19. Melencolia
Albrecht Dürer
Melencolia I, 1514
Engraving on copper, 239 × 168 mm
Inscription at upper left: MELENCOLIA I
A winged figure, crowned with water plants, sits motionless with her chin resting on her clenched fist, the traditional pose of acedia and melancholy contemplation. Around her are arranged the tools of the mechanical arts and of geometry: set squares, a plane, a saw, a hammer, pincers, nails, a pair of compasses, an hourglass, a scale, a bell, an inkwell. A putto writes on a tablet. In the foreground, a sphere and a sleeping dog; in the background, the sea and a rainbow crossed by a comet. At upper right, the famous magic square of order 4, whose rows, columns and diagonals all add up to 34, with the two central cells of the bottom row bearing the figures 15 and 14, the year the work was made.
The geometric protagonist is the irregular polyhedron on the left: a solid with eight faces. It is neither ornament nor background: it occupies a significant portion of the composition and is rendered with the same optical precision as the measuring instruments.
Dürer’s solid is not born irregular. Studies describe it as a rhombohedron, a cube deformed along its diagonal, from which two opposite vertices have been cut off: six pentagonal faces, two triangular. A regular form corrected by a truncation.
It is the same gesture from which the erratic is born. Dürer truncates two vertices; the procedure of Souvenir di montagna truncates all eight. There the cut is calculated. Here chance decides it.
In the print the polyhedron stands beside a figure who thinks and does not act, surrounded by tools she does not use. Many have read in it the melancholy of geometry: the suspicion that measure is not enough to reach the perfect form.
The constructed erratic starts from that point. It no longer seeks the perfect form. It accepts that measure produces a stone.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving, 239 × 168 mm
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, detail of the polyhedron
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (CC0)