Era melancólica. Figuras del imaginario barroco

Fernando R. de la Flor, professor of Spanish literature at the University of Salamanca, devised the most complex and suggestive global approach to the Spanish Baroque in recent years. Now he is turning his attention to melancholy. Supported by a concept that has been used to describe people and personages of individual genius since Aristotle, the author dissects an entire, very brilliant era with the enthusiastic discourse that characterises him. Crossing the pages is a precise idea of the melancholy of Spain’s seventeenth century, the result of disappointment and a collapsed horizon. Those spirits devoted to language and stagnating in the world’s inhibition left us texts and images whose aesthetic fascinates us today, but whose ethics, which we are now essentially incapable of sharing, discomforts us: we may never again be able to see the wise and serious angel and burdens of acidity without waving them away with a flick of a hand.