“I Turne My Back to Thee, but to Receive / Corrections”: Donne and the Art of Convetere in The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the Most Part According to Tremelius, and “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”

Abstract

The image of melancholy most suited to Donne—most suited to the way he perceives himself and how that perception results in self-fashioning—is Rembrandt’s Jeremiah (see figure 2.1). Because it was composed in 1630, the year before he died, Donne most likely never saw Rembrandt’s painting. The spirit of Rembrandt’s iconography, however, inspires and characterizes Donne’s self-fashioning as prophet at about the time he enters the ministry. The seated individual, head resting on his palm, was of course the common image of melancholy well before Rembrandt’s time, and it is this type which most closely resembles the classic treatment of this pose in Dürer’s Melencolia I (see figure 1.1).