Book Review: Born Under Saturn
October 2007
By Margot and Rudolf Wittkower. New York Review Books, $18.95
The idea of the artist as unconventional or above convention, alienated or maybe even crazy dates back long before the Romantic era. In the Renaissance, it was believed that creativity went hand in hand with melancholy—what we would likely call depression. For the Florentine philosopher-doctor-astrologer Marsilio Ficino, mel-ancholy was an ambivalent trait. Conferred at birth by the influence of the planet Saturn, it could make a person gloomy and useless or it could open him up to higher inspiration, the divine mania of which Plato spoke. Dürer’s engraving “Mel-encolia I” is an example of this phenomenon.
The theory of melancholy was a powerful tool for artists looking to raise their status. They could be more than just super-craftsmen; they could be privileged souls whose Saturnine quirks and willful behavior would have to be endured by patrons. As this book amply demonstrates, artistic madness was often exaggerated for effect, and few artists lived up to their legends. After all, they were professionals who had to get work done. The Wittkowers spend a good deal of space debunking the claims of Cellini and Caravaggio to superachievement in crime, and even deny the latter the distinction of being the first bohemian. Always leery of Freudian attempts to psychoanalyze artists and works, the authors also punch holes in the once-popular belief that the 18th-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt must have been insane because he had a special proclivity for depicting distorted, paranoiacexpressions. They disagree with those who see in Arcimboldo’s vegetable heads a proto-Surrealist vision. Again and again, they warn against imposing the ideas and standards of the present on the past.
The Wittkowers, a husband-and-wife team who fled Hitler’s Germany, published their book in 1963, and the present volume is a reissue by New York Review Books, which is making a name for itself with its timely rediscoveries. The scholarship is, of course, old now and based on even earlier researches by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Nonetheless, Born Under Saturn deserves a new generation of readers, not only for its rich lode of anecdotes about everything from artists’ strange antics to their working methods, their sex lives and even their business practices, but also for its fundamental sanity, balance and humor.
The idea of the artist as unconventional or above convention, alienated or maybe even crazy dates back long before the Romantic era. In the Renaissance, it was believed that creativity went hand in hand with melancholy—what we would likely call depression. For the Florentine philosopher-doctor-astrologer Marsilio Ficino, mel-ancholy was an ambivalent trait. Conferred at birth by the influence of the planet Saturn, it could make a person gloomy and useless or it could open him up to higher inspiration, the divine mania of which Plato spoke. Dürer’s engraving “Mel-encolia I” is an example of this phenomenon.
The theory of melancholy was a powerful tool for artists looking to raise their status. They could be more than just super-craftsmen; they could be privileged souls whose Saturnine quirks and willful behavior would have to be endured by patrons. As this book amply demonstrates, artistic madness was often exaggerated for effect, and few artists lived up to their legends. After all, they were professionals who had to get work done. The Wittkowers spend a good deal of space debunking the claims of Cellini and Caravaggio to superachievement in crime, and even deny the latter the distinction of being the first bohemian. Always leery of Freudian attempts to psychoanalyze artists and works, the authors also punch holes in the once-popular belief that the 18th-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt must have been insane because he had a special proclivity for depicting distorted, paranoiacexpressions. They disagree with those who see in Arcimboldo’s vegetable heads a proto-Surrealist vision. Again and again, they warn against imposing the ideas and standards of the present on the past.
The Wittkowers, a husband-and-wife team who fled Hitler’s Germany, published their book in 1963, and the present volume is a reissue by New York Review Books, which is making a name for itself with its timely rediscoveries. The scholarship is, of course, old now and based on even earlier researches by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Nonetheless, Born Under Saturn deserves a new generation of readers, not only for its rich lode of anecdotes about everything from artists’ strange antics to their working methods, their sex lives and even their business practices, but also for its fundamental sanity, balance and humor.
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