das Bild der Bilder. Zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Dürers Melencolie-
Kupferstich,” Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 (1982): 72–134.
Sebald, Winfried Georg. Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Direc-
tions, 1998.
Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower. Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of
Artists, A Documented History From Antiquity to the French Revolution. London: Weiden-
feld and Nicolson, 1963.
Žižek, Slavoj. Event. London: Penguin Books, 2014.
1 Hearts on Fire
Renaissance Portraiture and
Erotic Melancholy
Laurinda S. Dixon

Two English miniature portraits from the Elizabethan era (Plates 2 and 3) show their
subjects in a way never before seen in art. Attributed to Nicholas Hilliard (1547–
1619) and/or Isaac Oliver (1560–1617), both paintings depict attractive young men
gazing intensely outward, locking eyes with the viewer.1 The unique feature of both
these portraits is the curtain of shimmering flames that pervades their backgrounds,
obscuring all sense of place and time. The Hilliard miniature shows a pale young man
with dark, unkempt hair, wearing a fashionable earring in the shape of a fleur de lis.
In a remarkable display of casual disorder, he has cast off his doublet, appearing only
in a lace shift, unbuttoned nearly to the waist. Gazing outward, he absent-mindedly
toys with a locket at the end of a long chain around his neck. Oliver’s painting is simi-
lar, though slightly smaller. This young man has the same dark, soulful eyes, and his
beard and hairstyle are also similar. We do not know the identities of these men, but
they are so close in appearance that they could be taken for brothers, or perhaps even
the same person. Oliver’s youth also wears an earring, but instead of an undershirt,
he is dressed in a mantle, draped in the classical manner over his shoulders. In the
space above him is a Latin motto, “Alget qui non arter” (He grows cold who does
not burn). These carefully chosen works suggest that without inner fire, there is no
life—or love, for that matter. Whether they represent the same, or different men, both
images portray fashionable courtiers, exemplars of high social status and taste. That
they are in the grip of “burning passion,” seems to be obvious to modern viewers. But
what did that phrase imply as the sixteenth century yielded to the seventeenth? And
what purpose did these unconventional portraits serve?
English miniature portraits like these are compelling in their immediacy and
expressiveness. When not representing a sovereign, such as Elizabeth I, they depict
handsome, aristocratic youths and pretty, well-born ladies, often accompanied by
personal mottos and declarations of undying loyalty and eternal love.2 Such por-
traits convey a disquieting combination of sullenness and agitation, subtle sadness
and ardent desire. In their calculated air of exquisite ennui, they communicate both
privilege and passion. Painted in precise detail, sometimes on the backs of playing
cards, miniature portraits were originally hidden behind elaborate hinged covers and
worn as lockets around the neck (as in the Hilliard portrait) or as broaches pinned
to the clothing. The faces in these portraits peer intently from their frames, locking
eyes with the beholder as if to recruit us to some serious purpose. They capture the
fleeting quality of mood, blurring the boundary between objectivity and subjectiv-
ity. These cherished likenesses functioned as reminders of loved ones who, though
absent, were always available and close.
14 Laurinda S. Dixon
Historians explain the striking immediacy of English miniature portraits as reflect-
ing the “psychology” of their subjects, and interpret them as delicate and wistful evo-
cations of romantic love. Today, we glorify the state of being “in love” as a sublime
human experience, and a large and burgeoning scholarly literature in many fields
addresses the theme of the sombre, yet sublime lover. However, when applied to por-
traiture, this approach is anachronistic and, as we shall see, ultimately reductive. The
discipline of “psychology”—the modern science of the mind—was unknown before
the Freudian revolution of the nineteenth century.3 The early modern era perceived
love quite differently than do we, as a species of melancholia.4 As such, love was
perceived as a sickness in need of a cure. In their own time, these portrait miniatures
served as concrete representations of an ancient paradigm involving the eyes, heart,
and brain, which worked in tandem to produce a physical response to the passion and
sickness of love melancholy.5
By the sixteenth century, the definition of melancholia as a medical condition
had persisted for two millennia.6 Also called amor hereos or erotomania, the con-
dition depended on the ancient paradigm of humoral theory, which prevailed until
the Enlightenment.7 Within this worldview, all people and things were comprised of
four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—which, in turn, were characterized by four
qualities—cold, warm, hot, and wet. Four humors—black bile, blood, yellow bile,
and phlegm—represented the elements and qualities within the body. The elements,
qualities, and humours together formed yet another quartet, the four temperaments,
or human types. Warmth and wetness defined the sanguine temperament, embodied
in blood and air, whereas the choleric type, carried in yellow bile, was dominated by
dry, hot fire. Phlegmatics were cold, wet, and watery, distinguished by overabundant
phlegm. Melancholics were filled with black bile and, as a result, were dry, cold,
and earthy. Individuals took on the character of their dominant temperament both in
physical appearance and in the makeup of the soul, which we might call their “per-
sonality.” Melancholics tended to be withdrawn and depressed, reflecting the inertia
of earth. Generally, the condition could afflict a person in two ways. The temperament
could occur naturally, as the result of planetary and zodiacal dominance (born under
Saturn), heredity (having melancholic parents), or race (born a Moor, Jew, or Negro),
or “accidentally,” as the result of unforeseen events and passions, which afflict all
human beings throughout their lives. Health was defined as the perfect harmony of
humours within the body, and sickness was the result of humoral imbalance. Any dis-
eased or injured part of the body could affect the mind by sympathy and, vice versa,
any intense emotion or mental effort could induce disease. Love melancholia was the
result of humoral fires within the body, which left cold, black bile in their wake.8
The stylish young men and women in miniature portraits express a sort of delicious
misery, as if reveling in their melancholia. They are a study in contrasts—wretched
yet ecstatic; heated by the internal flames of passion, yet pale and cold to the touch;
morose yet appealing. The disease of love was contradictory, embodying the oppos-
ing qualities of heat and cold in a single condition. Love’s victims endured both the
tumultuous heat of desire and its inevitable cold, sooty aftermath. The association of
love, or “heroic,” melancholy with nobility was omnipresent in the chivalric tradi-
tion, which exalted the concept of romantic fervour. In reality, however, the notion
of privilege grew from a mistranslation of the Greek word “eros” (erotic love) into
“hereos” (noble).9 Thus, the ideas of eroticism and knightly virtue became conjoined
through misuse into a single definition. The chivalric pretentions of the Tudor court
 Hearts on Fire 15
embraced both the delights and vicissitudes of love melancholy, inherited from earlier
centuries.10 Fashionable lovers, men of sensitivity and depth, displayed their humoral
imbalance as a badge of privilege. By the seventeenth century, love melancholy was
fully accepted as a disease of fashion, denoting high social status, intelligence, and
sensitivity.11 Eventually melancholia became so strongly associated with the British
Isles and its aristocracy, that the disorder became known as “the English disease.”12
Vivid accounts of the irrational behaviour of melancholic lovers—fear, trembling,
insomnia, swooning, listlessness—are ubiquitous in early modern culture.13 Familiar
to all is Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Hamlet, who suffers as a result of his ill-fated love
for Ophelia. The mournful laments of John Dowland (1563–1626), who exploited his
very name as a pun on the words semper dolas (always grieving), are among the most
moving songs in the history of music.14 The symptoms of the disease of love were insti-
gated by intense inner heat, which afflicted not only lovers, but also scholars and holy
men. These three types—lovers, scholars, and hermits—suffered the burned out after-
math of humoral conflagrations.15 By the time of Hilliard and Oliver, love melancholy
claimed the attention of several theorists, most notably Jacques Ferrand, André du
Laurens, and Robert Burton.16 These authors penned vernacular monographs, which
were widely read by the literate public. Concurrently, love melancholy came under
increased scrutiny in academic circles, and was the subject of many doctoral disser-
tations in major European medical schools.17 But the pathology of melancholia was
also part of common wisdom. Just as we in the twenty-first century have absorbed the
nouns “complex” and “the unconscious” into our vocabulary, not all of us have actu-
ally read the source of these ideas. Psychological terminology is part of our contem-
porary wisdom, as was the language of the temperaments before the Enlightenment.
Early modern viewers need not have read a scholarly treatise to recognize the malady
suffered by the love-struck gallants in Hilliard’s and Oliver’s portraits.
The frontispiece of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Figure 1.1), which endured
basically unchanged throughout its many editions, visually displays the most impor-
tant melancholic types. The page is divided into four horizontal sections, each subdi-
vided into three parts. At the top centre of the page, beneath the astrological symbol
for the planet Saturn, sits Democritus, the venerable Greek thinker who maintained
that the best response to a difficult world is to laugh at its follies. He personifies the
pen name of the author Robert Burton, “Democritus Junior,” whose portrait appears
framed beneath the centre title. The philosopher sits in deep thought, quill in hand,
beneath a tree on a grassy hillock above a walled formal garden. The landscape views
to either side of him are populated with birds and animals traditionally associated
with Saturn and melancholy. At his right (our left) are birds signifying its attendant
vices, jealousy, and venery. The text identifies them as a kingfisher, swan, heron, and
two fighting cocks. On the other side are a sleeping dog, a cat, a buck and doe, a
rabbit, and bats, animals ruled by Saturn. In the sky above are a crescent moon and
a flying bat, both nocturnal entities. Two male figures, labeled “Hypochondriacus”
and “Inamorato” occupy the mid-section of Burton’s frontispiece. They embody mel-
ancholia’s inherent opposition—heat and cold, old age and youth. Other elements
of this page reinforce this dichotomy, but it is Inamorato (the lover) who is most
closely related to the lovesick swains in Hilliard’s and Oliver’s portraits. Burton’s
text describes him as standing with “folded hand: Down hangs his head, terse and
polite. Some ditty sure he doth indite. His lute and books about him lie, as symptoms
of his vanity.”18 On the ground, before him, is a laurel wreath, which reinforces his
Figure 1.1 Robert Burton, Frontispiece: The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps,
1628). Wellcome Collection. CC-BY
 Hearts on Fire 17
privileged social status. Like Burton’s Inamorato, the lovers who suffer in the flaming
holocausts of Hilliard and Oliver’s paintings were men of sensitivity and depth. Their
malady was a miserable, yet also delightful, sadness. More importantly, they were
men of courtly fashion, a role which they enthusiastically embraced.
Both Hilliard’s and Oliver’s portraits present their subjects as only partially
dressed—one appears in his undershirt, and the other in a casually draped stole. Their
calculated casualness is an astonishing departure from portrait tradition, which aimed
at presenting subjects in their “Sunday best.” However, dishevelment and disarray
were sure signs of erotic distraction, displayed by lovers in a passion. Melancholics
were so distracted that they neglected corporeal necessities, forgetting to wash, shave,
comb their hair, button their doublets, garter their hose, and tie their shoes. The
lovesick advertised their affliction in every aspect of their being, even to the point of
becoming unrecognizable to their friends. The physician Robert James, whose medi-
cal dictionary lists every malady known in seventeenth-century England, described it
as a tendency to “pine away in sloth and slovenliness.”19 Many portraits show sitters
with collars undone and shirts open, achieving the look of rumpled bedragglement so
favoured by amorous youths. Early modern English literature reinforced this conceit,
exhorting young men in a passion to dress with “your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe
untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation.”20
Love was one of the passions, or emotions, as they are known today.21 Like all
things, the humoral system rated passions as hot, cold, wet, or dry in degrees accord-
ing to their inherent qualities. Grief, for example, was cold, whereas love was hot in
the extreme. Unchecked erotic longing wreaked havoc on the human heart and body,
heating and drying it. The fires of love, depicted so graphically by Hilliard and Oliver,
caused the blood to boil, the organs to simmer, and the body’s moisture to be rapidly
consumed. The cold, dry symptoms of depression and physical torpor, suffered by
lovers, were a secondary effect of the rerouting of heat from the body’s exterior to
its inner organs. As a result, lovers’ eyes were hollow and dry, their bodies lean and
sometimes wasted. The flames recall Ferrand’s description of love’s inner fires as “pul-
sating in his innermost being.”22 Likewise, the Neoplatonic physician Marsilio Ficino
declared that “as long as love lasts, they are afflicted first by the burning of the bile.”23
Thus, the curtain of fire that invades the space in both portraits makes visible what
can only be intuited by clothing and facial expression—that flames literally consume
the body from within. The heat of erotic love is also declaimed in Elizabethan music.
The lyrics of Philip Rosseter’s well known song “What Then Is Love but Mourning?,”
asks “What is desire but a self-burning?”24
Love melancholy involved not only the body but also the soul, which consisted
of vegetative, sensitive, and rational parts, dominated respectively by natural, vital,
and animal spirits.25 Before the discovery of the circulation of blood, the body and
mind were believed to be controlled by these spirits, which responded to physical
and emotional stimuli. The natural spirits (the vegetative soul) originated in the liver,
circulated through the veins, and controlled involuntary faculties. The vital spirits
(the sensitive soul) emanated from the heart and were generated from inhaled air and
blood vapor before being passed through the arterial system to the brain. The animal
spirits (the rational soul) were fabricated in the brain, and performed the operations
of the rational soul and voluntary motion. Differences in the quality and configura-
tion of spirits contributed to the makeup of the soul, and influenced both personality
and intelligence. In all people, however, it was the heart, home of the vital spirits,
18 Laurinda S. Dixon
which instigated and dispersed the passions. The delicate, vulnerable heart was easily
wounded by love.26 Lovers were said to have a “heavy heart,” heaped with the dross
of burned humours. Furthermore, the fine strings, believed to comprise the heart,
were placed under great stress when challenged by hot love. Extreme passion with no
hope for fulfillment caused the strained strings to snap, due to contraction and expan-
sion by heat—hence the term “broken-hearted.”27
Hilliard’s and Oliver’s impassioned swains gaze intently outward from their enclos-
ing frames, engaging the viewer eye-to-eye. André du Laurens, physician to King
Henry IV of France, believed that desire originated in the eyes, which, in passing the
image of the beloved to the liver “doth set concupiscence on fire.”28 The belief that
the heart received love through the eyes has a long history, especially in chivalric
context.29 So important was the role of the gaze to lovers that the blind were gener-
ally believed incapable of erotic passion. Theoretically it all began as love entered the
brain through looking where, according to Ferrand (quoting Aristotle), it acted on
the body “like a poison,” initiating cataclysmic changes.30 Like the soul, the brain
(Figure 1.2) was also tripartite, divided into the faculties of imagination, reason, and
memory. This system, known as the cell doctrine of brain anatomy was accepted

Figure 1.2 Hieronymous Brunschwig, Cell Doctrine of Brain Anatomy, from The Noble
Experyence of the Vertuous Handy Warke of Surgeri (London: Petrus Treveris,
1525), 156. Wellcome Collection. CC-BY
 Hearts on Fire 19
31
throughout the early modern era. It explained the process of sight as beginning with
the imagination, located on the forehead, whose job it was to communicate the report
of the natural spirits, gleaned from the five “common” senses, directly to the heart.
Simultaneously, reason, located in the mid-brain, perceived the object and represented
it to the will. Reason determined if the thing being viewed was good or evil, and chose
either to act on the perception, or file it in memory, at the back of the brain.
In love melancholy, the heated vital spirits manufactured in the heart warmed the
animal spirits in turn, causing reason to react sympathetically. In response, the imagi-
nation, corrupted by the poisonous vapours thrown off by burning humours, com-
municated a false report to the deranged faculty of reason. As a result, an image could
become fixed in the imagination instead of being ultimately filed in memory. Under
the influence of erotic passion, the beloved’s image became stuck in a repeated loop,
bouncing from imagination to reason, to imagination again, and so on.32 The memory
was sidetracked, and the image lived continually in the imagination, the mind’s eye,
as an obsession. Images formed in this way literally left an impression on the imagina-
tion, in much the same way as a signet ring makes an imprint on wax. In love mel-
ancholia, the dryness of the brain caused such impressions to be retained, due to the
lack of normal elasticity in the infected imagination. Ferrand described impressions
produced in this way as “looking something like a drawing.”33
Every bit of sensory information—touch, taste, smell, hearing, or sight—entered
the brain as a visual image via the mind’s eye. Ferrand, echoing Plato, wrote “The eyes
are the windows by which love enters to attack the brain, then glides into the vital
organs where it generates venomous bile, quicker than an arrow.”34 Robert Fludd
(Figure 1.3) illustrates the cognitive process as originating literally in the “mind’s eye,”
placed in the forebrain. The process was explained through variations of the “extro-
mission” and “intromission” theories of sight, which viewed love as an infection of
the imagination, originating with visual rays, or “species.”35 Early modern authori-
ties differed in their descriptions of the nature and function of these visual rays, but
most agreed that lovers were unique in transmitting subtle vapours of blood in theirs.
Their eyes were the locus of an erotic exchange, the organs whereby blood vapours
were emitted, and by which “alien vapours” were both received and transmitted.36 If
infected by heated passion, the mind’s eye could form new species on its own or alter
existing species. This resulted in “phantasms,” an inner image enhanced with qualities
that were beyond reality.37 More seriously, the “look of love” was deemed capable of
wounding or even killing a receptive viewer.
The process of sight not only involved the viewer but also the person being viewed.
The burning swains in Hilliard’s and Oliver’s portraits are not the only ones experi-
encing the mechanical effect of heated passion. On the other end, the person looking
at their painted portraits was undergoing his/her own process of self-immolation.38 In
fact, the process of looking was mutual, and the gaze involved both the viewer and the
object of their contemplation in a dynamic and manipulative process. It was gener-
ally acknowledged that a direct gaze, if met by a receptive recipient, could instigate a
physical response. In men, if the heat of passion were inordinantly strong, the spirits
bypassed the brain altogether and moved directly to the penis, causing it to stiffen
spontaneously. This could happen even without direct physical contact with a partner.
In fact, fixing the image of a lover in the imagination and deliberately dwelling on it
could cause ejaculation. Theorists argued that, if such an emission were instigated
for reasons of health, temporarily moderating the heat of lust, the soul would remain
20 Laurinda S. Dixon

Figure 1.3 Robert Fludd, The Mind’s Eye (Imagination). Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et
minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia. 2 vols. (Oppenheim: De Bry,
1619), 2: 327. Wellcome Collection. CC-BY.

chaste. By looking directly and suggestively from the safety of their gilded frames,
Hilliard’s and Oliver’s passionate swains were manipulating the power of their gaze
to provoke a physical response in their defenseless, receptive lovers.39
Tradition accepted that love melancholy could be quelled by obtaining the object
of desire. Ancient medicine endorsed therapeutic sexual intercourse as a remedy for
lovesickness; however, Christianity could not condone it, except within the bonds of
lawful matrimony. The first edition of Ferrand’s Erotomania (1610) openly discussed
the forbidden cure. The book circulated for ten years before it was recalled for burn-
ing by the Inquisition.40 Ferrand’s fate was less severe than that of his contemporary
Giulio Cesare Vanni, who was tortured and burned at the stake for endorsing sexual
 Hearts on Fire 21
intercourse as a cure for love melancholy. Having learned his lesson, Ferrand was
careful to distinguish between “licit” and “illicit” lovemaking in the book’s second
edition. This time, Ferrand chastised earlier authors for suggesting, as he had earlier,
that a melancholic should “purchase young girls and sleep with them frequently.”41
Early physicians functioned as guardians of both soul and body. Faced with a choice
between celibate heaven and burning, lusty hell, a life-threatening illness like eroto-
mania was a small price to pay for eternal bliss.
Ironically, celibacy was an essential aspect of love melancholy, which was caused
by intense longing for an absent or unobtainable lover. This was appropriate in the
case of a courtier’s abstract love of a virgin queen, but what about marriage? It is
important to remember that most aristocratic marriages were arranged affairs. Love
matches, often clandestine, did happen, but, in general, the strength of one’s passion
had less to do with matrimony than the size of one’s purse. Generally speaking, the
“love” experienced by lovers and the “affection” felt by spouses were entirely differ-
ent passions. One was hot and uncontrolled, the other mildly warm and predictable.
When addressing the question of love in marriage, Andreas Capellanus explained
what he considered an obvious point: “Everybody knows that love can have no place
between husband and wife. They may be bound to each other by a great and immod-
erate affection, but their feeling cannot take the place of love . . . for what is love but
an inordinate desire to receive passionately a furtive and hidden embrace? But what
embrace between busband and wife can be furtive?”42 Burton also believed that, in
the practical, earthbound realm of marriage, husbands “do not love their own wives,
though otherwise fair, wise, virtuous, and well qualified, because they are theirs.”43
This conundrum assured the popularity of amorous portrait miniatures at the Eliza-
bethan court, which combined the continental fashion for Petrarchan love longing
with a neo-medieval code of chivalry, recalling the Arthurian origins of the Tudor
royal family.
In search of a lawful remedy with no moral repercussions, theorists encouraged the
act of looking as a substitute for coitus, a practice recorded in ancient and medieval
texts. Ferrand actually declared that “It is better to fall in love with an image.”44 He
preferred visual substitutes to the precarious and unpredictable torrents of heated pas-
sion generated by an actual physical encounter. To him, love was all about seeing, “a
state of continuous torment over an image painted . . . in the depths of the mind.”45
Ferrand prescribed images as he would a potion or a pill, instructing that “At the very
time when a man is actually thinking he must have an image before him.”46 When
following these instructions, the heated faculty of reason and inflamed animal spir-
its instigated the faculty of “reminiscence,” a sub-species of memory, housed in the
back cell of the brain.47 The Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta warned that
the appearance of the beloved in the imagination must be continually nourished, or
it could be easily driven out by others competing for the lover’s attentions. He main-
tained that “fascination by love takes place when owing to very frequent looking or
to an intense, though instantaneous look, one eye meets another, and two eye-beams
reciprocally encounter. . . . They come to sparkle through the eyes, rushing to, and
penetrating, the inner spirit which is rooted in the heart.”48 Portrait miniatures were
important factors in this process, drawing forth what we would today call a “psycho-
logical” response from the interaction of eyes, heart, spirits, and brain. By beholding
an empathic image of the beloved, passions grown cold with distance or time could
literally be rekindled. In the absence of the real thing, a portrait simulacrum replaced
22 Laurinda S. Dixon
the beloved, emitting its own visual rays and having a similar effect on the beholder,
but without the aggravating and dangerous blood species. Portraits allowed the loved
one always to be present in the mind’s eye, even if absent and unattainable in reality.
The emotional intensity communicated by Hilliard’s and Oliver’s portraits and the
physical response they instigated were not intended to be experienced by strangers,
but by one person only, the lover. The process of kindling inner fires was exclusive,
private, and consensual. When two mutually receptive lovers’ eyes met, either one-
on-one, or through a portrait intermediary, passion was magnified. John Donne’s sen-
suous poem “The Extasie,” which has been called a verbal expression of “spiritual
intercourse,” describes this meeting of eye beams, which, when conjoined, imprint
“pictures” of each lover on the other’s soul: “Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred /
Our eyes, upon one double string / . . . And pictures on our eyes to get / was all
our propagation.”49 In the more prosaic words of Burton, “Gazing one on the other,
they direct sight to sight, join eye to eye, and so drink and suck in love between
them.”50 Portraits of burning lovers were intended to captivate, fascinate, and enslave
by manipulating both the body and will. They allowed the lover’s image, imprinted on
the imagination, to be continually nourished and refreshed.
In the context of early modern scientific traditions, Hilliard’s and Oliver’s portraits
of melancholic lovers imperiled by flames functioned as active instigators and forti-
fiers of passion. They harnessed the power of the eyes, heart, brain, and passions,
which worked together in early modern cognitive theory. The very act of looking was
capable of kindling the mutual fires of love by initiating and reinforcing the appear-
ance of the beloved in memory. But these lovely paintings were more than inert, beau-
tiful objects of contemplation which record the appearance of a beloved. They were
active instigators of a type of consensual, visual coitus, which involved both viewer
and subject. In gazing at them, safe and sanitized in museum display cases, we involve
ourselves in a furtive, intimate menage a trois, made brazenly public by the passing
of four centuries.

Notes
1. Hilliard and Oliver were contemporaries, who worked for patrons at the highest level of
English court society. Their works, mostly miniature portraits, are unsigned. As a result,
both these portraits have been attributed, at one time or another, to both painters on
iconographic, stylistic, and technical grounds. My identification accepts the museums’ cur-
rent attributions. For the careers of Hilliard and Oliver, see Mary Edmond, Hilliard and
Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two Great Miniaturists (London: R Hale, 1983). On the
controversy of attribution, see Roy Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1983), 142–85; and Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Minia-
ture Rediscovered 1520–1620, Exh. cat. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 109–10,
112.
2. Scholars have interpreted English miniature portraits from many points of view, includ-
ing Elizabethan court culture, Petrarchan revivalism, and Shakespearean literary tradition.
Roy Strong has written prolifically about these works in Artists of the Tudor Court; The
Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hud-
son, 1977); The Elizabethan Image: Painting in England 1540–1620, Exh. cat. (London:
Tate Gallery, 1969); The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (New York:
Pantheon, 1969); The English Renaissance Miniature; and Tudor and Jacobean Portraits,
2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969).
3. The literature devoted to melancholia is vast. For surveys of the development of the concept
from a humoral disorder to a psychological one, see Arthur Kleinman and Bryan Good,
 Hearts on Fire 23
eds., Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry
of Affect and Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Stanley W. Jackson,
Melancholy and Depression From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986); and Stanley W. Jackson, “Robert Burton and Psychological Heal-
ing,” History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 44 (1989): 160–78.
4. Love melancholy is the topic of Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, All
the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It, 1621 (New York:
E P. Dutton, 1932. Reprint, New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001), book 3;
and Jacques Ferrand, Erotomania, or A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes,
Symptoms, Prognostics, and Care of Love, or Erotique Melancholy, trans. Edmund
Chilmead (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1640). These early modern authors relied on ancient
and Arabic precedents in their presentations of love melancholy, citing Plato, Plutarch,
Plotinus, Avicenna, Xenophon, and Theophrastus, among others. For modern discus-
sions, see Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, eds., Eros and Anteros: The
Medical Traditions of Love in the Renaissance (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1992); Kenneth R.
Bartlett, Konrad Eisenbichler, and Janice Liedl, eds., Love and Death in the Renaissance
(Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1991); and Marie-Paule Duminil, “La mélancolie amoreuse dans
l’antiquitè,” in La folie et le corps, ed. Jean Céard (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale
Supérieur, 1985), 91–109.
5. For the imagery of melancholia in English miniatures, see especially Laurinda S. Dixon,
The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700 (University
Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 55–80; and Olivier Meslay, “La
mélancolie des tueurs élisabéthains,” in Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident, ed. Jean
Clair, Exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 128–33.
6. See Jackson, Melancholy and Depression, 29–43, for ancient theories of melancholia,
including the Hippocratician school (fifth and fourth centuries BCE), Aristotle (384–322
BCE), Celsus (act. ca. 30), Soranus of Ephesus (act. ca. 98–138), Rufus of Ephesus (98–
117), Aretaeus (act. ca. 150), and Galen (131–201).
7. The concept of the bodily humours was familiar by the time of Hippocrates in the fifth
century BCE, though the first formal explanation of humoral theory is generally credited
to him. See Hippocrates, “The Nature of Man,” in Works, Vol. 4, trans. and eds. W. H. S.
Jones and E. T. Withington, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923–31).
For a modern discussion of humoral principles, see Benjamin Farrington, Greek Science:
Its Meaning to Us (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961).
8. Rufus of Ephesus (98–117) first made the distinction between natural and accidental mel-
ancholy. For a summary of Rufus’s theories, see Jackson, Melancholy and Depression,
29–43. Modern notions of “race” were inherent in humoral theory. Moors and Blacks
were considered melancholy owing to the dark colour of their skin, which linked them
with earth. Jews, however, endured melancholia as divine retribution for their rejection of
Christianity. See Eric Zafran, “Saturn and the Jews,” Journal of the Warburg and Cour-
tauld Institutes 42 (1979): 16–27.
9. For the etymology of the term “heroic melancholy,” see J. L. Lowes, “The Lovers Maladye
of Hereos,” Modern Philology 2 (1914): 491–546.
10. On love melancholy and the medieval chivalric tradition, see Michael Camille, The Medi-
eval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (Abrams, 1998); Dana E. Stewart, The
Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 2003); and Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle
Ages: The “Viaticum” and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1990).
11. For melancholy as an Elizabethan disease of fashion, see Lawrence Babb, “Melancholy and
the Elizabethan Man of Letters,” Huntington Library Quarterly 4 (April 1941): 247–61.
12. An appellation coined by George Cheyne, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous
Diseases of All Lands, as Spleen Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hys-
terical Distempers, etc. (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976). See also Carl
Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590–1642 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1968); and Oswald Doughty, “The English Malady in the Eighteenth Century,”
Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 241–69.
24 Laurinda S. Dixon
13. See Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholy in English Litera-
ture From 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951); Carol Falvo
Heffernan, The Melancholic Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1995); and Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Stud-
ies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge and
K. Paul, 1971).
14. Love melancholy is promenant in several Shakespeare plays, especially As You Like It,
Hamlet, Love’s Labors Lost, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. On melancholia in Shake-
speare’s dramas, see Lawrence Babb, “Love Melancholy in the Elizabethan and Early Stuart
Drama,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 12 (February 1943): 117–32. For the songs of
John Dowland, see Robin Headlam Wells, “John Dowland and Elizabethan Melancholy,”
Early Music 13 (November 1985): 514–28.
15. For depictions in art of these three melancholic types, which combined to create a fourth,
the melancholic artist, see Dixon, Dark Side of Genius.
16. Ferrand, Erotomania; André du Laurens, A Discourse on the Preservation of the Sight:
Of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. Richard Surphlet (Lon-
don: F. Kingston, 1599); Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy. These early modern authors,
and many others, relied on ancient and Arabic precedents in their presentations of love
melancholy, citing Plato, Plutarch, Plotinus, Avicenna, Xenophon, and Theophrastus. For
modern discussions, see Beecher and Ciavolella, Eros and Anteros; Bartlett, Eisenbichler,
and Liedl, Love and Death in the Renaissance; and Duminil, “La mélancolie amoreuse
dans l’antiquitè.”
17. See Dixon, Dark Side of Genius, 193–8, for a list of doctoral dissertations on the subject of
melancholia and its related syndromes, produced at European universities from 1590 to 1750.
18. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:23.
19. Robert James, A Medical Dictionary, 3 vols. (London: T. Osborne, 1743–45).
20. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3.2.397.
21. For the passions in early modern thought, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’ Natural Phi-
losophy (London: Routledge, 2000); and Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions
in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
22. Ferrand, Erotomania, 270.
23. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. and trans. Sears Reynolds Jayne
(Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), 168.
24. Thomas Campion and Philip Rosseter, A Booke of Ayres, Set Forth to Be Sung to the Lute,
Orpherian, and Base Violl (London: Peter Short, 1601).
25. For the complex interplay of qualities, temperaments, and emotions and their effects on
the human body and soul, see Ruth Leila, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1928); Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Elizabethan Psy-
chology and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” History of Ideas 38 (1977): 373–88; and
Jackson, Melancholy and Depression, 10–20, 352–72.
26. For the imagery of the love-struck human heart in medieval art, see Camille, Medieval Art
of Love.
27. For the effect of love on the human heart, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emo-
tions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77–134.
28. Laurens, Discourse on the Preservation of the Sight, 118.
29. For the heart in the context of chivalric love, see Stewart, The Arrow of Love; and Eric
Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
30. Ferrand refers, of course, to literal blindness, not to the metaphorical “blind love,” which
cannot recognize fault in the beloved. Ferrand, Erotomania, 80–1.
31. For the cell doctrine of brain anatomy, see Walter Pagel, “Medieval and Renaissance Con-
tributions to Knowledge of the Brain and Its Functions,” in The History and Philosophy
of Knowledge of the Brain and Its Functions: An Anglo-American Symposium, London,
July 15th–17th, 1957, ed. Frederick Noel Poynter (Oxford: Oxford Blackwell Scientific
Publications, 1958), 95–114.
32. Described by Ferrand, Erotomania, 252. See also Lina Bolzoni, “The Art of Memory and
the Erotic Image in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Europe: The Example of Giovanni
Battista Della Porta,” 103–22, in Eros and Anteros, eds. Beecher and Ciavolella.
 Hearts on Fire 25
33. Ferrand, Erotomania, 46. See also the advice of Tommaso Campanella, The City of the
Sun, summarized by Domenica Pietropaolo, “Love, Sex, and Eugenics in The City of
the Sun,” 135–45, in Éros et Antéros: Réflexions psychoanalytiques sur la sexualité, eds.
Denis Braunschweig and Michel Fain (Paris: Payot, 1971).
34. Ferrand, Erotomania, 233.
35. For explanations of ancient “extromission” and “intromission” theories of sight and the
question of sight as an active or passive activity, see David Lindberg, Theories of Vision
From Al-kindi to Kepler (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976); and David Park, The
Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997).
36. Ferrand, Erotomania, 81.
37. Ferrand, Erotomania, 321. On perverted species implicated in love, see Donald A. Beecher,
“Quattrocento Views on the Eroticization of the Imagination,” 49–65, in Beecher and Cia-
volella, Eros and Anteros; Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medi-
cine, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); and L. J. Rather, “Old and
New Views of the Emotions,” Clio Medica 1 (1965): 1–25.
38. See Laurinda S. Dixon, “The Eyes, Heart, and Brain of the Beholder: Experiencing English
Renaissance Miniature Portraits,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 36 (Summer 2010):
1–10.
39. [Regimen of Salerno], The Prose Salernitan Questions, Edited From a Bodleian Manu-
script (Auct. F. 3. 10), ed. Brian Lawn (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 10–11.
For discussion, see Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages.
40. On the controversy aroused by Ferrand’s treatise, see Donald A. Beecher, “Erotic Love and
the Inquisition: Jacques Ferrand and the Tribunal of Toulouse, 1620,” Sixteenth Century
Journal 20 (1989): 41–54; Jean Céard, “The Devil and Lovesickness: Views of Sixteenth-
Century Physicians and Demonologists,” in Beecher and Ciavolella, Eros and Anteros,
33–48, and Winifried Schleiner, “Ethical Problems of the Lie That Heals in Renaissance
Literature,” in Beecher and Ciavolella, Eros and Anteros, 161–75.
41. Ferrand, Erotomania, 334.
42. Andreas Capellanus (André le Chapelain), The Art of Courtly Love, trans. Jon Parry and
ed. Frederick W. Locke (New York: F. Ungar, 1957), 110. On the necessity of extramarital
love in the courtly tradition, see Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 94–6.
43. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:344.
44. Ferrand, Erotomania, 252–3.
45. Ferrand, Erotomania, 78.
46. Ferrand, Erotomania, 47.
47. Described by Daniel Sennert, Practical Physic, trans. Nicolas Culpepper and Abidiah Cole
(London: Peter Cole, 1664). On memory and melancholia, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin
Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Phi-
losophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 39; and Frances Yates, The Art
of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966).
48. Leonardo Bruno, Candeleo, trans. and cited in Robert Baldwin, “Gates Pure and Shining
and Serene: Mutual Gazing as an Amatory Motif in Western Literature and Art,” 46, in
The Language of Gesture in the Renaissance: Selected Proceedings of the Conference Held
in Toronto, November 1983, eds. Konrad Eisenbichler and Philip L. Sohm (Toronto: Cana-
dian Society for Renaissance Studies, 1986).
49. John Donne, “The Extasie,” in Elegies, and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. C. A. Patrides (Lon-
don: Dent, 1985), 1–20. For this interpretation, see Stewart, Arrow of Love, 134–7.
50. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 3:44. For the eye as the subject of later English por-
taiture, see Henneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Eighteenth-
Century British Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2012).

References
Babb, Lawrence. The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholy in English Literature From
1580 to 1642. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951.
Another random document with
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 with us where he can be taught the Christian religion.
Says he would not give up the new religion for the offer of
being king of Siam. Comes to worship, walking five miles
over muddy roads. Longs to see another Siamese
Christian—has hunted all over to find one.”
In the fall of that year Dr. and Mrs. House were obliged to spend
several months in Petchaburi to relieve the McFarlands, who went to
Bangkok for medical attendance. During that sojourn the doctor had
several conversations with Nai Kawn; and in letters to his brother in
America narrates the confession of that remarkable convert:
“Doctor, the Siamese think only of getting a living. That
they must have nor always are they very scrupulous as to
the means they resort to. Before—in the days of my
sinfulness—I was so too. Then I had not reflected upon,
was not attentive to my condition. I saw myself a sinner;
when I became conscious of this, the Lord Jesus Christ
was pleased to forgive me.
“My wife formerly—when I began to talk in the house
with those that came to see me about the religion of Jesus
—would go away, stop her ears, would say ‘I won’t hear it,’
and off she would go. Now she says nothing, listens,
sometimes says there is good in it; will hear me when I
pray in the room at night.
“I remonstrated with my neighbours but, Doctor, they are
wilfully set in their wickedness. But, Doctor, we cannot
make them repent. It is only those whom God pleases to
choose.
“They tell me that when the king hears that I have
become a disciple of Jesus I shall be whipped. I tell them,
if he kills me I care not. If the Lord gives me to die, I must
die as the Lord willeth. But while I live, I must bring forth
fruits to offer Him.”
Nai Kawn was never formally enrolled in the Church. He had found
the acme of joy and of liberty in the Gospel before he knew of the
church as an organisation. The witness of his conduct, the testimony
of his lips and the evidence of his fellowship with Christians was
more vital and compelling than a formal profession of ecclesiastical
relationship. The honour of having been the first native at Petchaburi
to become a member of the Church was gained two years later by
Nai Kao.
Another honour of primacy in the profession of religion was
attained at Bangkok in 1861, when Maa Esther became the first
Siamese woman to unite with the Church of Christ. She had been
given, a poor sick child, to Mrs. Mattoon by her father at an early
age; and had been adopted and reared by Mrs. Mattoon. She had
accompanied her foster mother to America in this same year. Maa
Esther has continued a faithful, consistent Christian all these
remaining years, and has been a zealous worker for the cause of
Christ.
What was the final evangelising tour by Dr. House was taken in
1862, when, accompanied by Rev. N. A. McDonald, who had lately
joined the mission, and Rev. Robert Telford, who was maintaining
the Baptist work among the Chinese in Siam, he made a trip along
the eastern coast of the gulf as far as Chantaboon. The responsibility
for the school, together with the condition of Mrs. House’s health,
made it inconvenient for him to continue this phase of the work which
he greatly enjoyed.

PERIOD OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

During the Civil War in the United States the mission was not very
seriously affected by the conditions of the home church. Except for
the first injunction from the Board against enlargement of the work
and for the exceeding high rate of bank exchange, Dr. House gives
no indications of adverse results on the field. Although the
missionaries then in Siam were from both sections of the divided
fatherland, they continued to live in cordial relations. During this
period several reinforcements reached Siam, showing that the
church at home had not allowed the war to curtail their work entirely.
These additions were: Rev. and Mrs. C. S. George (1862), Mrs. F. F.
Odell (1863), Rev. and Mrs. P. L. Carden (1866). On the other hand,
the mission suffered the serious loss of Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Mattoon,
who were constrained to resign in 1865 on account of Mrs. Mattoon’s
continued ill health.

SECOND FURLOUGH
Dr. House left Siam only twice during his twenty-nine years of
service. After a second period of seven-and-a-half years of labour,
he sailed for America on a furlough in February, 1864. Even then the
leave was taken not so much on his own account as because of Mrs.
House’s urgent need of recuperation. Since they left America, both
of Dr. House’s parents had died. He made the second journey at his
own expense. At this time the Civil War in America caused the rates
of exchange to be very high; to avoid this high rate, Dr. House
accepted a loan of one thousand dollars from the king’s private
treasury, giving only his personal note as security; and of this sum
the king authorised Dr. House to pay over to the widow of Rev. Jesse
Caswell, in America, five hundred dollars as a further token of
appreciation of his former tutor.
The journey home was made by way of the Red Sea, Palestine,
Egypt, Paris and England. Inclusive of the travel, their absence from
Siam covered two years and ten months. The return trip was made
by way of the Pacific, leaving San Francisco Sept. 9, 1866, thus for
the first time completing for these two the circumnavigation of the
globe. On the way out a stop was made at the Hawaiian Islands. The
travelers reached Hong Kong Nov. 4, and while waiting for a vessel
to continue their voyage they went up to Canton, where they were
most friendly received and hospitably entertained by the family of Mr.
S. E. Burrows, the head of a great commercial and shipping firm of
that place. The Burrows extended to Dr. and Mrs. House a free
passage in one of their own vessels which was sailing direct for
Bangkok, and there they arrived Dec. 16, 1866.
Again the returning missionaries received a warm welcome on the
part of their many native friends.
 “We were warmly welcomed by the missionary circle
and old friends out of it, native and foreign. Wish you
could have seen the congratulatory presents our native
friends and neighbours brought to shew their gladness at
our return.
“The king (being ill at the time) said ‘He was glad the old
missionaries had returned; he had been very sorry that
Maw House and Maw Mattoon were gone.’”
A few weeks later, when the king was able, he sent for Dr. House
and gave a private audience.
“On presenting myself at the palace gate when my
name was announced the king said (so I was told by some
around him) ‘Dr. H. is not like other foreigners; let him
come to me at once.’ I was ushered into the royal palace
ere he had left the grand audience hall—his courtiers and
pages waiting upon him. I was received with the cordiality
and familiarity of an old acquaintance.
“He asked me how I came? Did Mrs. H. come with me;
what countries I had seen? Mentioning Egypt, he asked
me if the canal across the isthmus of Suez would
succeed. Saying I had now gone around the world,
returning to Siam by crossing the Pacific Ocean to China,
he quickly interrupted, ‘Then you lost a day!’ and
explained to his attendants how it was....
“It was time for him now to make his evening visit to the
vast and lofty structure they were rearing for the funeral
solemnities of the late second king. Inviting me to follow,
he went down to his sedan and, preceded by soldiers and
followed by a crowd of attendants, was borne away.
Following, I found him seated in a temporary pavilion
erected where he could overlook the work. He soon called
me to his side—I, alone, of the hundreds around him,
stood upright. He made inquiries concerning Mrs. Caswell,
and as he looked again at her picture, turning to the
princess royal acting as his sword bearer, said, ‘This was
 the wife of the teacher that I revered.’ It was gratifying and
interesting to see these pleasant memories of persons
and events passed away eighteen years before, stealing
over him.
“Having intimated to the king my wish to take up my
note for one thousand dollars in his treasurer’s hands and
saying that I should, of course, expect to pay interest on
the balance of five hundred dollars—after deducting five
hundred dollars paid to Mrs. C. on his majesty’s behalf—in
a few days his majesty’s private treasurer paid me a visit,
having had the king’s instruction to receive from me simply
five hundred dollars, and to surrender to me the note on
which was endorsed these words in the king’s own
handwriting:
“‘S. P. P. M. Mongkut, the King, does not wish to have
interest from the loan to his good friend Doctor Samuel R.
House—wishing but some useful books, etc., according to
the pleasure of said doctor, with stating of price of article.
This testimony given 1st January, 1867, the seventeenth
year of our reign.’”

THE AWAKENING OF 1866–7

Doubtless the greatest joy upon return to Siam was to find that a
great spiritual awakening had taken place in the mission school. If
the fruits of labour seem sparse so far it must be considered that the
most favourable soil had scarcely time to produce its harvest. The
boys and girls who had been under the intimate influence of Dr. and
Mrs. House in the school were just approaching the adolescent age
when, in 1866, a spiritual awakening manifested itself. News of this
work of grace had reached Dr. House at Hong Kong, and upon
arrival at Bangkok he rejoiced to learn that the facts more than
confirmed the report.
“Found all well and the very best of good news awaiting
us, confirming the hopes I have felt all along that a better
 day was about to dawn on us in Siam. Two of our oldest
and most promising pupils (Hee, the writer of that
interesting letter to me, published in the Foreign
Missionary last year, being one of them), and a native
teacher in our employ (a man of some education) were
baptised a few weeks ago as converts from heathenism;
and another native teacher, Naah (Esther’s husband), with
others of the pupils in the mission school are desirous of
Christian baptism. These new converts with the older
church members sustain semi-weekly prayer-meetings
among themselves with warm interest.”
The convert named in this letter was Tien Hee, who, a few years
later, went to America to seek a higher education. Graduating in
medicine at the New York University in 1871, he returned to Siam,
where he became the first native physician practising the Western
system of medicine. He became eminently successful in his practise,
amassed considerable wealth, received the title of Phra Montri and
lately has been elevated to a higher rank of nobility, as Phya
Sarasin. In grateful recognition of what Christianity has done for him
he has made generous contributions toward the work of the mission.
Two months later Dr. House reported further confessions:
“It was my privilege and joy last Sabbath to receive to
our little mission church in the ordinance of baptism three
Christian converts, all connected or once connected with
our mission boarding school; and one of these my dear
old pupil Naah (Esther’s husband), the boy especially
given me by his Chinese father on his dying bed. The
others were Dik and Ting.... You do not know how many
fold I felt repaid by the privilege I enjoyed that Sabbath.”
In August of that year (1867) he writes further:
“We are permitted to report the admission by baptism to
our native church at this station at our last communion of
five new members. Two of them girls that have been long
under instruction in the missionary families; two others,
 elder pupils in the mission school for boys; and the fifth,
one more advanced in years.
“Among the four young persons who kneeled one after
another to receive the solemn ordinance which made
them church members was our dear Ooey, who has long
in her heart been persuaded of the truth of our religion and
the importance of attendance to it, and who a few weeks
before came out bright and clear and decided, in her
determination to serve the Saviour. Again it fell to my lot to
administer the ordinance; and a privilege unspeakable it
was to stand up and in the name of the Lord to apply the
seal of the covenant to the dusky brow of that child of
many prayers, and to others I had helped teach the way to
heaven.
“That Sabbath evening Ooey told me with beaming eyes
that her heart was full of happiness. And yet only the day
before the poor child had been told by her heathen father
—who was angry with her for forsaking the old religion—
that she ‘must never call him father, nor her mother,
mother again’....
“The fifth is Ah Keo, for over twenty years a servant in
the different mission families. I recollect talking and
praying with him the first year I was in Siam. But his
besetting sin, intemperance, made all exhortation lost on
him till this spring—a miracle of grace has been wrought.”
This religious interest increased with the days, so that the semi-
weekly meeting for prayer gave way to a daily meeting, in which the
young Christians exhorted their fellow students and friends to believe
on Christ, and their hearts were poured out in intercession for the
conversion of their families and of Siam. Then, in September, Dr.
House records another confession from among the student group:
“Delia made our hearts very glad the other day by
coming to us and saying her mind was made up to
become a Christian, and wished to be baptised. Her
mother and brother would be very angry with her, but she
 felt she must take up her cross. She is a girl of a great
deal of decision and energy of character.”
The fall meeting of the Presbytery of Siam for 1867 was marked
by items of unusual interest. Dr. House was installed pastor of the
church, as a successor to Mr. Mattoon. The formal call for his
pastoral services (signed by thirteen members), the charge to the
pastor and people, the prayers and the sermon were all in the
Siamese language—an index of the development of self-government
in the native church. At the same meeting A. Klai, of Petchaburi, was
licensed as a native local preacher, apparently the first to be fitted for
that rank. Dr. House jocularly refers to him as a “graduate of the
McFarland Theological Seminary of Petchaburi,” as he had been
under the instruction of Mr. McFarland. At the communion in the
Bangkok church this same autumn occurred the ordination of the first
native elder of the local church, the congregation having elected the
young man Naah already mentioned.

THE NOTABLE TRIP TO LAO

One notable trip of Dr. House remains to be narrated, a journey
into the land of the Lao—notable because of the accident which
nearly closed the career of the doctor. The trip occurred in 1868. The
previous year was signalised in the annals of missions in Siam by
the establishment of a station at Chiengmai among the Lao people in
what is now known as North Siam. It is curious to note that while Dr.
House himself had been among the first to become interested in
these people as he came into contact with the Lao boatmen at
Bangkok and although he once seriously contemplated leaving the
Mattoons alone at Bangkok while he should carry the Gospel into the
unexplored northland, yet when the proposition was being discussed
by the mission to open a station there the doctor enters a record of
his judgment that the time is premature.
However, additions to the corps of workers having made it
possible to establish another station, the mission decided to send
Messrs. McGilvary and Wilson, who had made an exploratory trip the
previous season, to open work among the Lao tribes. In January of
1867 the McGilvary family set out in small boats, making the journey
all the way up the Meinam. In the next December the Wilsons
followed along the same route. It was a three-months’ journey up
Siam’s great river, whose name means “mother of waters.” Above
Raheng the stream forces its way through a narrow gap in the
mountain chain, forming a long series of perilous rapids and
affording scenery which is described by voyagers as of surpassing
beauty.
Dr. House wrote concerning the reason for his own trip:
“And here I must let you into a little secret. Mrs. Wilson,
it seems, will require the attendance of a physician about
the first of March, and so also will Mrs. McGilvary. So
much the worse for both of them, you will say—seeing
they are five hundred miles from medical aid. Must they,
then, be abandoned to their fate? You must not, then, dear
brother, be much surprised to learn that this double call of
Providence has proved too strong for me. Much as I
dislike the practise of my profession, much as I dread the
long, tedious journey, much as I desire just now to stay
with my interesting and most dearly loved flock [the church
over which the doctor had just been made pastor] I have
felt it would be wrong for me to decline the invitation I
have received to visit Chiengmai at the critical time.
“But I cannot afford to waste three months on the
journey there, when by boat to Raheng in twenty-three
days Chiengmai from there can be reached by elephant in
eight to ten days more.”
Accordingly, the doctor determined to take the quicker route, and
by February 13, he had reached Raheng. There he was delayed five
days waiting for elephants to be provided for him. The company then
set out over the mountains, expecting to reach their destination
nearly on schedule time. Then came the accident, the story of which
is most vividly set forth in the letter written by Dr. House himself on
that same day.
 “Ban Hong North Laos,
“Monday, March 2, 1868.
“Rev. Mr. and Mrs. McGilvary.
“Dear Brother and Sister:
“So near and yet unable to get farther. Is it not a strange
Providence? When I started this morning strong and well,
refreshed by a Sabbath’s day rest at the little hamlet of
Wong Luang I was rejoicing in the thought that I was
almost at the end of this tedious and almost endless
journey through the sultry wilderness and would soon
receive the welcome which such friends as you will give,
when about eight or nine A. M. my elephant by whose side
I was walking, suddenly and without provocation turned
upon me and pushed me over with his trunk and, when
lying on the ground, thrust one of those huge tusks at me
and into my poor body—how deep I know not, but ripping
up my abdomen two and one-half inches just below the
umbillicus. It was a strange sensation I assure you. I was
expecting another thrust which I could not escape, for I
was jammed in by the side of a tree. By this time,
however, his driver had got his head turned into the road
again.
“And there I was in the far woods with very probably a
fatal wound and none but servants and Laos elephant
drivers. As my men came up poor Beo, who is most
faithful and much attached, burst into tears. And now
thoughts of Harriette and home rushed over me. But God
my Saviour, God to whom only yesterday I had renewed
my consecration of myself as His servant in a sweet
retired spot on the beautiful mountain stream where we
were camped, has permitted—nay ordered—this
unlooked-for calamity; and in God I trust, blessed be His
Name for sustaining me through the hours of this sad day.
“Such wound, of course, must be sewed up, and at
once, and I must do it, for I could trust none of those with
me, new men all but good Beo. It was curious business,
this sewing up one’s own abdomen; but it must be done,
and it was done—four stitches. By this time my men had
contrived a very comfortable litter with an awning from the
bamboos growing near at hand. Of course climbing upon
an elephant and enduring the merciless rocking motion
was out of the question. So borne by four men on the litter
we slowly journeyed on through the dry, parched woods,
over mountains and across the dry water brooks from
eleven or twelve to five P. M., when we reached this
village on the Maa Li River, on the route from Muang Tern
and Muang Li to Lampoon. And I am writing this by
candlelight in the Sala Klang of the place lying on my
back. It is wearisome work to write and I must stop soon.
The people here seem kind. I have engaged a messenger
to take this announcement of my misfortune to Chiengmai.
“And now, my dear brother and dear sister (and if
Brother Wilson and his dear wife have arrived, I include
them also), I need not say to you how serious is the injury
I have received. The first thought was that the omentum or
caul had protruded; it may have been lacerated fat under
the skin. It was replaced, of course. But whether the cavity
of the peritoneum was pierced or not, (and my symptoms
would have been more severe if it had been, I think), still
there must have been much contusion of the bowels, and
of course great danger of peritonitis, the gravest of all
diseases. I must lie perfectly still for days and days to
have a chance of getting well. Another day of such jolting
as today would be fatal. My only hope is in absolute rest.
My bowels are very sore, of course; but God will not
forsake His child and I will try to bear all that is appointed
me. I write to notify you that you, too, may trust your dear
Sophia, and brother W. his dear Kate, in the same ever
gracious hands. His angel has laid his hands upon me and
stopped me here.
 “I write also to say that neither of you must think of
coming over (from Chiengmai it is three days on elephant)
to visit me. You can do me no manner of good and your
wives absolutely require you both at home just now. It
would be positively wrong for you to leave them. I have
good, kind servants, medicines, books, and best of all my
Saviour’s presence, and I am resigned to His will. But, Oh,
poor Harriette—pray for her. We will pray for each other,
and God bless you and yours till we meet.
“Affectionately,
“S. R. House.
“P. S. If I get well, I—or if not, my four men—will proceed
to Chiengmai and deliver to you there six hundred ticals I
am bringing to your mission.”
This letter records a story of nerve and fortitude seldom equalled
in the annals of travel and exploration. One must pause after reading
it to take in the whole situation. The note itself was written at the
close of the day of shock and pain and suffering. It was written while
the sufferer was lying flat on his back, scarcely able to move without
agitating the wound; and written then lest a night’s delay might find
him unable to write. But as you read the letter you are conscious that
he writes not because he is thinking of his own need, but because he
knows that his friends will be greatly alarmed by his failure to appear.
The trip itself had been undertaken in a spirit of self-abnegation
solely for the welfare of his fellow missionaries. And the necessity of
the trip casts a vivid light upon the deprivations and hardships of
those pioneer missionaries. There are those who will exclaim,
“Fools! why did they go so far from contact with civilisation and under
such circumstances,—five hundred miles from the nearest
physician!” Yes, fools! but fools for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, “of whom the world was not worthy.”
Further details of this marvellous adventure are given in a letter
written two weeks later from the same place, the original of which is
still preserved.
 “I wonder if any surgeon was ever before called upon to
sew up his own abdomen! Somehow nerve was given me
to put in the four stitches without shrinking, though it was a
work of no little difficulty, as I had to be guided by the
reflection in a looking-glass—the wound not being in direct
line of vision—as I lay on my back too weak to sit up. All
the water I had was in a small porous drinking vessel—not
over a pint, and no other supply for miles....
“That evening I arranged for a messenger to carry the
tidings of my injury to the mission at Chiengmai. On the
evening of the third day they returned, and with them a
servant of Mr. McGilvary came along, and also our faithful
Christian Siamese brother, Nai Chune, who had gone up
in charge of Mr. Wilson’s household goods to
Chiengmai.... Had my letter reached Chiengmai a few
hours later it would have found Nai Chune gone, for his
passage was taken and his things aboard the boat to start
that day for Bangkok....
“I am lost in wonder when I think of the Providence by
which I escaped seemingly inevitable death. Who ever
heard of one being impaled on an elephant’s tusk and yet
living to tell the tale. God’s merciful Providence ordered
that when I was unexpectedly felled to the ground I was
thrown—not flat on my back, in which case I had been
pierced through and through; but on my right side, hence
his tusk which was aimed at the middle line of my body
glanced and so did not enter deep enough to inflict a
mortal wound. Had it pierced but the thickness of this
paper deeper than it did, peritoneal inflammation would
have ensued and speedy death....
(Later.) “The afternoon of the day I wrote the foregoing
letter a loaded elephant came to the sala where I am lying,
and the one riding it began to hand down various baskets
and bundles as if they had reached their destination. It
proved to have been sent by my good brethren of
 Chiengmai, who had forwarded supplies of everything that
could be thought of to make a sick man comfortable....
“With wise forethought they had arranged that a boat
should be awaiting me at the nearest landing place on the
river to take me to Chiengmai. I was too weak then and
the wound was not in a state to allow of my leaving the
sala; but the next Monday (just two weeks from the date of
the injury) I ventured to try the litter again. So with a new
set of elephants for my luggage and bearers for myself
hired in the village, that afternoon at 3 o’clock we started,
but found no camping place till 11 p. m.—a weary journey!
But all forgotten next morning when my eyes rested again
on the Meinam River and I was transferred to the boat.
Two days of vigourous poling up the river brought me to
my friends’ landing about five p. m. Wednesday, March
18.”
By Nai Chune the doctor was able to send to his wife the news of
the misfortune, though it was two months after the accident before
she received the message. Trusty servants were then sent up to
meet him at Raheng, where his boats were awaiting his return. The
complete healing of the wound and recuperation of strength required
more time than he had anticipated so that he was compelled to
remain at Chiengmai six weeks. During this enforced delay he had
the privilege of assisting in organising the first church at Chiengmai,
a little gratification to his old and ardent desire for the evangelisation
of the Lao. The return was made all the way by water. From
Chiengmai to Raheng the voyage required eighteen days, and
thence his own boats carried him the remainder of the way to
Bangkok in twelve days.
It is probable that Dr. House accomplished more touring in Siam
than any other missionary. During the first ten years, within which
most of the exploring was done, he was more free than Mr. Mattoon
to be absent for long periods and distant journeys. While the other
missions were restricting their work Dr. House had visions of
enlarging the range of Presbyterian activities. All the fields of present
mission stations in central Siam had been explored by Dr. House
and seed sown long before permanent work was undertaken. Love
of pioneering and zeal for the Gospel united to impel him to search
out the land with a view to ultimate conquest for Christ.
 X
NEW KING, NEW CUSTOMS, NEW
FAVOURS
It is a noteworthy testimony to the influence of the American
missionaries that through their instruction in modern science the
most enlightened monarch of the Orient should have come to his
death as a result of his zeal in behalf of astronomy. Although since
he had ascended the throne King Mongkut had not been able to
devote time to pursuit of the sciences as he had done while a priest
in the watt, yet he maintained a real interest. His requests to Dr.
House for translations from foreign journals included items of
scientific interest. His patronage of the mission school in favour of
the sons of nobles was not merely to have them taught English, but
that through that language they might obtain instruction in the
sciences.
When circumstances brought it within his power to lend assistance
to the scientific world he seized the opportunity with a royal will.
Astronomers had predicted a total eclipse of the sun for the year
1868, and indicated that the southern peninsula of Siam would be
the sole place on the globe where the eclipse would appear in
totality. In his great enthusiasm, desiring to be a patron of science,
the king determined to lead an expedition to witness the phenomena.
Dr. House describes the preparations in a letter (Aug., 1868):
“The gulf of Siam lay in the greatest duration of the solar
eclipse since the sun began to shine, as some say;
attracting to these realms astronomers from Western
 Europe. Great preparations were made to receive them
with all honor and to join them in witnessing the solar
phenomena, on the part of our science-loving king and his
government. Large levies of men were made to put up at
the spot fixed by the French astronomical expedition
suitable buildings for all who were present. No expense
was spared in the way of entertaining the numerous
guests. It is said that two thousand catties of silver
($96,000.) were expended upon the affair by our public
spirited king. A free ticket on a beautiful ship of war, and
entertainment while there, to all us foreign residents. But
as Mr. McDonald (now acting consul) desires to go and
both could not well be absent so long from the station, I
did not go down; and then, too, we were sure of a very
respectable eclipse here in Bangkok, which I wished to
improve for the benefit of the pupils in our school and our
native friends.... Here we saw stars distinctly in the day
time during the greatest obscuration.”
The site chosen by the astronomers was in the jungle, in which the
king caused a clearing to be made and temporary huts to be
constructed. During the brief sojourn in this unhealthy spot, the king
contracted a fever. The disease proved fatal, death occurring shortly
after the king returned to the royal palace.
The death of the king was a sore loss to the world. Dr. House
wrote:
“The missionaries lost, some of them a kind personal
friend and a ‘well-wisher’ as he used to sign himself, and
all a friendly-disposed liberal-minded sovereign, who put
no obstacle in the way of their evangelising his people.”
Western nations lost a royal friend who had opened the gates of his
kingdom for intercourse. But Siam herself, while mourning the death
of an enlightened sovereign, had gained so much through the
seventeen years of his felicitous reign that his death could not stop
her progress in the paths he had opened for her. The light which had
found its way into the jungle of human notions through the clearing
Mongkut had made was never again to pass into eclipse.

KING CHULALONGKORN
With the death of King Mongkut the personal relations of the
pioneer missionaries with the reigning monarch were terminated.
Concerning the successor, Chulalongkorn, Dr. House wrote:
“I have not seen much of the young prince in childhood;
he had been under the tutorship of the English governess
Mrs. Leonowens and, later, of Mr. Chandler (formerly a lay
Baptist missionary).... He had grown to maturity during the
nearly three years of my absence in America.”
As second or vice-king there had been chosen Prince George
Washington, with whom Dr. House was better acquainted.
The missionaries were eager to learn whether the new
government was to be as progressive as the old, and especially to
know the attitude to be assumed towards their work. Signs that
progression was to be the order of the reign were not long wanting.
Custom hitherto required that the coronation should be in the
presence of the princes only. At the coronation of Chulalongkorn an
innovation was introduced by invitations to the official
representatives of other nations resident in Bangkok to attend.
Shortly after the coronation the missionaries arranged, through the
United States consul, to pay their respects to the new king. They
were graciously received, and although the young king was suffering
from effects of a fever contracted on the ill-fated astronomical
expedition, he gave them an audience and conversed with them a
few minutes. When the consul was arranging for his official visit of
congratulations upon the vice-king, that personage requested as a
personal favour that the consul be accompanied by Dr. House. The
king was but fifteen years of age when he came to the throne, and
during his minority the government was under the regency of
Somdetch Chao Phya Boromaha Sri Suriwongse, an able and
upright statesman.
 With rapid succession came decrees changing age-long customs
and bringing Siamese social and civil institutions into line with
Western civilisation. The most radical and noteworthy of these
changes were: the abolition of the practice of prostration by which
everyone, of whatsoever rank, had been obliged to prostrate himself
on the ground, face downwards, in the presence of any who had a
superior rank in the social scale; the introduction at court and in the
army of a modified European dress to cover the near-nudity which
formerly prevailed; the prohibition of enslavement for debt, a
pernicious custom by which parents could sell their children,
husbands their wives, and anyone himself into servitude to discharge
a ruinous debt, resulting in a state of peonage from which the
hopeless victim could scarce escape; reformation of unjust political
practises; and the initiation of a state system of schools, telegraphs
and posts.
Concerning two of these reforms interesting sidelights have been
cast by writers. Mrs. Leonowens, by whom the prince had been
tutored in English, relates that when he heard of the death of
Abraham Lincoln he declared that “if he ever lived to reign over Siam
he would reign over a free and not an enslaved nation, and that he
would restore the ancient constitutional government and make Siam
a kingdom of the free.” Mr. J. G. D. Campbell, in his volume Siam in
the Twentieth Century, sketches the court-scene when the ancient
custom of prostration was abolished:
“In 1874,” he writes, “King Chulalongkorn assembled his
ministers and nobles and, having ascended the throne,
promulgated a decree emancipating them and all subjects
from the degrading custom of crawling on their knees in
the presence of a superior; after which, at his command
the whole assembly arose from their prostrate position on
their hands and knees and stood erect for the first time in
the presence of their sovereign.”
Though his personal relation with the occupant of the throne was
terminated, Dr. House found that the new government included many
of his old-time friends from the days of his lectures on science.
Among these were the regent himself, the minister of foreign affairs,
the master of the new mint and the commander-in-chief of the army.
A new office also had been established, and the doctor found his
friend Godata, formerly a priest in Chao Fah Yai’s watt, appointed as
court preacher with the duty of preaching on the Christian Sabbath a
moral lecture to the soldiers and cadets, by the king’s orders.

NEW FAVOURS
The mission workers hoped that a change in sovereigns would
mean no reaction; they scarcely expected more. But while King
Mongkut had “put no obstacle in the way,” King Chulalongkorn soon
removed the remaining obstacles by making effective the treaty
provisions even in the dependency of Lao. For it was the rapid
development of the work in that new station that precipitated a
condition in which the good offices of the new government alone
saved the day. Within two years of the beginning of work at
Chiengmai the first convert made a confession of faith, Nan Inta; and
in seven months more six others had received baptism. Then
suddenly the virulence of the king of Lao was manifested by the
martyrdom of two of these converts, put to death on his orders.
As the Lao state was subject to the king of Siam, and as the
government had given permission for the missionaries to work in that
dependency, appeal was taken promptly to the regent for protection
of the Lao missionaries whose lives were in danger. The regent sent
a commissioner with all dispatch to Chiengmai with stringent orders
to the Lao ruler that the missionaries must receive the full protection
guaranteed by the treaty between Siam and the United States.
Enraged by this invocation of a higher authority, the Lao king
declared that while the missionaries might remain as the Siamese
government had ordered, yet they must not teach religion or make
Christians; and openly vowed his purpose to kill any of his people
who should become converts to the new religion. The situation had
apparently become impossible; and to gain time while deciding what
course was best under the circumstances, the work was suspended,
and the workers had virtually decided to leave in the spring. About
that time, however, the tyrant with a large suite left for Bangkok to