"Douce Mélancolie" à la Scena per Angolo: The Sublime Melancholy of Hubert Robert - Detached from Roman Models
Altti Kuusamo
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021042825673
Tiivistelmä
In my paper examine how melancholy and paintings of ruins link together
in Hubert Robert’s (1733–1808) paintings and how we can comprehend
some other concepts close to melancholy in order to shape the material side of
the famous douce mélancolie of
Robert. As far as I know there has not been a
great deal of serious discussion of what implications Denis Diderot’s
characterization of Robert’s ruin paintings as douce mélancolie would have for determining his special kind of
melancholic interest for ruins.
While Renaissance
excluded sadness from its view of melancholy, the 18th century left
cosmology out of its arsenal of melancholy. When melancholy was not any more in
the cosmic-religious control, there appeared new sentiments or correlatives to
sense melancholy.
Robert painted hundreds
of paintings and drawings depicting huge colonnade galleries with a broken
vault. Great many of these images differ significantly from their ancient historical
references. In Robert’s
painted oeuvre caprice, capriccio, is
a key word. The main type of caprice is the elongation of the gallery-hall in a
lateral perspective. The material side of caprices shows as up also by repetitions.
It is connected to the principle of sublime and megalomania. Repetition is one
symptom of melancholy, a kind of obsessive return to the same themes and
motifs, the substitutes for unforgotten love objects. Ruination as a sublime object of desire. There
appears a strange connection between sensibility, capriccio and sublime in Robert’s works.
The colossal ruins
have been represented the way which places the landscape inside the gallery, so
that it forms a kind of interior ruin landscape.
It is hard to find signs of transcendence in Robert’s ruin paintings in spite
of the feeling for immense, almost inhuman length of colonnades. People
depicted in the scenes are commonplace in character. The cosmic infinity
which was so important for earlier views of melancholy is changed into the
feeling of/for dull material glory. The greatness of Rome has been described as
an anonymous greatness of fancy which even blurs the sense of historical time. Robert’s
time-sense linked to a new kind of uninspired inspired melancholy.
All in all Hubert Robert’s I’ll try to find out how Hubert’s painted
ruins scenes escape Piranesi’s views of capricci
the way which lead to the – special and involuntary – Aufspannung (the strain which is a modulation of Freud’s Verdichtung) and create ‘freaks of
culture’ by showing them as “freaks of nature”.
Kokoelmat
- Rinnakkaistallenteet [19207]