Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer: a close reading

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Albrecht Dürer made this engraving in 1514, and people have argued about it ever since. It is small enough to hold in two hands, crowded with objects, and quiet in a way that feels almost heavy. Here I read it slowly: what is there, how it is built, what it might mean, with the esoteric side clearly labelled.

At a glance

An engraving is a print. Dürer cut his lines into a copper plate with a sharp tool called a burin, then inked and printed it many times. So there is no single “original” hanging somewhere: many museums own an impression, and the Met’s is the one shown here.

First look: what you see

A large winged woman sits on a low step at the right. Her head rests on her left fist. Her face is in shadow and her eyes are wide open, looking at nothing in particular. In her right hand she holds a compass, but she is not using it. A book lies closed in her lap. A wreath of leaves sits on her head, and a ring of keys and a purse hang from her belt.

Around her, things lie scattered as if someone stopped work and never came back. On the ground there are a plane, a saw, a ruler, nails, and pincers. A sphere rolls near a thin, curled up dog that is asleep. A huge stone with many flat faces, a strange solid that people still call “Dürer’s solid,” blocks the middle of the picture. A small winged child, a putto, sits on a millstone and scribbles on a tablet.

On the wall of the building behind her hang an hourglass, a pair of scales and a bell. Below the bell is a square grid of numbers. A ladder leans against the wall and runs out of the picture. Far away on the left, over the sea, a comet or bright star blazes under a rainbow, and a bat-like creature flies across the sky holding a banner with the words MELENCOLIA I.

Tools everywhere, and nobody is working.

Composition, color and light

There is no color here, only black lines on paper. Dürer builds every tone, from deep shadow to bright sky, out of lines. Look closely at the woman’s dress and you will see tight parallel lines, crossing lines and tiny flicks. Where the lines are dense, the paper reads as dark. Where they open up, light comes through. This is called hatching and cross-hatching, and Dürer was one of the great masters of it.

The composition is crowded and slightly unstable. The big solid tilts forward, the ladder rises out of the frame, and the ground slopes. Your eye has nowhere to rest. The main figure sits in the lower right, heavy and still, while the brightest light sits in the far upper left, at the comet over the water. That diagonal, from dark, weighed down figure to distant light, is the backbone of the picture.

The darkest area is the woman’s face. Dürer does the opposite of what you might expect. Her expression is the emotional center of the print, and he hides it in shade. The light reaches her hands, her skirt and her wings, but not her thoughts.

Notice the scale, too. A creature built to fly sits heavily on the ground. Even without any symbolism, that tells you something about the mood.

Symbols and story

Here we move from looking to interpreting. Most of the objects carry meanings that educated viewers of 1514 would have known.

Melancholy. In the medical theory of the time, the body held four humors, and the black bile humor produced the melancholic temperament: dark, heavy, brooding. Melancholics were thought to sit with their head in their hand and a darkened face, which is exactly how Dürer shows her.

Geometry and craft. The compass, ruler, sphere, polyhedron and builder’s tools belong to geometry and the mechanical arts. In the Middle Ages geometry was often personified as a woman with a compass. Here geometry and melancholy seem to have merged into one figure.

Time and measure. The hourglass, scales and bell measure time and weight. The whole wall is a display of measurement.

Wealth and power. The keys and purse at her belt were read by Panofsky as signs of power and wealth, attributes of the melancholic in older texts. That is an interpretation, but a well supported one.

The dog. Dogs often stood for melancholy in pictures of the temperaments. This one is thin and asleep, which fits the idea of a mind turned in on itself.

The title. The banner says MELENCOLIA I, with the number one. Why “I”? There is no “II” or “III” by Dürer. One reading, which I come back to below, links the number to a system of three kinds of melancholy described by the writer Agrippa.

The story, if there is one, is not an action but a state. A gifted, powerful figure has every tool of knowledge and craft, and still cannot move.

Context: the artist and the period

Dürer was born in Nuremberg in 1471, the son of a goldsmith. He trained as a painter and printmaker, traveled to Italy, studied perspective and human proportion, and became the first artist from north of the Alps to win international fame, largely through his prints. A painting stayed in one place, but an engraving could be sold and sent across Europe.

Melencolia I belongs with two other large engravings, Knight, Death and the Devil (1513) and Saint Jerome in His Study (1514). They are similar in size and equally ambitious, and art historians call them the three Master Engravings. They were not sold as a set, but they seem to answer each other: an active life in the world, a peaceful life of study, and a troubled life of the mind.

Dürer cared deeply about mathematics and later wrote treatises on measurement and proportion. The geometry here is not decoration. It asks how far rules can take an artist, and where inspiration comes from.

The esoteric angle

This is the part many readers come for, so I want to be careful about what is history and what is later reading.

Historical The print draws on learned ideas that were mainstream in 1514. Melancholy was linked to the planet Saturn in astrology and medicine. The Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino had argued that melancholy, the Saturnine temperament, was also the temperament of genius and deep thought. The German scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa had written his Three Books of Occult Philosophy by 1510, though it was printed only in 1533. In its astrological magic, each planet had a square of numbers, and the four by four square belonged to Jupiter. Jupiter was thought to soften Saturn’s heavy influence.

Historical The square on the wall is a real magic square. Every row, column and diagonal adds up to 34, and so do the four corners and the four central cells. The two middle numbers in the bottom row read 15 and 14, the year of the print. Dürer clearly built it with care.

Later tradition The classic interpretation comes from Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy (1964). They read the print as an image of “melancholy of the imagination,” the first of Agrippa’s three kinds of melancholy, which would explain the “I.” In this reading, the winged figure is the artist’s mind: gifted, but stuck at the level of craft and measurement, unable to reach higher insight. The Jupiter square on the wall would then be a kind of remedy, placed there to temper Saturn. This reading is strongly supported by texts of the period, but it is still an interpretation.

Later tradition Other readings exist, from self-portrait of a mood to allegory of geometry. Claims that the print hides coded messages from a secret brotherhood are speculation with no evidence.

Modern Today the square of four appears in modern magical practice, including in sigil work where people trace letters on number squares. If you use it that way, you are working in modern practice, built on Renaissance sources. That is a perfectly good thing to do, as long as you know which layer you are in. My page on sigils shows how modern practitioners use planetary squares.

Here is the square, so you can check the sums yourself:

A detail to linger on

If you open the Met’s high resolution image, zoom into the wall. The bell, the hourglass and the square sit almost touching, each one a different way of dividing time or number. Then go back to her face. The eyes are open. This is not a picture of laziness or sleep, which the dog has taken care of. It is a mind that is switched on and cannot find its way forward, which many of us know from our own creative and spiritual lives.

Try it yourself

Here are the worksheet questions I use for every close reading. Copy them into a notebook, open the image as large as your screen allows, and give yourself twenty minutes. Fill them in order and do not skip ahead to meaning.

1. Basic information. Write down the title, artist, date, material, size and collection number from the At a glance box. Size matters: picture the real object on a wall or in your hand.
2. First look, two minutes. Before you read anything else, write three words for your first reaction.
3. Description. List at least fifteen things you can see, without explaining any of them. People, animals, objects, places, colors, marks, writing.
4. What is going on here? Then ask: what do I see that makes me say that? What more can I find?
5. Formal analysis. Where are the lightest and darkest areas? Where do the lines lead your eye? Is the space deep or shallow? What is the focal point?
6. Meaning in three levels. What is shown (a woman, a dog, an old man)? What story or theme do those things stand for? What does the work tell you about the time and place that made it?
7. Evidence check. Mark each statement you wrote with E for evidence you can see or document, I for an interpretation, and P for your personal response. For this print, add one more: count the measuring tools. What does each one measure, and what is left that cannot be measured?

If you want the full method with a worked example, my page on how to look at a painting walks through it step by step.

Sources and the museum page

Every fact in the At a glance box comes from the Met’s own record for this impression, Melencolia I, 43.106.1, where you can download the image for free. For the interpretation, the key book is Saturn and Melancholy by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, and Panofsky’s The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer is still a wonderful read for beginners. The square of Jupiter is printed in book 2 of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

If you want more magic in art, read my overview of the esoteric in art, then try the close reading of The Magic Circle by Waterhouse. For the craft side, my correspondences guide explains how planets, numbers and materials were linked. And if you like this way of looking at old symbols, the history chapters in my witchcraft book take the same careful approach.