Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer

Homer is the philospher’s stone.
Aristotle is melancholy passed
into gold, while Alexander is shown
on the chain he wears - choler that was tasked

with bringing principality to term.
Rembradt has the prince of philosophers
rest his hand on Homer’s sanguine herm,
and dangles his student’s medal. Sulphur

is the black sun eaten by a lion.
So nothing but contemplation is seen,
as supposedly the age of iron
turns back to gold. Melancholy, the mean,

theoria the balance, between war
and poetry, in Aristotle’s paw.

Oxford - 17 December 2020

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653) is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I offer a Four Humours and Alchemic explanation of the painting based on commentary by Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 99) and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486 - 1535) of Problema xxx in the Aristotlean or pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, which argued that melancholy could be a mean to give rise to genius and not just madness.