Despair (from Latin desperatio, “hopelessness”) is an early modern term for an inclination towards suicide, and sometimes for the act itself. As a deadly sin, despair was in medieval and early modern art paired with the virtue of hope (Latin spes), for example in Giotto's depiction of the seven sins and seven virtues in the Arena Chapel at Padua (1304-1306). On the one hand, the concept of despair derives from the ancient idea of the inevitable dissolution of all matter…