Considered a "tireless" church worker by others, he confessed, rather, that he "suffered horribly from melancholy".
("Always Dowland, always mourning.") The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent," is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane." Other major melancholic authors include Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor, whose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Holy Living and Holy Dying, respectively, contain extensive meditations on death.
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The first sees it as a sign that one is too attached to the material world, while Sufism took it to represent a feeling of personal insufficiency, that one was not getting close enough to God and did not or could not do enough for God in this world.
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In music, the post-Elizabethan cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland, semper dolens.
Only few concerts were given in 2006, amongst others one acoustic performance in the Neue Nationalgalerie with the exhibition Melancholia. Genius and Mania in arts and two concerts each in Russia and in Spain.
In this, one might link him to Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, who specifically recommended his novel, Der Nachsommer, as a therapeutic tool for the overcoming of melancholia or depression.
Jon Fosse created an homage to Hertervig with his 1995 novel Melancholia I, and also wrote the libretto for Georg Friedrich Haas's opera adaptation Melancholia which premiered at the Opera Garnier in Paris on 9 June 2008 on stage by Stanislas Nordey (Lawrence Olivier Award 2008 for a new opera) and costumes of Raoul Fernandez.
Touted as the subtle sort of fetish erotica that relies on the drama of melancholia instead of on pure eroticism as secret springboards for erotic imaginings, trance painting is deemed by de Veyra to have been culled from the art of Blue Period Picasso, Diego Velázquez as much as Raphael, Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Nobuyoshi Araki and the "defamiliarization" technique of the Russian Formalists.