Genius And Melancholy

Noel L. Brann, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 107, The Debate Over The Origin Of Genius During The Italian Renaissance, (Brill, 2002), ch. I., The Seeding of a Theory of Melancholy Genius, C. The Humanist Perspective, pp. 59-60:

“This extremely bitter fatigue of studies, and exceedingly burdensome meditation (pensiero) of the mind,” Alberti [Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)] complained in his Delle comodità, “always contributes to us something more of self-torment than of rejoicing.” If, on one hand, scholars manage to elicit a certain pleasure from their arduous studies, Alberti pessimistically mused, on the other hand they generally find a way to stifle that pleasure “by their reflections and very great labors.” On this account, Alberti admonished, one who adopts a life of letters is prone to suffer an excruciating “anxiety of studies” (ansietà degli studii), the result being that “he cannot sleep, eat, or rest, takes no pleasure or repose in anything, and, endeavoring to understand all things, constantly remains in a state of bitter thought.” As for those things he has already learned, he is able to retain them only with great effort, with great skill, “and with great anxiety and reflection.”

What strikes the reader from this diagnosis of the “scholar's disease” by Alberti is that its symptoms belong to one who, being dis-contented with the pedestrian concerns of everyday life, seeks but fails to find solace in contemplative detachment from those concerns. Moreover, further passages from his treatise inform us, one so inclined to the scholarly life, being dissatisfied with the finite nature of the worldly concerns from which he is attempting to escape, strives to surmount them through an inner drive to the infinite. At bottom, as Alberti further spelled out his diagnosis, the cause of the painful tribulations arising out of intense intellectual inquiry is that “the studious man is never able to find a method of imposing a limit on his desire for learning. Nor is it ever permitted to him to rest his mind until that time when he has wiped away his ignorance of all the most hidden things.” As a result, Alberti warned, a man of letters “has very little or no quiet in either his mind or body, always remains melancholy and solitary (sta sempre malinconico & solitano), and displays bitter weariness, extreme vigilance, curious thoughts, very lofty occupations, and ardent cares.” Such a man, accordingly, “is never able to find pleasure or delight, and throughout his life fails to savor so much as a moment of rest from his labors and vexations. Much as the contemporary mystics prescribed an “infinite cure” for what they diagnosed as an “infinite disease,” so does the same prescription logically apply to the scholarly melancholy characterized by Alberti as “infinite anxiety, infinite strivings, infinite discomfort, infinite harmful injuries, infinite travails, and infinite calamities.”

Regarding the very same topos of the Life of Letters (or genius) and melancholy, but in another context, another geography, and some three centuries later, vide the following title: Anne C. Vila, Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).