In: HeLix - Heidelberger Beiträge zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft, 3 (2010), pp. 1-21

Abstract

Although the word melancholy and the name of the Roman god Saturn are never explicitly mentioned in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), the film makes many visual and auditory references to them. This article shows and analyzes these iconographic references, i.e., the motifs and symbols that allude to this temperament and god in the film, and offers an interpretation of them in this new context. In order to do so, we will take into account some of the categories proposed by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl (1992) in their analysis of the copperplate engraving Melancolia I (1514) of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer and add some relevant ones.