polity holy roman empireconcept:era early modern

Melencolia I

Engraving (1514) by Albrecht Dürer. A winged figure amid a profusion of symbolic objects — compass, polyhedron, magic square, hourglass — in a state of brooding contemplation. One of the most analyzed images in Western art. Multiple impressions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Scholarly Significance

Dürer's most complex and iconographically rich engraving; a foundational image in Western thinking about creativity and melancholy.

Notes

·One of Dürer's 'Meisterstiche' (master engravings), along with Knight, Death and the Devil (1513) and Saint Jerome in His Study (1514).
·The 'I' in the title may designate the first of a planned series (never completed), or the first of three types of melancholy in Renaissance humoral theory.
·Iconographic elements include: a truncated rhombohedron (Dürer solid), a magic square of order 4, an hourglass, scales, a compass, a sphere, a comet, a rainbow, sleeping cherub, and a starving hound.
·Panofsky and Saxl's 1923 monograph established the canonical iconographic interpretation in terms of creative melancholy.
·The 4×4 magic square in the upper right corner sums to 34 in every row, column, diagonal, and corner square; 1514 appears in the bottom row.