The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or imagine her in the condition in which the physician Brasavola found his patient Malatasta after a dose of hellebore he had prescribed: “With his hands on the ground and his anus raised towards the sky—as though one were seeing that Socratic Aristophanes who, drawing geometrical figures on the ground, seemed to be gathering truffles—he squirted black bile onto a white wall, and so befouled the whole room and himself that,” and so forth. Utterly fouled, or worse: if you saw her like this, I say, would you love her as you do?

Suppose you saw her on a frosty morning, in cold weather, in some fit of passion or disturbance of mind, weeping or raging, wrinkled and ugly to look at. A woman who, with a composed expression, often seems so lovely and delightful, “so pretty in form,” may, merely by laughing or smiling, make an ugly sparrow-mouthed face and reveal uneven, loathsome, rotten, dirty teeth.

She has dark skin, gouty legs and a deformed, crooked body beneath a fine dress. Perhaps, for all her costly headdresses, she is bald; and although she seems so beautiful in darkness, by candlelight or at a distance, as Callicratidas observed in Lucian, “if you saw her close up or in the morning, she would seem uglier than a beast.” “If you carefully consider what comes out through the mouth, nostrils and other passages of the body, you have never seen a viler dunghill.”

Follow my advice: see her undressed; see her, if possible, without her finery, “stripped of her borrowed colours.” Perhaps she is like Aesop’s jay or Pliny’s blister beetles: she will be repulsive and ridiculous; you will not bear to look at her. Or imagine seeing her ill, pale, wasting away, on her deathbed, skin and bones, or already dead: “She whose embrace was most delightful,” as Bernard says, “will be horrible to look at.”

She who usually smells sweet now stinks, with no sweet scent.

Like a posy, she smells sweet and is fresh and beautiful one day, but dried up, withered and stinking another. Beautiful Nireus, so greatly admired by Homer, once dead is uglier than Thersites; and Solomon, dead, is as ugly as Marcolphus. Your lovely mistress, who was once “Charis, dearer than one’s eyes,” dearer to you than your own eyes, once ill or dead is

Judged fouler than foul mire,

worse than any dirt or dunghill. Her embraces were never so welcome as her appearance is now terrible. You would do better to look at a Gorgon’s head than at Helen’s corpse.

Some think that seeing a woman naked can itself change a man’s affection. It is worth considering, says the Frenchman Montaigne in his Essays, that the most skilful masters of amorous play prescribe a full view of the body as a remedy for sexual passions. The poet suggests as much: