Melancholy and Genius: The Flattering Side of Black Bile

The same black bile that physicians bled out of patients was, for Ficino and Agrippa, the mark of depth and vision. This is the long idea that melancholy is the temperament of genius, traced from pseudo-Aristotle to Duerer's stalled angel.

In 1514 Albrecht Dürer cut a copper plate that has puzzled people ever since. A winged woman sits on a low step at the edge of a building. Around her lie the tools of a maker: a plane, a saw, scattered nails, a pair of compasses in a hand that is not using them. A ladder leans on the wall. A polyhedron and a millstone fill the middle ground. She rests her cheek on her fist and stares past all of it. Dürer titled the engraving Melencolia I. Everything needed to build something is present, and nothing is being built.

That single image holds a very old and very strange idea: that the heaviest of the four temperaments, the cold dry melancholic weighed down by black bile, is also the temperament of genius. The physicians treated black bile as a sickness. The philosophers treated it as a gift. For centuries both were saying it of the same substance, and sometimes of the same person.

The question a Greek text dared to ask

The idea has a birthplace, a short treatise long attributed to Aristotle and now usually credited to his school, the Problemata, book thirty, first question. It opens with a claim that must have sounded like flattery and provocation at once. Why is it, the writer asks, that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, in poetry, or in the arts turn out to be melancholic? He then argues that black bile behaves like wine. Too much of it makes a person dull or despairing. The right amount, held at the right heat, makes them acute, inspired, capable of more than ordinary people manage.

This is not the clinical picture at all. If you want the temperament as illness, in its full early modern catalogue of fear and sadness without cause, that belongs to Burton's Anatomy. The Problemata is doing the opposite. It is turning the affliction into a credential.

Saturn over Florence

The idea slept for a long time and woke in Renaissance Florence. Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato into Latin and led the informal academy under Medici patronage, was himself a melancholic and said so plainly. In De vita, his three books on the scholar's health printed in 1489, he tied the temperament to a planet. Saturn is cold and dry, slow and remote, the star of old age, solitude, and deep study. Saturn, Ficino argued, both afflicts the thinker and lifts him. The same influence that brings the black moods brings a reach of mind that warmer tempers never touch.

Ficino meant this as medicine as much as philosophy. Much of De vita is practical advice on how a scholar might survive his own gift: what to eat, when to walk in the sun, how to lean on the kindlier planets to offset Saturn's cold. If you want the wider frame he was working inside, where a birth chart and a bodily temperament were read together, that is the subject of the zodiac and your temperament.

Agrippa, and the furor of the melancholic

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa took Ficino's careful medicine and made it bolder. In his De occulta philosophia he described a melancholic frenzy, a furor, that could raise the mind in three directions: to the arts and crafts, to reason and politics, and highest of all to prophecy and the divine. On this reading the melancholic was not merely clever. He was the one temperament open to inspiration from above, precisely because black bile drew the soul inward, away from the noise of the body.

It is worth noticing how far this had travelled from the sickbed. A humour that a physician bled and purged out of a patient had become, in the same century, the mark of the seer.

Brilliance and paralysis in one seated figure

Which returns us to Dürer's step. The engraving is usually read as the visual summary of this whole tradition, and it is faithful to its strangeness. The figure has wings and cannot fly. She holds the compasses of the geometer and measures nothing. She is surrounded by knowledge and stalled inside it. This is not the cheerful promise that suffering makes you deep. It is the harder claim the tradition kept circling: that the gift and the affliction are one thing, and a person can be lifted and crushed by the same weight in the same hour.

That doubleness sets melancholy apart from the other humours in this literature. No one wrote a Problemata for the cheerful sanguine. The gift was always tied to the darkest of the four, and the writers who praised it were, often enough, describing their own difficult minds. If you would rather see where you actually sit among the four before you read anyone's flattery into it, the test is a plainer place to start than a birth chart, and the melancholic temperament in its own portrait is stranger and more capable than either the clinic or the horoscope alone can say.