The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700 by Laurinda S. Dixon (review)

Dark Side of Genius is essentially an art history, and is lavishly illustrated—assisted by a generous grant to defray the costs of such beautiful and numerous images. This is a coffee-table book and much more: a pleasure to own as a real book rather than as an e-book, as well as excellent in its scholarship and style. It brings us to a better understanding of the notion that, as Laurinda Dixon states in the final sentence, “to be accepted as a genius, one must look the part” (p. 192). We are not surprised to find that the discourses of melancholy and genius had their own related visual codes in the early modern period, but what Dixon does so well is to bring a new depth and range to existing art-historical studies, the most important of which remains Saturn and Melancholy by Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl (1964).¹

The book is not exactly about genius though: it covers, in separate chapters, “three exemplary male archetypes of the melancholic persona: the hermit, the lover, and the scholar, as represented in art from approximately 1500–1700” (p. 6). A lover is not a genius, nor is a hermit, nor, sad to say, is a scholar necessarily. Genius appears in the artist’s self-portrait which, as Dixon argues convincingly, used these three discourses of religion, love, and learning to self-fashion the previously menial figure of the painter into a tortured yet talented soul. Because melancholy became an even more fashionable disease in this period than it had been in classical times (see Pseudo-Aristotle’s Problem 30), artists successfully appropriated its rich cultural capital in an attempt to raise their own status.

England and Holland are the chosen loci of Dixon’s inquiry, and justify themselves with plentiful examples of interaction between these closely linked cultures, and a largely shared discourse of fashionable melancholy. It is of course true that the whole of Europe was under the thrall of fashionable melancholy, and Dixon does devote some attention to this unavoidable fact. Other studies have examined aspects of the wider European situation, but Dixon’s investigation shows how such research might be given more depth. She is especially successful in her analysis of the deployment of musical discourse in depicting melancholic genius as well as in the wider culture of melancholy. Dixon also handles medical, literary, and philosophical writings well, being strongest in her (probably inevitable) use of the key text of the period, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Despite Dixon’s assertion that the figure of the artist-melancholic was not present in the eighteenth century, she concludes her book by citing the voluble hypochondriac James Boswell, who noted that “our sufferings mark our superiority” (p. 191). The book would benefit from a more informed perspective on the eighteenth century’s relationship to melancholy, even if it did assume different names and forms as it evolved throughout that period. Why no mention of sensibility and its role in the development of a new rationale for the valorization of the suffering melancholic, or “leuchocholy” (“white melancholy”) as the depressive poet Thomas Gray would call it?² This gap might have occurred due to the different emphases of scholarship in art history and other disciplines—such as literary studies—where more work has been done on other aspects of melancholy.³

Dixon’s analysis assumes the absence and exclusion of women from this discourse of creative genius, at least until the twentieth century. There is a body of scholarship that has been showing the efforts of female writers and artists to appropriate the force of this tradition to highlight the authenticity of female genius: Margaret Cavendish’s (1661–1717) frontispiece to The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Written by Her Excellency, the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastle (1655) uses the image...