Abstract
The image of melancholy most suited to Donne—most suited to the way he perceives himself and how that perception results in self-fashioning—is Rembrandt’s Jeremiah (see figure 2.1). Because it was composed in 1630, the year before he died, Donne most likely never saw Rembrandt’s painting. The spirit of Rembrandt’s iconography, however, inspires and characterizes Donne’s self-fashioning as prophet at about the time he enters the ministry. The seated individual, head resting on his palm, was of course the common image of melancholy well before Rembrandt’s time, and it is this type which most closely resembles the classic treatment of this pose in Dürer’s Melencolia I (see figure 1.1).
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Notes
Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 281.
Sanford Budick, “Rembrandt’s Jeremiah,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988), 260–64.
See James L. Kugel, In Potiphar’s House (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994), 176–80, 194–95, and 197.
Lawrence Babb, Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1951), 182.
Raymond-Jean Frontain, “‘The Man Which Have Affliction Seene’: Donne, Jeremiah, and the Fashioning of Lamentation,” in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004), 127–47.
Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 87
Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poetry of Henry Vaughan, ed. French Fogle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964). Quotations from Vaughan’s poetry will be from this edition.
English translation by Charles Moseley, A Century of Emblems: An Introductory Anthology (London: Scolar Press, 1989), 169.
John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559 (Charlottesville: The UP of Virginia, 1976). All quotes from The Book of Common Prayer 1559 will be from this edition.
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© 2014 Reuben Sánchez
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Sánchez, R. (2014). “I Turne My Back to Thee, but to Receive / Corrections”: Donne and the Art of Convetere in The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the Most Part According to Tremelius, and “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”. In: Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397805_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397805_2
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