Dürer’s Melencolia I and the Seven Lively Arts

The exhibition of Albrecht Dürer’s works on show in Edinburgh until October is a wonderful opportunity to see the work of someone who was undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of his time. He was one of the first to explore the artistic possibilities of the self-portrait; his drawings from nature are lively and naturalistic. Much of his work shows a modern scientific care for exactness, added to an almost uncanny intuition. His drawing of a rhinoceros, for instance, was based on a description: he never saw one in the flesh.

He made what is possibly his most famous engraving, Melencolia I, in 1514. He includes the date in the bottom line of figures in the so-called ‘magic square’ to the right of the composition. While the subject matter of his other engravings is perhaps easier to read (St. Anthony; St. Jerome in his study; The Prodigal Son; Death, the Knight and the Devil) Melencolia I remains something of a mystery: the central figure sitting in an attitude of melancholy, the dog lying listlessly at her feet, the bored looking cherub, or putto to her left, the tools and pieces of wood scattered about, the large geometrical shape to the left of the composition, the magic square mentioned above; and so on. Questions arise on looking at the picture, such as: Who is she? Why is she so melancholy?

I believe that we can begin to approach an answer to some of the riddles posed by the engraving by looking at the system of education that was widespread in Dürer’s time. There were once two paths in education: the threefold path, or Trivium, and the fourfold path, or Quadrivium. The Trivium was composed of Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectics (later replaced by Logic). The Quadrivium was Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. Each of these disciplines was personified in a goddess-like figure.  To study the subjects that these goddesses represented had the quality of approaching a religious mystery.

Among those scholars of the Middle Ages who characterized the Seven Lively Arts in this way was Alan of Lille, a Cistercian monk who lived from about 1128 to 1202. He was closely connected to the so-called School of Chartres, an esoteric group of largely Cistercian monks who lived and studied in the environs of Chartres Cathedral, not far from Paris. Alan of Lille wrote about them in his book Anticlaudianus, or The Good and Perfect Man. He describes there how the goddesses of the Trivium and the Quadrivium help to build a chariot for one of the seven Virtues, Prudence, to travel to the highest heaven, in order to persuade God to allow for the creation of a new soul for the human being.

Of these goddesses of education, Grammar is the oldest. She is a hag who had come into the world at the time of Osiris. She lived far from the haunts of men until she was discovered by Hermes. She carries a sharp knife to perform surgery on the lips and teeth of those who could not otherwise speak properly. Her ‘planet’ in the medieval sense of the term, is the Moon.

Rhetoric is a beautiful, majestic woman of mature years, dressed in a highly colourful robe. Her planet is Venus.

Dialectics is a pale woman of severe aspect, dressed all in black. She holds a serpent in her hand. Mercury is her planet. These three make up the Trivium.

The goddesses of the Quadrivium are as follows: Arithmetic is a beautiful and stately figure. Rays of light radiate from her brow and ray back, emerging from unity and returning to unity. She belongs to the Sun.

Astronomy appears in a fiery ball of light. She is a maiden in a robe decorated all over with diamonds. She wears a crown of stars, and in her hands is a book made of various metals in which the progress and paths of the stars are described. Her planet is Saturn.

Music comes announced by a symphony, and is accompanied by the Three Graces, who go before her, singing as they go. She is harmonious and well balanced, and her planet is Mars.

Finally, and most interestingly for understanding Melencolia I comes Geometry. She is depicted as a woman of sturdy limbs, who holds a pair of compasses in one hand and a sphere in the other. Her task is to describe and explain the world of Nature to the Gods. She belongs to the planet Jupiter.

We can see that in Dürer’s engraving the sturdy-limbed female figure is holding a pair of compasses, while her sphere lies on the floor. The magic square behind her is the one associated with the planet Jupiter. Each of the seven planets of medieval astronomy was awarded its own magic square, with the number of smaller squares shown within them becoming greater, the nearer to Earth the planet. While Jupiter’s square for instance contains sixteen smaller squares, four lines of four, the Sun’s square has six lines of six. Each line of the Sun’s figures adds up to 111, making a sum of 666!

If the presence of the compasses, sphere and Jupiter square is not enough, other evidence that suggests that this engraving depicts Geometry includes the carpentry tools and wood lying about the bottom of the picture. Carpentry is, after all, among other things, a kind of practical geometry. Then there is the geometrical form to the left of the composition, known as the Dürer Solid.

However, although we may have identified the figure in the engraving, it does not explain why she is so melancholy. One solution to this may lie in the task of Geometry as describing the world of Nature to the gods. The world of Nature includes the world of human beings, and that world was changing with new discoveries being made and old orthodoxies being challenged. The very shape of the universe was being reassessed in Dürer’s time. Dürer’s work is not that of a conservative; he was in the forefront of his time as a painter and draftsman. But among the things that were changing was education. The Platonic study of Dialectics was being replaced more and more by the more Aristotelian study of Logic. Logic has no goddess-like being to watch over it, and no planet associated with it. The outer planets of Uranus and Neptune were yet to be discovered. For the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, dialectics was a striving to find the truth through question and answer among philosophers. In such conversations, where two or three philosophers were gathered together, it might be possible to reach up to the highest level of human thought, called Noesis by Plato, and new intuitions be found to guide them towards an answer. Logic of Aristotle’s kind, on the other hand, contained all its elements within it; no opportunity or necessity for new intuitions: the facts alone would suffice.

Could it be that Dürer’s Geometry was no longer able to reach to the gods; that a new logical materialism was drawing a veil over the divine heights, that she was stuck with no one to report to? The bell behind her in the composition is still: no one rings it to send for her. The scales to weigh good with bad, right with wrong, are unused, and meanwhile, the sands of time in the hourglass are running through. She is not required to climb the seven-rung ladder in the background to mount to the seventh heaven and report her findings. Was Dürer himself prophesying in a melancholy way the coming of our own secular age? Certainly the sky in the engraving is dark, and a strange, batlike figure holds the title of the engraving in the left of the composition. The rainbow in the upper left of the engraving does not seem to promise anything in the way that Noah’s rainbow did after the Great Flood. The comet below the rainbow seems to herald a new dark age, exemplified by the batlike creature. There appear to be no gods active here. Perhaps the secret of Geometry’s melancholy is that she is unemployed.

Peter Snow