Melancholy, medicine, mad moon and marriage: Autobiographical expressions of depression

Abstract

The issue of identity or ‘who am I?’ has been endlessly posed, as Roy Porter has already observed, by philosophers, poets, psychiatrists and people at large, and ‘if the question has stayed the same, the answers have changed over time’.1 And if the answer to that question has changed over time so has the answer to ‘what is wrong with me?’ when asked in relation to a dejected state of mind. The rise of autobiography is one of the ways in which attempts have been made to answer these questions. It has been suggested that there is a close correlation between the development of self-portraiture and autobiography, which has been attributed, in part, to the development of good mirrors in Europe.2 Paul Delaney observes that Albrecht Dürer is the best example of an early Renaissance artist using the mirror as tool for self-analysis and introspection; his first recorded work, at the age of 13 in 1484, is a drawing of himself with the inscription ‘made out of a mirror’.3 Dürer’s self-portraits change radically through a variety of costumes, settings and expressions, from a handsome young man that holds a good-luck charm in 1493 to the nude and broken Man of Sorrows in 1522, which suggests either a trying-on of various guises or a search for a sense of self that proves to be elusive.