Your own museum practice

In this lesson: Melencolia I’s magic square, a symbol notebook built from open collections, an af Klint style color map and what next.

You can look slowly, read a symbol in context and tell fear from satire. In this last lesson you turn that into a practice you can keep for years: a puzzle in one famous engraving, a week-long symbol notebook built from free museum collections, and a creative color map inspired by Hilma af Klint. Then you plan where to go next.

A magic square in a famous print

Historical Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514) shows a brooding winged figure surrounded by tools, a polyhedron, an hourglass and a four-by-four magic square. Every row, column and diagonal adds up to 34, and the two middle numbers of the bottom row give the date, 15 and 14.

Later tradition In Renaissance magic a four-by-four square of this kind was linked with Jupiter, and Jupiter was thought to soften the heavy influence of Saturn, the planet of melancholy. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa set out such planetary squares in De occulta philosophia (printed in full in 1533). What Dürer himself meant by the square is debated, so treat any single explanation as one reading among several.

Symbols in context and color as meaning

Historical Hilma af Klint, a Swedish painter involved in Theosophy and spiritualist circles, painted her large abstract series for an imagined temple between 1906 and 1915. In her own system blue often stood for the feminine, yellow for the masculine and pink or red for love. Wassily Kandinsky, also influenced by Theosophy, published Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1911, linking colors with inner states.

Modern Making your own color map is a modern creative exercise, not a recreation of af Klint’s method. It is a way to notice your own associations, which is exactly what a symbol notebook trains too.

Free collections and how to use them

Modern One of the gifts of the last fifteen years is open access. In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art released hundreds of thousands of images of public domain works for free use. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Finnish National Gallery all offer large free collections too.

Look for the words “public domain”, “CC0” or “open access” on the object page. Use the zoom tool generously; you can often see details, such as the cracks in paint or the lines of an engraving, that you could never see in a gallery.

The magic square, checked by hand

If you want to check Dürer’s square yourself, here is its top row as it appears in the print: 16, 3, 2, 13. The second row is 5, 10, 11, 8, the third 9, 6, 7, 12 and the bottom row 4, 15, 14, 1. Add any row, column or main diagonal and you get 34.

The four corners add to 34 too, and so do the four central squares. Try it with a pencil; it is a small, satisfying way to spend time with a print made over five hundred years ago.

Your museum practice, step by step

What you need: a notebook, a pen, colored pencils or watercolors that are labelled non-toxic, and free open-access collections such as the Metropolitan Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington or Wikimedia Commons. Allow ten minutes a day for a week, plus forty minutes for the color map.

1. Zoom into the magic square in Melencolia I, copy it and check the sums and the date.
2. Each day for a week, search an open collection for one word, such as moon, cauldron, owl, broom or pentagram.
3. Choose one image and write where the symbol appears and what it is doing in that picture.
4. Note the date, maker and museum, so you can find it again.
5. At the end of the week, compare your entries for the same symbol: does its meaning change with context?
6. Make a color map: choose six colors and write what each means to you.
7. Paint or draw one small abstract composition using your map, and write three lines about it.

Journal prompts: Did any symbol mean opposite things in two different pictures? Which of your color meanings came from your own life, and which from things you have read? Which artist or museum do you want to spend more time with?

Planning a museum visit

When you can visit a real museum, plan a short visit rather than a long one. Look up the collection online beforehand and choose three works to see. On the day, give each the ten-minute method, sit down between them and leave before you are tired. Afterwards, write a short entry in your symbol notebook for each. Many museums offer free days or free entry for young people, and many have prints and drawings study rooms where you can ask to see works on paper by appointment, which is a wonderful way to see prints like Dürer’s up close.

Modern Beginners often ask whether it matters if they see a work in person or online. Both are valuable: in person you feel scale, surface and light, while online you can zoom in further than any guard would let you lean. People also ask what to study next after this course. Choose one period or artist from these lessons and read one good book about it, and keep your symbol notebook going. A last myth to drop is that you need a degree to do art history; careful looking, honest sources and curiosity are the heart of it.

Recording an image properly

A notebook is far more useful if you can find every image again. For each entry, write down the same few facts, the ones a museum label or object page gives you: the artist or “unknown”, the title, the date, the medium (such as oil on panel, woodcut or engraving), the museum and the accession number, which is the museum’s unique catalogue number for that object. Add the web address and the licence, for example “public domain” or “CC0”.

It sounds dry, but it changes your notebook from a scrapbook into a small research tool. When you meet the same owl or moon a year later, you can go straight back to compare. If you share your notes or images online, the licence line shows that you checked.

A sample week: the moon

To show how the symbol notebook can unfold, here is one possible week built around a single word.

Monday: search “moon” in an open collection and choose a Romantic landscape with a moonlit sky. Note where the moon sits and what it lights.

Tuesday: find a medieval or Renaissance image of the Virgin Mary standing on a crescent moon, a common motif drawn from the woman “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet” in Revelation 12:1.

Wednesday: look at the Moon card in a public domain tarot deck, such as the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith, and list its parts: the dog, the wolf, the crayfish, the two towers and the path.

Thursday: find a print or drawing where the moon is part of a joke or a warning, such as a night scene in Goya.

Friday: search for an astronomical drawing of the moon, perhaps from a seventeenth-century book of observations.

Saturday and Sunday: reread the week’s entries and write a paragraph on how the same object could mean devotion, danger, time, science or play depending on its setting.

Visiting a print room

Many large museums and libraries have study rooms where you can ask to see prints and drawings that are not on display. Book ahead and say which works you would like to see, using the accession numbers from your notebook. Expect a few simple rules: pencils only, no pens, clean dry hands, and sometimes gloves or none, depending on the institution.

A staff member will place the sheets in front of you. Seeing a real Dürer engraving under good light, close enough to follow each line, is one of the quiet pleasures of art history, and it is often free. If you cannot visit, many print rooms answer polite email questions about objects in their care, and some will send details of a work’s history.

A worked example

A learner copies the square and finds every line adds to 34, and 1514 in the bottom row. Her symbol week includes an owl in a Dutch still life, where it seems to stand for night and the passing of time, and an owl in a Goya etching, where it stands for foolishness and dark thoughts. She writes: “Same bird, different jobs.” Her color map makes green “starting over” and gray “rest”, and her small painting is a gray field with one green shape rising through it.

Try this

Zoom into the magic square in Dürer’s Melencolia I. Copy it, add up each row, column and diagonal, and find the year hidden in the bottom row. Then write one sentence on why a magic square might belong in a picture about melancholy.

Recap

Melencolia I hides a magic square adding to 34 and the date 1514; its meaning is debated. A symbol notebook built from open collections teaches you that symbols depend on context. Af Klint and Kandinsky linked color with spiritual meaning, and a personal color map helps you notice your own.

What next

Visit one museum, in person or online, every month, and use the slow-looking practice each time. The esoteric art page, the tarot art history page and Pamela Colman Smith take you deeper, and Occult History for Beginners explains the ideas behind Theosophy and Spiritualism.

You have finished Art History for Beginners. Press “Mark as done” and claim your certificate of completion. Then browse the art movements and pick one you have never heard of.

Further reading: The Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, free online. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (Phaidon, first published 1950), a classic first book.

Sources

• Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, engraving, 1514 (impressions in many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), book 2, on the planetary tables.
• Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich, 1911), translated as Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

Mark as done