This work of art beautifully portrays the link between melancholy and the creative or intellectual man. A young man has a violin and a music book in front of him, but he appears to be disinterested in his work as he stares ahead with soulful eyes into the distance. The musical elements suggest that he is interested in creative work, but his melancholy demeanor shows a new association with the idea of melancholy.

In the time of Aristotle, he believed melancholy was a common characteristic for anyone who excelled in the areas of art, philosophy, or poetry. However, not everyone with melancholy was viewed the same in society. There was a distinction between the delusional, crazy people who were lower in society and the more mellow sadness of the intellectuals in society. Melancholy almost became like a trend, where it was fashionable with the right people and shameful with others. At times, those with melancholy were removed from society to live in madhouses where they were abused and mistreated.

However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "the suffering of melancholy was associated with greatness; again it was idealized, as inherently valuable and even pleasurable, although dark and painful" (Radden 15). This state of melancholy had many explanations during this time, from the isolation of the intellectual life to the idea of black bile moving during the process of thinking. Scholars continued to try to explain the irrationality of melancholic delusion with reason through the idea of black bile. Engel expands on this idea in his book Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe by saying "melancholy materialized in terms of an essayist's effort to write sensibly about a world which was recognized ultimately as defying worldly sense" (Engel 20). The reason scholars could have been so plagued by melancholy was the unreason that accompanied it, and there was no easy way to use reason to explain their melancholy, besides the age-old notion of black bile.

Vila wrote in her book on the Suffering Scholars that the title 'genius' was "a status tinged with suffering as well as glory". This encompasses the idea of beauty in intellectual melancholy because it included both hardship and honor. These ideas that seem so opposite, the pursuit of reason and the affliction of unreason, were actually bound up within one another.