An outstanding exhibition #65

Caspar David Friedrich : Monk by the sea

There is presently a beautiful exhibition about "melancholy" displayed
in Paris .. Melancholy, the English disease to quote Robert Burton who
explained everything about it already in the 16th century..
I copied below some excerpts from the presentation...

Melancholy - Genius and Insanity in the West

Introduction

This exhibition has been organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux of France and the Staatliche Museen of Berlin, with the support of the Picasso Museum of Paris.
It will be on show at the Neue National Galerie in Berlin, from 16 February
to the 7 May 2006.

No mental state has so occupied the Western mind as melancholy; going to
the heart of the problems that preoccupy us today - from history to
philosophy, from medicine to psychiatry, from religion to theology,
from literature to art. Melancholy, traditionally the cause of suffering
and folly has also, since antiquity, been considered one of the elements
in the temperaments of those marked for greatness, in our heroes and
geniuses. Its description as a sacred illness implies a certain duality and melancholy is still mysterious even though today, with its new name of
depression, there is a medico-scientific approach to it. The iconography
of melancholy is extraordinarily rich and it is therefore not surprising that
it is history of art that has been in the forefront of the establishment of a
new approach to the cultural history of this saturnine malaise.

D.Fetti: melancholy

The exhibition will offer the public a glimpse of these little-known riches by showing over 250 works divided into eight themes (Melancholy in
Antiquity / The devil’s pool; The Middle Ages / The children of Saturn; The Renaissance / The anatomy of melancholy; The age of enlightenment / Light
and shadow; The eighteenth century / The death of God; The romantics / The naturalisation of melancholy / The Angel of History; Melancholy and Modern Times), constants and variations on this sacred theme. From Attic stele to contemporary works, from Dürer to Ron Mueck via La Tour, Füssli, Goya, Friedrich, Delacroix, Rodin, Van Gogh, Munch, De Chirico, Picasso and
others this exhibition emphasises the vital role played by melancholy on
the different forms of artistic creation throughout Europe.