The visual history of ideas

To picture an idea — melancholy, wisdom, power, death — an artist has to decide what it is. Trace one across the centuries and you watch its meaning change. Each essay follows a single idea through the paintings that shaped how we see it.

Visual history · 5 paintings

Melancholy

For five centuries artists painted the same downturned head resting on a hand — but what melancholy meant changed completely: from a Renaissance badge of genius, to a Baroque meditation on death, to modern psychological alienation.

More visual histories are on the way — wisdom, power, death, the sea, the night.