The unforgettable text ‘Saturn and Melanconia’ by Erwin Panofsky is the basis of the choice of the name TheArtTime, in which Time certainly prevails over Melancholy, but is also closely linked to it.
They are two connected values. Time flows, leaves traces, the art scratches and soothes with its questions and its offers; melancholy is connatural to the man, who perhaps creates and collects for the same reason: to escape that black humor, that subtle ‘pleasure to be sad ‘inherent in the precarious and mortal nature of the human being.
Time and Melancholy; The time of Art is that time that remains. In this text the author investigated about Renaissance man, centered on himself, but also small in front of the eternal universe; this feeling is more alive than ever even today.
Saturn changes and flows and the sense of smallness is infinite.
In every sector of knowledge, medicine, psychiatry, history, philosophy, religion, theology, alchemy, art, literature, studies on time and melancholy have intensified since the release of this text, precisely because they raise questions that are fundamental to postmodern man.
Even in the modern era , the sense of the ineffability and the cancellation of some identity categories was investigated and expressed.
It is a red thread, Time, which traverses art and holds it back.
Melancholy in Art is not so much anxiety, sadness or fatigue; melancholy indicates above all, within the subdivision of the four Aristotelian humors, a temporary mood, softly pensive, ineffable and nostalgic. It is like the Nostos of Ulysses, which consisted in desiring the return home and the incessant desire to leave again. It is the melancholy of the evening or autumn or, as Shakespeare said, the ‘Melancholy of Moor-ditch’.
Time is something that flees, nostalgia is the eternal desire, beyond space and time, to impress a character of eternal return to experiences, moments, questions, ideas; a possible return through the forms of art.
Melancholia I by Albrecht Durer is that masterpiece of mysterious symbols, mathematics mixed with the sublime Renaissance art, which reveals this artist’s trait: head in his hands, a thoughtful look towards the mysteries of the organic and inorganic world: of life, tout court.
The reason why the artist creates and the collector retains the eternal ideas that those who create them deliver.
The ArtTime is the “newspaper” of this Time, ever changing but eternal.
excellent blog with a good explanation
Thank you !! R.