An agreeable horror’. Giardini e melancholia nell’opera di Burton e Le Blon

Moving from the engravings that decorate the frontispiece to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, this essay individuates the melancholic dimension connected with gardens in English seventeenth-century culture. The emblematic figures etched by Christian Le Blon and described by Burton in the opening poem of his celebrated treatise reveal ambiguous and seemingly contradictory elements that shed light on the links between gardens and melancholy: along with features that belong to the classical iconology of melancholy and death are images that seem to allude to cheerfulness and life, thus reflecting the paradoxical emotions that gardens – and melancholy – arouse.