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.