The Anatomy of Melancholy

I think anyone would take pleasure in looking at a geographical map: “to draw the mind with sweet delight through the astonishing variety and charm of things, and awaken it to a fuller knowledge of them.” Regional and local depictions allow him, as it were, to behold all the distant provinces, towns, and cities of the world without ever leaving his study, measuring their extent and distance with a scale and compasses, and examining their situation.

Charlemagne, as Platina writes, had three beautiful silver tables. On the surface of one was a large map of Constantinople; on the second, a finely engraved Rome; on the third, an exquisite representation of the whole world. He took great delight in them. What greater pleasure can there be today than viewing those elaborate maps by Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, and others, or examining the books of cities published by Braun and Hogenberg?

Or to read those exquisite descriptions by Maginus, Münster, Herrera, Laet, Merula, Botero, Leander Albertus, Camden, Leo Africanus, Adricomius, Nicholas Gerbelius, and others? Those famous expeditions of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Marco Polo the Venetian, Lod. Vertomannus, Aloysius Cadamustus, and the rest?

Those careful journals of Portuguese and Dutch travellers, of Bartison, Oliver à Nort, and others? Hakluyt’s voyages, Peter Martyr’s Decades, the accounts of Benzo, Lerius, and Linschoten; the travel narratives of Jod. a Meggen, Brocard the monk, Bredenbachius, Jo. Dublinius, Sandys, and others, to Jerusalem, Egypt, and other distant parts of the world? The delightful itineraries of Paulus Hentzerus, Iodocus Sincerus, Dux Polonus, and others? Or to read Bellonius’s observations and P. Gillius’s surveys; to see those parts of America represented in finely engraved pictures by the de Bry brothers?

Or to see a well-engraved herbal: herbs, trees, flowers, plants—all vegetation—depicted true to life in their natural colours, as in Matthiolus’s work on Dioscorides, or those of Delacampius, Lobel, and Bauhinus, and that recent, enormous herbal by Besler of Nuremberg, in which almost every plant is shown at its actual size?

Or to see birds, beasts, sea fish, spiders, gnats, serpents, flies, and all other creatures depicted by the same art, faithfully represented in vivid colours, with an exact account of their natures, powers, qualities, and so forth, as Aelian, Gesner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Bellonius, Rondoletius, Hippolytus Salvianus, and others have carefully done? “To know the mysteries of heaven, the secrets of nature, and the order of the universe brings greater happiness and sweetness than anyone can grasp in thought, or any mortal hope for.”

What studies can be more pleasing than mathematics, whether theoretical or practical? Surveying land, making maps, models, sundials, and the like have always greatly delighted me. “Such is the beauty of mathematics,” says Plutarch, “that it is unworthy to compare with it those trappings and baubles of wealth, those girlish displays.” Such is the excellence of these studies that all those ornaments and childish bubbles of wealth are unworthy of comparison with them.