Albrecht Dürer

Sophie Rosenwald Adler, (1871–1955); not in Lugt;

Thence by descent.

J. Meder, Dürer-Katalog, Vienna 1932, no. 75;

A. Bartsch, The Illustrated Bartsch, W.L. Strauss (ed.), New York 1981, no. 74;

R. Schoch, et al., Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, Munich 2002, no. 71.

Melencolia I is arguably Dürer’s most absorbing and perplexing work. The 1514 engraving depicts a winged woman accompanied by a dozing, somewhat emaciated, dog, and a putto scribbling on a tablet. She absent-mindedly handles a caliper and is surrounded by various other rejected, disarranged objects—tools associated with carpentry and geometry: a hammer, ruler, pad-saw, plane, sphere, polyhedron, set-square, and nails. Behind her, a ladder leans against an unfinished building, on the walls of which hang a set of scales, an hourglass, and a bell; the latter is suspended above a magic square, with rows, columns and diagonals that each total 34. In the background, an eerie, crepuscular seascape is illuminated by a comet and lunar rainbow, beneath which flies a bat, its wings supporting an emblazoned scroll. The woman’s identity as the personification of melancholy is here revealed.

In antique and medieval philosophy, melancholy was considered the least desirable of the four humours believed to determine human temperament; it was dreaded above the choleric, the phlegmatic and the sanguine. Melancholics purportedly possessed an excess of black bile, which could precipitate insanity. Since at least the ninth century, the melancholic disposition had been fundamentally linked with Saturn, while the sanguine was associated with Venus or Jupiter, the choleric with Mars, and the phlegmatic with the Moon. As Panofsky describes: ‘Once established, this “consonance” between melancholy and Saturn was never questioned. Every human being, mineral, plant or animal supposed to have a melancholy nature among them, for instance, the dog and the bat—ipso facto “belonged” to Saturn, too. The very posture of sadness, with the head resting on the hand, is melancholy as well as Saturnian; and as the black gall was considered the most ignoble of humors, so the “Saturnus impius” was held to be the most unfortunate of celestial influences. As the highest of the planets, as the oldest of the Olympians, and as the former ruler of the Golden Age, he could give power and riches. But as a dry and icy star, and as a cruel father-god dethroned, castrated and imprisoned in the bowels of the earth, he was associated with old age, disablement, sorrow, all kinds of misery, and death.’¹ 

Saturn and the temperament of melancholy enjoyed a metamorphosis in the early Renaissance, when Humanist philosophers, most notably Marsilio Ficino, espoused their association with genius as well as madness and desolation. Saturn was said to represent the ‘mind’ of the world, while Jupiter symbolised its ‘soul’; the former had imagined what the latter simply governed, representing deep thought rather than industrious action. Ficino and his fellow Neo-Platonists called themselves ‘Saturnians’, lauding him as their celestial leader while they resigned themselves to melancholy as their inevitable earthly condition.²

It is this dualistic characterisation of melancholy that Dürer represented in 1514. His gloomy angel is surrounded by tools pertaining to geometry and scientific measurement; she is therefore well-equipped to pursue the fields of knowledge thought to support artistic creation (domains Dürer studied intensively in an effort to delineate theories of absolute beauty). She had hoped that theoretical knowledge would expose the secrets of the universe; however, she finds that scientific measurement will not admit her to any sphere beyond Earth itself. She is stagnant, unable to fly despite her wings, and her tools remain unused. Frustrated by the inadequate scope of human insight and powerless to transcend the terrestrial realm of imagination, she is impotent and incapacitated, unable or unwilling to create.

Along with Knight, Death, and the Devil and Saint Jerome in his Study, Melencolia I completes Dürer’s so-called Meisterstiche (master engravings). In these mature works, created in 1513 and 1514, the artist reached the pinnacle of his abilities as an engraver. Aside from their technical virtuosity, the three prints are connected by their analogous formats and through their depictions of solitary figures within intricately detailed and highly symbolic settings. The Meisterstiche also correspond to the three kinds of virtue espoused in medieval philosophy: moral, theological, and intellectual; thus together they capture the complexity of contemporary thought.

This impression compares well with the British Museum's Sloane (E,4.116) and Malcolm (1895,0915.345) impressions, though is overall more silvery in tone, as is often observed in early examples of this subject. 

¹ E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton 1955, p. 166.

² Panofsky 1955, p. 167.