Engraved by Albrecht Dürer in 1514, Melencolia I is the most analyzed single print of the entire Northern Renaissance. A winged personification of Melancholy sits at the right, head propped on her hand, surrounded by the tools of geometry, alchemy, and craft: compass, polyhedron, magic square, hourglass, scales, sleeping hound, hammer and saw, ladder, comet in the sky. A putto next to her scribbles on a tablet. The objects refuse to add up to a unified meaning; the picture is constructed as an enigma the viewer must work through.
The print is one of three Dürer 'Master Engravings' produced 1513-1514 (alongside Knight, Death and the Devil and Saint Jerome in his Study). The trio represents Dürer's mature mastery of the engraving medium and his ambition to make the printed image carry the kind of philosophical content normally reserved for theological texts. The magic square in the upper right of Melencolia I is one of the earliest published 4x4 magic squares in European mathematics; the date 1514 appears in the bottom row.
The image is in the public domain. Melencolia I has been read across five centuries as: a self-portrait of the artist's intellectual condition; an allegory of the limits of geometric knowledge; an emblem of the saturnine temperament in Renaissance Neo-Platonist physiology; a meditation on the impossibility of complete knowledge. Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama centers on it. Erwin Panofsky's Dürer monograph dedicates a chapter to it. It remains the canonical image for the theme 'thinking about thinking.'
