The Melancholy Self in Art History

Review of Donald Capps, At Home in the World: A Study in Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Art (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013), ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-969-6, xxiv + 188 pages, with illustrations, paperback, $23.

Donald Capps is an emeritus professor of pastoral psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of numerous books and articles on psychology and religion (see the Wikipedia website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Eric_Capps). At Home in the World may be characterized as a psychohistory of selected moments in the unfolding of what the author terms the “melancholy self” in Western art. The chief theoretical inspirations for this idea are Sigmund Freud’s papers “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and “The Uncanny” (1919), and Erik H. Erikson’s notion of the “composite Self” (in Identity: Youth and Crisis, 1968). Basically, the “melancholy self” may be defined as that part of the Eriksonian composite Self, which is preoccupied with loss and longing, and its point of origin in ontogeny is emotional separation from the mother in the second and third year. What has been lost in this process is precious, writes Capps, and the “sense of having lost something precious remains with us throughout our lives” (p. xii).

Having already studied manifestations of the “melancholy self” in other historical figures like Saint Augustine and William James, Capps turns here to artists as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci, James McNeill Whistler, Norman Rockwell, Jan Vermeer, Sanford R. Gifford, and George Inness. Capps is also concerned with viewer responses to artists, in particular how works of art “help us to recover through the imaginative process that which we have lost”

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and how such works “help us experience the world that is external to the maternal environment as a place in which we can be at home” (p. xx, italics added).

Two opening chapters deal with Leonardo da Vinci’s “maternal icon,” the Mona Lisa, and the “melancholic appeal” of that icon. For Leonardo, who was the illegitimate child of a peasant woman named Caterina, this unfinished painting was a representation of the mother whom the future artist lost when he was taken from his mother’s home to his father’s household before the age of five. What Capps (following Freud) terms the “uncanny” smile of the Mona Lisa was a revelation of the origins of Leonardo’s melancholy self, “the visual representation of that heimlich place that has since become unheimlich” (27), namely, the mother’s body. Not only the smile, but the eyes of this portrait are a mystery as well: “Could it be, then, that melancholy feelings originate in the boy’s perception that he has failed to make his mother’s eyes dance with joy…?” (25). Leonardo was very reluctant to declare his commissioned portrait of Lisa finished: “to hand it over to Lisa’s husband, Francesco, would replicate the loss of the mother that occurred when his father took him away from Caterina and installed him in the house occupied by his father and his stepmother” (35).

Francesco never did receive his painting from the artist. By a circuitous route it ended up in Paris, at the Louvre.

As for the responses elicited from viewers of this most famous painting in the world, Capps speaks of an “iconoclastic backlash” starting in the 19^th century which included humorous literary and artistic assaults, a number of physical assaults, and a famous theft of the painting. Capps views these acts of aggression as expressions of melancholy striving analogous to the melancholia Leonardo himself experienced. For example, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian painter-decorator living in Paris who believed (mistakenly) that the portrait had been stolen by the French as war booty, stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre on August 11, 1911. This theft provoked the French press to respond with exaggerated expressions of regret about “the dear departed,” as if the famous painting had been some distinguished lady. Capps suggests: “…the thief was attempting, in a symbolic manner, to reverse the loss that he and other young boys experience in early childhood when they are emotional-

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ly separated from their mothers. As if to acknowledge that this act was symbolic – that he really couldn’t have his mother back – Peruggia put the painting at the bottom of an old chest….” Meanwhile, he was satisfied to have just a postcard of the painting on his mantel nearby, for “the melancholy self has learned to be content with replicas and vestiges of the lost object” (37). In the end, Peruggia was willing to part with the painting, arranging to have it turned over to an Italian art dealer in December of 1913. The now even more famous lady was returned to the Louvre, and Peruggia got off with a light prison sentence of a little over one year.

Capps also proposes some very interesting interpretations of the creation and reception of other specific art works, including Whistler’s The Artist’s Mother, Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop, and Gifford’s Kauterskill Clove. Here, however, the complexities of each case preclude attempting even a schematic summary. Suffice it to say that Capps consistently and imaginatively brings his notion of the melancholy self to bear on quite heterogeneous kinds of art; for example, landscape as well as portraiture, modern as well as renaissance works, and caricature as well as serious (especially religious) art.

Capps is most attentive to the potential religious elements in art, for very often the melancholy self finds a home which might be defined with equal validity as art or as religion. Concluding a section of his chapter on George Inness’s landscape painting Sunrise, Capps writes: “…landscapes portray the fact that there has been a displacement of feelings toward the original love object onto the mother we call earth. Thus, landscape art reflects and replicates a psychological reality – the birth of the melancholy self” (156).

What, then, is a landscape—a work of art, or a work of religion? A painting, or “the mother we call earth,” i.e., that old-fashioned goddess Mother Earth? From the viewpoint of Capps’s melancholy self, it does not seem to make much difference which label is applied, as long as the beholder ends up feeling “at home in the world.”

Donald Capps writes in a dense yet evocative style. His central psychological concept of the melancholy self is supported time and again in the analyses of specific works. His new book

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will be of considerable interest to scholars in religious studies, art history, and psychohistory.

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