I
I first encountered Melencolia I in the early months of 2010 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Curators gathered twelve prints from the museum’s collection in a small exhibit, Albrecht Dürer: Virtuoso Printmaker, and the engraver’s deftly rendered constellation of objects drew me in.
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 9 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (1514)
Crowding his composition were tools scattered about the foreground: a block plane, chisel, hammer, tongs, and handsaw; creatures: a cherub and a dog; geometric forms: a sphere and a dodecahedron; and a miscellany of other objects including a bell, book, censer, divider, hourglass, inkpot, keys, millstone, money purse, nails, and a scale; and several enigmatic inclusions: a small boat at water’s edge, a distant city, a comet, a ladder, a rainbow, and an Egyptian number square.[1]
Edward Steichen, Brancusi’s Studio (c. late 1920s)
That encounter held fast. Late in 2015 I gave a talk at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago entitled “Transcendence and Immanence: The Sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti” in which I made a connection between the geometric forms in Dürer’s 1514 engraving and the sepia-toned photographs of Brancusi’s Paris atelier taken by Edward Steichen in the late 1920s.[2] Dürer referencing Euclid, Brancusi working out similar ideas in oak, marble, and bronze.
Two years later, I delivered a lecture at Concordia University, Nebraska entitled “Prone to Ponder: Reading Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I” as part of their celebration of the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Dürer, a lifelong Catholic and Christian humanist, was an avid reader of Martin Luther’s writings. On one occasion, having received what he described as a “little book” by Luther from Duke Friedrich of Saxony, Dürer penned a letter of thanks to Georg Spalatin, the Duke’s chaplain. “God helping me, if ever I meet Dr. Martin Luther, I intend to draw a careful portrait of him from life and to engrave it on copper, for a lasting remembrance of a Christian man who helped me out of great distress. And I beg your worthiness to send me for my money anything new that Dr. Martin may write.”[3] Art Historian Henry Luttikhuizen fills out the story:
Dürer participated in humanist circles. Not only was he a close friend of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, but Dürer also knew Erasmus of Rotterdam quite well. The artist even belonged to the Sodalitas Staupitziana, a group of intellectuals that named their society after Luther’s spiritual advisor, Johannes von Staupitz, who forwarded the Reformer’s ninety-five theses to Rome. In October of 1518, Luther visited the group in Nuremberg and stayed in Pirckheimer’s home. Although there is not documentation supporting an encounter, Dürer may have met the Reformer on one of these occasions.[4]
Dürer’s print, in conversation with Brancusi’s sculptures and the early stirrings of the Protestant Reformation, now occupied a corner of my imagination.
Returning to Melencolia I, I confess that too impressed by the engraver’s remarkable skill and intriguing collection of objects, I’d given scant attention to the work’s primary subject: Melancholy. Dürer renders her as an angelic figure dressed in a resplendent gown. A wreath of watercress and Ranunculus aquatillis crowns her head. Leaning forward, her right hand holds a dividers, her left cradles her cheek, and a closed book rests in her lap. A first glance suggests that Melancholy is world-weary and yet her gaze, directed outward and beyond the frame that contains her, challenges that notion. In fact, there exists a gap between Melancholy’s posture and gaze. The object of that gap animates the whole of Dürer’s composition: the young artist contemplates the meaning of life and with it, the quicksilver disposition of perfection.
In this light, the significance of Dürer’s objects gains clarity. The sphere and dodecahedron are ideal forms. The tools employed to fashion them, mere. A laconic dog lies on the floor, a cherub mimics Melancholy’s pose, and a host of questions follow. If the moored boat sets out across the water, will it reach the distant city? The rainbow’s end? If one ascends the ladder, does heaven await? What mystery is present in the ancient number square? Alas, the world of objects, measures, and meanings seems to elude young Melancholy.
Many believe that Albrecht intended Melencolia I as a spiritual self-portrait. The impeccable draughtsman knew firsthand what every serious poet, composer, and maker also knows: it can seem that perfection exists as infinite regress. That is, ever-present in melancholy is some sense of loss. But this sadness need not lead to desolation. In fact, the wistful, evanescent, and sublime often arrive as consolation.
Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in His Study, 9 7/16 x 7 1/4 in. (1514)
II
During my 2010 visit to MFA Boston, another Dürer print also caught my attention. St. Jerome in His Study (the artist depicted the saint 15 times) was also completed in 1514. Again, it was not the human figure that first drew me in but in this instance the thick walls, graceful arches, leaded windows, and wood paneling of Jerome’s study. Light passing through its ornamented windows casts delicate patterns on the walls. Jerome’s lion and dog sleep side by side in the foreground. And like Melencolia I, this small engraving is animated by an assortment of things: books, an hourglass, a small bust, candle stick holders, a Jonah gourd, and cushions. An empty chair, turned slightly toward Jerome, sits near his desk. A lone crucifix rests atop his writing table. We are witness to the sweet solitude of undisturbed study. Working in his Nuremberg studio a thousand years after the saint’s death, this space and all it contains is entirely Dürer’s invention.
Like Melencolia I, the real subject of St. Jerome in His Study is its forward-leaning figure. But no leafy garland here. Crowning the old man’s balding head is a nimbus of light. A further comparison yields three observations. First, although both engravings showcase rich iconography, their spatial constructions are entirely distinct. While Melencolia I moves from the machinations of Melancholy’s mind to a rendering of imagined things and lands beyond, the Jerome print employs one-point perspective. All lines converge exactly at the midpoint of the right edge of the picture plane. We read the space that Melancholy occupies from her eyes outward. We enter Jerome’s chamber from the outside in.
Second, while Melancholy’s upturned eyes are directed out to a world of her imagining, Jerome’s gaze is directed down to his writing slope. Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 386 and soon took residence in the monastery that Paula of Rome had built for him. The largess of her patronage enabled Jerome’s life of study and notably his translation of the scriptures from Greek and later, Hebrew into the Latin Vulgate. Now an old man, quill, ink, wax, and vellum at hand, his work continues. Perhaps after two decades of painstaking translation work, the brilliant yet irascible scholar has turned to other writing and correspondence that awaits his attention. Jerome remained in the Bethlehem monastery until his death in 420.
Third, if young Melancholy is dazzled by the mystery and enigma of the world that lies before her, Jerome’s concern is to finish his work. In the Jerome print there exists a line of sight from the vacant eye sockets of a human skull (memento mori) resting on the window sill near the left edge of the print, to the shadow shapes of Jerome’s eyes. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Albrecht produced the Melencolia and St. Jerome prints the same year that his mother, Barbara, died. She was 62 and he was 42. Night is coming.
III
Most credit Hippocrates as the first to reason that there are four seasons, four kinds of bodily fluid, and four personality types or tempers: the phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic, and choleric. In her fine study The Dark Side of Genius, historian Laurinda Dixon observes that, “Common through its long history is melancholia’s association with the planet Saturn, the element earth, and the bodily humor of black bile.” “Since the time of Aristotle, the condition [melancholy] was believed to afflict aristocrats, intellectuals, hermit-saints, and creative men of genius.” The learned Dürer surely understood these matters. Dixon goes on to point out that, “Melencolia I marks a turning point in history, when the conventional medieval perception of art as a predominantly manual craft was augmented by the belief that artists possessed unique intellectual and creative gifts.”[5]
Martin Conway writes: “[Dürer’s] engraving of the Melancholic Temperament, the temperament that is to say of the student, the author, and the artist, was intended to express the painfulness of intellectual conception. It is really a work of religious art and, as such, it has taken and maintains an astonishing hold upon the minds of thoughtful men.”[6]
Regarding Luther’s spiritual formation, Graham Tomlin notes, “at some point about 1514 and 1515 while living in the monastery at Wittenberg, and pursuing his daily round of lecturing, praying, preaching, letter writing and studying, Luther took a vital step forward when he discovered a new meaning to the term “righteousness of God.”[7] Grace had been given to him entirely apart from all of his striving. A pattern is taking hold. The task of theologians like Luther, scholars like Jerome, and artists like Dürer is to order thought and perception. Their vocation is to ponder the meaning of things, be it God’s nature, the stirrings of human minds and hearts, or the reality of abiding in this world.
If I pause, I can hear the scratch of Jerome’s quill, the stroke of his stylus pulling down lines of ink on expensive vellum. Short flows. Full stops. So also I am witness to the cut of Dürer’s burin as he engraves reverse images on soft copper plates. My first encounter with Melencolia I generated some sense of connection. To be sure, it was the artist’s handsome work, but more than that a desire to approach the perfect. These days, working at a quickened pace, I find that Jerome is my soulmate.
This blogpost is the third in a series of essays on melancholy. See also Highlanders and Applewood.
Notes:
[1] For a detailed examination of Melencolia I’s iconography, see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, intro. Jeffrey Chipp Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 157-171.
[2] The Fourth Pres presentation was one of ten lectures hosted by Walter Hansen. Afterward, Walter and I co-edited these lectures into a book, God in the Modern Wing: Viewing Art with Eyes of Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021).
[3] William Martin Conway, ed., The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 89.
[4] Henry Luttikhuizen, “Scratching the Surface: Art and Agitation in Early Modern Germany,” Stirring the World: German Printmaking in the Age of Luther (Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin College, 2017), 3.
[5] Laurinda S. Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 1, 6, 2.
[6] Conway, 79-80.
[7] Graham Tomlin, Luther and His World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 57.