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Created with fine black lines printed on an ivory-white paper, a winged woman sits with her head in one hand, surrounded by tools, a dog, and a baby-like, winged putto perched on a millstone, all in front of a distant landscape with a still body of water under an arched rainbow in this vertical engraving. Filling the lower right quadrant of the composition, the winged woman, Melencolia, sits with her body angled to our left, and she looks in that direction from under furrowed brows. Lit from our right, her face is cast in shadow, but she has a straight nose and her lips are closed. She wears a ring of leaves over hair that falls in waves over her shoulders. Wings curve up from her back, and she wears a long-sleeved dress with a tight bodice and a voluminous, pleated skirt. She rests her chin on one tightly closed fist. The other arm rests on a book in her lap, and she holds one of the two legs of a tall compass in that hand. Several keys hang on a ribbon looped onto her belt, and they nestle into the deep folds of her skirt. Around her feet are a purse cinched closed, several nails, the metal tip of a bellows, a saw, a plane, the end of a pair of pincers, an ink pot, a molder’s form for baseboards, and a round sphere about the size of a basketball. The dog lies in a tight circle to our left of Melencolia’s feet, its chin resting across its paws. The dog’s ribs show through the short fur of its hide. Next to the dog, the millstone leans against the building that fills the right half of the composition. The millstone is round and flat, is about the height of the woman's torso, and a hole is cut from its center. A chubby child sits atop the stone. It has short, curly hair, stubby wings, a loose robe, and it draws on a tablet propped on its lap. Beyond the child, a wooden ladder leans against the building, and a pair of scales hangs above his head. On the face of the building, hanging over Melencolia’s head, is an hourglass with the sand about halfway spent and a magic square, which is a grid of four rows and four columns. The numbers in the grid read, from left to right, 16, 3, 2, 13 in the top row; an upside down 5, a 10, 11, and 8 in the second row; a backward 9, a 6, 7, and 12 in the third row; and a 4, 15, 14, and 1 in the bottom row. A bell hangs from a ring above this grid. On the step beyond the sleeping dog and millstone, another large stone is carved into flat planes to create an irregular, geometric, rhomboid form about as tall as the millstone. A hammer lies in front of the rhomboid, and beyond it is a melting pot sitting among tongues of flame in a mug-like cup. In the upper left quadrant of the composition, a placid body of water leads back to a distant town and small boats, beneath a starburst that fills the sky. An arched rainbow crosses the sky over a rat-like bat with its sharp teeth and tongue showing. It holds a banner reading “MELENCOLIA I.” The artist signed and dated the engraving as if he had carved into the front face of the step on which Melencolia sits, near the lower right corner: “1514 AD,” with the uppercase D nestled between the long legs of the wide, uppercase A.

Albrecht Dürer

Melencolia I, 1514

Not on View

Medium

engraving on laid paper

Dimensions

sheet (trimmed to image): 24.2 x 18.8 cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)

Credit Line

Rosenwald Collection

Catalogue Raisonné

Meder, no. 75, state i/ii

Accession Number

1943.3.3522

Artists / Makers

Albrecht Dürer (artist) German, 1471 - 1528

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
Read our full Open Access policy for images .

Inscription

in plate, lower right: 1514 / AD [artist's monogram]; verso, lower left, in graphite by a later hand:1788 [underlined] / V [?] CM [?]; verso, bottom center, in graphite by a later hand: 74.; verso, lower left, in graphite by a later hand: t 210; verso, lower left, in graphite by a later hand: NK [?] 36758; verso, lower right corner, in graphite by a later hand: M: 200 Blac[illegible, faded]

Exhibition History

1949: Goethe as a Print Lover: to Celebrate the Bicentennial of his Birth, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, 1949, no catalogue.

1953: Masterpieces of Graphic Art from the Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1953, no catalogue.

1953: Nuremberg and the German World, 1460-1530: prints and books from the Kress and Rosenwald Collections, 1953, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., no cat.

1954: Masterpieces from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1954, no cat.

1955: Miniatures and Prints from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1955, no cat.

1956: Masterpieces of Graphic Art from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1956, no cat.

1958: The Fantastic, the Occult, and the Bizarre in Prints from the Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1958, no cat.

1960: Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya: Exhibition of Fine Prints, Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA, 1960-1961, no. 9.

1970: Albrecht Dürer, 1471-1528: A Study Exhibition of Print Connoisseurship, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, 1970-1971, no. 22A.

1971: Dürer in America: His Graphic Work, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1971, no. 59, repro.

1982: Lessing J. Rosenwald: Tribute to a Collector, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982, no. 8, repro.

1991: Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1991-1992, no. 199, repro., as Melancolia I.

1997: Six Centuries/Six Artists, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, no cat.

Bibliography

1932: Meder, Joseph. Dürer-Katalog; ein Handbuch über Albrecht Dürers Stiche, Radierungen, Holzschnitte, deren Zustände, Ausgaben und Wasserzeichen. Vienna: Verlag Gilhofer und Ranschburg, 1932. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971.

1985: Snyder, James E. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350-1575. New York, 1985: 316-319, fig. 349.

1990: Chapman, H. Perry. Rembrandt's Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity. Princeton, 1990: x, 27, 31, fig. 28.

1991: Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1991-1992: no. 199.

1991: Kopper, Philip. America's National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation. New York, 1991: 208, 209, repro.

1998: Mandel, Corinne. "Melancholy." In Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art, edited by Helene E. Roberts. 2 vols. Chicago, 1998: 2:584-587.

2001: Schoch, Rainer, Mattihas Mende, and Anna Scherbaum. Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk. Munich, 2001: vol. 1: no. 71, state i/ii.

2013: Parshall, Peter. "Graphic Knowledge: Albrecht Dürer and the Imagination." Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (September 2013): 393, 404, 405, 406, fig. 9.