Dürer's Melencolia I Plato's Abandoned Search for the Beautiful - P. Doorly

Dürer's "Melencolia I": Plato's Abandoned Search for the BeautifulAuthor(s): Patrick DoorlySource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 255-276Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177417 .

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Diirer's Melencolia I: Plato's Abandoned Search

for the Beautiful

Patrick Doorly

The literature on Melancholia is more extensive than that on any other engraving by Durer: that statement would probably remain true if the last two words were omitted.-Campbell Dodgson, 19261

Anyone familiar with the history of Western printmaking will find nothing surprising in Campbell Dodgson's statement,

except, perhaps, that it predates so much twentieth-century scholarship on the subject. By 1991, Peter-Klaus Schuster

required two volumes to survey and engage with the literature in his monograph on Melencolia 1.2 The persistent enigma posed by Albrecht Dfrer's engraving (Fig. 1) is curious, for its author would appear to have left a sufficient number of clues for us to interpret his unusual subject matter. Not only did he date the engraving and sign it with his monogram, but he also inscribed the wings of the batlike creature flying through the

sky with the legend MELENCOLIA I. It is reasonable to suppose that this label, reinforced by the melancholic pose of the female figure seated in the foreground, is the key with which Diirer intended the meaning of his image to be unlocked.

Furthermore, we can supplement the evidence of the engraving with six preparatory drawings, one of which contains an

important inscription.3 One hundred years ago, Karl Giehlow proposed the inter-

pretation of Melencolia I that attracted the widest support throughout the twentieth century.4 His thesis rested on the claim made by Marsilio Ficino in De vita triplici (1489) that out-

standing individuals were prone to melancholy and subject to the planetary influence of Saturn. Given his exceptional talent, Dfirer might have recognized his own temperament in that connection. While it has never been established that Diirer had read Ficino's book, a derivative manuscript, De occulta philosophia by Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, was

circulating within German humanist circles a few years before the date of the engraving.5

In 1923 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl published their research into the sources of Diirer's image, building on the foundation laid by Giehlow.6 Panofsky incorporated that material into his authoritative book The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer (1943), where he concluded that the engraving "is in a sense a spiritual self-portrait of Albrecht Diirer."7 After Saxl's

death, and in collaboration with Raymond Klibansky, Panof-

sky published their last word on the subject in Saturn and

Melancholy (1964).8 That immensely learned survey of an-

cient, medieval, and Renaissance allusions to melancholy, while reaching far beyond Melencolia I, endorsed the earlier

interpretation. Panofsky's view of Diirer's engraving remains the one most often paraphrased in catalogues of his work, but it has not prevented numerous alternative, or supplementary, explanations of the image from being published during the

subsequent forty years. Giehlow, however, had originally adopted a different ap-

proach to the interpretation of an engraving by Diirer with an obscure subject. In a brief note of 1902, he had shown how

many of the peculiar features of Diirer's Nemesis (Bartsch 77,

Fig. 2) were explained by a Latin poem written by Angelo Poliziano.9 When holding this text against the engraving, Giehlow observed, Diirer emerged as a "very scrupulous illustrator." The goddess "walks aloft, floating in empty air"; her loins were "girded with a cloud"; she resounds with "whirring wings"; and she carries a bridle and bowl, a pairing of attributes in a Nemesis unique to Poliziano. Although this

engraving has been revisited by a number of scholars, most

notably by Panofsky in 1962,10 the link between image and text has not required major revision.

The source Giehlow hit upon to elucidate Melencolia I, on the other hand, did not supply the visual motifs of the en-

graving. Giehlow had to cast Diirer as a speculative thinker, who drew from De vita triplici the Neoplatonism, theology (both Christian and pagan), astrology, and ancient medicine on which to base his own views, which he then promoted with

imagery culled from other sources. On no other occasion did Direr adopt such a role. Indeed, in a draft introduction to his Four Books on Human Proportion, he wrote, "... I myself had rather hear and read a learned man and one famous in this art than write of it myself, being unlearned."" In the printed dedication, Diirer again described himself as "an untaught man of little learning."12 His three publications are technical

treatises, a point noted by the Latin translator of the Four Books on Human Proportion (1532).13 As an engraver, Diirer restricted himself to working from established texts.

This paper will argue that Melencolia I, like Nemesis, is based on a text. Our reading of Direr's masterpiece will be simpler than the one promoted by Giehlow and Panofsky and will more closely reflect Diirer's interests and practice, particu- larly in 1514. It will argue that Diirer's subject is not melan-

choly but beauty, and that his label "Melencolia I" in the

background represents the end of a story unfolded before our eyes in the foreground. It rejects a link between the

image and the ideas of Marsilio Ficino, or Florentine Neo-

platonism, in favor of a close association with Plato himself. For Melencolia I is based on Plato's longer dialogue between Socrates and the sophist Hippias, the Greater Hippias, or Hip- pias Major (Hippias Meizon). In this dialogue, Socrates repeatedly asks Hippias, "What is the beautiful?" Hippias offers a number of answers, all of which Socrates is able to discredit. Socrates then presents his own answers, each of which Hip- pias initially concedes, until he is forced to discard them when Socrates points out their inadequacy. Diirer has scattered emblems of these abandoned solutions throughout his

print. The dialogue ends with both men accepting their

ignorance, a state for which Diirer needed a visual metaphor. Only then did he draw on the imagery of melancholy.

We will first consider how Greater Hippias may have become



256 ART BULLETIN JUNE 200'4 Vl OIUME IXXXVI NUMBER 2

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1 Albrecht Direr, Melencolia I, B. 74, engraving, 1514. London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

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DURER'S A,M'LEN',COLIJA 1 257

2 Diirer, Nemesis (Large Fortune), B. 77, engraving, ca. 1501-2. London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

available to Durer and why he would have been eager to read it. Then we will examine the iconography of the engraving in order to disclose Plato's themes.

Plato, Vitruvius, and Pliny Plato's Complete Works were first printed in 1484, in a Latin edition based on the translation completed by Marsilio Ficino some fifteen years earlier.14 The first printed Greek edition of Plato's works was published by Aldus Manutius in September 1513.15 Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530), Durer's close friend and collaborator (Fig. 3), owned a copy of both books.16 We do not know when Pirckheimer acquired either

volume, but he clearly was eager to purchase Greek books as

soon as they came on the market. On August 18, 1506, Durer wrote to him from Venice, "A book-printer, of whom I en-

quired, tells me that he knows of no Greek books having recently appeared. Any that he comes across he has promised to let me know of, so that I can write to you."17 On October 13 of the same year Durer wrote again, "I cannot anywhere hear of any Greek books recently published."'8 The letters from Pirckheimer that must have prompted these replies have not survived. On October 28, 1507, Desiderius Erasmus wrote to Aldus from Bologna that most scholars were eagerly awaiting his Plato "in Greek type."'9

By 1506 Pirckheimer had established himself as a translator of Greek writers, including Aristophanes, Lucian, Homer,



258 ART BULL.ETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2

after its publication, when his son and Durer were in their teens.24

Diirer's knowledge of Greater Hippias is apparent in his

manuscript notes of 1512-13, as we shall see. The quest that led him to Plato was probably driven by his conviction that the beauty of Italian representations of the nude was achieved by applying a system of proportions. His admiration for such figures is first attested by his drawings after Andrea

Mantegna and Antonio Pollaiuolo, which are dated 1494, when Diirer was twenty-three.25 Thirty years later, he asked Pirckheimer to mention in his preface to the Four Books on Human Proportion "that I give the Italians very high praise for their naked figures and especially for their perspective."26 In a celebrated draft introduction to that treatise, Diirer revealed how his interest in "human measurement [mensch- lich mas]" had been awakened:

I found no one who has written about a system of human

proportions exceptJacopus, a native of Venice and a lovely painter. He showed me how to construct man and woman based on measurements. When he told of this, I would rather have come into possession of his knowledge than of a kingdom.... ButJacopus I noticed did not wish to give me a clear explanation; so I went ahead on my own and read Vitruvius, who describes the proportions of the human body to some extent.27

3 Diirer, Willibald Pirckheimer, B. 106, engraving, 1524. London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle.20 Of the twenty-nine books by ancient Greek authors published by Aldus between 1494 and his death in February 1515, Pirckheimer owned

twenty-six.21 Pirckheimer was quoting Plato in his letters by 1502, and in 1523 he published his own translations of eight pseudo-Platonic texts under the title Dialogi Platonis.22 Jo- hannes Cuno, the Dominican who lived and worked in Al- dus's household, corresponded with Pirckheimer.23 Given the need to recover the substantial capital investment re-

quired for printing Plato's entire corpus, Aldus must have had the wealthy Pirckheimer high on his list of potential, if not actual, subscribers. We may take as a working hypothesis that the Aldine Plato recorded with Pirckheimer's bookplate at a Sotheby's sale in 1925 was delivered to Nuremberg just weeks after its publication in September 1513.

Pirckheimer came from a patrician Nuremberg family, which had built up a notable library over several generations. His father, Dr. Johann Pirckheimer (ca. 1440-1501), a dis-

tinguished scholar who had himself taught the young Willi- bald, is the most likely purchaser of the Latin Plato shortly

Direr dated a drawing of a woman marked up with a

system of proportions in 1500, when Jacopo de' Barbari was resident in Nuremberg, which is therefore the probable year of their meeting.28 A few years later, Diirer constructed the

figures in the engraved Nemesis (1501-2, Fig. 2) and Adam and Eve (1504, B. 1) according to Vitruvian proportions. Vitruvius had made his brief statement on the proportions of a human

body in Book III of De architectura. Without the sort of sym- metry and proportion apparent in a well-shaped man, he wrote, there can be no principle ("rationem") in the design of a temple (De architectura, 3.1.1). Vitruvius then gave a number of simple numerical relationships by way of example: the height of a man is measured by the height of eight heads, or of ten faces from chin to hairline, with similar relation-

ships for other parts of the body (3.1.2). In 1507 Diirer summarized this passage in notes accompanying a drawing of a Vitruvian man inscribed in a circle and square.29

In the introduction to De architectura, Direr would have encountered Vitruvius's advice on the education of the architect. His knowledge, Vitruvius wrote, is born of both practice and theory ("scientia... nascitur ex fabrica et ratiocina- tione," 1.1.1). "Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artificer [neque enim ingenium sine disciplina aut disciplina sine

ingenio perfectum artificem potest efficere]" (1.1.3). Furthermore, the architect should be lettered, so that he may leave a lasting memorial in his treatises; know how to draw; be instructed in

geometry; and know history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astrology (1.1.3). For the next quarter of a century Diirer sought instruction in those topics that offered ratioci- natione to his practice as a painter. In particular, he pursued beauty through Messung (measurement), Diirer's word for

perspective, proportions or commensurability, and geome-



DURER'S MELENCOLIA I 259

try.30 The fruit of this research appeared in two of his trea-

tises, Instruction in Measurement with the Compass and Straight- edge of Lines, Planes and Solid Bodies (1525) and the Four Books on Human Proportion, published posthumously.31 In his dedication of the former to Pirckheimer, he wrote that the art of measurement ("die Kunst der Messung") is the correct

grounding of all painting ("der recht Grundt ist aller Male-

rei").32 By then, his mind had taken on a distinctly Platonic cast:

But if we were to ask how we are to make a beautiful figure, some would give answer: according to the judgment of men. Others would not agree thereto and neither should I. For who will give us a right understanding in this matter without true knowledge? ... Truth only comprehends that which might be the most beautiful form and measurement of a man and nothing else.33

In the preface to Book III of De architectura, just before the

passage on human proportions, Vitruvius had introduced his readers to Socrates, whom "Apollo had pronounced through his priestess at Delphi to be the wisest of men." Socrates had wished that there were windows in a man's chest, Vitruvius informs us, so that his knowledge and feelings should be visible to all (3. preface. 1). As an example, Vitruvius explains that the ancient painters and sculptors whose names will last forever ("Myron, Polycleitus, Pheidias, Lysippus and the others who attained fame by their art") had enjoyed the patron- age of great cities and kings. Others no less knowledgeable and skillful had been forgotten, for the lack of such presti- gious endorsement. If an artificer's knowledge were on dis-

play, merit would no longer be judged by uninformed opin- ion. Vitruvius implied that in writing "on the excellence of our science [nostrae scientiae virtutem]," he was following Socrates' advice (3. preface. 2). Here was a model for Dfirer's ambitions as a technical writer, which also managed to associate Socrates with the fame of sculptors and painters.

In his search for "how we are to make a beautiful figure," Durer also turned to the other main source on ancient art,

Pliny the Elder's Natural History. In a draft of 1512-13, apparently intended for his projected Food for Young Painters (Speis der Malerknaben), he described how "Pliny writes that the old

painters and sculptors, such as Apelles, Protogenes, and the

rest, told very knowingly in writing how a well-built man's

figure might be measured out."34 Immediately before Pliny's account of Apelles, we read that the latter's teacher, Pamphi- lus, "was the first painter highly educated in all branches of

learning, especially arithmetic and geometry, without the aid of which he maintained [the] art could not attain perfec- tion."35 This was the view adopted by Diirer, as we noted above. But first he would need to discover "which might be the most beautiful form and measurement of a man...."

Euclid, Pacioli, and Lucian Vitruvius and Pliny lent authority to two of Direr's assump- tions: that beauty in a drawn figure depended on a system of

measurement, and that these proportions had once been known and subsequently forgotten. These beliefs preyed on Durer's imagination for the rest of his life. On September 8, 1506, he wrote to Pirckheimer from Venice that his Feast of the

Rose Garlands had refuted those who had claimed he was a

good engraver but unable to use color.36 Earlier that year, however, he had reported a less easily rebutted complaint. There were Italian painters who ". .. revile [my work] and say that the style is not antique and so not good."37 We may understand "not antique" to mean not based on antique sculpture, but Durer never realized that the beauty he

sought, insofar as it could be recovered, was preserved in ancient statues. He searched for a theoretical grounding to

painting in ancient books and, when that quest proved fruit-

less, by conducting experiments in Messung. The crowded outdoor space in The Feast of the Rose Garlands had allowed him to dispense with linear perspective. Now he wrote to

Pirckheimer, "... I should like to ride to Bologna to learn the secrets of the art of perspective, which a man is willing to teach me."38 It seems likely that Diirer reached his teacher in that city (where Michelangelo was working on his bronze statue of Pope Julius II), for the knowledge of perspective revealed in his Instruction in Measurement shows a sophosti- cated grasp of Italian theory, and the detailed body measurements elaborated in his Four Books on Human Proportion find a

precedent in the unpublished treatises of Piero della Francesca. However, an ability to represent bodies consis-

tently in pictorial space does not necessarily make them beautiful.

That summer, while lying ill in Mantua, Andrea Mantegna heard that Diirer was in Italy. The old painter sent for him, "in order to instruct Albrecht's facility and certainty of hand in his own understanding and skill. For Andrea often la- mented in conversation with his friends that those qualities had not been granted to him, nor his knowledge to Al- brecht."39 The story comes from the preface by Joachim Camerarius to the 1532 Latin edition of Diirer's first two books of Human Proportion. Camerarius cannot have known what Mantegna said to his friends, but his account sounds

very like the way Diirer might have interpreted such a sum- mons. Mantegna was the only first-rank Italian painter to have

engraved a significant number of copper plates. He would

certainly have recognized in Dfirer's engravings the work of a consummate master, and might therefore have wanted to meet him. For his part, Diirer knew Mantegna to be the

greatest painter of the antique nude in northern Italy. "But before he could reach Mantua, Andrea was dead, and [Al- brecht] used to say that this was the saddest [tristius] event in all his life."40

In the following year, while still in Venice, Durer bought a

copy of the first Latin translation of Euclid's surviving Greek

texts, including the Elements of Geometry and the Optics.41 Its title page announced "[The works] of Euclides of Megara/ Platonic philosopher/doorkeeper of mathematical disci-

plines.... 42 Throughout the Renaissance, Euclides of Me-

gara (ca. 450-380 B.C.E.), one of the companions of Socrates

at his death (Phaedo, 59c), was mistaken for Euclid, the author of The Elements (probably ca. 325-250 B.C.E.). The error

may have given Durer another nudge toward Socrates and Plato.

Diurer's perspective studies must have encouraged him to read De divina proportione, the mathematical treatise written in Italian by Fra Luca Pacioli (Fig. 4) and published in Venice in 1509. Pacioli seems to have studied mathematics with Piero



260 ART BUI,I.ETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME IXXXVI NUMBER 2

4 "JACO.BAR.VIGENNIS," Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli with a Pupil, 1495. Naples, Museo e Gallerie di Capodi- monte (photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano)

della Francesca, either in Borgo S. Sepolcro, where both had been born, or in Urbino, where each had stayed. After Piero's death in 1492, Pacioli was in possession of at least two of his three mathematical manuscripts, for he incorporated them into his own published books (without acknowledgment, to

Giorgio Vasari's later disgust).43 In De divina proportione Pa- cioli argued that perspective, the subject of Piero's third

manuscript treatise, entitled painting to be considered a mathematical discipline, like music.

There is abundant internal evidence that Durer knew De divina proportione, both in his writings and in Melencolia I, as we shall see. The title page alone must have sounded irresist- ible to him, given the way his interests had developed (Fig. 5): "Divine Proportion: A work necessary to all perceptive and curious wits, where every student of Philosophy, Perspective, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, and other Mathe- matical disciplines, will acquire and delight in a most deli-

cate, subtle and admirable doctrine, with various questions of the most secret knowledge." Pacioli treated many subjects later addressed by Durer, including the geometric construction of the Roman alphabet and illustrations of the five

regular solids (taken from Piero della Francesca's treatises and redrawn, Pacioli tells us, by Leonardo da Vinci). Walter L. Strauss has suggested that Direr's adoption of a new

system of progressive proportions in his figure studies may reflect the direct or indirect influence of Pacioli. The first such drawing with a date is of 1513.44

Before he confronted Plato directly, Durer was exposed to

yet another ancient writer who had discussed painting. His 1505 engraving Musical Satyr and Nymph with Baby (B. 69) derives from his two drawings of a centaur family,45 which

must have been inspired by Zeuxis's famous painting of a female centaur suckling her young, as described in Lucian's Zeuxis or Antiochus. As the translator from Greek into Latin of a number of Lucian's essays, it was presumably Pirckheimer who had introduced Direr to this text. More to our purpose, a draft translation by Pirckheimer survives of Lucian's "Cha- ridemus or of Beauty," probably dating from 1511.46 In that

year Durer was busy completing his books of woodcuts, before devoting himself to an intense study of human proportions between 1512 and 1513, when he also wrote the notes for his Food for Young Painters.47

In a draft dedication to Pirckheimer for his later treatise On Human Proportion, Durer reminded the latter of their discussions on "the various arts": "When, amongst other

things, I enquired of you whether there were any books which treat of the manner in which the human body should be

depicted, you answered me that, though without doubt there had been such, they have not come down to us."48 In late

antiquity Plato's dialogues were given subtitles indicating the

topic that each addressed: "Republic, or on justice"; "Gorgias, or on rhetoric"; and so on. If in response to Durer's questioning, Pirckheimer had read out the table of contents from his Latin Plato, he and Durer would have found two dia-

logues subtitled "on the beautiful": Phedrus de pulchro and

Hyppias maior de pulchro. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates discuss the love of an older man for a boy, before describing the chariot ride to heaven where Ideas maybe contemplated directly. Greater Hippias is now considered to be one of Plato's earliest works, before he had elaborated his theory of Ideas. The dialogue remains earthbound, and throughout it the two

speakers pursue "the beautiful itself [to kalon auto]." Unlike




the conventional anecdotes praising beauty in Lucian's Cha-

ridemus, the investigation of beauty in Greater Hippias evi-

dently impressed Diirer deeply.49 Diirer's essay on beauty, the "aesthetic excursus" to mod-

ern scholars, was printed in book 3 of his Four Books on Human

Proportion. Pirckheimer saw that work through the press shortly after Durer's death in 1528, so it cannot be used to shed light on the Melencolia of 1514. Yet sixteen years earlier, Durer had written drafts for the text, which survive among his

manuscripts. In these essays, he returned repeatedly to the

subject of beauty. This passage of 1512 is typical:

There lives also no man upon earth who could give a final

judgment upon what the most beautiful shape of a man should be; only God knows that. How beauty is to be

judged is a matter of deliberation. One must bring it into

every single thing, according to circumstances, for in some

things we consider that as beautiful which elsewhere would lack beauty. The beautiful and the more beautiful are not easy to discern. For it would be quite possible to make two different figures, neither of them conforming to the

other, one stouter and the other thinner, and yet we scarce

might be able to judge which of the two may be more

beautiful. What the beautiful is I know not, though it adheres to many things. When we wish to bring it into our work we find it very hard ....50

Apart from the references to human figures, which reflect Durer's own interests, each sentence in this passage takes up a theme from Greater Hippias. The dialogue ends when Socrates remarks, "I think I know what the proverb means: 'Beautiful things are hard [chalepa ta kala; Ficino:... pulchra difficilia esse]" (303e7). Diirer's references to Plato and to

beauty in his notes of 1512 and 1513 depend not on Flor- entine Neoplatonism, as scholars persuaded themselves

throughout the twentieth century, but on Plato's Greater Hip- pias.51 It is time for us to turn to Plato.

Greater Hippias, or On the Beautiful In the first section of Greater Hippias (281a-286b), we learn that Hippias is the ambassador to Athens from Elis and a

peripatetic teacher of excellence (arete, traditionally translated as "virtue"). Socrates has him boast of the money he has made as a tutor of wealthy young men while on public business for his city. "Did not wise men in the past refrain from public affairs?" Socrates asks. Hippias replies that their wisdom could not encompass both public and private mat- ters. "Then how much has the art of wisdom progressed!" Socrates exclaims. Just as sculptors say that were Daedalus to come back to life, his works would be laughed at compared with recent works, so would it be with the wise men of the

past. They were too simpleminded to know that wisdom is to be measured by the amount of money one makes (281d- 283b).52

Hippias (who is deaf to the heavy sarcasm) then invites Socrates to attend a lecture in which he is to speak of beautiful pursuits for young men. The topic reminds Socrates that a man had recently asked him what the beautiful was, and he had been unable to reply. Now he can ask Hippias, for whom the answer will be but a small example of his wide learning

M, Antonio Capella eruditiff, tecenrentent A. Paganius Paganinus Charadfcr

bus elegantiffimis accuratifsi, me imprimebart

5 Title page from Fra Luca Pacioli, De divina proportione, Venice, 1509. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, AA 69 (2) Art

(286c-e). Socrates makes clear that the man asked "not what is beautiful, but what the beautiful is [ho ti esti to kalon]"

(287e). Hippias replies that a beautiful maiden is beautiful. To that

answer, Socrates retorts, the man would say, is not a beautiful mare beautiful? And a beautiful lyre? Hippias agrees with both suggestions. How about a beautiful pot? Hippias is irritated. Who was this uncultivated person to introduce such base objects to a serious discussion? A well-made pot may be

beautiful, but not compared to the beauty of a mare or a maiden. "But is not the most beautiful maiden ugly com-

pared to the gods?" counters Socrates. Hippias had not answered the question, "What is the beautiful itself?" (287e- 289c).

Hippias tries again: gold is the beautiful. When gold is added to anything, it is made beautiful. "Then is Pheidias a bad workman, not to have made his Athena of gold rather



262 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2

6 Diirer, enlarged detail of Melencolia I (photo: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

ing [panti mathemati]? For what I am asking is this, man: what is the beautiful itself? and I cannot make you hear what I say any more than if you were a stone [lithos] sitting beside me, and a millstone [mulias] at that, having neither ears nor brain." (292d,e)53

This passage marks the climax of the first half of the

dialogue, when Hippias was offering examples of particular beauties. From now on, Socrates will propose more general definitions of the beautiful. If we recall that last exasperated clause, ". .. I cannot make you hear what I say any more than if you were a stone sitting beside me, and a millstone at that, having neither ears nor brain," and turn to Direr's engraving, we will notice a millstone. Propped up next to the

foreground figure, it is surmounted by a seated putto. The

appearance of a millstone in both Melencolia I and Greater

Hippias is striking because a millstone is an unusual object to encounter without a plausible context. The coincidence is

only one of numerous parallels we shall discover between

dialogue and print. In his later "aesthetic excursus" Direr was to describe the

approach that is characteristic of all his work: "... he who would make anything aright must in no wise retract aught from nature, neither must he lay what is intolerable upon her.... let every man beware that he make nothing impossible and inadmissible in nature...."54 The problem posed to an illustrator by Socrates' metaphor is that a millstone with or without ears and brain is not found in nature. Presumably, to draw a face on the millstone would have been "inadmissible." Is Durer's device of seating a putto on the millstone, writing on a tablet pressed close to its chest, a brilliant expedient to illustrate a millstone having neither ears nor brain? The tot is not, after all, of an age to be writing at all. If we deem its eyes to be closed, the parallel with Plato's words is even closer

(Fig. 6).55 That Diirer conceived of the objects in his print as symbols

for abstract concepts is suggested by another drawing with a

putto holding a plumb line and quadrant (which Diirer did not use)56 and an inscription (Fig. 7):

schlissel

than of ivory for the face, hands and feet, and of stone for her

eyes?" asks Socrates. But these things must be appropriate (prepon, translated by Ficino as decorum), protests Hippias. So is the appropriate the beautiful? When boiling a beautiful

soup in our beautiful pot, is a golden ladle more appropriate than one of fig wood? (289e-290e).

Hippias tries a different track: "For every man and every- where, it is most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and hon- ored by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring" (291d-e). If I

gave this reply to the man, responds Socrates, and he hap- pened to have a stick, he would give me a thrashing, and

justly, too.

"How so?" he will say; "are you not able to remember that I asked for the beautiful itself, by which everything to which it is added has the property of being beautiful, both stone and stick and man and god and every act and every learn-

betewt

pewtell

gewalt

reichtum

"Keys mean power; purse means wealth." A purse and keys hang from the belt of the female figure in Melencolia. Before

investigating the significance of these things to Greater Hip- pias, we should be satisfied on two points. Is the illustration of an ancient Greek text the sort of task Diirer might undertake in 1514? If so, are the millstone and putto in keeping with his

approach to such illustrations?

Horus Apollo Durer had been a book illustrator since his apprenticeship, when his master Michael Wolgemut had directed the prepa- ration of 1,890 woodcuts to illustrate the Nuremberg Chronicle

(published in 1493).57 As a journeyman in Basel, according to Panofsky's attributions, he designed 40 woodcuts for Mar-

quant von Steyn's Ritter vom Turn (1493), some 35 designs for Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools (1494), and drew on 146 blocks to illustrate the Comedies of Terence.58 The 15 magnificent



woodcuts for his own Apocalypse of 1498 demonstrate that he could find visual equivalents for the most unpromising liter-

ary material. In 1511, his annus mirabilis for book publishing, Durer issued the Small Woodcut Passion (37 woodcuts) and reissued with additions the Apocalypse (now 16 woodcuts), The

Life of the Virgin (20 woodcuts), and the Large Woodcut Passion

(now 11 woodcuts). When we encounter an unusual print by Durer, perhaps our first suspicion should be that he is inter-

preting a hitherto unidentified text.59 A contemporary parallel to Melencolia I as an illustration of

Greater Hippias lies in the collaborative project undertaken by Pirckheimer and Diirer to illustrate a little book claiming to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. This Greek manuscript, Hieroglyphica by "Horus Apollo," or Horapollo, first recorded in 1419, was printed by Aldus Manutius in 1505. Pirckheimer undertook a translation into Latin, to be illustrated by Diirer, for Emperor Maximilian I, who was keen to trace his geneal- ogy to hitherto undreamed-of antiquity.60 Eight sheets of Direr's illustrations survive, together with a complete copy.61 Durer's drawings follow the text very literally. Horapollo writes, "To denote a horoscopist, they draw a man eating the hours. Not that a man actually eats the hours, for that is

impossible, but because food is prepared for man according to the hour."62 Dfirer shows a man with an hourglass in his mouth (Fig. 8). "When they denote a magistrate or judge, they place the royal stole beside the dog, who is naked." Durer draws a dog with a stole around its neck (Fig. 8). The illustrated translation was presented by Pirckheimer to Maxi- milian in Linz in April 1514.63

In 1512 Diirer had embarked on Maximilian's ambitious

projects for printed monuments, advised by Pirckheimer and other scholars, including the vast woodcut Triumphal Arch, made up of 192 blocks and dated 1515 (B. 138). At the top of that fantastic edifice, framed by an aedicule against the

crowning dome, is a woodcut portrait of Maximilian sur- rounded by emblems taken from the Hieroglyphica (Fig. 9). Durer has kept the dog, seated Maximilian on a bundle of

papyri (denoting his ancient descent, according to the Hiero-

glyphica), while he holds a scepter encircled by a snake (he is master of a great part of the terrestrial globe), above feet

walking through water by themselves (which everyone had

thought impossible), and so on.64 So in 1514, Diirer was producing very literal illustrations to

a Greek text translated by Pirckheimer and applying the

resulting emblematic imagery to a major work of public art. Our reading of Melencolia, which he engraved in the same

year, has Diirer adopting exactly the same procedure with Plato's Greater Hippias.

De Divina Proportione We return to the key passage in Plato's dialogue, quoted above, when Socrates is exasperated with Hippias: "... I asked for the beautiful itself, by which everything to which it is added has the property of being beautiful, both stone and stick and man and god and every act and every learning." By "stone and stick and man and god and every act" Socrates

may be referring to Hippias's previous answers. The word

mathemati, here rendered as "learning," will become the modern "mathematics," but it had a broader and looser meaning in Greek. The word is a cognate of manthano, "I learn," so the

7 Diirer, Inscription, with a Putto with Quadrant and Plumb Line, Strauss, 1514, no. 28, drawing. London, The British Library, Add.5229 fol. 60 (photo: By permission of the British Library)

Loeb edition of the dialogue translates the phrase used by Socrates as "every acquisition of knowledge." Ficino translated it correctly as "disciplina," but that Latin word would obscure the "mathematics" from Diirer and Pirckheimer, which was to be vital to Diirer's interpretation of the text.

For instruction in the meaning of mathemati, it seems that


,1

I. ! I/




8 Diirer, detail of Dog with Stole, House-Guard, Man Eating Hourglass, Fire and Water, Strauss, 1513, no. 15, illustration for Horus Apollo, Hieroglyphica, drawing. Berlin, Kupferstich- kabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (photo: ? Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2003)

Direr turned to De divina proportione. Pacioli's table of contents describes chapter 3 in book 1, "What This Name Math- ematical Signifies and Means [Quello che significa e in porti questo nome mathematico]." In this chapter Pacioli explained that the word comes from the Greek mathematios, which is to

say "disciplinabile," subjects that can be taught. For his part, Pacioli understood the mathematical disciplines to be arithmetic, geometry, astrology, music, perspective, architecture,

and cosmography. However, "the wise" accept just the first four (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy [sic], music), regard- ing the rest as subordinate. But if music is to be included in these four, he continued, why not perspective? Which of us

seeing a lovely, well-drawn figure that lacked only breath would not judge it a thing more divine than human? It was

impossible to imagine the Apostles in Leonardo's Last Supper better painted. In Pacioli's judgment, admittedly a foolish and lowly one ("benche imbecille e basso"), there should either be five mathematical disciplines, including music and

perspective, or three, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Pacioli's four mathematical disciplines are the antique and

medieval quadrivium.65 He wanted a place to be found among them for perspective, the mathematical underpinning of

painting, or, if that proved unacceptable, for music to be

ejected as equally subordinate. Pacioli was not consistent: in

chapter 2 of book 1 he had on three occasions referred to a trio of arithmetic, geometry, and proportions. This second

chapter of De divina proportione, a panegyric on mathematics, gave Dfirer at least seven loosely mathematical themes that

reappear in Melencolia I (an eighth became the subject of his third treatise66). We shall examine them in the sequence adopted by Pacioli.

Pacioli began his second chapter by quoting "the master of those who know" (Aristotle) that there is nothing in the intellect that has not in some way first passed through the senses: ". .. and of the senses, the wise conclude that the most noble is sight." "This art of painting is made for the eyes, for the sight is the noblest sense of man," echo Dfirer's notes in 1513.67 Pacioli goes on to assure his patron, Lodovico Sforza, that while the mathematical disciplines may have been restricted to scholars in the past, in future they will reach a much larger public, for "they are the foundation and ladder that gives access to every other science [sieno fondamento e scala de pervenire a la notitia de ciascun altra scientia]."

Leaning against a wall in the center of Melencolia is a ladder, silhouetted against the distant landscape. If it gives access to "every other science," as Pacioli maintained, we would expect it to rise from a mathematical foundation. Indeed, it stands on a raised platform supporting the geometric solid, in a space full of mathematical symbols.68 Pacioli

continued,

It would be impossible without knowledge of [the mathematical disciplines] to understand properly any other [science]. And it is written in wisdom, "Quod omnia consistunt in numero, pendere et mensura". that signifies that everything that is revealed in the universe below and above must

necessarily be subject to number, weight and measure.69

This famous phrase ultimately derives from Plato, who in book 10 of The Republic (602d) castigates illusionistic scene

painters for exploiting our weakness for being deceived. "Have not measuring and numbering and weighing proved to be most gracious aids to prevent the domination of our soul"

by appearances? It is not a remark liable to commend Plato to

painters, yet Durer took up the challenge. He wrote imme-

diately after his notes from Pliny referring to Apelles and

Protogenes (quoted above) that since the noble books of these ancient painters had lamentably been destroyed in the




9 Diirer and others, detail of The Triumphal Arch, B. 138, woodcut, 1515. London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

early days of the Church, he was moved to make known his own ideas. "And I will undertake my task according to measure, number and weight; he who puts his mind to it will find it thus hereafter."70

We need not be surprised if Durer had taken his "own ideas" from a memorable phrase written a few years earlier by Luca Pacioli, who in turn had taken them from the writings of "wisdom," ultimately, a reference to Plato.71 That is how the baton of culture is passed down the generations. Durer made the phrase his own by illustrating it. To the right of the ladder, he has introduced the "magic" square of sixteen, scales, and an hourglass-Pacioli's "number, weight and measure," made visible. A hidden beauty is revealed in the numbers when they are added up, for in whichever direction one counts, the total is always 34.72

Still in his second chapter, Pacioli declared that he would not speak of the sweet harmony of music, nor the supreme beauty of perspective and architecture, nor ". . . the description of the universe both maritime and terrestrial, the doctrine of the bodies and the aspects of the heavens.... [la descritione de luniverso maritimo e terestre e doctrina de corpi e celestiali aspecti....] ." We shall have to return to "the doctrine of the bodies." Music, perspective, and architecture are also

absent from Melencolia I, but not the last of Pacioli's mathematical disciplines, his "cosmography." In 1512 Direr wrote, "The measurements of the earth, the waters, and the stars have come to be understood through painting and many more things will become known to men by means of painting."73 Diirer viewed painting as the means for representing the world, not as "fine art." He was living in the first age of modern cartography, and in 1515 he was to make woodcuts of the earliest accurate celestial globe to appear in print, arranged in two hemispheres (B. 151, 152). Perhaps the distant sea and coastline in Melencolia I, under the "rainbow" and "comet," refer to "the universe below and above" that in Pacioli's words (quoted above) "must necessarily be subject to

number, weight and measure."74 Pacioli continued his second chapter by declaring that he

would omit other "practical and speculative" sciences depen- dent on mathematics, including "all the mechanical arts," in order to be less tiresome to the reader.75 The mechanical arts

may be represented by the tools and instruments in Melencolia

I, but Direr linked these objects more directly to the text of Greater Hippias, as we shall see.

Pacioli's paean to mathematics was summarized by what "the wise express magisterially in the proverb: Aurum proba-




10 Dfirer, detail of SaintJerome in His Study, B. 60, engraving, 1514. London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

11 Duirer, detail of Saint Eustace, B. 57, engraving. London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

tur igni et ingenius mathematici [Fire proves gold, and mathematics the intellect]: that is, the value of gold is tested by fire, and the motions of the intellect by the mathematical dis-

ciplines."76 Opposite the ladder, on the other side of the

irregular solid, Diirer has introduced a small brazier of burn-

ing coals, in which a goldsmith's crucible is set, with a pair of

tongs lying beside it. This precise illustration of Pacioli's

proverb is evidence, more convincing even than the ladder, of the link between Melencolia and De divina proportione. Dfirer has interpreted Plato's phrase "panti mathemati" according to Pacioli's explanation and praise of mathematics.

The magnificent female figure holding dividers in the

foreground of Melencolia has long been recognized as belong- ing to a tradition of personifications of Geometry.77 Pacioli concluded his second chapter by repeating the old story that "the ancient and divine philosopher" Plato forbade those

ignorant of geometry from entering his most celebrated

"gymnasium": "He did that because in [geometry] every other hidden science is to be found [El chefeci perche in lei ogni altra scientia occulta se retrova]." Given all the incidents in the second chapter of De divina proportione that Direr seems to have illustrated-the ladder, scales, hourglass, panel of num-

bers, landscape and seascape under aspects of the heavens, and crucible of gold-perhaps he also accepted the main thrust and conclusion of Pacioli's argument: the mathemati-

cal disciplines give access to every other science, and on Plato's authority, geometry has pride of place among them.

If in 1500 or shortly afterward, Vitruvius had drawn Diirer's attention to Socrates, "the wisest of men"; and in 1507, the title page of Durer's Euclid announced that the supreme authority on geometry was a Platonic philosopher; and after

1509, Luca Pacioli's praise of mathematics had concluded with the example of Plato, "the divine philosopher"-Dfirer might by then have been eager to learn if Plato could give him "a right understanding" of "how we are to make a beautiful figure." We may suppose that he would "rather have come into possession of [this] knowledge than of a kingdom." Before September 1513, Pirckheimer would have translated Greater Hippias for Diirer from Ficino's Latin text, which crucially lacked the reference to mathematics. After

September 1513, in the excitement that must have attended the arrival of the first ever printed Greek text of Plato's works,

perhaps the two friends reread Hippias Meizon, eperi tou kalou, this time with Pirckheimer translating Plato's own words. The

phrase "panti mathemati" may have sounded as different to Ficino's "disciplina" in Durer's ears as Erasmus's Greek New Testament would sound to the Vulgate in Luther's. It confirmed Dfirer's belief that beauty in painting should be

sought in Messung. So from Pacioli's imagery in praise of

mathematics, he conjured up Melencolia's emblems of mathematical beauty.

Socrates on the Beautiful We return to Greater Hippias. Socrates dismisses Hippias's last two attempts at defining the beautiful by showing, first, that it would not be beautiful for Achilles and the gods to be buried

by their children (293b), and second, that the appropriate may appear beautiful without actually being beautiful (294e). He now for the first time proposes a definition of his own:

perhaps whatever is useful (chresomon; Ficino: "quod utile

est") is beautiful. For example, we do not call eyes beautiful that appear beautiful while being unable to see, but only those "able and useful for seeing."

... in the same way the whole body is beautiful, part of it for running, part for wrestling; and again all the animals, a beautiful horse or cock or quail; and all utensils [ta skeue

panta; Ficino: "apparatus omnes"] and land vehicles and on the sea freight-ships and ships of war; and all instruments in music and in the other arts [ta organa panta... hupo tais allais technais; Ficino: "instrumenta... ad artes alias pertinentia"], and, if you like, customs and laws

also-pretty well all these we call beautiful in the same

way; looking at each of them-how it is formed by nature, how it is wrought, how it has been enacted-the useful we call beautiful, and beautiful in the way in which it is useful, and for the purposes for which it is useful, and at the time when it is useful; and that which is in all these aspects useless we say is ugly. (295c-d)

Hippias agrees with these claims (though Socrates will soon discard them). Durer also accepted the last suggestion, for in his notes of 1512 he wrote, "Usefulness is a part of beauty. Therefore what is useless in a man, is not beautiful."78 In the

engraving, the passage finds its first parallel in the whites of




Geometry's eyes, which gleam against her dark face, their

penetrating stare contrasting with those of the putto on the

millstone, which are perhaps "unable to see" (Fig. 6). The

beauty of Diirer's sleeping dog lies not in its unprepossessing appearance but in its usefulness as a hunter. Unlike the

companionable pet dozing in SaintJerome's study (1514, B.

60, Fig. 10), the dog in Melencolia Ibelongs to the lean breed of hounds that attend Saint Eustace in Direr's earlier engraving of that name (B. 57, Fig. 11).79 The preparatory drawing for the irregular polyhedron contains a fox, with a bird

perched on the tablet displaying Diirer's monogram (it also includes a disembodied eye at the vanishing point of a perspective construction, Fig. 12).80 If these creatures were a first draft for Plato's animals, Diirer substituted for them one more useful to man.81

At Geometry's feet are scattered "utensils": the nozzle of a

bellows, nails, straightedge, saw, plane, molding board, pin- cers, inkwell with penholder, and hammer.82 She holds her

dividers, and above her head hang the scales and hourglass, which may count as "instruments." In his dedication to Pirck-

heimer, Diirer wrote of his Instruction in Measurement (1525), "... it is well meant and will be useful to all who study art. It will not alone be serviceable to painters, but also to goldsmiths, sculptors, stone-masons, joiners, and all who require measurements."83 Plato is not specific in his utensils and

instruments, so Diirer's examples cannot match them as

closely as the "millstone without a brain." Nonetheless, the

correspondence between engraving and dialogue is extended

by the association of beauty with utility, reinforced by Diirer's own addition of measurement.

In Greater Hippias, Socrates returned to his theme. That which has power to accomplish anything is useful, while that which is powerless is useless (295e). Power then, is beautiful

("Dunamis men ara kalon"); the want of power ugly (Ficino: "Potentia ergo pulchrum, impotentia turpe"). Hippias agrees. We recall Diirer's notes on his drawing with the

quadrant and plumb line: "Keys mean power; purse means wealth" (Fig. 7). If the keys hanging from Geometry's belt are a reference to Socrates' claim that "Power is beautiful," we should find a further allusion in Plato's text to the purse/ wealth. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates had en-

couraged Hippias to boast of all the money he had made from wealthy pupils: it had not helped Hippias to discover the beautiful.

Now Socrates shows that power and useful things can also do bad, which is not beautiful (296d). Only if used for the

good are power and useful things beautiful: then they are beneficial. So is the beneficial the beautiful? Yes, replies the

hapless Hippias. But the beneficial creates the good. What creates is a cause. So is the beautiful the cause of the good? For in that case, just as the father is not the son, nor the son the father, the beautiful is not good, nor the good beautiful- "and that pleases me least of all the things we have said"

(297c). Again, Socrates has Hippias agree that "[t]he beautiful is

the part of the pleasant that comes from sight and hearing" (299b) before revealing the logical contradictions that

phrase entails. Geometry's bright eyes already represent sight. An emblem for the beauty of hearing might be the bell,

displayed prominently over the panel of numbers.

f. , ?P ?

12 Diirer, Truncated Cube; Fox; Bird, Strauss, 1514, no. 22, drawing. Dresden, Sachsische Landesbibliothek-Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek

Finally, Hippias is allowed to give voice to his exasperation. "But now Socrates, what do you think all this amounts to? It is mere scrapings and shavings of discourse, as I said a while

ago, divided up into bits; but that other ability is beautiful and of great worth, the ability to produce a speech well and

beautifully [eu kai kalos logon] ...." (304a). Socrates replies that Hippias is blessed, for he knows what a man should

practice and practices it satisfactorily. But he, Socrates, is cursed to be always perplexed. For when he is persuaded by Hippias, "that man" who had originally asked Socrates what the beautiful itself was, will say to him: "How are you to know either who produced a discourse beautifully or not, or anything else whatsoever, when you are ignorant of the beautiful? And when you are in such a condition, do you think it is better for you to be alive than dead?" (304d-e).

If Diirer had expected an answer to the question, "What is the beautiful?" Plato has disabused him of that hope. As with all Plato's dialogues, the assumption remains that it is better to travel well than to arrive. But as the illustrator of Greater

Hippias, Diirer had to give visual expression to the conclud-

ing admonition: When you are ignorant of the beautiful, "do

you think it is better for you to be alive than dead?" Unfail-

ingly resourceful, Durer hit upon the image of melancholy to

express that condition. He made it the motto of his print.

Geometry The reading of Melencolia I adopted here depends on Diirer

interpreting literary sources, with Pirckheimer as his translator and guide, so we should consider whether they referred to




i': ' .-!-!. d;:'^ 5 A . 15 .'-;:. ..

13 Durer, Woman, Seated, Strauss, 1514, no. 29, drawing. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (photo: ? Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2003)

a text for Geometry's attributes. Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury is the ur-script of medieval and Re- naissance personifications of the Liberal Arts. It was also

"perhaps the most widely read schoolbook of the Middle

Ages."84 We cannot arrive at firm conclusions from the parallels between this elaborate fifth-century allegory and Melen- colia I, since Durer may have drawn on any number of inter- mediate images. But nor should we willfully ignore them.

Early in book 6 of the Marriage, entitled "On Geometry," we are told that Geometry's reputation is so high that she doubt- less surpasses Apelles or Polyclitus in representing anything:

Immediately there came into view a distinguished-looking lady, holding a geometer's rod in her right hand and a solid globe in her left. From her left shoulder a peplos was

draped, on which were visible the magnitudes and orbits of the heavenly bodies, [and] the dimension, intersec-

tions, and outline of the celestial circles .... [The peplos] was marked with many figures-to serve the purposes of her sister Astronomy as well-numbers of various kinds,

gnomons of sundials, figures and designs showing inter-

vals, weights, and measures, depicted in many colors. This tireless traveler was wearing walking shoes, to journey through the world, and she had worn the same shoes to shreds in traversing the entire globe.85

The word translated here as "geometer's rod," radius, can

mean either a measuring rod or the radius of a circle. Inter-

preting it as dividers was well established. Presumably Durer's

Geometry could not hold her solid globe ("sphaeram soli-

dam") in her left hand while propping up her head in an attitude of melancholy, so it lies at her feet. Durer has not embroidered those astronomical signs on her dress, but has he conflated them with "the measurements of the earth, the

waters, and the stars [that] have come to be understood

through painting"? In 1509 he had purchased the large house in the Zisselgasse (now known as the Durer House) that had belonged to Bernhard Walther (1430-1504), a dis-

ciple of the astronomer Regiomontanus. Walther's equip- ment remained in the house (which retains the window

through which he measured the heavens), as did his library, bought by the Nuremberg city council and made available to

practitioners of the liberal art of astronomy. In 1514 the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Werner, who had discovered a comet, was using the library while writing his treatise on conic sections.86 So expert advice was available to Durer on how to adapt the astronomical devices from Geom-

etry's peplos to more contemporary interests. Number,

weight, and measure also reappear in this quotation from the

Marriage. Most of Geometry's disquisition in book 6 describes a

journey through the ancient world, for that is how she got her name: "I am called Geometry because I have often traversed and measured out the earth." Perhaps Durer has spared her shoes-which would scarcely be conspicuous in the engraving-and shown Geometry as the tireless traveler ("viatrix

infatigata") by equipping her with wings. The book resting on

Geometry's lap is presumably a copy of The Elements. Geom-

etry's last act in book 6 was to take Euclid's books and hand them to Jove.

A drawing in Berlin (Fig. 13) may bring us back to Greater

Hippias. It shows a seated woman apparently holding coins and a purse, with keys hanging from her belt, which has sometimes been regarded as a first draft for the figure of

Geometry/Melancholy.87 So remote is this wingless Nurem-

berg matron from Durer's magnificent maiden that we may suspect she has been transformed by Hippias's first answer to Socrates: "A beautiful maiden is beautiful." However "parthe- nos kale kalon" might have been translated by Pirckheimer,

perhaps the phrase conjured up in Diirer's mind images of a more familiar Virgin, of whom he produced fourteen draw-

ings in 1514.88 We may indeed judge Diirer's Geometry to be

beautiful, but she is not the beautiful itself. The batlike creature flying through the sky is almost

unique among the objects featured in the engraving in being absent from the three texts that we have examined. It was

presumably introduced by Diirer as a vehicle to carry his

inscription.89 The "I" after "Melencolia" remains an enigma.

The Beautiful Itself In Melencolia I, the most conspicuous object for which we have still to find an explanation is the large irregular polyhedron, about which Panofsky was silent.90 In Greater Hippias, the subject most frequently evoked by Socrates and Hippias, which we have yet to find illustrated in the engraving, is the beautiful itself. Could these two lacunae be mutually depen- dent, so that they vanish when conjoined?

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The "proportion" that Luca Pacioli called divine in his book was known to Euclid as "a line divided in extreme and mean ratio," or simply as "the section [tome]," and was re- named the "golden section" for a more secular age in 1835 by Martin Ohm.91 The extraordinary success of that nineteenth-

century rebranding, which continues to seduce people who should know better into a belief that "the section" contains an occult key to beauty, is a salutary analogy to the potency that Pacioli's "divine" tag seems to have exerted in the sixteenth

century. The epithet "divine" leaked into secular Renaissance

writing from ancient texts, where it is very common. Vitru-

vius, for example, referred to the "divine intelligence and will" of Caesar in the opening sentence of De architectura. Before Vasari made "divine" a label for outstanding masters of disegno (especially Michelangelo), it was already an almost

obligatory epithet for Plato.92 Pacioli devoted the fifth chapter of his first book in De

divina proportione to explaining why his coinage of "divina

proportione" was so apt. His first four reasons are trivial: it has unity, like God; it is expressed in three terms, like the

Trinity; it cannot be reduced to number, as numbers and words cannot comprehend God; it is unchanging, and so is God. His fifth and last reason, however, is significant for

understanding Diirer's irregular body. In the Timaeus, 29c,d, Plato had related his "likely story" of

the generation of the universe when order (kosmos, a word rooted in beauty) was imposed on chaos. The four elements of earth, air, fire, and water were each formed of the four most beautiful bodies (the regular polyhedra, 53e), which in turn were formed from the most beautiful triangle (54a). The fifth regular polyhedron, the dodecahedron, was left over, so Plato proposed rather lamely that the god used it up for

decorating the universe (to pan, 55c). A generation later

Aristotle, who did not share Plato's passion for geometry, noted that earth and water were heavy and move naturally downward, while fire and air were light and move naturally upward. Movement in the heavens, on the other hand, was

circular, so they must consist of another element, which lacked both lightness and heaviness. Aristotle reasoned that this fifth element, the "quintessence" to later generations, was ungenerated, indestructible, and unchanging.93 Pacioli, without referring to Aristotle, conflated the two traditions and claimed that Plato had associated the dodecahedron with the quintessence.

The dodecahedron is made up of twelve pentagons, each of which, Pacioli informed his readers, had to be constructed

using "the section," which was further revealed whenever the

"diagonals" of a pentagon cross. Thus did "the section" ac-

quire its divinity, as a quality of the five-sided figures that make up the fifth, heavenly element.94

The woodcuts reproducing Leonardo's drawings of the

regular solids are prefaced in De divina proportione by an illustration of a gate, inscribed: "The gate of the temple of the lord called beautiful [Porta Templi Domini Dicta Speciosa] ." For readers, it functions as a kind of frontispiece to the illustrations of the five regular bodies that follow, ending with the dodecahedron (Fig. 14). In the double portrait in Naples including Luca Pacioli (Fig. 4), a dodecahedron rests on a book to his left. A later engraving by Jacopo Caraglio (ca. 1500-1565) shows the Cynic philosopher Diogenes outside

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his barrel, pointing to the dodecahedron illustrated in De divina proportione (Fig. 15).95 Diogenes is impressing on us the

special significance of the dodecahedron, while his mocking comment on Plato's definition of a man as a "featherless

biped" is relegated to the background.96 In book 4 of his Instruction in Measurement, Durer gave

directions for making the five Platonic solids.97 He illustrated them first as a "net" of flat planes, then constructed in plan and elevation (Fig. 16). Durer acknowledged only Euclid as his source, omitting any symbolism or reference to Pacioli or Plato.98 But his edition of Euclid lacked illustrations of the five regular solids, while we have seen compelling evidence, both in Melencolia Iand in his notes of 1512-13, that eleven

years earlier Durer had studied De divina proportione, where the five regular solids appear as full-page woodcuts. Presum-

ably, Durer would have been curious to learn of the "divinity" promised by Pacioli's title. The table of contents identifies the relevant chapter,99 where Durer would have read of "Plato's" association of the quintessence with the dodecahedron.

If Diirer's problem had been to find a visual equivalent for the beautiful itself, the dodecahedron was the most obvious solution at his disposal. In Plato's dialogue, Socrates and

Hippias did not find the beautiful. They remained in a state of

ignorance, unclear whether they were better off alive or dead, a condition Durer made visible as melancholy. The engraving shows that Geometry/Melancholy has not succeeded in fash-

ioning a regular dodecahedron. As far as we can see, she has

managed just three pentagons, but on a solid so irregular that




15 Jacopo Caraglio, Diogenes, engraving. London, The British Museum, Department of. Prints and Drawings (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

it can be read as a partially truncated cube (Plato's polyhedron for earth). Is it a perfectly judged emblem for the failure of Socrates and Hippias to find the beautiful?

Summary and Reception The following themes in Greater Hippias reappear in Melenco- lia I:

(a purse of) money a beautiful maiden

(the crucible of) gold the millstone "all mathematics" (see below) "whatever is useful" (dog, tools, instruments, eyes) power (the keys) the pleasant in sight and hearing (eyes and bell) the condition of being ignorant of the beautiful (melan-

choly)

a failure to discover the beautiful (a botched dodecahe-

dron)

These illustrations of the value of mathematics from Pacio- li's De divina proportione reappear in Melencolia I:

the ladder

number, weight, and measure (panel of numbers, scales, and hourglass)

gold tested by fire the universe below and above, subject to number, weight,

and measure

geometry, in which every hidden science is to be found

Numerous references to the beautiful in Greater Hippias reappear in Dfirer's notes of 1512-13:

our inability to give a judgment on the beautiful how beauty is to be judged is a matter of deliberation




beauty in some contexts is not beauty in others a professed ignorance of the beautiful, written in the first

person (Diirer adopting Socrates' voice) usefulness is a part of the beautiful the beautiful is hard

In addition, a direct link between Greater Hippias and Me- lencolia I may account for Diirer's note, "Keys mean power; purse means wealth" (Fig. 7).

If these are indeed the suggestive allusions made by Durer in Melencolia I, we must consider why they went entirely unrecorded. Dfirer's drawings in the same year for Horapol- lo's Hieroglyphica offer the most promising line of inquiry. Erasmus had defined the reception of hieroglyphs among humanists in the edition of the Adages that he had expanded for Aldus Manutius in 1508, Erasmi Roterodami adagiorum chili- ades tres. This was the book that had established his interna- tional reputation. In his long commentary on the adage "Festina Lente" (Make haste slowly), Erasmus described the

genesis and significance of the anchor and dolphin in the Aldine colophon. Aldus had shown Erasmus the silver coin of Titus Vespasian given to him by Pietro Bembo, with the anchor and dolphin on the verso (similar to that on the gold coin100 in Figure 17). "Now the only meaning of this symbo- lus," observed Erasmus, "is that favorite dictum of the emperor Augustus 'Make haste slowly'; and this we learn from the ancient texts relating to hieroglyphics."101 The anchor, which secured a ship, indicated slowness, while the dolphin ex-

pressed speed. The device-with other "noble Egyptian hi-

eroglyphs"-is illustrated and interpreted with the same ad-

age in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499), d7, a copy of which Durer seems to have owned.102 This book and Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, which Erasmus

names, are probably the hieroglyphic texts he had in mind in the passage just quoted. Erasmus goes on to discuss the

subject in general terms:

Hieroglyphics is the name given to those enigmatic de-

signs so much used in the early centuries, especially among the priest-prophets and theologians in Egypt, who

thought it quite wrong to express the mysteries of wisdom in ordinary writing and thus expose them, as we do, to the uninitiated public [sapientiae mysteria literis communibus

vulgo profano prodere]. What they thought worth knowing they would record by drawing the shapes of various animals and inanimate things, in such a way that it was not

easy for the casual reader to unravel them forthwith. It was

necessary first to learn the properties of individual things and the special force and nature of each separate creature; and the man who had really penetrated these could alone

interpret the symbols and put them together, and thus solve the riddle of their meaning [aenigma sententiae deprehendebat] .103

This way of thinking presumably prompted Emperor Maxi- milian I to have his portrait in The Triumphal Arch dressed in

hieroglyphs (Fig. 9). In this quotation, Erasmus has also described the attitude that Durer must have adopted when he conceived Melencolia I: "What they thought worth knowing they would record by drawing the shapes of various animals

16 Dodecahedron, woodcut, from Dfirer, Underweysung der messung ...., Nuremberg, 1538. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Vet. Dl c.24 (1)

17 Anchor and dolphin, verso of Roman aureus of Titus, enlarged two times, ca. 80 c.E. London, The British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals (photo: ? copyright The British Museum)

and inanimate things, in such a way that it was not easy for the casual reader to unravel them forthwith."

The relationship of the legend on the bat's wings to the

picture is clarified by reference to emblems, the "modern

hieroglyphs" that were devised from the same sources and in the same cultural milieu. The first printed emblem book, Andrea Alciato's Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531), can

probably be traced in manuscript back to 1522 or even 1519.104 Alciato's printed dedication, which almost certainly belongs to the earlier manuscript, is to Konrad Peutinger, humanist, lawyer, town clerk of Augsburg, and councillor of Maximilian I while the emperor was occupied with his elaborate printed monuments, to which Durer and Pirckheimer made notable contributions. Peutinger also owned a manu-

script of Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, a Latin translation of which had been dedicated to him in 1515.105 In 1517 there




appeared another Latin translation of the Hieroglyphica, by Filippo Fasanini, who was a professor in Bologna when Al- ciato was in that city as a law student. Alciato gained his doctorate in law in 1514.106

The printed Emblematum liber formalized the threefold di- vision of the emblem implicit in its origins: a motto (or lemma), the picture, and an explanatory text.107 The inscription on the coin of Titus, or the adage "Festina lente," is the

equivalent of the motto. The anchor and dolphin, or the illustrations to the Hieroglyphica, correspond to the picture. These two elements alone do not reveal the meaning of the device. Without the explanatory text in Erasmus's commen-

tary (or in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), we would not know the significance of Aldus's trademark (which functioned like an emblem, Alciato explained in a letter of January 9, 1523).108 In the later emblem books, the key to the motto and illustration came in the explanatory epigram.

By analogy to the mature form of the emblem, the legend "Melencolia I" on the wings of Diirer's bat corresponds not to a title but to a motto. It offered a succinct mnemonic for the significance invested in the engraving by Durer. But to reveal the full meaning of the print required the explanatory text, which in this article we have argued was Plato's Greater

Hippias. By not exposing their mystery to the vulgar and profane,

the circle of humanists who held the key to Melencolia I demonstrated their respect for its hidden knowledge and trust in each other's fellowship. Over the ensuing years, their attention shifted to new concerns. Pirckheimer had sought an introduction to Erasmus in 1514, reminding his interme-

diary of their common friendship with Konrad Peutinger.109 The subject of the subsequent correspondence between the two scholars changed with the years, from learned interests that may have found time for hieroglyphs to more fearful reflections on the unfolding Reformation. Eventually, with the passing of the community with which Durer had shared his "sapientiae mysteria," the code for the pictographs he had devised for Greater Hippias was lost. In the preface to his Latin translation of the treatise On Human Proportion, Joachim Ca- merarius professed close friendship ("nobis amicissimi") with Durer and acquaintance with his friends.110 Either that

friendship was less intimate than he claimed or else he knew Direr only in later years, when the subject of the engraving was never raised. For Camerarius was never initiated into the esoteric meaning of Melencolia I. In the earliest known com-

mentary on the engraving (1541), he described its imagery as a play with "absurdities."1''

Unlike Socrates and Hippias, Diurer did not abandon his search for the beautiful. Finding no answer in Plato, and

having failed to meet Mantegna, he wrote to Raphael, enclos-

ing a self-portrait on linen, which some twenty-five years later Giulio Romano showed to Vasari. Raphael had judged it to be a "cosa maravigliosa," Vasari reported, and had sent Durer in return "many drawings by his hand."1'2 Presumably, this information came from Giulio (1499?-1546), who had joined Raphael's workshop in about 1515 and inherited its contents

(with Giovan Francesco Penni) on their master's sudden death five years later. One of the drawings Raphael sent to Durer has been identified in the Albertina, Vienna, from Dfirer's inscription: "1515. Raphael of Urbino, who was held

in such high regard by the Pope, has made this nude study and has sent it to Albrecht Durer in Nuremberg to show him his hand."113 The red chalk drawing displays two beautiful

full-length life studies of a nude youth seen from different

viewpoints. Perhaps Durer had indicated what subject would

gratify him most should Raphael choose to reciprocate his

gift with a sample of his own art.14

Raphael, Vasari added, noting the dissemination ("lo an-

dare") of Durer's prints, arranged for his own work to be

engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. Durer may have shown him what subject matter would be appreciated abroad, for the first of these engravings mentioned by Vasari is the Mas- sacre of the Innocents, another study of nudes. In Antwerp on October 1, 1520, Durer gave Tomaso Vincidor, a Bolognese painter who had been sent to Flanders by Pope Leo X, a whole set of his prints to be exchanged in Rome for those

engravings after Raphael.115 Diirer's studies of human proportions did not, as he had

hoped, become his enduring legacy. They suffered their most

crushing put-down from Michelangelo: ". . . Albrecht discusses only the proportions and varieties of human bodies, for which no fixed rule can be given, and he forms his figures straight upright like poles; as to what was more important, the movements and gestures of human beings, he says not a word."'16 The most magnificent monument to Dfirer's long search for the beautiful remains an engraving, the significance of which he artfully disguised under the motto "Me- lencolia I."117

Genius Who was "that man" to whose severe judgment Socrates

repeatedly deferred when questioning Hippias? Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates states that he was his very close relative and they lived in the same house (304d). We knowing readers can take the hint that Hippias is too obtuse to grasp: that "man" was Socrates' daimon. It was his daimon who inter- vened in the Phaedrus, after Socrates had argued that it was better for a boy to yield to a man who did not love him than to a lover (242c). When on trial for his life, Socrates ex-

plained to the court why he had habitually advised individuals in private but never the state in assembly: his daimon had held him back, and thereby preserved his life (Apology 31d). The Latin equivalent of daimon is genius, the spirit double that is born and dies with a man and influences his conduct.

Insofar as Pirckheimer and Durer knew the word genius, the ancient meaning is what they would have understood by it. Durer also knew and used the Italian word ingenio,"8 which means the talent that we are born with: it is the Latin

ingenium, as quoted above from Vitruvius ("ingenium sine

disciplina...."; natural ability without instruction....). In about 1700, these two words were conflated by literary critics to give us the modern genius, which described an outstanding creator of original work, too gifted to need the models of earlier practitioners.1l9 Recent research has suggested that the label was first devised for William Shakespeare, to justify his disregard of the "Aristotelian" unities obeyed by Pierre Corneille andJean Racine.'20 The work of a genius, Imman- uel Kant later pronounced, served as the rule for others, while remaining beyond the reach of rules itself.'12

Ficino had taken from pseudo-Aristotle's Problemata (30.1)




the notion that "all men who are distinguished in some way are melancholics," and from Plato's Phaedrus that "poetic doors are beaten on in vain without rage."122 Panofsky allowed himself to refer to Ficino's claims as "the Florentine Neo-Platonic doctrine of genius" and entitled a chapter "The Glorification of Melancholy and Saturn in Florentine Neo- Platonism and the Birth of the Modern Notion of Genius."123 These claims are anachronistic: the modern meaning of genius did not emerge gradually, like the rising status of the

artist, but abruptly (albeit from established ingredients), to answer a need. Again, discussing Melencolia I, Panofsky wrote:

"[Diirer] depicted a Geometry gone melancholy or, to put it the other way, a Melancholy gifted with all that is implied in the word geometry-in short, a 'Melancholia artificialis' or Artist's Melancholy."124 Rereading that sentence unencum- bered by the connection with Ficino, that "in short" sounds

dangerously like a sleight of hand.125 No one doubts Panofsky's stature as one of the outstanding

art historians of the twentieth century. Like every other com- mentator on Melencolia I since Vasari,126 he took Diirer's

legend on the wings of the bat as the starting point for his

interpretation, which led to the unlucky entanglement with Ficino. Not the least satisfaction in reconnecting Melencolia I with Greater Hippias has been the recovery of Dfirer's bracing engagement with Plato from the fog of Ficino's Neoplatonic lore. Panofsky's principal lapse in judgment was to use his

interpretation of Melencolia I to present Direr as a precursor of a later cultural transformation, which the Renaissance

painter-engraver cannot have anticipated. Diirer's essay on beauty sounds modern because it was

based on a classical source. The importance of his collaboration with Pirckheimer, through whom he gained access to

Vitruvius, Pliny, Euclid, Pacioli, Lucian, and Plato, has been

decisively confirmed by this study. In public acknowledgment of this debt, the painter dedicated two of his treatises to his

"especially dear master and friend."'27 Their collaboration made possible the Melencolia I, which has held in its thrall for almost five hundred years collectors, connoisseurs, and historians who were ignorant of its meaning. Thus has Diirer

exposed the fallacious assumption behind Socrates' questions: we did not need to know what the beautiful itself was before recognizing the beauty of this engraving.

Patrick Doorly taught history of art at the School of Art and Design, Croydon College (London), for over twenty years. He is currently working on a book that examines changing attitudes to art from antiquity to the present day [University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JA, England, patrick. doorly dsl.pipex. com].

Frequently Cited Sources

Conway, William Martin, Literary Remains of Albrecht Dfrer (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1889).

Holt, Elizabeth, A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1, The Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1947; reprint, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 305-42.

Pacioli, Luca, De divina proportione (Venice, 1509). Panofsky, Erwin, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, 4th ed. (1955; reprint,

Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1971).

Plato, Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. H. N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (1926, rev. 1939; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 1996).

Rupprich, Hans, Durer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 3 vols. (Berlin: Deutscher Verein fir Kunstwissenschaft, 1956).

Strauss, Walter L., The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Diirer, 6 vols. (New York: Abaris Books, 1974).

Notes In memoriam John Shearman (1931-2003), magister optimus.

1. Campell Dodgson, Albrecht Direr (London: Medici Society, 1926), 94. 2. Peter-Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I: Dirers Denkbild (Berlin: Mann, 1991);

Schuster, 18-83, summarizes the published interpretations of Melencolia I. See also Matthias Mende, Durer-Bibliographie (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1971), 246-51.

3. Strauss, vol. 3: 1514, no. 22, Truncated Cube; Fox; Bird, Sachsische Landes- bibliothek Dresden; 1514, no. 23, Balance in Two Views, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; 1514, no. 24, Head of a Child in Two Views, British Museum, London; 1514, no. 25, Putto with Plumb and Quadrant, British Library, London; 1514, no. 28, Molder's Form; Four Compasses; Drapery Study, Sachsische Landesbib- liothek, Dresden; 1514, no. 29, Woman, Seated, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.

4. Karl Giehlow, "Dfirers Stich Melencolia I und der Maximilianische Hu- manistenkreis," pts. 1 and 2, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fur vervielfaltigende Kunst (Die Graphischen Kunst) (Vienna) 26 (1903): 29-41; 27 (1904): 6-18, 57-78.

5. See Panofsky, 168-69. 6. Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, "Dfirers Kupferstich Melencolia I: Eine

quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung," in Studien der Bibliotek War- burg, vol. 2 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1923).

7. Panofsky, 171. 8. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melan-

choly (London: Nelson, 1964). 9. Karl Giehlow, "Poliziano und Dfirer," Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fur

vervielfaltigende Kunst (Beilage der Graphischen Kuinste), 25 (1902): 25-26. The poem had been dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent on November 2, 1482. It was printed many times, including in an edition of Poliziano's collected works published by Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1498). Adam von Bartsch, Le Peintre-graveur, vol. 7, Les vieux allemands, pt. 2 (Vienna, 1808); The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 10, Sixteenth Century German Artists: Albrecht Duirer, ed. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris, 1981).

10. Erwin Panofsky, "'Virgo and Victrix': A Note on Diirer's Nemesis," in Prints, Thirteen Illustrated Essays ..., ed. Carl Zigrosser (London: Peter Owen, 1962); for the uniqueness of the bridle and bowl, see 20.

11. Diirer, quoted in Conway, 165, 253: "... ich selbs wolt lyber ein hoch- gelerten berumbten man in solcher kunst h6rn vnd lesen dan das ich als ein vnbegriinter dofan schreiben s6ll." See also Rupprich, vol. 1, 97.

12. Durer, quoted in Conway, 230; Hubert Faensen, Albrecht Diurer, Schriftli- cher Nachlass (Berlin: Union, 1962), 173: "ein Ungelehrter, kleins Ver- stands .. ."

13. Joachim Camerarius, quoted in Conway, 137: "Letters it is true he had not cultivated, but the great sciences of Physics and Mathematics, which are perpetuated by letters, he had almost entirely mastered"; 139: "... he had brought painting into the fixed track of rule and recalled it to scientific principles." Rupprich, vol. 1, 307: "Litterarum quidem studia non attigerat, sed quae illis tamen traduntur, maxime naturalium et mathematicarum rerum scientiae, fere didicerat"; 310: "... quod picturam in viam praeceptio- num induxerat et revocarat ad rationem doctrinae...."

14. Nigel Guy Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London: Duckworth, 1992), 93. Marsilio Ficino, Divus Plato (Flor- ence: Laurentius Venetus, 1484). I have consulted the edition published in Venice, 1491.

15. Plato, Omnia Platonis Opera (Hapanta ta tou Platonos) (Venice: Aldus Manutius, September 1513).

16. Pirckheimer's library was acquired by Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, on his visit to Nuremberg in 1636. Henry Howard, his nephew and heir, gave the library to the Royal Society, which sold the majority of its contents to the bookseller Bernard Quaritch in 1873. Ficino's Latin version of Plato remained unsold in 1892; see Bernard Quaritch, Contributions towards a Dictionary of English Book-Collectors, pt. 1 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892), 5. Pirckhei- mer's Greek Plato was sold in 1925 to "Baer & Co": Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books Sold by Order of the President and Council of the Royal Society, sale cat., Sotheby's, London, May 4, 1925, lot 165.

17. Dfirer to Pirckheimer, Aug. 18, 1506, in Conway, 54; Rupprich, vol. 1, 53, lines 55-58: "Awch hab jch ein puchtrucker gefrogt, der spricht, er wil noch nix Krichisch, dazjn kurtz sey aws gangen, was er aber erfar, daz will er mich wissen lassen, daz jch ewchs schreibn mfig."

18. Durer to Pirckheimer, Oct. 13, 1506, in Conway, 58; Rupprich, vol. 1, 59, lines 69-70: 'Jtem jch kan nyndert [nirgends] erfaren, daz man ettwas news Krichisch getruckt hett."




19. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, trans. R. A. B. Mynors, vol. 2, The Correspondence of Erasmus 1501-14 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 131.

20. Niklas Holzber, Willibald Pirckheimer, Griechischer Humanismus in Deutsch- land (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1981), 381-82. Rupprich, vol. 1, 40.

21. Holzber (as in n. 20), 88. 22. Ibid., 305, 383. 23. Martin Davies, Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice

(London: British Library, 1995), 56. 24. Holzber (as in n. 20), 305, 381. See Andreas Stolzenburg's entry on

Pirckheimer in The Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London: Macmil- lan, 1996).

25. Strauss, vol. 1, 1494, nos. 11, 12, 13, 1495, no. 2. 26. Duirer, quoted in Conway, 228; Rupprich, vol. 1, 100, lines 12-13:

"... das jch dy Walhen fast lob jn jren nackettn billdern vnd zw for jn der perspettiua."

27. London, Brit. Lib., Department of Manuscripts, Sloane 5230, fol. 44; trans. Strauss, vol. 2, 503; Rupprich, vol. 1, 102: "Jdoch so ich keinen find, der do etwas beschriben hett van menschlicher mas zw machen, dan einen man Jacobus genent, van Venedig geporn, ein liblicher moler. Der wies mir man vnd weib, dy er aws der mas gemacht het, vnd das ich awff dycse tzeit liber sehen wolt, was sein mainung wer gewest dan ein new kunigraich.... Dan mir wolt diser forgemeltJacopus seinen grunt nit klerich an tzeigen, das merkett ich woll an jm. Doch nam ich mein ejgen ding fur mych vnd las den Fitrufium, der beschreibt ein wenig van der glidmas eines mans."

28. Strauss, vol. 2, 1500, nos. 29, 30. 29. Conway, 165-66. Rupprich, vol. 2, 163-64. Strauss, vol. 5, 1507, no. 12.

All quotations of the Latin text of Vitruvius are in Marcus Pollio Vitruvius, On Architecture, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), and English translations are from Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover, 1914).

30. Direr may have derived Messung from Pliny's de mensuris. See Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 35.80: "[Apelles] acknowledged his inferio- rity ... to Asclepiodorus in measurement, that is in the proper space to be left between one object and another. [Apelles] [. .. cedebat Asclepiodoro de mensuris, hoc est quanto quid a quoque distare deberet]."

31. Albrecht Direr, Underweysung der messung mit dem zirkel und richtscheyt in Linien ebnen unnd gantzen corporen (Nuremburg, 1525); and idem, Hierin sind begriffen vier Bftcher von menschlicher Proportion (Nuremburg, 1528).

32. Reprinted in Faensen (as in n. 12), 159-60. 33. Direr, quoted in Holt, 321; German text, Conway, 244, from the

"aesthetic excursus" (Direr's essay on beauty) in bk. 3 of Four Books on Human Proportion (1528); Rupprich, vol. 3, 293, lines 215-19, 233-35: "So wir aber fragen, wie wir ein sch6n bild sollen machen, werden etlich sprechen: nach der Menschen vrtheyl. So werdens dann die andern nit nachgeben und ich auch nit. Ahn ein recht wissen wer wil vns dann des gewiB machen? ... Die warheyt helt allein innen, welch der menschen schonste gestalt vnd maB kinde sein und kein andre." Holt's excerpts from Direr's writings were taken from Conway's translations, revised by Erwin Panofsky. The italics in my quotations indicate where I have adjusted the English to conform more literally to Direr's German.

34. Durer, quoted in Conway, 178, 203; Rupprich, vol. 2, 103, lines 1-4: "Plinius schreibt das dy alten moler vnd bilhawer, als Abelles, Protognes vnd dy anderen, haben gar kinstlich beschriben, wy man ein wolgestalte glidmol der menschen sol machen."

35. Pliny, 35.76: "primus in pictura omnibus litteris eruditus, praecipue arithmetica et geometria, sine quibus negabat artem perfici posse."

36. Dfirer to Pirckheimer, Sept. 8, 1506, in Conway, 55; Rupprich, vol. 1, 55, lines 57-61.

37. Direr to Pirckheimer, Feb. 7, 1506, in Conway, 48; Rupprich, vol. 1, 44, lines 41-42: "Noch [nachher] schelten sy es vnd sagen, es sey nit antigisch art, dorum sey es nit gut."

38. Durer to Pirckheimer, Oct. 13, 1506, in Conway, 58; Rupprich, vol. 1, 59, lines 85-87: "Dornoch wurdjch gen Polonia [Bologna] reiten vnder kunst willen jn heimlicher perspectiua, dy mich einer leren will."

39. Conway, 139; Rupprich, vol. 1, 309: "Is ergo cum Mantuae decumberet et Albertum in Italia esse audivisset, curavit celeriter ad se accersi instructurus facilitatem eius et certitudinem manus rerum cognitione et arte. Non enim raro in sermonibus familiaribus questus fuerat quod vel sibi non contigisset illa, aut Alberto scientia sua."

40. Conway, 139; Rupprich, vol. 1, 309: "... sed prius decesserat Andreas quam Mantuam potuisset [Albertus] pervenire, neque quicquam dicere sole- bat in vita sibi tristius accedisse."

41. The book survives with Direr's inscription, Rupprich, vol. 1, 221: "Daz puch hab ich zw Venedich vm ein Dugatn kawft im 1507jor. Albrecht Durer."

42. Euclid, Euclidis Megarensis/ Philosophi Platonici/ Mathematicarum discipli- narumjanitoris...., trans. from Greek to Latin and ed. Bartolomeo Zamberti (Venice, 1505). See Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements, trans. Sir Thomas L. Heath, 2nd ed. (1925; reprint, New York: Dover, 1956), vol. 1, 98. The editio

princeps of a Greek text of Euclid appeared in 1533: ibid., 100. The title page of Zamberti's edition is reproduced in Albrecht Direr, Unterweisung der

Messung; The Painter's Manual, trans. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 13.

43. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccelenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Sansoni, 1966-87), vol. 3, 257-58, introduction to the "Life of Piero della Francesca." Luca Pacioli

incorporated much of Piero's Trattato d'abaco in his Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni eproportionalita (Venice, 1494), and introduced an Italian translation of Piero's Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus as pt. 3 of his De divina proportione (Venice, 1509); see J. V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62-104.

44. Strauss, vol. 5, 2407, 1513, no. 7. 45. The drawings and print are illustrated together in Panofsky, figs. 121-

23. 46. Emil Reicke, Willibald Pirckheimer's Briefivechsel, vol. 2 (Munich: C. H.

Beck'sche, 1940), 99. The partial translation appears above a draft letter that

probably dates from 1511. Rupprich, vol. 3, 267 n. 1. 47. Durer dated few of his studies of human proportions, but the six dated

1513 prompted Strauss to date sixty-three further studies to that year, and

thirty-five to 1512; Strauss, vol. 5, 1512, 1513. 48. Dated October 18, 1523: Conway, 227; Rupprich, vol. 1, 102: "Noch dem

sich zwischen vns zw mer moln hat begeben, das wir zw red worden sind van allerlei kinsten, vnd vnder anderen jch frogte, ob awch pucher forhanden weren, dy do fan der gestalt der menschen lerten machen, fernam jch von ewch, sy weren gewest, aber pey vns nit entgen." Pirkheimer may have drawn on such sources as Pliny (as in n. 30), 35.79: "[Apelles] singly contributed almost more to painting than all the other artists put together, also publishing volumes containing the principles of painting [voluminibus etiam editis, quae doctrinam eam continent]."

49. The attempt by modern scholars to exclude Charidemus and Greater

Hippias from the authentic works of their respective authors is, of course, irrelevant to an evaluation of their impact on Pirckheimer and Durer. George Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates (London: Murray, 1867), 364-65, traced the unwarranted desire to exclude Greater Hippias from the Platonic canon to embarrassment at the rough handling of Hippias by Socrates.

50. Conway, 179, 198; Holt, 316; Rupprich, vol. 2, 120, lines 24-38: "Es lebt awch kein mensch awff erden, der beschlislich sprechen m6cht, wy dy aller sch6nest gestalt des menschen mocht sein. Nymantz weis daz dan gott allein. Dy schon zw vrteilen, dofan ist zw rat schlagen. Nach geschicklikeit mus man

syjn einjtlich ding pryngen. Dan wir sehenjn etlichen dingen ein ding vir schon an,jn eim anderen wer es nit schon. Schon vnd schoner is vns nit leicht zw erkennen. Dan es ist woll miiglich das zwey vnderschidliche bild gemacht werden, keins dem anderen gemes, dicker vnd dainer, das wir nit woll vrteillen kunen, welches schoner sey. Dy schonheit, was das ist, daz weis ich nit, wY woll sy vill dingen anhangt. Woll wir syjn vnser werck pringen, so kumt vns das gar schwer an...."

51. Panofsky, 165, takes a reference by Direr to "Platonic Ideas" in 1512 as evidence that Durer was "certainly aware," first, of Ficino's Letters, which had been published by Anton Koberger (Durer's godfather), and second, that the first two books of Ficino's De vita triplici had been translated into German.

52. All quotations from Greater Hippias are reprinted by permission of the

publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Plato, vol. 4, Loeb Classical Library, vol. L 167, translated by H. N. Fowler, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939.

53. "Hop-s "; phesei: "ouch hoios t'ei memnesthai hoti to kalon auto eroton, ho panti ho an prosgenetai, huparchei ekeinoi kaloi einai, kai lithoi kai xuloi kai anthropoi kai theoi kai pase praxei kai panti mathemati; auto gar egoge, o anthrope, kallos eroto ho ti estin, kai ouden soi mallon gegonein dunamai e ei moi parekatheso lithos, kai houtos mulias, mete ota mete egkephalon echon" (292d,e). For translations of (reater Hippias I have followed H. N. Fowler (1926). However, I have substituted for Fowler's "the absolute beautiful" and "absolute beauty" a literal rendering of Plato's words, "the beautiful itself," and for his "every acquisition of knowl-

edge," "every learning." The emphasis in the passage quoted is mine. 54. Conway, 243, 244; Rupprich, vol. 3, 291, lines 59-61: "DarauB kumbt,

wer etwas rechtz wil machen, das er der natur nichtz absprech vnd leg jr nichtz vntreglichs auff'; 292, lines 129-30: "Doch hut sich ein yedlicher, das er nichtz vnmuglichs mach, das die natur nit leyden kin."

55. The putto has ears in both the engraving and Durer's preparatory drawing (Strauss, vol. 3, 1514, no. 24) and (it appears to me) one eye open and one closed.

56. Vitruvius (as in n. 29), 1.1.4: Geometry "teaches us the use of the rule and compasses... and [how] rightly [to] apply the square, level and the

plummet." 57. Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Durer and His Legacy, exh. cat., British Museum,

London, 2002, 92, cat. nos. 23, 24. 58. Panofsky, 27-29; and Strauss, vol. 1, 1492. 59. As is normally assumed to be the case with the engraved Sea Monster (B.

71), the woodcut Hercules (B. 127), and the drawing Pupila Augusta (Strauss, vol. 1, 1496, no. 17).

60. Panofsky, 173-74. 61. Osterreichischen Nationalbibliotek, Vienna, codex 3255; and Strauss,

vol. 3, 1513, nos. 8-16. Karl Giehlow, "Die Hieroglyphenkunde des Huma- nismus in der Allegorie der Renaissance besonders der Ehrenpforte Kaisers




Maximilian I," in Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhochsten Kaiserhauses 32, no. 1 (1915): 170-209, prints Pirckheimer's Latin with the copies of Diirer's illustrations.

62. This and the following translation are from George Boas, The Hieroglyph- ics of Horapollo, Bollingen Series, vol. 23 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1950), 77, 78.

63. Strauss, vol. 3, 1513, no. 8. 64. Boas (as in n. 62), nos. 40, 30; and Panofsky, 177. 65. The earliest reference to the subjects of the quadrivium as a taught

syllabus is in Plato's Protagoras, 318e, where, curiously, it is attributed to Hippias.

66. Diirer's treatise on fortification: Albrecht Diirer, Etliche Underricht, zu Befestigung der Stett, Scholtz und Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527). Pacioli, 2.2, had explained that geometry, arithmetic, and proportion are vital to the defense of a state, as Archimedes had demonstrated when he defended Syracuse with machines of war that depended for their manufacture on the power of number, measure, and proportions.

67. Conway, 177, 202; Rupprich, vol. 2, 132, lines 76-78: "Dyse kunst der maler wirt vurgemagt den awgen. Dan der aller edelst sin der menschen is das gesicht."

68. The irregular solid is set on a raised "foundation" in the preparatory drawing (Fig. 12), Strauss, vol. 3, 1514, no. 22.

69. Pacioli, 2.2: "E sensa lor notitia sia impossibile alcunatra bene intendere e nell sapientia ancora e scripta 'Quod omnia consistunt in numero pondere & mensura' cioe che tutto cioche per lo universo inferiore e superiore sisqua- terna quello de necessita al numero peso e mensura sia soctoposto."

70. Conway, 178 n. 1, does not translate this last sentence, included by Panofsky in Holt, 315 n. 7; but Conway includes the German on 204. Rupp- rich, vol. 2, 104, lines 36-38: "Vnd will aws mas, tzall vnd gewicht mein firnemen anfohen. Wer achtung dorawf hat, der wiirtz hernoch also finden."

71. Possibly via the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon 11.20, which may have been written in Hellenistic Alexandria; see F.L. Cross, ed., The Oxford Dictio- nary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), s.v. "Wisdom of Solomon."

72. It shows all the numbers from 1 through 16, which added together yield 136, which, divided by 4, yields 34. Diirer's numbers are given in Pacioli's De viribus quantitatis, of which one unedited manuscript survives: Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, codice no. 250. Luca Pacioli, De viribus quantitatis, transcribed by Maria Garlaschi Peirani, ed. Augusto Marinoni (Milan: Ente Raccolta Vinciana, 1997). The relevant passage is reproduced in Nick MacKinnon, "The Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli," Mathematical Gazette 77 (1993): 165-66. Panofsky comments, in Klibanksy et al. (as in n. 8), 327 n. 14, "It is remarkable that Pacioli deals only with the squares simply as a mathematical jeu d'esprit,' and merely mentions their astrological and magical significance without going into it: he therefore completely ignores any talismanic virtues of the various squares...."

73. Conway, 177; Rupprich, vol. 2, 113, lines 54-58: "Dy messung des ertrichs, wasser vnd der stern is verstentlich worden durch daz gemell vnd wirt noch menschen vill kfint durch antzewgung der gemell."

74. Two printed scale maps of Germany, one dated 1491 and the other of about 1500, are reproduced in Bartrum (as in n. 57), nos. 33, 34. Pirckhei- mer's translation of bk. 8 of Ptolemy's Geography (1525) reproduces the first world map to include the Americas: Willibald Pirckheimer 1470-1970: Eine Dokumentation in der Stadtbibliotek Nurnberg, exh. cat., Stadtbibliotek, Nurem- berg, 1970, no. 29.

75. Pacioli, 2.2 verso. 76. Ibid.: "Onde fra li savi por comunicare proverbio magestralmente se

costumato a dire. 'Aurum probatur igni et ingenius mathematici': cioe la bonta de loro demostra el fuoco e la peregrineca del ingegno le mathematici discipline."

77. Panofsky, 161. 78. Conway, 180; Rupprich, vol. 2, 121, lines 79-81: "Der nutz is ein teill

der schanheit. Dorum was am menschen vnniltz ist, das ist nit schon." 79. Reiner Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Durer:

Das druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1 (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 180. 80. Strauss, vol. 3, 1514, no. 22, notes that the animals were delineated in

black ink and the rest of the drawing in brown, which prompted Panofsky and Saxl (as in n. 6), 136-39, to suggest that they are an addition unrelated to Melencolia I. But an addition by Dfirer does not, of course, exclude a further reference to Melencolia I.

81. The mirror-image drawing in Bayonne for the dog in Melencolia I, dated 1514 and signed with an uncertain version of Diirer's monogram, is generally considered to be a copy after the lost original by Direr: Strauss, vol. 3, 1514, no. 27.

82. The items are so identified in Panofsky, 156-57. 83. Conway, 212; Faensen (as in n. 12), 160: ". . . dieweil es aus einer guten

Meinung und allen Kiinstbegierigen zu Gut geschicht und auch nich allein den Maleren, sonder Goldschmieden, Bildhaueren, Steinmetzen, Schreine- ren und allen den, so sich des Mass gebrauchen, dienstlich sein mag."

84. Martianus Capella, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans. William Harris Stahl and RichardJohnson with E. L. Burge, vol. 1, Commentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 22. The editio princeps of De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii was published in 1499 in Vicenza; a second edition was published in 1500 in Modena.

85. Capella (as in n. 84), vol. 2, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 218. Martianus Capella, Martianus Capella, ed. James Willis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1983), 204: "et cum dicto prospicio quandam feminam luculentam radium dextera, altera sphaeram solidam gestitantem amictamque laevorsum peplo, in quo siderum magnitudines et meatus, circulorum mensurae conexio- nesque vel formae.... ipsum vero vernantis aethrae salo refulgebat, denique etiam in usum germanae ipsius Astronomiae crebrius commodatum, reliqua vero versis illitum diversitatibus numerorum, gnomonum stilis, interstitiorum, ponderum mensurarumque formis diversitate colorum variegata renidebat. crepidas peragrandae telluris causa easdemque permenso orbe contritas viatrix infatigata gestabat."

86. I am indebted for this information to one of the Art Bulletin's anony- mous reviewers. See also Rupprich, vol. 2, 9; and Diirer (as in n. 42), 25.

87. Strauss, vol. 3, 1514, no. 29. 88. Ibid., 1514, nos. 2-15. 89. Schuster (as in n. 2), vol. 1, 168-70, discusses the bat. 90. In the short appendix 1 of Klibansky et al. (as in n. 8), 400-402, the

authors suggest that the polyhedron may indicate the stonecutters' trade, and "descriptive, that is to say optical, geometry."

91. Euclid, 1956 (as in n. 42), 6.30, says that the line AB is divided in extreme and mean ratio by C if AB:AC = AC:CB. See also 2.11, with Heath's notes. The earliest known appearance of the term "goldener Schnitt" is reported to be in a footnote in Martin Ohm, Die reine Elementar-Matematik, 1835 (where he implies that the phrase was already current); the first use of the term golden section in English appears to be in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875), s.v. "Aesthetics," an article byJames Sully; see D. H. Fowler, "A Generalization of the Golden Section," Fibonacci Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1982): 146-47.

92. The title page of Ficino's Latin translation of Plato (Venice, 1491) simply states, beneath a dedicatory poem, "Divus Plato."

93. Aristotle, On the Heavens, bk. 1, secs. 2, 3. 94. Pacioli, table of contents, heading for chap. 30, "Del modo a saper fare

el nobilissimo corpo regulare detto Duodecedron altramente corpo de 12 pentagoni secondo le platonici forma dela quinta essentia e del nome de suoli lati." For Euclid's construction of a dodecahedron comprehended in a sphere, see Euclid, 13.17.

95. B.xv.94.61. Caraglio adapted Ugo da Carpi's chiaroscuro woodcut after Parmigianino, in which Diogenes points not to a dodecahedron but to the signatures of those two artists in the open book; see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 154-57.

96. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 6.2, "Life of Dio- genes," 40. Plato, The Statesman 266e.

97. Dfirer used the phrase "Plato's five regular bodies" elsewhere: Conway, 175.

98. Similarly, Diirer requested "That nothing be introduced which is stolen from other books" in Pirckheimer's preface to Direr's Four Books on Human Proportions: Conway, 228; Rupprich, vol. 1, 100, lines 8-9. Walter L. Strauss, in Durer (as in n. 42), 17, states that Diirer's construction of the pentagon is based on Ptolemy's Almagest.

99. Pacioli, table of contents, "Del conducente titulo de questo tractato dicto dela divina proportione: Capitulo. V."

100. Harold Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, vol. 2, Vespasian to Domitian, 2nd ed. (London: British Museum Publications, 1976), Titus, no. 76.

101. Erasmus (as in n. 19), vol. 33, Adages (1991), 5-6. 102. A copy in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, is inscribed on the

title page, "Emptus ex bibliotheca Alberti Dyreri mar[cis] Rh[enensibus] 7 Anno domini 1555. 13 die Augusti/Eras[mus] Hock D." Rupprich, vol. 1, 221. There is no indication as to when or where Diirer bought the book, but see Rupprich, vol. 1, 53 n. 10.

103. Erasmus (as in n. 19), vol. 33, Adages, 6. Erasmus, Opera Omnia (1703-6; reprint, Hildersheim: G. Ohlms, 1961-62), vol. 2, 399-400: "[Id autem symboli nihil aliud sibi velle, quam illud Augusti Caesaris dictum speude bradeos, indicio sunt monimenta literarum hieroglyphicarum.] Sic enim vo- cantur aenigmaticae scalpturae, quarum priscis seculis multus fuit usus, po- tissimum apud Aegyptios vates, ac Theologos: qui nefas esse ducebant, sapientiae mysteria literis communibus vulgo profano prodere, quemadmodum nos facimus, sed si quid cognitu dignum judicassent, id animantium re- rumque variarum expressis figuris ita repraesentabant, ut non cuivis statim promptum esset conjicere: verum, si cui singularum rerum proprietates, si peculiaris cujusque animantis vis ac natura cognita, penitusque perspecta fuisset, is demum collatis eorum symbolorum conjecturis, aenigma sententiae deprehendebat." Erasmus's account is anticipated in Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, bk. 8, chap. 4.

104. Many of the relevant documents are assembled in Hessel Miedema, "The Term 'Emblema' in Alciati," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 234-50. Alciato's manuscript Emblemata is traced back to the lifetime of Maximilian I (1459-1519) by Claudie Balavoine, "Archeologie de l'embleme litteraire: La dedicace a Conrad Peutinger des Emblemata d'Andre Alciat," in Emblemes et devises au temps de la Renaissance, ed. Marie-Therese Jones-Davies (Paris:Jean Touzot, 1981), 9-21. Further evidence is reviewed by Bernhard F. Scholz, "The 1531 Augsburg Edition of Alciato's Emblemata: A Survey of Research," in Emblematica 5, no. 2 (winter 1991): 213-54.




105. Balavoine (as in n. 104), 17. 106. Giehlow (as in n. 61), 146. 107. John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 39. 108. Andrea Alciato to Francesco Calvo, "9 Dec 1522," in Miedema (as in n.

104), 236: "... I have, at this Saturnalia, composed a book of epigrams, to which I have given the title Emblemata; for I give in each separate epigram a description of something, such that it signifies something pleasant taken from history or from nature, after which painters, goldsmiths and founders can fashion objects which we call badges and which we fasten on our hats, or else bear as trademarks, such as the anchor of Aldus...."

109. Pirckheimer to Beatus Rhenanus, Dec. 9, 1514, letter 318, in Erasmus (as in n. 19), vol. 3, 53.

110. Rupprich, vol. 1, 307. 111.Joachim Camerarius, Elementa rhetoricae (Basel, 1541); Jan Bialostocki,

Direr and His Critics 1500-1971 (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1986), 29, 31: "... In order to show that such minds ... are frequently carried away into absurdities, he reared up in front of her a ladder into the clouds, while the ascent by means of rungs is as it were impeded by a square block of stone...."

112. Vasari (as in n. 43), vol. 4 (1976), life of Rafael da Urbino, 189-90. 113. Rupprich, vol. 1, 209: "1515. Raffahell de Vrbin, der so hoch peim

pobst geacht ist gewest, [hat] der hat dyse nackette bild gemacht vnd hat sy dem Albrecht Durer gen Nornberg geschickt, im sein hand zw weisen." It is illustrated in Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 153.

114. Panofsky, 284, claimed that with the Albertina drawing, Raphael had palmed Diirer off with a work by one of his assistants. This view did not find favor among Raphael scholars: see John Shearman, review of Giulio Romano, by Frederick Hartt, Burlington Magazine 101, no. 681 (1959): 458. The case for the Albertina drawing being an independent, autograph work by Raphael is made in Arnold Nesselrath, "Raphael's Gift to Dfirer," Master Drawings 31, no. 4 (1993): 376-89.

115. Albrecht Dfirer, Albrecht Direr: Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), 69; Rupprich, vol. 1, 158, 186 n. 260.

116. Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), 99; idem, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonar- roti (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1998), 57: "E a dire il vero, Alberto non tratta se non delle misure e varieta dei corpi, di che certa regula dar non si pu6, formando le figure ritte come pali; quel che piu importava, degli atti e gesti umani, non ne dice parola."

117. Treating Durer's "melencolia" as one of the four humors of ancient medicine is so entrenched in the literature that it is worth pointing out that the word could signify the feeling of gloom, regardless of cause. When Alberti described how a painter should treat the emotions in Depictura, he wrote, "We see how someone who is saddened [Latin, 1435: tristes; Tuscan, 1436: uno atristito], because care presses on him and thoughts besiege him, stands with his powers and feeling almost in a daze.... In one who is melancholy [mae- rentibus; a chi sia malinconico], you'll see the head hanging down...."; trans. Creighton E. Gilbert, Italian Art 1400-1500, Sources and Documents (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 65. Where Alberti had used maeror, grief, in the original Latin, he employed malinconia, melancholy, in Tuscan. That word does not translate atra bilis, or black bile, the exact Latin equivalent of melagcholikos. Failing to meet Mantegna, "... [Albrecht] used to say ... was the saddest [tristius] event in all his life" (see n. 40 above). The German word

DiDrer had used for tristius is lost to us in the Latin report. When Hippias and Socrates failed to find the beautiful, and wondered if they were better off alive or dead, Dfirer turned to a Greek word to characterize their, and his own, dejection: melancholy.

118. For example, of the Mexican gold Cortes had sent to Emperor Charles V, "I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands"; Diirer (as in n. 115), 64. See also Conway, 101ff.; Holt, 339; and Rupprich, vol. 1, 155, lines 47-49: ".. . und hab mich verwundert der subtilen jngenia der menschen jn frembden landen." For the meaning of genius as understood by Dfirer's contemporaries, see for example the satire in Erasmus (as in n. 19), vol. 27, Julius Excluded from Heaven: A Dialogue (1986), 155-97, where the genius of Julius II offers a running commentary on the deceased pope's vain attempts to browbeat Saint Peter into opening the Gates of Heaven to him.

119. Penelope Murray, ed., Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), passim.

120.Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), 163. 121. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (1790;

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 317-320, sec. 49. 122. Marsilio Ficino, De Vita Triplici, 1489, Marsilio Ficino's Book of Life, trans.

Charles Boer (1980; reprint, Woodstock, Conn.: Spring, 1996), 8. 123. Klibansky et al. (as in n. 8), 241, 362. 124. Panofsky, 162. 125. Nor do the two pieces of evidence offered by Panofsky at all justify his

claim that "Direr himself, then, was, or at least thought he was, a melancholic in every possible sense of the word" (Panofsky, 171). Indeed, Christoph Scheurl, in Libellus de Laudibus Germaniae et Ducum Saxoniae (Leipzig, 1508), noted, "Our Albrecht is very personable, obliging and proper. Like the old painters, he is of a happy disposition, in the manner of highly educated people" (quoted in Bartrum [as in n. 57], 13; Latin text in Rupprich, vol. 1, 290, trans. Strauss, vol. 2, 1014); and in 1532, Camerarius wrote, '"Yet he was not of a melancholy severity nor of a repulsive gravity [Non tamen erat aut tristi severitate aut gravitate odiosa]; nay whatever conduced to pleasantness and cheerfulness, and was not inconsistent with honour and rectitude, he cultivated all his life" (quoted in Bartrum [as in n. 57], 14; based on Bialostocki [as in n. 111], 28; Latin text in Rupprich, vol. 1, 308). The claim that Durer conceived Melencolia I as a pair with Saint Jerome in His Study has been discredited by Robert Grigg, "Studies on Diirer's Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands: The Distribution of Melencolia I," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 49, no. 3 (1986): 398-409.

126. Vasari (as in n. 43), vol. 5 (1984), 6. 127. In the Instruction in Measurement, Durer, 1525 (as in n. 31): "Meinem

insonders lieben Heren und Freund, Herrn Wilbolden Pirckheymer .. ." and in the Four Books of Human Proportion, Direr, 1528 (as in n. 31): "meinem g6nstigen lieben Herrn und grosserspriesslichen Freund"; my translation, based on Conway. Pirckheimer's feelings are recorded in his elegy on Durer's death: 'You who have been my most intimate associate these many years, / O Albrecht! the greatest part of my soul, / With whom in all confidence I could join in sweet discourse/Confiding my thoughts to a trusted breast./Why, hapless one, did you abandon so suddenly your inconsolate friend/Going hence with swift foot, never to return?/Nor was I able to touch your dear head, or your hand / Or to utter last words in a sad farewell"; trans. Bialostocki (as in n. 111), 24.

