10 ART HISTORY ART HISTORY 11

madness allied to genius to decode the engrav- so solid, “seems weirdly possessed of an inner well as a way clear of the predicament. Poised and the Resurrection, implies a history of the ing. This was developed into a book-length torque, a kinetic potential that makes its planar between extremes, but ready to move in the right world in which the figures depicted and the What good would climbing do? study, still one of the masterpieces of the War- components seem to rotate away from the cen- direction, Melancholy’s narrative “situation” figures gazing at what is depicted form part of burg school: Saturn and Melancholy by Panof- tral axis”, and how “this instability lends the invites and instigates a tempered response in the a whole. In Dürer’s image we are in a timeless sky and his colleagues Raymond Klibansky and form an uncanny ‘agency’ in steering the eye’s beholder, a moderate and modulated speculation present which corresponds to no spot on earth, Therapy, melancholy and Albrecht Dürer Fritz Saxl, which appeared in English in 1964. activity around the composition”. He brings out with the power not only to model, but to restore and to identify with the brooding central figure What all these scholars share, argues Mitchell the complex mathematical echoes set up by the the mind’s creative functioning. would seem more likely to entrap one in one’s Merback in Perfection’s Therapy, his erudite magic square (scholars have even argued that it It is as if, fired by his thesis about the work’s melancholy than to relieve it. GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI new study of Dürer’s engraving, “is a commit- holds the key to the construction of the polyhe- therapeutic power, Merback has forgotten The source of the problem is that Merback ment to reading Dürer’s picture as a unified dron), and points out that Dürer in fact dates his everything he had previously said about it. He consistently identifies melancholy as Dürer Mitchell B. Merback statement, a symbol in the sense articulated by work twice – once, in his usual fashion, above could be describing a different picture. He depicts her with acedia, one sin in a very pre- Panofsky’s mentor, the neo-Kantian philoso- his monogram, though here half hidden in the might of course persuade us if he were to show cise series in a precise cosmology. But if you PERFECTION’S THERAPY An essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I pher, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)”. He explains shadows beneath the bench on which the figure us what it was in the engraving that we had believe, as I do, that there is something radi- 357pp. Zone. $32.95. what he means by this: sits, and again in the middle two numbers of the read so wrongly, but he doesn’t do that. cally new and radically different about 978 1 942130 00 0 Each assumes that the engraving’s accumulated bottom row of the magic square: 1514. Instead he bombards us with information Dürer’s Melancholia, that she belongs not to object-signs all point beyond themselves, to All this merely reinforces our immediate about medieval and Humanist therapeutic the ordered world of Dante but to the new something mysteriously “contained” by the sense, on seeing the picture of chaos and practices and theories, but there is nothing world whose outlines will be explored by y sometime friend Belacqua”, one work, as if gestating there, awaiting the herme- confusion (the tools of Melancholy’s trade there that makes me feel that this bears any Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Mann and many of Samuel Beckett’s early stories neutical act that will liberate it and bring it into scattered on the floor, the sense of too many relation to our particular image. others, then the entire premiss of Merback’s Mbegins, “enlivened the last phase of the light of day. Once successful, such an act will things piled together on the right and bottom left To take just one example. It is well known argument collapses. From this type of melan- his solipsism . . . with the belief that the best show the whole work to be a synthesis of these of the picture) allied to stasis (in Melancholy’s that certain works of art were literally seen as choly there is no obvious release; once it has thing he had to do was to move constantly from revealed meanings. posture, her wide-open eyes gazing not outward aids to healing. Merback points to Rogier van you in its grip it colours your entire world, and place to place. He did not know how this conclu- More recently, though, scholars, foremost but somehow into herself, the compasses inac- der Weyden’s “Last Judgement”, commis- the suggestion that there is a way out of it sion had been gained, but that it was not thanks among them Joseph Koerner, have taken to tive in her hand, the emaciated dog at her feet, sioned in 1443 for the hospice in Beaune by the seems insufferably smug and self-confident. to his preferring one place to another he felt arguing that “instead of mediating a meaning, asleep but hardly relaxed, and over it all the Burgundian Chancellor, Nicolas Rolin, and his But, a defender of Merback might reply, all sure.” Belacqua Shua, the Dublin layabout ‘Melencolia’ seems designed to generate multi- wide open expanse of sea and the sky with its wife; the Isenheim Altarpiece, by Matthias Grü- your examples belong 300 years after Dürer, who is the protagonist of these stories, is a ple and contradictory readings” (as Koerner weird light, the baleful rainbow and the eerie bat newald and Nikolaus Hagenauer, created in the who was still very much a man of the Renais- thinly veiled version of the young Beckett puts it), that “the impossibility of ever arranging heralding its melancholy message to the world). same years as Dürer’s engraving for the monas- sance. Mann may use the Dürer image in con- himself. The story goes that when, one mid- the parts into a cohesive and meaningful whole, The Warburg argument that this is an image of tery of St Anthony near Colmar; and the high nection with his latter-day Faustus, but the key day in Paris in the 1930s, Peggy Guggenheim should be understood as a deliberate effort by Neoplatonic genius (which according to Ficino altarpiece in the hospital church of the Holly here is that he is a latter-day Faustus. My and friends called on Beckett to go picnicking Dürer to convey the feeling of melancholic dis- and others tends to be allied to melancholy) Spirit in Laatsch, South Tyrol, by Jörg Lederer response would be: What about Hamlet? Are as they had planned they found him still in tress, to simulate the disorientation that attends seems more and more wide of the mark the and Jörg Mack. If we look at any one of these in we to identify Hamlet’s melancholy as a cura- bed. “Get up!” they shouted. “We’ve got to a particular state of mind”. longer one looks. detail, Merback’s attempt to draw “Melencolia ble disease for which the tradition, both get moving!” To which the budding writer Merback’s sympathies lie with this more I” into their orbit seems utterly perverse. In Col- Christian and Humanist, suggested clear rem- answered: “Why?” and, turning over in bed, recent trend but he wishes to take this insight in ut Merback has only been laying the mar, at the Monastery of St Anthony, those suf- edies (Merback is very persuasive on this), or went back to sleep. a new direction. The engraving, he argues, groundwork for his own view. “Accord- fering from ergotism, a disease caused, we now as an incurable condition brought about by a Beckett’s alter ego in these stories is named seeks not only to disorientate viewers, but, Bing to the theory put forward in this know, by contaminated rye but which, in early general crisis in authority, which in Hamlet’s after a character in Dante. In Canto 4 of the having done so, to redirect them along a new book”, he says early on, modern Europe, was known as St Anthony’s case means less than absolute faith in his Purgatorio Dante and Virgil come across a path that will restore them to health. But first he Dürer’s print is singularly equipped to perform a fire, were looked after in a great chamber at the father’s ghost and its injunction to avenge strange figure: explores, with great subtlety, the way in which particular task: to stimulate a certain kind of far end of which was displayed Grünewald’s him? My sense is that the answer has to be the We drew near; and there were persons in the the picture is fashioned to repel any attempt at a receptive process in the beholder. That process I huge polyptych whose central image is a vast latter, and that is why Hamlet still speaks to us shade behind the rock, in postures people take for unified vision. He begins, as indeed does Panof- will describe as therapeutic in nature – therapeu- and terrible depiction of Christ on the cross, so powerfully today. negligence. And one of them, who seemed weary, sky, by comparing and contrasting “Melencolia tic in the Petrarchan sense, as a union of rhetoric covered in boils precisely like those afflicting But, it might be retorted, Hamlet was writ- was sitting embracing his knees, holding his face I” with another engraving made by Dürer in and philosophy in the pursuit of virtue, and also in sufferers from ergotism. It is easy to understand ten a century after Dürer engraved his image, down low between them. “O my sweet lord,” said “Melencolia I” by Albrecht Dürer, 1514 1514 and clearly designed as some sort of com- the “medical” sense, as a stimulant and balm for how it was felt that gazing on the sufferings of and in a very different environment. That is I, “look at that fellow; he appears more negligent panion piece, “St Jerome in his Study”. rebalancing the mind. Understood in these terms, this Christ would give a sense of hope and soli- true, of course, but it seems to me that both than if Laziness were his sister.” Then he turned ignore or subvert but which we know exist, but but for a few precious years to be rid of his apa- Employing an orthodox method of geometrical Melencolia’s challenge to the beholder, we will darity to the victims of the horrific disease. these great works of art, while being embed- to us and gave us his attention, shifting his face up of a meaningless and timeless present in which thy and cynicism and given belief in the value of perspective here, Dürer creates a lucid architec- see, takes on the quality of a cognitive exercise Merback implies that “Melencolia I” per- ded in their times, speak to us more directly a bit along his thigh, and said, “Now you go up, one thing is as good as another, and so there is making music. Long before he strikes his bar- tural space “in which the location of every aimed at restoring and fostering health. formed a similar role for those suffering from and with more power than most of the great you are so vigorous.” no reason to try to do anything. A century before gain, still a theology student in Halle, he sticks object is logically subordinated to the whole, This is a Humanist version of Dante’s melancholy, but it is enough to suggest the par- monuments of Renaissance art – Spenser’s At this moment Dante recognizes him as an old Beckett, Kierkegaard had given him a modern on the wall above the piano in his rented room where everything finds its natural place of expressed position that his Paradiso is designed allel to see its absurdity. This is a small image, Faerie Queene or Botticelli’s “Primavera”, acquaintance. Delighted that Belacqua is here voice in his first book, Either/Or: “How terrible something he has picked up in a junk shop, a repose, like the interior of the great philologist’s to lead people from a state of confusion to one made to be looked at by a single person at a say. They do so because they ask us to face the and not in Hell, he asks him why he is sitting tedium is . . . . I lie stretched out, inactive, the reproduction of mind”. By contrast, “Melencolia” frustrates of grace, so Merback has no difficulty in finding time; Grünewald’s polyptych, with its suffer- fact that neither the traditional Christian mes- there like that: “Are you waiting for a guide, or only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I a so-called magic square, such as appears also in our eye and mind at every turn. To begin with it texts and images, from classical antiquity ing Christ flanked by the Virgin Mary and John sage nor the noble Humanist endeavours built have your old habits claimed you once again?” move about in is emptiness . . . . I do not even Dürer’s Melancolia, along with the hour-glass, lacks a predominant vertical, horizontal, or through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, to on the one side and John the Baptist with the on its ruin may quite work, and that there is And he, “O brother, what good would climbing suffer pain . . . . If you marry you will regret it; the sphere, the scale, the polyhedron, and other diagonal line, and appears to have no visual back his argument. The trouble is that every- Lamb of God on the other, and with its adjoin- nothing else to turn to for consolation except do? For the angel of God sitting on the threshold if you do not marry you will regret it . . . . Hang symbols. Here as there the figure was divided into centre. There are, moreover, two light sources, thing he says and all the examples he gives, ing panels of St Anthony’s desert nightmares the dramatization of this fact. would not let me go on to the torments. First it is yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself sixteen Arabic numbered fields, in such a way one top left, in the area of the threatening bat from antiquity, from the Middle Ages, and from necessary for the heavens to turn around me out- you will regret it . . .”. that number one was in the right-hand corner, six- with outstretched wings on which the title of the Dürer’s own extensive oeuvre, merely serves to side here as long as they did in my life, since I What both Kierkegaard’s young man and teen in the upper left, and the magic, or oddity, picture is displayed, and one, quite atypically highlight the fact that “Melencolia I” simply delayed my good sighs until the end, unless Beckett’s Belacqua suffer from is not acedia simply consisted in the fact that the sum of these for Dürer, at lower right. Thus light is not evenly does not fit the mould into which he is trying to prayer help me first, which must rise from the (sloth), one of seven precisely differentiated numerals, however you added them, straight distributed, yet every object seems to be place it. When he writes that “Vigilant attention heart that lives in grace . . .”. deadly sins, but melancholy, what Baudelaire down, crosswise, or diagonally, always came to touched by a strange flickering glow. Yet this is to the self, the tempering of the creaturely pas- The law of Dante’s universe decrees that called Spleen, which knows no boundaries thirty-four. not to say that “Melencolia” is simply chaotic or sions by reason, the inclining of the will toward those who never repented spend the remainder and for which there seems to be no remedy. In The uncanniness is what fascinates the classi- unstructured. On the contrary, we sense that humility, the cultivation of virtue – to the Ren- of time locked in their respective circles of Hell, this world there is no such a thing as an cally minded narrator Zeitblom, but for there are complex sets of relationships at play aissance humanist, these were long term imper- but that those who, even if only at the last upward trajectory away from one’s condition Adrian it clearly also suggests the uncanny here, that the polyhedron somehow relates to atives for the conduct of life”, he is plainly right, moment, cast themselves on God’s mercy, will and towards redemption, and the idea of nature of music itself. the sphere beneath it, the bell to the hourglass but what has this to do with “Melencolia I”? be consigned to the mountain of Purgatory, someone praying for you and this making a Dürer’s contemporaries recognized the next to it, the huge left arm of the seated female And when he tries to link his thesis specifically whose lower slopes are hard to climb but which difference is nothing but a bad joke. importance of the engraving, and many artists figure to the little putto, and so on; but, as with to the engraving, he entirely fails to persuade. gets easier as one ascends. Belacqua is an infer- Many who have thought about this have felt tried out their own versions of Melancholy, the the magic square, there is something uncanny He notes the engraving’s strange oscillation nal figure in his inability and unwillingness to that its first and perhaps greatest depiction is to most famous being Cranach’s. German art his- about the whole, something not quite right, if between “overheated frenzy” and “frozen move, and yet, as he explains, he will slowly and be found in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving from torians throughout the twentieth century puz- only we could put our finger on it. torpor”, but then goes on: in due time, helped on perhaps by the prayers of 1514 mysteriously entitled “Melencolia I”. zled over its meaning and significance. Erwin Merback alerts us to the oddity of the ladder Warning the beholder about this dangerous bor- others, reach the desired goal. Adrian Leverkühn, Thomas Mann’s latter-day Panofsky, in his great book on Dürer (1943), that, on close inspection, reveals itself to be derline is not, however, the engraving’s only There is no such hope for his Dublin counter- Faustus, is one such. The bargain he makes with made clear the importance of Italian Neoplato- more like one of Richard Gregory’s impossible answer to this crisis. Laying out the grounds for part. His vision is not of the universe turning in the Devil is that in exchange for his soul he nism for the Humanist circles in which Dürer objects (my analogy) than anything anyone the mind’s resistance and suggesting possible time to God’s laws, which we might choose to desires not infinite riches or power or women, moved and used Ficino’s theories of divine could climb; to how the polyhedron, apparently itineraries, it also offers a kind of consolation, as

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