"Douce Mélancolie" à la Scena per Angolo: The Sublime Melancholy of Hubert Robert - Detached from Roman Models

Abstract

<p> </p><p>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 <i>douce mélancolie</i> 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 <i>douce mélancolie</i> would have for determining his special kind of melancholic interest for ruins.</p><p>While Renaissance excluded sadness from its view of melancholy, the 18^th 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.</p><p>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 Great many of these images differ significantly from their ancient historical references.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, <i>capriccio</i>, 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, <i>capriccio</i> and sublime in Robert’s works. </p><p>The colossal ruins have been represented the way which places the landscape inside the gallery, so that it forms a kind of <i>interior ruin landscape</i>. 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 <i>infinity </i>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.</p><p>

</p><p>All in all Hubert Robert’s I’ll try to find out how Hubert’s painted ruins scenes escape Piranesi’s views of <i>capricci </i>the way which lead to the – special and involuntary – <i>Aufspannung</i> (the strain which is a modulation of Freud’s <i>Verdichtung</i>) and create ‘freaks of culture’ by showing them as “freaks of nature”. </p>