Albrecht Dürer's "Melencolia" is a technically masterful piece of art with a highly complex content. A fascinating copperplate engraving of an enigmatic depiction in a technical perfection that still captivates today’s observers. Dürer's "Melencolia" is considered the most discussed work in art history. However, no matter how many reproductions there are in art books and the like, only the original work emanates the captivating aura that results from the dense and enigmatic content in combination with the infinite fineness and plasticity of the intaglio printing’s ruling. Dürer achieved a technical perfection in "Melencolia" that also fascinated his contemporaries. He wrested a delicacy and soft tonality from the hard copper plate with his graver that is, for its depth and materiality, of a painterly quality. The eyes, through which the winged allegory of melancholy with its propped-up head gazes, are wide awake and bright white. The face is shadowed and hair, feathers, and laurel wreath have a palpable plasticity. Dürer also rendered the fur of the sleeping dog in the truest sense of the word "to a hair" and attained a materiality and haptic surface appeal that, in terms of quality, is unmatched in the linear technique of copperplate engraving. Albrecht Dürer, probably the most widely acknowledged German Renaissance artist, was a painter, graphic artist, mathematician, and art theorist, and began to understand his artistic work, entirely in the spirit of Renaissance, no longer as merely the result of a creative process involving craftsmanship, but rather as the essence of an intense intellectual act of creation. The artist is more of a scientist who shall acquire knowledge in the most diverse fields of knowledge, such as anatomy, mathematics, geometry and perspective, and must be an expert both in religious as well as in mundane topics. "Melencolia" is a graphic masterpiece, which, like the other two so-called "Master Engravings" ("Saint Jerome in His Study" and "Knight, Death and Devil"), was created at the peak of Dürer's creativity. In these three large-format engravings, which Dürer conceived and meticulously executed on the copperplate in his Nuremberg workshop between 1513 and 1514, we are presumably dealing with representatives of a life of virtue, the virtuous knight ("Knight, Death and Devil"), the theologically virtuous saint ("Saint Jerome"), as well as the representation of intellectual virtue in the form of the highly complex allegorical depiction of "Melencolia". While a melancholic temper was still viewed negatively in the Middle Ages, it was subject to a positive reinterpretation in Neoplatonic Renaissance literature with reference to a passage in the "Problemata" of the ancient philosopher Aristotle (4th century B.C.). Dürer was the first to implement this reinterpretation pictorially by staging his "Melencolia" as a highly intellectual being through the multitude of attributes added as references to the most diverse fields of knowledge. Aristotle, in fact, had raised the fundamental question regarding the genius cult, which continues to have an effect up until today, why all outstanding representatives of philosophy, politics, poetry, and the fine arts were melancholics, an idea that was taken up again by the Neoplatonists in Renaissance and is still discussed in various contemporary writings. "The melancholic, regarded with much skepticism in the Middle Ages, advanced to the class of a genius. In order to belong to this class, many, among them Dürer, would go to great lengths. Melancholy and genius were now mutually dependent. Researchers like Schuster rightly speak of a "hidden self-portrait" [..]" (R. Schoch/M. Mende/A. Scherbaum, Albercht Dürer. Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Munich 2001, p.183). In the copperplate engraving "Melencolia", Dürer confronts us with a highly complex auto-referential conception of the life of an artist, which would be formative for numerous subsequent generations of artists as well as for the genius cult. Dürer's "Melencolia" is not only the subject of an almost endless amount of academic writings, but has also been widely received in literature, right up to Thomas Mann and Günter Grass.
The reception of this exceptional work began as early as in 1602 with the almost contemporary copy by Johann Wiricx and has had decisive influence on modern artistic self-conception and self-portrayal to this day. Hence it is little surprising that Anselm Kiefer, the mystical seeker of meaning, explored Dürer's "Melencolia I" in several of his works almost 500 years later, which once again proves the unmatched quality of Dürer's creation. The present early copy, printed during Dürer's lifetime, is also a rare in terms of its state of preservation: unlike most prints of the time, this sheet was not trimmed to the platemark and thus to the edge of the motif, as it was common practice among print collectors. This makes it one of the extremely rare prints to have survived in such an "untouched" condition. [JS]