In a contemplative posture, an angelic figure sits in front of a building. Surrounding her is an array of tools: a compass, a sphere, a polyhedron, a saw, nails, among other carpentry instruments—objects associated with geometry and the mechanical arts. Hanging from the figure are a bundle of keys and a purse, references to power and wealth. On the wall, a balance scale, an hourglass, and a bell are fixed—devices for measuring time and matter—flanked by a magic square of Jupiter engraved on the surface. Next to the protagonist, a putto sits on a millstone, holding in his hands a copper plate and a burin, elements used in the engraving process. In the background, a bat carries a banner bearing the title of the print, behind which a landscape reveals a comet illuminating an abstract sky circumscribed by a rainbow.

Produced in 1514 by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Melencolia I continues to arouse the interest of countless scholars and has given rise to an equally innumerable body of studies. Its precise meaning (if such a thing exists), however, remains enigmatic, as does the very nature or purpose of the image, though certain elements have become broadly consensual within art historiography. Already in the sixteenth century, the print achieved considerable resonance. For the German humanist Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574), the first known interpreter of Dürer’s work, it shows how the melancholic mind, in its search to comprehend all things, ends up being led into absurdities. A few years later, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) would describe the engraving as a work that amazed the entire world. Scholarly studies on the print proliferated throughout the twentieth century, following a path opened by the publications of the German art historian Karl Giehlow (1863–1913), in the form of two extensive articles written between 1903 and 1904, situating the work within the context of the interest in astrology and hieroglyphics at the court of Maximilian I in Vienna.

For Giehlow, the image represents a learned mosaic of these interests, portraying the melancholic temperament in its positive and negative aspects in perfect balance, namely, the potential of genius to elevate itself through divine inspiration or to decline into the darkness of madness—a reading that regards the artist as a great speculative thinker. The following year, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), in similar terms, considered the print an allegory of speculative thought. Following the trail opened by the Vienna School art historians, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) and Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) would publish the first in a series of studies dedicated to the engraving, defining the general contours (still influential today) that would guide various interpretations. After their joint 1923 publication titled Dürers "Melencolia I": eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (“An Inquiry into Its Sources and Historical Typology”), the study was resumed by Panofsky in his monograph on Albrecht Dürer, published in English in 1943, when the historian joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and finally in the monumental Saturn and Melancholy, published with Saxl and the historian of philosophy Raymond Klibansky (1905–2005) in 1964. The extraordinary erudition and analytical depth of the text rendered it an indispensable source for the study of humoral theory and its visual expressions throughout history.

As Panofsky demonstrates, Dürer draws upon the repertoire of the ancient psychosomatic theory of the humors, developed in Antiquity based on the writings of Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BCE) and Galen (129–216 CE). According to this system, known as the theory of the Four Humors, the human body contains four fluids or substances, whose balance would condition both the natural functioning of the body and of the mind, defining different personality types. Thus, the predominance of black bile in the body would be responsible for the melancholic temperament; phlegm for the phlegmatic; yellow bile for the choleric; and blood for the sanguine. This system also established links with the four elements, thereby assuming, from the outset, a macrocosmic significance: the melancholic humor was linked to earth; the choleric to fire; the sanguine to water; and the phlegmatic to air. Finally, in the later years of Antiquity, humoral theory would become definitively associated with natural philosophy (such as the seasons and the ages of man) and later, among ninth-century Arab astrologers, with the planets, so that the melancholic humor came to be attributed to the influence of Saturn; the sanguine to Jupiter; the choleric to Mars; and the phlegmatic to the Moon or Venus.

According to traditional humoral theory, widespread in the Middle Ages, melancholics were afflicted by sadness and destined for misfortune, poverty, and the most servile and degrading occupations, such as mason, peasant, gardener, or sick man, among others—an iconography known as that of the “Children of the Planets,” famously treated by Aby Warburg in his studies on Renaissance art. However, this negative view of melancholy was paralleled by another that not only rehabilitated the saturnine humor as positive but in fact elevated it as the highest of all. This viewpoint was promoted by the Problemata, a text written and compiled between the Hellenistic period and the final years of Antiquity, falsely attributed to Aristotle. The author links black bile to the Platonic theory of divine furies, postulating that the melancholic humor was responsible for extraordinary abilities and gifts, as well as rapture and divine revelations, shared by great men and mythological heroes, including Hercules, Ajax, Empedocles, and Plato. This vision, though not unknown during the Middle Ages, found fertile ground among the Florentine Neoplatonists, being explored in the paradigmatic De vita triplici (1489) by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), a treatise on astrological magic aimed at preserving the health of scholars—naturally inclined toward melancholy (as was Ficino himself)—one of the main sources for Dürer’s print.

Panofsky identifies an additional and even more relevant source: the German magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535). In the preliminary version (written around 1510) of his monumental De occulta philosophia libri tres, published in 1533, Agrippa draws from similar Ficinian outlines and describes three means by which melancholic furor produces marvelous effects, through the possession of celestial demons that occupy the human body: by imagination, by reason, and by the mind. The first of these, for the historian, refers directly to Dürer’s engraving (from which its title, Melencolia I, is derived), endowing extraordinary skills in the manual arts, such as painting, architecture, and other crafts. For Panofsky—who conducts a true archaeology of the engraving and its elements—Dürer performs an iconological transformation, unifying the antagonistic perspectives on the melancholic humor with the medieval iconography of the personification of Geometry.

Panofsky, however, interprets the engraving in tragic terms. It would represent the frustration of the inspired genius, unable to attain the enlightenment he obsessively seeks. For the author, the angel’s wings symbolize the aspirations of genius which, inert, result in the melancholic condition. The engraving would thus reflect the suffering of the creative genius, incapable of fulfilling his ambitions due to the limitations of material conditions, and thus stricken by the melancholy arising from this incapacity. Panofsky’s reading met with vigorous critiques. One of the most incisive and pertinent was provided by Frances Yates, a pioneer in the study of Western esotericism and also associated with the Warburg Institute. As she points out, Panofsky ironically neglects the implications of Renaissance occult philosophy in his “romantic” reading, reminiscent of the neo-Kantianism of the early twentieth century to which the historian subscribed through his association with Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). For Yates, the engraving does not show the failure of the melancholic genius, but rather his inspired rapture, reinforced by the emaciated dog symbolizing the mortification of the senses—a condition for spiritual illumination.

The influential Panofskian reading, as Mitchell B. Merback observes, is striking for distancing itself from themes and elements that constituted the Warburg Institute’s legacy, including fundamental factors of Renaissance philosophy and psychology such as theurgy, Neoplatonism, magic, Kabbalah, witchcraft, and the occult. Even in his various studies on the influence of Neoplatonism on the visual arts, Panofsky would take care to carefully exclude its magical and ecstatic elements, restricting this impact to the neutral, intellectual domain of allegory. Indeed, these concerns with the “irrational,” demonic, and “Dionysian” forces in European culture guided Warburg’s own intellectual project, as the Institute’s founder. Thus, the various readings of the engraving share the consideration of it as a symbol or allegory that must be rationally deciphered. More recently, however, new approaches have proposed alternative ways of seeing the work—not merely as a sterile puzzle to be intellectually decoded by the historian, but as an active element capable of influencing the observer’s cognitive functioning, prompting a “movement of the soul,” a traditional notion present in Renaissance rhetoric, poetry, painting, and medicine.

Along these lines, for Merback, the work may have been conceived by the artist as a therapeutic element—an amulet capable of calming the passions, restoring and balancing the observer’s health. His interpretation aligns with new studies and approaches concerning Renaissance culture and art. On one hand, it revisits the Warburgian sensibility by considering, free from reductive theoretical constraints, the cultural framework of the period and its belief in the active potential of images, their subterranean elements, and “phantoms,” at a moment still secure from the “disenchantment” process that would take hold in the following centuries. On the other hand, this view finds support in the establishment of Western esotericism as an autonomous field of scientific investigation, to which Yates contributed decisively. Taken together, both approaches provide a new understanding of how images were conceived, considering the view of a world understood as a complex “forest of symbols,” whose influence on reality is active and inexorable—a conception that permeated multiple fields linked to the visual arts and occult philosophy during the Renaissance. According to this perspective, it is possible that Melencolia I was executed as a talisman, intended to temper the negative effects of Saturnine influences through combination with the Jovian influence, marked by the magic square accompanying the figure. In this sense, the new interpretations prompted by Dürer’s engraving exemplify, in nuce, the transformations undergone by the discipline itself. The receptivity to new epistemological fields and innovative interdisciplinary approaches allows for a deeper and broader understanding of the object of study, while also providing new answers and questions regarding the past and its traces.

Thainan Noronha de Andrade

Universidade Federal de São Paulo

June 30, 2025 

FOCILLON. Henri. Vie des formes. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1934.

GOMBRICH, Ernst H. Aby Warburg – Una biografia intellettuale. Milano: Le Comete/Feltrinelli, 2003.

KUBLER, George. The shape of time. Remarks on the history of things. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1970.

SAXL, Fritz. “Continuity and variation in the meaning of images”. In: A heritage of images. A selection of lectures by Fritz Saxl. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, pp. 13-26.

WARBURG, Aby. Atlas Mnemosyne. Madrid: Akal, 2010.

WARBURG, Aby. “Mnemosyne”, Arte & Ensaios, v. 19, n. 19, 2009, pp. 125-131.