Melencolia I

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Melencolia I
Dürer: Christ as the Man of Sorrows

The picture Melencolia I from 1514 is one of Albrecht Dürer's three master engravings . It is considered to be a particularly brilliant achievement by the artist, but it poses many puzzles to the ignorant observer and - like many of his other works, by the way - is characterized by complex iconography and symbolism . The number after the title has been interpreted as a classification according to the teachings of Agrippa von Nettesheim ( De occulta philosophia ), according to which the planet Saturn, which influences the melancholic, produces three types of genius - the first level is clarified here. This motif becomes the subject for the artist, since as a genius he often finds himself in a mood similar to the allegory depicted , namely with the will to create but unable to do something. A very similar representation and posture of the figure can be found in Dürer's picture Christ as Man of Sorrows , which is in the possession of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe .

Image content

  • The figure dominating the picture is a clothed, angelically winged, human figure who sits on a step and holds a compass and a book closed with a visible clasp in her lap, at her feet a dog, as it were as a companion, since he is prone to melancholy applies to madness. A bunch of keys and a purse are attached to the belt of her dress, the meaning of which Dürer has indicated on the preliminary drawing as a symbol of power and wealth.
  • On her right side sits on a millstone (often interpreted as a wheel of life) a boy or putto or “genius”, whose left stubby wing touches her right wing. He is holding a tablet ( Cartolino ) supported by an engraving stylus, at the other end of which is an eraser.
  • Objects are scattered around on the floor: hammer, pliers, nails, saw, plane, straight edge. All of these items are tools of the artist and craftsman (mostly the carpenter). The seventh tool is a marking gauge ( English gauge ), can be touched with the parallel lines along one edge. Above the ball on the left a two-part chalk line device (chalk band tool): lying on the side is the container of the chalk band, which is pulled through the upright, capped ink or powdered powder keg.
  • A sphere and a polyhedron (a parallelepiped truncated at two corners ). The side surfaces above and below are two equilateral triangles (which show the hexagram plan of the corner stone in the projection from above) and six non-regular pentagons; the twelve corners belong to two types: in six corners an equilateral triangle and two pentagons meet, in six corners three pentagons meet.
  • Alchemy : Between the polyhedron and the sea there is a basin full of burning coals, on it a melting pot with a cast nose, next to it a pair of tweezers.
  • On the building behind the two figures hang a balance scale, an hourglass and on it a sundial scale with only eight digits and the four (IIII) as the last hour ( death and transience) - the shadow stick shows no time in moonlight - as well a bell, the strand of which leads out of the picture; you can't see who's holding it. A ladder with seven visible rungs leans against the wall.
Magic number square
  • Below the bell, a magic square , engraved on a metal plate, is embedded in the seamless south wall of the tower or pillar. The sum of all rows, columns, diagonals, quadrants and corners is 34. It contains the number 1514, the year in which the work of art was created (repeated together with the usual AD signet on the step on the right edge of the picture). Around the year 1514 are the numbers 4 and 1, which could stand for Dürer's initials according to their position in the alphabet. How the geometrical figures and the compasses in the hand of the angelic figure are a symbol for the geometry and mathematics with which Dürer was intensively concerned, since in his opinion the artist should also be able to measure precisely in order to get a picture true to life and always with the To be able to represent nature as a model (see also thread grid ).
  • In the background in the left half are the sea, the countryside and a city. The dark sky above is illuminated by a radiant star , a comet and spanned by a rare (lunar) rainbow. In the right half of the picture, the ladder and the building point upwards. The incidence of light from the right and above behind the viewer corresponds to the darkness on the left. The hour remains indefinite. The star has been interpreted in different ways: as Saturn it brings calamity, as a comet a turning point in time or as a falling meteor a danger to mankind.

interpretation

The enigmatic work is closed to a complete interpretation to this day, although it has been tried again and again since its creation. The most recognized interpretation comes from the art historian Erwin Panowsky . This ambiguity or iconological ambiguity is typical of good works of art, but also because of its great technical skill, this image is counted as one of the “master engravings ”, and even related to each other , alongside knights, death and devil and St. Jerome in the case .

The first approach is to see it as an allegory of melancholy , not to say depression . The engraving was created in the transition from the Middle Ages to the German Renaissance, whose pioneer was Albrecht Dürer. The tools lying around and the putto working with a graver on a plate takes into account the medieval connection between art and craft, polyhedra and magic square refer to the connection between science and art in the Renaissance. Accordingly, Erwin Panofsky saw in the picture an expression for the Melencolia Artificialis , an artist melancholy that is not depressive but ingenious, but tends towards melancholy, influenced by the planet Saturn. This statement is based on a reinterpretation of melancholy by the Florentine Marsilio Ficino , according to which it is the only one of the four temperaments that enables creativity. Therefore, for the painter Dürer, this was also a theme for his art, which is fed from the same sources. He knew from his own experience of the dangers lurking when the mental tension was too great and expressed this through the personification of Melencolia.

Another interpretation would also be possible: Dürer knew from his trips to Italy the new art movement of the Renaissance, which began north of the Alps about 100 years later than in Italy. The contemplative female figure could face it. The Middle Ages are coming to an end (hourglass), a new time will soon be heralded (bell), things are going up (seven-lobed ladder), light (knowledge) spreads its rays in the sky, vaulted by a rainbow (blessing). The usual will soon be gone (farewell and melancholy). For the future upswings (wings) in science and art, the still sitting female figure is already wreathed with fresh branches. The ugly little flying animal and mythical creature that carries the banner (on closer inspection, the banner should consist of the inside of the creature's belly skin, which is stretched across the sky, as it were), stands for the danger of getting stuck in thought, not getting up to something to do.

Dürer, who also wrote scientific works (on mathematics, on perspective and on human body proportions), seems to have incorporated much of his self-image into the picture. Polyhedron and sphere (as the auxiliary construction circumscribing the polyhedron) could point to the drawing method he invented to construct polyhedra. What is certain is that the geometric objects point to the new scientific aids, which the artist should now use.

Woodcut by Gregorius Reisch, Margarita Philosophica , 1504

In general, the tools listed are, in addition to the geometric shapes, symbols of creative endeavor, as they were already depicted in the woodcut by Gregor Reisch (1504) with the Latin title Typus geometriae in his book Marguerita Philosophica . They should be understood as a call to action through which the world becomes more understandable and manageable.

Ursula Marvin ( Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory ) interpreted the star in the background of the picture as the Ensisheim meteorite of November 7, 1492. Dürer had at the time in the 38 kilometers from Ensisheim remote Basel stopped and painted the explosion of the meteorite on the back of a small wooden plaque, with his painting of St. Jerome as penitent on the front. The art historian David Carritt assigned the work to Dürer in 1956.

reception

Gottfried Keller was inspired by Dürer's sheet in 1848 to write the poem Melancholie . In a last stanza, which was not written until 1882, Keller came to the conclusion that Dürer had captured the moment of enlightenment in the gaze of the angel figure, which ended the depressive phase of melancholy and led to creative action: She ponders - the demon must escape Successful mature plan.

With his paintings Melancholie , created in the 1890s, Edvard Munch places himself in the tradition of the picture.

The original title of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Der Ekel (1938) was supposed to be Melancholia , according to Dürer's copperplate engraving . The final title (French La nausée ) was only given by Sartre's publisher.

Thomas Mann describes the “magic square” and its “fatal coherence” in his novel Doctor Faustus (1943) in Chapter 12. A reproduction of Dürerstich hangs “in a prominent place” above the pianino by the composer Adrian Leverkühn in his student apartment in Halle. It could stand for a central motif of this novel, for the coherent relationship between the motifs in the novel as an art genre ("Relationship is everything. And if you want to call them closer by name, then their name is" ambiguity "", Chapter 7) and in music ( strict sentence ). Ehrhard Bahr provides a different interpretation. When the news of the German Shoah crimes became known in the USA , man in the melancholy saw the necessary mourning work of every German, the necessary farewell to German inwardness, to romanticism that had turned devilish from 1933 to 1945.

In Günter Grass' From the Diary of a Snail , the Melencolia is the only picture that the teacher, fleeing from the National Socialists, takes with him.

In Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance (1981) , the picture is given a detailed interpretation with regard to the silence of two female protagonists in the novel, who experienced and questioned the atrocities of the Third Reich , but were no longer able to articulate them.

Also in the novel The Lost Symbol (2009) (original title: The Lost Symbol ) by Dan Brown , reference is made to the magic square in Melencolia I by Dürer. There it is used to decipher a secret message, just like in the novel Das Jesusfragment by Henri Loevenbruck , published seven years earlier .

Jean Firges uses Melencolia I as the cover image of his book about the psychological development of Paul Celan , towards illness and suicide.

Lars von Trier takes up the subject of the falling heavenly body in his feature film “ Melancholia ” from 2011. The futility of human action becomes apparent in the face of an indifferent universe when an exoplanet that is on a collision course rushes towards earth and wipes out the planet.

literature

Web links

Commons : Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerd Unverfetern (Ed.): Dürer's things. Single-sheet graphics and book illustrations ADs from the possession of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen . Art History Seminar of the University of Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-88452-862-9 , p. 206 .
  2. ^ Hans Tietze, Erica Tietze-Conrat: Critical index of the works of Albrecht Dürer . tape 2 : The mature Dürer . Holbein-Verlag, Basel / Leipzig 1938, No. 583 (2 half-volumes 1937–1938).
  3. ↑ Two preliminary sketches have been preserved for the putto: SL, 5218.39 in the British Museum and in the British Library Sloane 5229 , fol. 60. This preliminary sketch also bears the inscription “Key betewt violence, pewtell betewt wealth”. See Lassnig 2008, p. 53.
  4. ↑ Erwin Panowsky: The life and art of Albrecht Dürer . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-8077-0122-2 .
  5. ↑ Erwin Panowsky: The life and art of Albrecht Dürer . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-8077-0122-2 , p. 219 .
  6. ^ Johann Konrad Eberlein: Albrecht Dürer. rororo monograph, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2003, p. 119.
  7. ↑ Ursula B. Marvin: The meteorite of Ensisheim - 1492 to 1992. In: Meteoritics. Volume 27, 1992, pp. 28-72; Christopher Cokinos : The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars. Tarcher / Penguin, New York 2009.
  8. ↑ HJF Jones: Carritt, (Hugh) David Graham (1927-1982), art historian and dealer picture. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography .
  9. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre: The disgust. Rowohlt paperback; Reinbek 2003.
  10. ^ Bahr: Th. Mann's lecture: " Germany and the Germans ": coming to terms with the past and German unity. In: Michael Braun, Birgit Lermen (Ed.) :: “You tell stories, you form the truth.” Th. Mann: German, European, global citizen. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2003 ISBN 3-631-38046-1 pp. 65–80, here p. 73. The aforementioned speech from 1945 is one of Faustus' preparatory work.
  11. ↑ Hartmut Böhme: On the literary reception of Albrecht Dürer's copperplate "Melencolia I". In: Jörg Schönert, Harro Segeberg (Hrsg.): Polyperspektiven in der literary Moderne. Studies on the theory, history and impact of literature. Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 978-3-8204-0173-8 , pp. 16-19. See also Manon Delisle: Endless End of the World - Iconography and staging of the catastrophe by Christa Wolf, Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 978-3-8260-1966-1 , pp. 163–166. See also the entry Melencolia I in the article Artworks in the “Aesthetics of Resistance” .
  12. ↑ Black Sun Melancholy: Melancholy as a creative and destructive force in the life and poetry of Paul Celan. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2011 ISBN 3-933264-67-7 .