Albrecht Dürer’s melancholy angel serves as the exemplary model of despondent-frenetic genius during the Renaissance. In 1514, Dürer engraved Melencolia I (see figure 1.1). The angel sits idly, chin resting on her clenched fist, a compass in her other hand, the instruments of science and reason, of building and construction, surrounding her, though she daydreams seemingly unable or unwilling to act. The common iconography for melancholia by this time, Dürer’s image, nonetheless had a powerful influence on artists who followed, perhaps most prominently his contemporary Lucas Cranach the Elder, who painted four works titled Melancholy—one in 1528, two in 1532, one in 1533—each offering an allegory of melancholy, though some of the basic elements in all four paintings roughly paralleling Dürer’s engraving. An oil on wood, one of the 1532 works shows a pale, orange-haired, blue-winged angel wearing a red gown (see figure 1.2). Like Dürer’s angel, Cranach’s wears a garland but hers looks rather flimsy in comparison as it slants awkwardly across the top of her forehead, strangely evocative of a crown of thorns. And like Dürer’s angel, Cranach’s angel sits, though she does not rest her cheek upon her hand; instead of a compass she holds a knife with which she whittles a stick. Albeit she acts, she does not seem enthused. The stick she whittles will presumably be used as a toy by the naked children—paralleling Dürer’s putto—three of whom watch through an open window as the fourth plays on a swing. On the floor near the window, two partridges mill about. A decorative gold jar (perhaps holding sweets) and a silver platter of dark (rotting?) fruit rest on the table, the date “1532” carved on the front edge of the table, vaguely echoing the numbers in Dürer’s magic square fixed on the wall above the angel and just below the bell. On the floor near the table, close to the angel, a small dog curls up comfortably, reminding us of Dürer’s emaciated, uncomfortable-looking hound. Though Dürer presents a landscape in the background—a night scene with the beach as well as part of a town—Cranach’s background is bizarre. Outside the window, the fourth naked child rides a swing whose ropes seem to hang from thin air. Above and to the left looms a dark cloud within which, in a night scene, a man whose fancy clothing is the same color and design as the jar on the table, and whose hat is the same color as the angel’s gown, rides a horse; the man is surrounded by naked demons or witches who ride a bull and a boar, the group led by a large serpent as the shadow of the cloud ominously darkens the daytime landscape. Just about every element in this composition—as well as the other three—suggests melancholy, or the Saturnine temperament, evidencing not only the significance of melancholy to Renaissance artists but also the significance of Dürer’s melancholy angel to Renaissance artists. Perhaps most significantly, Dürer shows the potential inherent in choosing a melancholy figure as subject.

In their early, influential study, Saturn and Melancholy, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl focused on how artists visualized melancholy during the Renaissance, many of those melancholy images being angels or women.³ (For a list that includes some of these as well as other melancholy figures, see Appendix A, “Renaissance Angels and Other Melancholy Figures.”) Indeed, more recent studies have further developed the relationship between melancholy and iconography. Adam H. Kitzes, for example, argues for a connection “between melancholy and iconography, so much so that the very discipline of iconography can be seen as the response to an overwhelming array of symptoms, pseudo-symptoms and idiosyncrasies, all of which somehow needed to be organized.”⁴ (For a discussion of the modern trends in scholarship regarding Renaissance melancholy, see Appendix C “Renaissance Melancholy and Modern Theory.”) Attempting to capture visually what the individual may go through physiologically or psychologically, results in an icon whose many details require interpretation. But the emphasis on iconography allows one to identify the melancholic individual, however confused or complex the identification. Kitzes adds, “Small wonder . . . that iconography and melancholy should go hand in hand—almost as though the relative stillness of the melancholic in itself signaled a willingness to accept one’s role qua figure.”⁵ Perhaps so, but if there is an acceptance, it evidences self-recognition of the “figure,” or role, one assumes.

Panofsky concluded of Dürer’s Melencolia I, “she is above all an imaginative Melancholy, whose thoughts and actions all take place within the realms of space and visibility, from pure reflexion upon geometry to activity in the lesser crafts; and here if anywhere we receive the impression of a being whose thoughts ‘have reached the limit.’”⁶ And although, as Panofsky argues, Dürer’s conception of melancholy may have been inspired by Ficino, “the De vita triplici can hardly have had any influence on the composition of the engraving, for the very idea which is most essential to Dürer’s composition, namely the integral interpenetration of the notions of melancholy and geometry (in the widest sense), was not only foreign to Ficino’s system, but actually contradicts it.”⁷ There is “limit” to thought in Dürer’s composition, and logically no action follows—logically because thought must precede action. Surely, this is incorrect. For as we shall see, the type of melancholy associated with genius, and which will become more properly known as heroic melancholy, depends upon the two extremes of inactivity and activity. The absence of geometry notwithstanding, Walter L. Strauss contends that Neoplatonic mysticism inspired Dürer’s melancholy angel. Rather than Ficino’s brand of Neoplatonism, Dürer was more strongly influenced by Agrippa’s conception of melancholy as imaginative, which was of course more endemic to artists.⁸ For Strauss, Panofsky did not quite get it right because it is more about Agrippa’s influence than Ficino’s—a significant point of contention.

Indeed, while angels were popular images through which to convey an artist’s conception of melancholy, so too was the prophet Jeremiah. And while angels may possess a sense of self-consciousness that seems human, the prophet is easier to identify with because he often feels unappreciated, by God and by the people to whom he preaches, and complains about it. He makes rather petulant statements, such as declaring he does not want to be a prophet anymore, and accusing God of duping him. Although initial resistance to the call is a common motif in the prophet stories of the Bible, one does not mark this penchant for sadness, self-pity, and complaint in the other prophets—at least not to the extent one does in Jeremiah, who represents the hard times and the sad task of the prophet, albeit a prophet not above complaining. During the Renaissance one could more easily identify with this figure (and not with an angel) precisely because of the biographical aspect, because he seems believable as a literary character. Hence, Jeremiah appears often in Renaissance secular and religious popular culture as well as mainstream culture in ways that, say, Isaiah, Moses, even David, do not.

We find the most prevalent use of Jeremiah in the poetry of the period. Sometimes, a poet may allude to a specific biblical passage; sometimes, a poet may wish to present himself as a type of Jeremiah. Sometimes, Lamentations inspired a poet to transcribe the biblical text or to present a lamentation of his own in the tradition of Jeremiah, with some of the better-known examples being Donne’s The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the Most Part According to Tremelius (date uncertain); Thomas Traherne’s A Thanksgiving Prayer to the Nation (ca. 1670–74); George Sandys’s Paraphrase upon the Divine Poems (1638), a song book that includes Lamentations; and Samuel Drayton’s Harmonie of the Church (1591), which includes a transcription of the last chapter of Lamentations in fourteeners.

The two biblical texts also influenced the prose of the period in three genres: sermons, jeremiads, and biblical commentaries. The sermon is usually built around a particular biblical passage, and there are many seventeenth-century sermons that rely on Jeremiah or Lamentations. For example, Thomas Adams bases his sermon, Physicke from Heaven (1629), on Jeremiah 8.22. A sermon by Samuel Hieron, The Spiritual Tillage (1621), makes use of Jeremiah 23.29, although Hieron bases his sermon primarily on Proverbs 11.18. And as we shall see in chapter 3 of this book, Donne organizes his sermons on Lamentations 3.1 (preached at St. Dunstan’s, date unknown) and The Gunpowder Sermon (preached at St Paul’s Cathedral, November 5, 1622) around passages from Lamentations. An especially popular form by which to address contemporary political issues, many jeremiads appeared in the mid seventeenth-century, especially from parliamentarians and royalists alike during the English Revolution. Most of the jeremiads...