Pode o conhecimento dar alguma alegria? Uma interpretação da Melancolia I , de Albrecht Dürer, a partir da Ética de Spinoza

摘要

This article seeks to interpret the engraving Melencolia I (1514), made by the German Renaissance’s painter Albrecht Dürer, according to the philosophical background of Spinoza’s thought. The central idea is that, in this picture, there would be an artistic-philosophical intuition by which Dürer associated melancholy to the idea of a confused and muddied knowledge caused by imagination. Another engraving, also created in 1514, completes this intuition: St. Jerome in his study, in which the melancholy of the Renaissance’s man of culture disappears. Such insights allow reading the two pictures from the perspective of Spinoza’s theories of mind and knowledge. He assumes that knowledge is associated with joy, since it is free from the shadows of the imagination projected by fear, excessive desire, beliefs or/and superstitions.