To portray melancholy, Albrecht Dürer engraved a bowed figure whose abstracted concentration contrasts with the proliferation of objects around her. In this way, it appears that the mystery she is contemplating is precisely that of her connection with things, which remain extraneous as she turns her gaze elsewhere. In fact, for both Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, Dürer's Melencolia I refers to the issue of the image, conceived not as a specific form, work of art or philosophic representation, but as the site of a sense that yields itself only in its material configuration. Thus the space of melancholy is shifted from the subject to that borderland, of continuous intersection between the self and external reality, between the interior and the world, that is the image – conceived as a concrete and reciprocal configuration of both. Meditation on the same restores to melancholy its contradictory character, the unity of destruction and construction attributed to it by Aristotlean tradition, and which modernity, identifying it with an Ego that is depressively worldless, or counter to the world, largely deprives it of.
University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-6888-527X
Book Title
La malinconia dell'immagine
Book Subtitle
Rappresentazione e significato in Walter Benjamin e Aby Warburg
Authors
Alice Barale
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
168
Publication Year
2009
Copyright Information
© 2009 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/978-88-8453-889-5
ISBN Print
978-88-8453-888-8
eISBN (pdf)
978-88-8453-889-5
eISBN (xml)
978-88-9273-781-5
Series Title
Studi e saggi
Series ISSN
2704-6478
Series E-ISSN
2704-5919