Era melancólica. Figuras del imaginario barroco

The Spanish Golden Age witnessed, within the folds of the Baroque, the germination of the seed of melancholy. Beyond a humoral imbalance associated with genius, the homeland of the self-absorbed, or the laughter of the nihilist; beyond an uncompromising rhetoric that explores depth, passion, silence, radiance, and meditation on death, that Baroque melancholy is interpreted here as a lost category, impossible to recover in the present, which, precisely through that absence, reveals the extent of its own limitations. Fernando R. de la Flor, Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Salamanca, has produced the most ambitious and thought-provoking overall interpretation of the Hispanic Baroque to appear in recent years. He now revisits that panorama through the black light of melancholy. Drawing on a concept that, since Aristotle, has been used to describe individuals and fictional figures of exceptional genius — together with their iconography — the author dissects an extraordinarily brilliant age with the passionate style that has become his hallmark. Running through these pages is a precise conception of melancholy in seventeenth-century Spain, born of disillusionment and a collapsed horizon of expectations. Those spirits devoted to language and yet immobilised by their withdrawal from the world bequeathed to us texts and images whose aesthetics continue to fascinate us today, but whose ethics — now largely beyond our capacity to share — make us uneasy. Perhaps we shall never again be able to behold the wise and solemn angel of acedia without dismissing it with an irreverent flick.