Md. Asif Uddin

Tabula I

Melencolia I

Albrecht Dürer, 1514

Melencolia I, Albrecht Dürer
Thought at rest, surrounded by instruments it will not use.
Artist
Albrecht Dürer
Date
1514
Source
Art Institute of Chicago · CC0

One of the three Meisterstiche — the master engravings Dürer made in 1513 and 1514, alongside Knight, Death and the Devil and St Jerome in His Study. A winged figure sits among the instruments of measurement and construction: compass, scales, hourglass, plane, a truncated polyhedron, a magic square. None of them is in use.

The square in the upper right is a 4×4 magic square whose bottom row contains 15 and 14, giving the year.

It is usually read against the Renaissance theory of the humours, in which melancholy was the temperament of the scholar and the artist — the condition that makes thought possible and also stops it.