De Marsilio Ficino a Albrecht Dürer considerações sobre a inspiração filosófica de “Melencolia I”

Abstract

The topic of melancholy has been a source of attention from philosophers, doctors, artists, historians, thinkers in various fields of knowledge, since time immemorial. Part of this interest to understand the mystery that keeps its own definition, ambivalent and fascinating, which is sometimes referred to melancholy as a state of imbalance sick, sometimes as sin to be punished either as a state that exalts the soul of genius. In the history of the arts, the melancholy always the part of an iconography from ancient classic. This work is then addressed by melancholy of an artist in particular, in a specific time. With the key point the study and interpretation of the engraving "Melencolia I", by Albrecht Dürer, this work focus not only the formal characteristics of this work, but the various possibilities and connections that it has the time and place where it was produced, mainly Neo-Platonist the philosophy of Marsilio Ficin. Traveling beyond the narrow confines of a purely formalist reading, the study considers the work of art as an active and complex relationship to the events surrounding the story, thinking about his iconographic analysis as a tool for reconstruction of the individual, the environment, the general history.