Van Gogh: When sadness lasts forever

If he had been born in the Middle Ages, the physicians of the time might have thought of him, whose hair was the color of the expiring blots, that he was possessed by the Daemon Meridianus: the terrible infernal spirit that haunts the men's hearts, causing them that distressing disease called melancholy.

In fact, this 'crazy man with red hair' - whose work strikes us today with such a markedly extraordinary sensitivity, but which at the time occupied a secondary place compared to his inexplicable reactions - is attributed, they say, in his bed of death, this phrase, which summarizes, eloquently, what his true life was: 'sadness will last forever'.

If his life was dangerously balanced on that no less metaphorical dividing line that separates the two main hemispheres of existence, his death continues to be an enigma: although the hypothesis of suicide tends to be accepted as the culmination of a tormented existence, there are those who think However, he was assassinated.

Murder by consumption could also be considered the ephemeral life and languid death of sunflowers, the color of which, in the opinion of specialists, attracted him by the regular ingestion of foxglove, a remedy with sedative effects but causing a curious disease, xanthopsia , part of whose effects is the vision of yellow halos.

But apart from poisoning or meridian possessions, two authentic hagiographic landmarks influenced the Van Gogh soul: the stars and the sunflowers.

I would like to think that in Vincent's tormented but genuinely romantic soul, sunflowers were on earth what the stars in the sky were: some immutable, others fleeting like life itself, but all, without exception, wonderfully beautiful.

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