By Jane Spencer

An Iconographical Analysis

Albrecht Durer’s engraving portrays an artist with great potential, enriched and at the same time crippled by artistic moodiness. The focal point is a gloomy woman, face shadowed, resting her chin in her hand and staring darkly into the distance; above her, a bat carries a banner that labels the piece as a discussion of “Melencolia.”

The woman has wings but sits listless, symbolizing that too often, an artist’s potential is wasted because his introspective temperament keeps him inactive. Her head is crowned with laurels, suggesting that she has achieved fame, but is still restless. At her feet lie the artist’s tools: a saw, nails, and some unfinished scraps of carpentry, evidently thrown aside in frustration. The dog at her feet—a symbol of fidelity—looks starved, as if the artist’s faithfulness to her vocation is worn thin; alternatively, Durer might have felt that melancholy was his most constant companion in his life as an artist.

In her lap the woman holds a compass, an artist’s tool for measuring. The compass is a symbol of direction and correct orientation. It forms a strong, direct line that guides the viewer’s eye out of the foreground, with its more temporal objects, and into the background, where the open sea symbolizes eternity and the beam of light in the sky suggests the hope that the artist can find in contemplating heaven. She doesn’t respond, however, and the small angel perched at her shoulder looks dejected, as if his efforts to cheer her by thoughts of heaven haven’t raised her spirits. She cannot see beyond the evil-looking bat holding the scroll of “Melencolia,” and feels that his nocturnal realm has become her own. The hourglass above her suggests that precious time—which could be spent creatively—is wasted in pointless gloom.

A deeper cause of the artist’s sadness might lie in the inherent limitation of visual art. Images are necessarily confined to the weighty material world (perhaps symbolized by the scales hanging above the angel) while the human soul aspires to the higher, weightless world of spiritual meaning. The National Gallery of Art’s commentary suggests that in the engraving geometric objects like the caliper, sphere, and carved polyhedron reference Durer’s personal fascination with geometry and its relation to beauty; he was always trying to use geometry to “theorize absolute beauty.” But since the artist works with sensible images, she can’t transcend the limitations of matter to arrive at an absolute ideal. The commentary suggests that the ladder leaning behind the artist points to her desire, obviously frustrated, to climb from the world of matter into the world of spiritual abstraction. The angel sitting at her shoulder—seen in a new light—seems to be hiding whatever he is writing on his tablet, maybe symbolizing that though the artist can achieve mastery in making material images, this artistic success won’t make her a master of spiritual questions.

The cause of the artist’s melancholy seems at first to be sadly insurmountable; the limitation doesn’t lie in her own willpower, but in the nature of visual art itself. The beautiful images she forms must always point beyond themselves, and are consequently always—of themselves—insufficient to satisfy the soul. A path beyond such artistic melancholy, however, is the recognition that art doesn’t form the woman’s whole identity: she is an artist, but even more importantly a rational, spiritual human who can transcend art’s limitations. Her art will end when the hourglass runs out and time ceases, but her immortal soul will enjoy eternal life.

Durer may have found cathartic relief from his own artistic melancholy as he carved and printed this piece. It was a dialogue with himself; he could relate to the suffering artist, but he also tried to encourage himself to rise above his mood by showing the broad horizon in the distance, the light in the sky, and the sympathetic angel companion, a sign that the artist is never alone or wholly misunderstood. Even if he felt frustrated in his attempts to capture perfect beauty, he takes a step back from his work and acknowledges that this perfection still exists on the horizon beyond his art, a promise only to be fully enjoyed in heaven. Moreover, Durer may have intended his piece as encouragement for anyone who finds his mood getting in the way of his vocation. Every man’s temperament offers him both a unique set of burdens which threaten to hold him in sadness, and a unique set of wings.

Melencolia I holds up a mirror so that artists—or men in general—can step outside themselves for a moment and notice the bigger picture: the light in the distant sky, the valuable work still to be finished, the companionship of the angel, and the wings waiting to be spread. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the lover of beauty grows wings which eventually allow him to fly back to his homeland of heaven. Similarly, Durer suggests that a view of eternity will nourish the artist and give him the energy to create beautiful art, itself a reflection—if material and limited—of God’s beauty.