Antenna Audio presents a marvelous audio tour for a "marvelous exhibition" (Financial Times Deutschland).Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art at the New National Gallery Berlin received high praise from the press: "Two thousand years of human history, two thousand years of progress, revolution, paradigm shifts, wars, crises, and, well, melancholy. The exhibition, which will be shown in Berlin from February 2006, is itself a melancholy masterpiece." (Frankfurter Rundschau).
In fact, the exhibition aspires to do nothing less than reveal the spiritual mystery surrounding the creation of art. It brings together the great artistic geniuses within the framework of a history of ideas that has never before been written in this epoch-making form. Drawing on a wide range of major works from leading international museums and collections, the exhibition unfolds a visual panorama that takes the visitor from classical antiquity to the present day.
The audio tour provides a detailed introduction to the finest of the works on display, among them Durer's superb engraving "Melencolia I", which represents the melancholiac's unbounded cosmos in an almost iconic way on just a few square centimeters, or Caspar David Friedrich's "Monk by the Sea", in which humankind becomes aware of the forlornness of its existence in the face of supremely powerful Nature, or Rodin's "Thinker", where the tension engendered by thought affects even the tiniest muscle.
Ian Dickinson lends the tour the appropriate timbre, blending melancholy and meditation, and quoting poems by Horace, Theodor Korner, and John Milton that are directly linked to the works under discussion. Period music rounds off the contemplation of an exhibition that is likely to be unrivalled for a long time to come.
