The Enigma of the Object and the Flight of Melancholy: Dürer’s Melancholia I

Albrecht Dürer’s darkly enigmatic engraving of 1514 is unique in his own period as a sustained exploration of an interior psychological state. It firmly established the iconographic type of ‘Melancholia,’ as artists and writers over the next 500 years returned repeatedly to Dürer’s brooding figure, whether as a tragic condition of the creative mind or as an icon of existential doubt. Under such hermeneutic weight, it becomes difficult to recover the conditions of the print’s original conception and to discover how, in its iconographic sources, its preoccupations—in its essential DNA—Dürer’s image remained embedded in and directed towards the concerns and anxieties of its own time. In this spirit, Andrew Morrall offers a rereading of the print that recasts the theme of melancholy and suggests that the figure is not in fact “Melancholia” at all.