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Dictado por : Dr. Gerardo Herreros

THE IMAGE OF MELANCHOLY AND THE EVOLUTION OF BAROQUE IDIOM by Ken Perlow © 1995

Introduction

This paper traces the linkage between Hermetic philosophy, with the gifts of melancholy at its core, and the development of the forms of the secunda prattica at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. The connection is subtle but clear, not just in direct attributions by pioneering Baroque composers of their ideas to Platonic notions of melancholy, but in the epistemological models which generated the new musical practices; Baroque idiom was a natural outgrowth of the scientific cosmology that was discovered by neo-Platonists. It is no accident that its earliest Italian forms were developed using the newest and most powerful tool of the inchoate scientific age--experimentation--during just that brief period when the new science co-existed with the old, magic alongside the mathematics, and that it became clichéd and predictable just as cosmological paradigms forsook alchemical magic for celestial mechanics.

The Evolution of Melancholy

Though well known, the Classical taxonomy of the four humorsblood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bileand their effects on the human psyche cannot be traced to any unambiguous source. Galen, the Greek physician who popularized this linking of physical state to bodily fluids, himself attributed the philosophy to Hippocrates, and both Empedocles and Pythagoras followed Galen's lead. With a quadripartite schema for classifying all matter, and a conception of science that stressed deductive logic over empiricism, it was perhaps inevitable that some such taxonomy would be invented. Galen's system was as follows:

Humor	Temperament	Season	Quality	Element
Blood	Sanguine	Spring	Warm + moist	Air
Yellow bile	Choleric	Summer	Warm + dry	Fire
Black bile	Melancholic	Autumn	Cold + dry	Earth
Phlegm	Phlegmatic	Winter	Cold + moist	Water

The most important concept to the Greeks was that these humors be kept in balance, that health entailed possessing these bodily fluids in equal measure. But even from the start there was a sense of "good" and "bad" fluids: Blood was not a surplus humor, indeed, there isn't even a word for "sanguine" in Classical Greek. Excessive amounts of the others, however, produced illness. But among the three remaining was yet another distinction: Melancholy was characterized predominantly by mental symptomsfrom fear to depression to madness.

Plato, in the fourth century BCE, was the first to find a silver lining in the nimbus cloud of melancholy, in so doing becoming the first writer to associate it with the now well-known flip-side of depression, namely mania. In Plato's taxonomy of mental health, a surplus of black bile made one prone to such frenzy that divine inspiration could be achieved in music and poetry. In the dialogue Phaedrus Socrates states, "...in fact frenzy, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings" [Plat, p.46]. This notion became immediately popular, and this popularity was to be sustained for more than a millennium. What Plato had hit on was the timeless conceit that those sensitive enough to be affected by the fundamentally oppressive nature of life are those who can and do express it in their art. Gellius, a contemporary, commented that melancholy had become "a disease of heroes." The idea was coopted and refined by the systematic Aristotelian view of natural philosophy, which synthesized the Galenic medical conception of melancholy with the Platonic conception of frenzy.

"This union found expression in what for the Greeks was the paradoxical thesis that not only the tragic heroes, like Ajax, Hercules, and Bellerophon, but all really outstanding men, whether in the realm of the arts or in those of poetry, philosophy, or statesmanshipeven Socrates and Platowere melancholics." [KPS, p.17]

This dilemma of how a person could be both great and sick was posed directly as Aristotle's Problem XXX (from the Problemata Physica, ultimately attributed to "pseudo-Aristotle", most probably the work of Theophrastos, but believed well into the Seventeenth Century to be genuine): "Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics...?" And the question was answered in characteristic Aristotelian idiom:

"To sum up, the action of black bile being variable, melancholics are variable, for the black bile becomes very hot and very cold. ... Since it is possible for this variable mixture to be well tempered and well adjusted in a certain respect...therefore all melancholy persons are out of the ordinary, not owing to illness, but to their natural disposition." [KPS, p.29]

Problem XXX thus represents a balance point between the Platonic and Aristotelian world views:

"The concept of frenzy as the sole basis for the highest creative gifts was Platonic. The attempt to bring this recognized mysterious relationship between genius and madness, which Plato had expressed only in a myth, into the bright light of rational science was Aristotelian... This union led to a shift of values through which the 'many' were equated with 'average', and which stressed the emotional 'Be different!' rather than the ethical 'Be virtuous!'... Divine frenzy came to be regarded as a sensibility of soul, and a man's spiritual greatness was measured by his capacity for experience and, above all, for suffering." [KPS, p.60]

In contrast, Medieval theologians conceived of Melancholy as an illness, with only a few exceptions: To William of Auvergne, an Aristotelian, it represented a state of grace, and for Chrysostom it was a spiritual trial which only deep introspection and prayer could make bearable and even understandable. Most, like Hildegard of Bingen, reinforced the Augustinian sentiment that melancholy reflected not a state of grace but the Fall from Grace--the ultimate object of despair [KPS, p.79]. And this was not merely in describing melancholy as mental illness, but as a judgment, like God's of Adam, of the entire temperament. Thus, melancholy became associated not simply with day-to-day suffering, but with original sin. A competent physician could produce some relief from the pain, but the disease was incurable, hereditary, and universal. Thus, the nature of melancholy had become somewhat schizophrenic. To the Classical philosophers it was desirable; to the Medieval theologians it was anathema. This dilemma was particularly acute for followers of Plato, for whom melancholy had taken on a spiritual dimension; it was not merely good, it was divine, and yet from the Church's perspective it was Satanic. The dilemma was resolved by Ficino, ushering in almost a century of neo-Platonist revival in art and science.

The Hermetic Conception

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was the father of Renaissance neo-Platonism. It was he who produced the first translation of Hermes Trismegistus's Pimander into Latin. It was immensely popular, printed for the first time in 1471 and going through no fewer than sixteen editions before the end of the century [Yat1, p.17]. The neo-Platonists looked longingly back at Classical times and before; what was old was good, and the older the better. Thus, Hermes, then believed to have been an Egyptian contemporary of Moses, was the wisest of all. Pimander--the divine spirit, the Nous--appears to Hermes in a dream, and slakes Hermes's thirst for knowledge of the nature of the universe. Pimander reveals the magic of creation in convoluted allegories and structures which posit the elevation of spiritual man through the nested spheres of corporeal existence until, finally bereft of all vestiges of evil, mortal nature he enters into the "ogdoadic nature, hears the Powers singing hymns to God and becoming mingled with the Powers." [Yat1, p.25]

The story of creation in Pimander has the magical flavor of the Gnostic Gospels. The Egyptian Adam "is more than human; he is divine and belongs to the race of the star demons, the divinely created governors of the lower world. It is true that he falls, but this fall is in itself an act of power. He can lean down through the armature of the spheres, tear open their envelopes, and come down to show himself to Nature. "...In short, the Egyptian Genesis tells the story of the creation and fall of a divine man, a man intimately related to the star-demons in his very origin, Man as Magus." [Yat1, p.28]

Ficino passionately embraced Hermetic doctrine, the pristine fount of illumination flowing from the divine Nous, which would lead him to regard the core of Platonism as truth derived from Egyptian wisdom. It would be more than one hundred years before all the Hermetic writings would be shown to be the work not of an ancient Egyptian but of a Second or Third Century Christian (and thus their eerie similarity to the Gnostic Gospels). In his seminal 1489 work, De vita triplici, Ficino sets out a Hermetic theory of melancholy: "Melancholia, id est, atra bilis est duplex: Altera quidem naturalis a medicis appellatur, altera vero adustione contingit." [Fic2, p. unnumbered] Melancholy has two distinct natures, the one a medical pathology in which the humor just sits there, the other a spiritual nirvana in which the humor fiercely burns. (And thus is a definition of the word "adust" still given as "melancholy".)

Melancholy had long been associated astrologically with the planet Saturn, the dimmest of the planets visible to the naked eye and the slowest moving, and to which were attributed similar attributes of crystallization, depression, and fear. In explaining the causes which produce melancholy in scholars, Ficino also redefined the role of Saturn, which now took on the virtues of perseverance, patience, and concentration. In De vita Ficino notes this influence of Saturn coupled with the mental energy of Mercury as a cause of the drive for scholarship. And Saturn's nature is presumed to be cold and dry, which is the same as that of melancholy.

Other influences reinforce the cold-and-dry motif: Ficino presents an almost Buddhist conception of study, comparing it to the journey from a circle's circumference into its center. But the property of being centered is principally that of the earth itself, to which black bile has a very close resemblance. To ice the argument, Ficino notes that a hard day of contemplation turns the brain cold and dry through an excess of thought, depleting the spirits. Though Ficino is closely identified (and identified himself) with Plato, in making this argument he actually binds together the Aristotelian conception of the melancholy of the outstanding intellect with Plato's divine frenzy. Black bile "obliges thought to penetrate and explore the center of its objects, because the black bile is itself akin to the center of the earth. Likewise it raises thought to the comprehension of the highest, because it corresponds to [Saturn] the highest of planets." [KPS, p.259]

It was very important to Ficino that melancholy throw off the evil associations that had been made to it in the Middle Ages. His theory is most understandable from a psychological perspective: He himself claimed to be of melancholic temperament and occasionally experienced deep depressions [Kris, p.212]; the fusion of the spiritual characteristics of unrest and frenzy with the clinical characteristics of depression and immobility is otherwise difficult to synthesize.

"In this sense the vague sorrow of the internal consciousness is a philosophical experience which constitutes the common basis for the theories of restlessness and melancholy, but is interspersed in either case in an entirely different manner and direction. For when we speak of the restlessness of consciousness, the basic experience at once is inserted into a great metaphysical or theological context and the state of mind, though it is felt at once and concretely, is merely the occasion through which that context enters our feeling and consciousness. Here we are entirely on the ground of the medieval Christian conception as given by St. Augustine." [Kris, p.213]

On the other hand, when the same state of mind is placed against a mundane rather than metaphysical backdrop, it is simply sadness, caused by any manner of earthly and heavenly imbalances. Ficino thus incorporated the Medieval view of melancholy as original sin, a condition that could not be overcome and thus had to be accepted and worn as a badge of honor. Melancholy's dual nature was one of static and dynamic components, which though they shared a common foundation were never logically linked very well. Nevertheless, this conception of the tortured artist, stretched on the philosophical rack between the depths of sorrow and the heights of genius, a figment of Ficino's own psyche and very much a reflection of the Hermetic macrocosm-and-microcosm, is still with us today.

"The birth of this new humanist awareness took place, therefore, in an atmosphere of intellectual contradiction. As he took up his position, the self-sufficient 'homo literatus' saw himself torn between the extremes of self-affirmation, sometimes rising to hubris, and self-doubt, sometimes sinking to despair; and the experience of this dualism roused him to discover the new intellectual pattern, which was a reflection of this tragic and heroic disunity--the intellectual pattern of 'modern genius.' At this point we can see how the self-recognition of 'modern genius' could only take place under the sign of Saturn and melancholy; and how, on the other hand, a new intellectual distinction now had to be conferred on the accepted notions of Saturn and melancholy. Only the humanism of the Italian renaissance was able to recognize in Saturn and in the melancholic this polarity, which was, indeed, implicit from the beginning, but which only [pseudo-]Aristotle's brilliant intuition, and St. Augustine's eyes, sharpened by hatred, had really seen... There was therefore a double Renaissance: firstly, of the neo-Platonist notion of Saturn, according to which the highest of the planets embodied, and also bestowed, the highest and noblest faculties of the soul, reason, and speculation; and secondly, of the 'Aristotelian' doctrine of melancholy, according to which all great men were melancholics (whence it followed logically that not to be melancholy was a sign of insignificance)." [KPS, p.247]

Ficino melds his fascination and reverence for melancholy into an Hermetic taxonomy of succeeding cosmological spheres expanding up to the Nous. In De vita triplici he posits three levels:

Level	Type	Ruler	Function
1	Mens imaginatio	Mars	Invention, creativity
2	Mens ratio	Jupiter	Discursive reasoning
3	Mens contemplatrix	Saturn	Transcendent intuition

In what would become a quintessential characteristic of Hermetic doctrine in the Renaissance, Ficino adhered to the Augustinian view of inevitability here. Although there were three levels, one had no choice but to be stuck at whichever level the frenzy left him; the system was grand but static, neither evolution nor learning were possible. Because melancholy was simultaneously at both the center and the apex of intellectual life, thus could only contemplation--no longer fettered by imagination or even logic--truly deserve the title of melancholy. This view that it was impossible for the merely imaginative mind to rise to true melancholy was reinforced, ironically, by those philosophers who associated melancholy strictly with illness. They too claimed that the afflicted mind could not rise above imagination.

De vita was a standard reference among Renaissance scholars. It was natural, therefore, that this theory of melancholy should be discussed and modified. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was born in Cologne in 1486. His fascination with the occult was equaled only by his skill as a mercenary, and he served in both the courts and military campaigns of Maximillian I, Louis XII, Henry VIII, and Popes Julius II and Leo X. There is no record of his ever meeting Ficino, but he was lecturing in Germany on the Pimander in 1511. In spite of his Byzantinely picaresque life, he was a highly contemplative and liberal man, openly friendly to Jews during an era when it was dangerous to be so, and somewhat of a feminist, authoring a treatise entitled On the Pre-eminence of Women. Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, which spelled out his interpretations of the Hermetic arts, was over 20 years in the making, finally published in 1531. But there were drafts in circulation as early as 1510, and in these Agrippa posited a more dynamic theory of melancholy.

Agrippa embraced Ficino's three levels, calling them melencholia imaginativa, melencholia rationalis, and melencholia mentalis, but inserted--presaging the Mannerists--the dynamism of the focused, animist search for the Nous:

"The whole of antiquity bears witness that this occurs in three different forms, corresponding to the threefold capacity of our soul, namely the imaginative, the rational, and the mental. For when set free by the 'humor melancholicus', the soul is fully concentrated in the imagination, and it immediately becomes an habitation for the lower spirits, from whom it often receives wonderful instruction in the manual arts... But when the soul is fully concentrated in the reason, it becomes the home of the middle spirits; thereby it attains knowledge and cognition of natural and human things...But when the soul soars completely to the intellect, it becomes the home of the higher spirits, from whom it learns the secrets of divine matters..." [KPS, p.357]

To Agrippa, the frenzy of melancholy was thus the source of inspired creative achievement, and the faithful and disciplined student could graduate to its highest level.

The Artistic Connection

Agrippa's manuscript circulated among clubs of occultists in France and Germany, as Agrippa himself traveled and made contact with kindred spirits. Among these associates was a man named Trithemius in Würzburg, one of whose friends was Albrecht Dürer. Dürer's 1514 etching Melencholia I echoes this Agrippan taxonomy, and explains the otherwise mysterious numbering (no Melencholia II or higher has ever been found). This study of a stocky, brooding angel, obviously stuck in the middle of an architectural vision, with tools strewn about and magical symbols surrounding her, was widely distributed and is known to have undergone at least two different printings. At least one copy of the etching made it to England, as Robert Burton specifically mentions it in his Anatomy of Melancholy [Burt, p.451]. It was imitated, in general theme and often specific detail, by artists into the Seventeenth Century. That this imagery should have been important to Dürer is not surprising. Dürer himself was a melancholic, a man who at the age of 30 had thought the new theory of art he had learned from Jacopo de' Barbari would enable him to define true universal beauty with a compass and straightedge; ten years later he would give up in considerable despair. In 1512 he wrote, "But what beauty is, I do not know." [KPS, p.364] Thus, Melencholia I can be seen as another of his sternly reflective self-portraits, perhaps the most telling of them.

The thread between Renaissance and Baroque idiom is much clearer in the visual arts than the aural ones, perhaps because the change in musical forms was so consciously contrived, as opposed to naturally flowing. And Dürer's footprints are unmistakable. In music, the neo-Platonist theorists were in agreement with the Aristotelians with respect to the modes and ethical effects of music, but they differed diametrically on the existence of universal harmony. Ficino wrote:

"But the soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music which may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is two-fold: One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make marvelous harmony." [Fic1, p.110]

Music was a fundamental part of Ficino's Orphic magic. He is said to have sung Orphic songs--which he believed to have been written by Orpheus himself in extreme antiquity--to invoke the powers of the planets and focus their influences. Thus the neo-Platonist theorists came down squarely on the side of Pythagoras, whose scalar ratios reflected this universal harmony, just as that system of tuning was going out of style. Tellingly, few of them were actually musicians. Pico della Mirandola, a contemporary and student of Ficino, "studied music as a boy and is said to have composed in his youth. A nephew later wrote that he 'accompanied his verses with song and instrumental sound'. Although he possessed a number of important Greek musical sources, his writings do not give any evidence of his having read them." [Pal2, p.30]

And vice versa--few of the scientists of music in the Renaissance specifically advanced the axioms of neo-Platonism. Among the more widely read were Franchino Gaffurio, whose 1492 treatise Theorica musice presents analyses of all the major Classical sources with little attempt to reconcile them, and Gioseffo Zarlino, who although more sympathetic to Plato than Aristotle presents in his Le institutione harmoniche of 1558 an entirely rational explanation for musical aesthetics. The former makes brief mention of the divine frenzy, and the latter presents a magically numerological explanation of consonances and dissonances, but neither wrestles with the human condition and its humors. [Pal2, p.230ff] Thus, we follow for the moment the artistic trail, which mirrors, and perhaps in some manner focused, the change in musical expression from the intellectually contemplative to the emotionally pathetic.

There are mid-sixteenth century paintings that echo the same intellectual passions as Melencholia I. Vasari's Melancholy, surrounded by a number of mathematical instruments, on a fresco done in 1553 in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and Doni's Disegno are obvious imitations.

"The Melancholy painted by Francesco Morandini, called Poppi, as one of four temperaments on the wall of the studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio is distinguished from her northern sisters by her marked pathetic expression of sorrow, agitated almost to the weeping point; and in Marmi another work by Doni, which appeared in 1552, we find another woodcut which, though very ordinary, exercised a most powerful influence, and shows the sublime profundity of the main figure of Melencholia I transformed into the elegiac sadness of a 'feminetta tutta malinconosa, sola, abandonata, mesta, et aflitta' mourning on a lonely rock." [KPS, p.387]

Doni, known to have owned a copy of the Dürer engraving [KPS, p.387], presaged a central theme of the Baroque, the integration of the Platonic image of melancholy with that of vanity. His and other Italian etchings share Dürer's conception of melancholy as despair arising from an emotional state, but they add a focus, a sharp edge to it. Superseding diffused grief appears a definite object (in the Feti work, a skull). The human dream is folly; man has become divorced from the cosmos. This sentiment was no mere affectation--it reflected the reality of an uneasily evolving understanding of that cosmos.

Things Fall Apart

The sixteenth century was a period that reveled in cosmic harmony, and music was at the heart of this magic. The occult force of musical modes reflected and reinforced the natural harmonies of the planets; it was a terrestrial manifestation of the stars and the perfection of the entire cosmic system. Agrippa carefully related the musical scale to the planets and the elements in De Occulta Philosophia, crafting a design of expanding circles that would later be pictorialized by Robert Fludd as the harmony of the world. Everything interconnected, and the poetic furor of melancholy made it all accessible, radiating from the innermost depths of the soul out to the ultimate sphere of the universe and reflecting that harmony back into it. The system was in perfect resonance. But that resonance ultimately vibrated the system apart as it encouraged the quest for the Nous.

The brooding, inspired Platonism had discovered a new key--empiricism--which opened a magical door to experiments beyond mere logical exercises. There was no single, seminal proposal of this doctrine, but Bolognese scholar Pietro Pomponazzi at the very beginning of the Sixteenth Century and then Neapolitan friar and agitator Tomasso Campanella toward the very end both wrote of the immutability of universal principles and the reliability of sensory knowledge, if well enough trained, to see the true Hermetic forms of things. "God was transcendent in nature and for this reason, magi, through ecstatic fervor, shared intellectual divinity as they plumbed the depths of dynamic natural laws." [Mani, p.97] This was powerful stuff. It was a time when it was thought possible to be able to know everything, and many a magus set out to do just that, the grand cosmological order was so compelling. Those who observed that order more carefully, however, found subtle but ultimately unbearable discrepancies.

What concerned astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, leading to his publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestrum libri VI in 1543, was not so much the now Byzantine complexity of the Ptolemaic system of epicycles used to compute planetary orbits as its use of equants to account for their variable proper motion. These were lines which radiated not from the exact centers of the planets but instead had to be skewed slightly to one side or the other. With a sun-centered system the orbits could be reduced to simple and perfect circles, which were much more pleasing to Hermetic sensibilities. These circular orbits still could not predict planetary positions accurately, and the end result was a system of computations as complicated in aggregate as the Ptolemaic one, but the elegance of orbital circles and the clear geometrical explanation for retrograde planetary motion led to the quick acceptance of this view by most Hermetic scholars. Both Giordano Bruno and Campanella embraced the sun-centered Copernican theory as a vindication of Hermes Trismegistus's foretelling in the Asclepius of the sun as the visible manifestation of God [Yat1, p.238]. And Copernicus, though he never considered himself a Hermeticist, explicitly associated Hermes with his discovery of heliocentrism [Yat1, p.168].

Further rips in the universal fabric came, ironically, from the universe itself. On August 21, 1560 the weather was clear in Denmark, and there was a partial eclipse of the sun--exactly as predicted. It was not an especially rare nor spectacular sight, but the accuracy of the prediction so captivated a young law student that he decided to give up that field entirely and study astronomy. The lad was Tycho Brahe, who as an astronomer viewing the heavens on a November night twelve years later noticed a star in the constellation of Cassiopeia that had never been there before. He made careful observations and published them in his 1573 treatise De nova stella, but he could not come up with an explanation. (It would be more than 300 years before models of stellar evolution would be proposed, but Brahe's label "nova" immediately stuck and is still used.) By all Classical epistemology, Platonic or Aristotelian, the stars were immutable.

Brahe's precise planetary observations were picked up by Johannes Kepler, who used those data in his quintessentially Hermetic attempt to prove that the orbits of the six Copernican planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the moon having been shown to orbit the earth) were circles etched upon spheres that were spaced one from the other by each of the five Platonic solids in turn. He failed, but while working on this grand taxonomy he observed in November 1604 in the constellation Ophiucus another supernova, this one so bright it remained visible to the naked eye for 17 months. Kepler, well-versed in Hermetic doctrine, had delayed publication of his Harmonice Mundi for decades as he struggled to accept the meaning of the elliptical quality of planetary orbits which he had proven instead of his desired, nested spheres, but the birth of another new star convinced him that there was truly a new order, and in 1607 he published it. Still the Renaissance magus, however, he came to the conclusion that even though planetary orbits were not circular, they were nevertheless clearly describable, and that in the mathematical simplicity of his descriptive equations he had found the music of the spheres.

Thus did orthodox neo-Platonism give way to Mannerism, in which empirical methods were at the command of the inspired Nous, not simply in the pursuit of logos but of gnosis--the divine search for truth--and this new-found power now enabled the aspiring magus, scientist and artist alike, to see the cosmos from new perspectives. This new world of science was still very much a world of magic, and now the magic had become exceedingly charged; Mannerist philosophers as separated as Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus, and Bruno all took great pains to create elaborate taxonomies of the magic at their disposal. But if they were powerful, they were also dangerous. The Church had tolerated the Renaissance Hermeticists: there weren't many of them, but more importantly their inward-directed, melancholic belief system was essentially meditative. Now, however, they were becoming both gnostic and cocky, traveling widely and declaiming their discoveries. And it didn't matter whether they were popular or not--the idea that even a single mystic could through his inspired Nous attain the universal truth was intolerable to a religious institution that already had a tough fight on its hands.

"The doctrine of divine inspiration as the source for intellectual virtuosity in effect merges Aristotelian and neoplatonic systems, and this merger becomes a powerful weapon for apologists of Mannerism. Patrizi devotes an entire treatise to the subject of furor poeticus, a subject eagerly taken up by many other theorists. The experience of furor raises the poet to the rank of genius and provides the justification for every iconoclastic invention. Giovanni Maria Verdizotti has chosen an apt title for his poem of 1575: Genius sive de furore poetico. If poetic furor is a sign of genius, and genius a sign of great wit, then the more pedestrian meaning of maniera as external elegance and novel style now emerges as the philosophical manifesto of avant-garde sublimity." [Mani, p.32]

The difference between the Hermetic and Mannerist world views was subtle, but the result was earth-shaking--the new system was as exuberant as it was unstable. In an appendix to the fifth volume of Hamonice Mundi (1619) Kepler attacked English Hermeticist Robert Fludd, who responded in 1621 with a treatise in his Utriusque Cosmi Historia. Kepler answered with an Apologia (1622) to which Fludd again followed up the same year with Monochordum Mundi. It was a long and public battle; the argument was about the meaning of numbers. Kepler had had no trouble with heliocentricity, since it was supportable in Hermetic writings, and he came not only to accept but to embrace his discovery about planetary orbits as a confirmation of the grand design. But to do that was both to lose the elegant symmetry of the macrocosm and microcosm and to adopt an entirely new vision of mathematics: "The root of the difference between himself and Fludd lay in their differing attitude toward number, his own being mathematical and quantitative whilst that of Fludd was Pythagorean and Hermetic." [Yat1, p.460] With this view Kepler placed mathematics, as a tool, separate from and outside of the harmonic unity. Number was no longer a reflection of the cosmos but a method for understanding and describing it. It was the beginning of the decoupling of nomos and logos, of things and the names of things.

"Neo-Platonic hermeticism had fulfilled its purpose; it had fostered the genuine and experimental sciences. Once their techniques were established, they produced a natural philosophy of their own. The pantheist universe gave way to an idea of nature as a machine, an arrangement of parts in perpetual motion. Ancient metaphysical notions about the cosmos had literally lost their magic. The circle was indeed broken, and the mannerist magus had become the baroque scientist. But the foundation of what historians consider to be modern science was laid by the perverse experiments and intellectual convolutions of Mannerist thinkers. The character, style, and some of the content found in their works are explicable only in terms of a mannerist ambiance, and as such died with the waning of the Age of Mannerism. But hidden in their radical games were the seeds of modern technological science." [Mani, p.100]

"This fracture between the world and signs brought with it profound consequences. In the first place, signs and language no longer existed as given ontological entities anterior to knowledge. Instead they were now seen to be made along with knowledge itself... This is not to say that natural signs could not exist alongside conventional, man-made signs, but rather they came to function as signs, to signify, only in human acts of knowing. Second, signs no longer functioned to conflate things across time and space according to their resemblances. Instead signs, like knowing itself, dispersed things across the field of analysis. Third, and most important, the sign took on a new function of representing the reality that was now separated from it." [Tom2, p.192]

Proclaiming this paradigm shift at the close of the 16th Century marched magician-philosophers Campanella and Bruno. Both journeyed extensively throughout Europe, boldly announcing the new Copernican theory as a harbinger of Hermes's utopian City of the Sun. Both ran afoul of the authorities for their recusant pantheism much more than their anti-Ptolemaic sentiments, and they were silenced. Campanella was jailed in 1599 and would not be released for more than twenty years. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, a fate that is metaphoric of the entire Hermetic epistemology. Galileo's discovery in 1610 with the newly-invented telescope of satellites of Jupiter served merely as Hermes's obituary--the order had already crumbled. Galileo was silenced too, of course, but the new epistemology could not be, it simply moved away; on Christmas day of 1642, the year Galileo died still under house arrest, Isaac Newton was born.

What remains of poetic furor when nomos is cleaved from logos?

"Resemblances were no longer the form assumed by the world and knowledge; they were liminal experiences... They remained central only for two figures, whose relations to knowledge of signs in the new epistemological order needed, as a result, to be reformulated: the madman and the poet. Both of these figures were vestiges, so to speak, of the magical episteme... The madman in the analytic age saw only resemblances... The poet, on the other hand, saw through the new order of knowledge to the earlier one and found there something that retained a certain reality, albeit one almost overwhelmed by the analysis of difference and the chasm between the world and language." [Tom2, p.193]

The nature of poetic furor was intensely debated around the turn of the seventeenth century; few writers dismissed the notion outright. Francesco Patrizi's 1586 De furor poetico described it as an intermediary between the soul and higher beings, a divine light that is the source of prophecy as well as poetry. Girolamo Franchetta's 1581 Dialogo del furore poetico is also rooted in magical thought, but contains a more Aristotelian mechanistic conception, wherein the poetic furor results "from the melancholic temperament ruled by black bile rendered clear by abundant spirits" [Tom2, p.215], thus harking back to Problem XXX. There was not much difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of poetic furor at this point--the Platonists claimed that ideas were directly infused into the poet by celestial beings; the Aristotelians limited and defined the process to be the actions of natural forces, such as light, on the poet's bodily humors. But now overlain on these conceptions was the new epistemological notion of representation. And so the purpose of poetry became dynamic, literally forceful, as the new epistemology came to understand the cosmos in terms of forces. Poetry, though still considered of divine origin, was no longer important as a cosmological connector; it was, like Kepler's mathematics, a tool. And thus did Aristotle's Poetics gain ascendancy, not as the cause of the paradigm shift but as the result of its need for a new methodology.

Things Fall Together

In the midst of this epistemological turmoil sat the members of the Florentine Camerata, who walked the same streets as Ficino barely 80 years after his death, who were familiar with those paintings of melancholy in the Palazzo Vecchio, and who may well have seen or even owned copies of the Dürer engraving. The renewed study of Greek music (which, as the work of Gaffurio and Zarlino shows, had never really stopped) has a distinctly Hermetic tinge to it. It was, after all, a return to the imagined ancient roots of harmony to extract its purest essence. In this incarnation it concentrated on melopoeia, the tradition of poetic song, and not merely harmonic theory. In so doing it naturally came to deal with melancholy, as the sources under scrutiny derived from Greek tragedy, and it was a Platonist conceit to be fascinated specifically with this genre because the great Euripides had been a contemporary (though just barely) of Plato's. Although the term "Florentine Camerata" has come to denote the whole movement behind the secunda prattica, these were real academies that were founded in Florence between about 1576 and 1582. Among these convenors were Jacopo Corsi and Emilio de Cavalieri, but the most important and influential, indeed the founder, was Giovanni dei Bardi, Count of Vernio. [Pirr, p.218]

Bardi (1534-1612) was the eminence grise of the movement. He would hold court with his fellow theorists and musicians until he left Florence for Rome in 1592. He was a neo-Platonist--one of the last. Bardi's Intermedi of 1589 reveal his passion for the Hermetic system just in their names: The Harmony of the Spheres, The Rivalry of the Muses, The Song of Arion, The Descent of Apollo and Bacchus Together with Rhythm and Harmony. In these pieces he pays homage, magnificently costumed and staged, to the supreme harmony of the cosmos; they constitute a definite linkage, looking both ahead to the conception of opera and behind to the sounds of antiquity. Bardi was philosophically conservative, but hardly fossilized. In his essay On Ancient Music and Good Singing addressed to Caccini, he stated that in the gradual return of music to monodic expression rigid theorizing must give way to sweetness [Pirr, p.230]. And this was the clarion call of the Baroque: the triumph of substance over form, the text over the music. In that seminal essay Bardi charted a new course for music, beginning not with the then-current theorists but with definitions straight from Plato. He went so far as to suggest that the current modal system should be scrapped and replaced with the Ptolemaic one. But then, after much analysis of how that system could be adapted to modern use, he cautioned Caccini that all of these mechanics exist only so that the text can be all the more clear, that he should resist temptations to use counterpoint, to respect the natural flow of the language, and to avoid passagi except on long syllables specifically to enhance their affect.

Bardi is also believed to have written (his intermedi reveal the depth of his interest in theater and staging), sometime between 1581 and 1589, the Discorso come si debba recitar tragedia. In this essay Bardi focuses on the chorus, to which he felt that modern revivals did the least justice. His suggestions for staging invoke highly Hermetic imagery:

"But let us return to speak of the entrance of the chorus... They entered dancing... These ballets represented the movement of the eighth sphere, the sun, the moon, or another planet, or the theory of these movements or other marvelous subjects. For greater understanding we shall adduce an example of how they represented the prime mover leading the celestial spheres. The latter, having come on stage, commenced going around in a circle...and they moved from the left singing and dancing as they made a complete circuit and returned to the original place. Then in another movement they imitated the same steps ...circling back to the first place. Then they stood still, representing the immobility of the earth." [Pal1, p.147]

Here again Bardi stresses that above all, the text must be intelligible: "Let us now come to discuss the performance. It is of great importance to have the most excellent actors who express the action of the poet well, for a beautiful speech not well delivered or music badly sung will seem less worthy than it is; so a tragedy badly played will not make known its excellence and beauty." [Pal1, p.143] And he reinforces this sentiment:

"The ancient musicians were for the most part very fine poets or very great philosophers who did not think so much like the moderns do, about teasing the ears, as much as impressing on the intellect, the most noble part of man, according to the subject, cheerfulness, pain, or other passion. This happened because musicians followed the verses of the poet with respect to rhythm and accompanied them by the sound of the voice and instrument with such dexterity and sweetness that no word of the poem was lost. They thought nothing but to make themselves understood..." [Pal1, p.145]

In these essays Bardi uproots the Platonist episteme and replants it in Mannerist soil. The poetic furor and the transcendent states of melancholy are supreme; thus, it is the emotional character of the composition that reigns. But the musician's job is now representational; the music is the tool to move the listener to the passion expressed by the text. To use this tool correctly the musician must understand the Ptolemaic tonal system, whose rules describe the changing of tones according to the particular feeling to be expressed, and the masterful musician can evoke these passions at will. The dawn of the Baroque era occurred at the dawn of empiricism, so it is important to note that Baroque idiom was decidedly not the scholastic province of an academy. Music had become a tool, in the service of the Nous, and its forms would now evolve through experimentation, not by fiat. This new direction was Bardi's legacy. Into his salon had come Caccini, Peri, Mei, Cavalieri--the great composers of the day--and they greatly admired him. In his forward to Le nuovo musiche (1601) Caccini fondly remembered songs that he composed and performed for those meetings. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Bardi's influence is that when he became involved with the Accademia della Crusca in 1585 the Camerata stopped meeting regularly, and then when he left Florence in 1592, they stopped altogether.

The Magic Legacy

Scientific soil proved too alien for the Platonic episteme to flourish. It had been rooted in a rich and grand cosmology, but that had eroded away. In both music and art the passionate system quickly withered, becoming clichéd and trivialized. Hermetic learning, not so long ago a connection to real magic, was reduced to little more than stage magic--memory houses, parlor tricks. Lacking the context of a unified system, poetic furor became an instrument of the everyday world, a commodity. Nevertheless, there are three composers of the Baroque period who are often specifically associated with neo-Platonist magic: Claudio Monteverdi, John Dowland, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Last Magus

Perhaps more than any other composer of the early Baroque, Claudio Monteverdi embodied the shift from structural perfection to expressive force. His daring harmonies in support of textual passages generated considerable criticism, the most passionate from Bolognese theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi in a dialogue published in 1600, L'Artusi overo delle imperfettioni della moderna musica. This turned into a polemic that would last seven years.

"For [Artusi] there were only two justifications for human actions, the authority of past masters and logical or mathematical demonstration. Faced with Monteverdi's use of a melodic diminshed fourth, Artusi asked, 'Does he have the permission of nature and art thus to confound the sciences?' " [Tom1, p.23]

Further, Artusi argued, since concenti were, by definition, sweet sounding, and Monteverdi's constructions were harsh sounding, Monteverdi could not possibly have produced new concenti. In response, Monteverdi made a Platonic defense of his secunda prattica: his aim was "to make the words the mistress of harmony and not the servant." So, if the foremost goal of music was to stir the passions, then he was free to break the rules for expressive ends, to evidence divine frenzy, composing neither by formula nor by chance. The best composition was one that united semantic and syntactic elements so perfectly that the distinction between its musical and non-musical elements would disappear, and his spirit would thus be in tune--literally--with the cosmos. There is indeed magic in Monteverdi's music; he was a magician in the finest Hermetic tradition.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

"Semper Dowland, semper dolens." More than any composer of the turn-of-the-Baroque period, John Dowland's name is linked with melancholy. He wrapped himself in its imagery, which drips from both his texts and the unusual cascading fourths of his melodies. It is inviting to posit (as Anthony Rooley does) Dowland in the magical world of Hermeticists John Dee and Robert Fludd, who were his contemporaries. And a circumstantial case can be made--Dowland's travels to Europe even brought him to the Palatinate and Hesse right at the time of greatest fascination with the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. But that is the best case that can be made. There is no evidence that Dowland ever met any of these magia or soi-disant Rosicrucians, and he certainly did not travel in their circles. Even cursory biographical information reveals an extraordinarily naive man, a convert to Catholicism surrounded by political intrigues he did not fully understand, and also a bitter man who felt that he was unappreciated, or more to the point, unremunerated, for his awesome talents. On the other hand, it is vastly oversimplifying the case to claim (as Robin Wells does) that Dowland's use of those symbols had no magical meaning. The works of Fludd and Dee were widely published; Agrippa had lectured in England, surely bringing copies of Ficino if by chance there had been none previously. The symbology was well known at least superficially. Most probably Dowland found the accoutrements of Hermetic melancholy a resonant and useful outlet for his malaise. Fortunately for posterity anti-depressive pharmacology was still in its infancy.

The Inspired Artisan

Whatever the magic in his music, Bach considered himself not a frenzied genius but a master craftsman. By the time of the High Baroque the affective musical toolkit had become highly specialized. The procedures were well codified, and the skilled composer knew exactly how to use them all.

" 'Le génie n'est autre chose qu'une grande aptitude à la patience.' Thus did Buffon in his inaugural speech at the French Academy in 1753 express an idea that was a favorite with Bach, too, who used to say, in homelier fashion, 'I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.' In these words he harked back to the heritage of his family. Music was a craft. It could be taught, and it could be learned. Assiduity must lead to perfection. To have talent was a matter of course: had not everybody, for instance, five healthy fingers on each hand, just like Bach?" [D&M, p.37]

Bach saw himself as a member of a declining guild, looking anxiously at the oncoming New Age of Ars Gratia Artis when music would have no higher purpose, when anyone who aspired to be a musician could simply call himself one and hang out a shingle. It is little wonder so much of his correspondence concerns money (as Peter Schickele's A Bach Portrait so humorously reveals). In Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (a stultifyingly convoluted trip through the mind of a computer scientist with illusions of literacy) Douglas Hofstadter claims that Bach's having improvised (or so the story goes) the six-part ricercar that concludes the Musical Offering was as difficult as playing 60 games of chess simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning every one. It appears that Bach conceived of his own skill in very much those terms.

Epilogue

In the new epistemology of science melancholy lost not so much its meaning as its purpose. It reverted to a condition to be endured, and now in an emerging free marketplace, to be treated. Books on its identification and cure--music often noted as particularly effective for relief--became all the rage; Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy went through five editions before he died in 1640 and four more after. The understanding of human psychology was as elusive then as now, and the slightly shocking symptomatologies of melancholy people which accompany the careful taxonomy in Burton's tome and others appealed to both medicinal and prurient interest in an entirely legitimate presentation. Composers and pharmacists alike peddled the prescriptions--even the cover of the Anna Magdelena Bach notebook was inscribed with the legend, "Der Anti Melancholicus." But as the Baroque Era gave way to the Age of Reason music too lost its purpose. The mechanical universe, a clockwork of forces and causes, had no more place for divine frenzy. Poetic furor would be rediscovered by the Romantics, but in the service of entirely worldly ends. The magic itself disappeared.

"The moral philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment took possession of the time-honored impregnable fortress of theology. With this, the preeminent position of religion was broken. In the wake of this tradition-destroying movement music was taken out of the comprehensive structure of theology and turned over to an enlightened mankind as an independent art. Removed from its limited yet useful position, the function of instrumental music, devoid of word and sect, became problematic. When, in the course of the Eighteenth Century, the princely courts, second home to music besides the church, decayed and vanished as art centers, music lost its environment, that is, its very meaning and purpose. With the vanishing power of church and court, music lost its true reason to exist and function. 'Sonate, que me veux-tu?' said Fontenelle, a nephew of the great Corneille, highlighting with this sentence the whole problem of l'art pour l'art. What purpose has a liberated music in a world ruled by reason, existing only for its own sake?" [Herz, p.20]

References