Melencolia I

Melencolia I is the most discussed and debated image in the pantheon of Western art. The rich symbolism that still remains open to interpretation embodies the complexity of humanist thought in the Renaissance period. This work is one of the artist’s three so-called Meisterstiche (‘master engravings’), created between 1513-1514, which are widely considered the pinnacle of the artist’s mastery of the graphic medium. It is thought that the three engravings, Melencolia I, Death, Knight and the Devil and Saint Jerome in his Study each represent one of the three forms of virtuous living, intellectual, moral and theological, as outlined in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (written circa 1265–1274 but published in 1485). In Dürer's time, the nature of a virtuous life, and by extension of the ideal ‘Renaissance man’, was a popular topic of conversation in literary and artistic circles. Dürer himself was surrounded and no doubt inspired by the Nuremberg humanists, above all by his friend Willibald Pirckheimer. Treatises such as Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ (1513) and Castiglione’s ‘The Courtier’ (1528) give testimony of this culture and the moral debates of the time.

The melancholic temperament was associated with intellectual creativity and as such this depiction has been understood to be an allegorical self-portrait. Indeed, it has been suggested that the ‘I’ of the title Melencolia I refers to Cornelius Agrippa’s hierarchy of the Melancholic temperament, with ‘imagination’ ranking above ‘mind’ and ‘reason’. The winged figure can thus be taken to be an allegory of artistic melancholy and the tools of measurement in the image refer to the artist’s examination of the natural world.