She sits, surrounded by an array of discarded objects, her head resting against her fist, her arm resting on her knee, her gaze resting on something, or someone, or maybe nothing in the far distance. If she lived in the modern world, we might think that she was a bored student impatient for her studies to conclude so that her real life might begin; or a young traveller waiting for a much-delayed flight to a holiday destination; or, possibly, a refugee held in a temporary camp until the outcome of her appeal for permission to remain has been determined. The young woman in question is, however, clearly not from our world. Unlike most of us she has wings, and she shares her space with an undernourished dog and a dozing putto. She sits – immobile – in a picture that was made in 1514.
Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I, is on show at the National Gallery in London, as part of an exhibition that examines several major journeys the artist made during his working life. I spent some time at the exhibition last weekend, my first visit to an art gallery this calendar year, and I enjoyed the chance to study the wide range of paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and drawings that have been assembled. Central to the exhibition are a group of Dürer’s works that was either made or shown during his lengthy visit to what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, during 1520-21. Antwerp competed with Venice (another city that Dürer visited) to be the preeminent port in Europe, and for a man with ambitions to sell his work to collectors all over the continent, it was an ideal place for him to showcase his skills as a draughtsman. As well as painting works on commission, he was one of the first artists to seek commercial success through the distribution of multiple copies of woodblock prints and engravings, which were cheaper and easier to transport. Melencolia I is one such work, and perhaps his best. The image is overly crowded for modern taste, but despite all the objects on view nothing much seems to be going on. The picture is highly symbolic, but its meanings remain obscure.
Looking at Dürer’s winged-woman last weekend, reminded me of another recent anniversary, namely the four hundredth year since the first publication of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. Burton spent his entire adult life – which he described as “silent, sedentary, solitary” – in Oxford, first as a student, then as a college fellow, and finally as a vicar. He wrote at great length, seeking to explain the causes of and to recommend treatments for the sickness of melancholia. Penguin Books have recently published a new hardback version of his famous work, to celebrate its quatercentennial, which comes in at 1,376 pages of text. It seems that Burton thought the best way to avoid becoming melancholic was to write endlessly about the subject. If it is a state of mind that feeds upon its own despondency, then it might well be that some form of distraction will prove to be both preventative and curative.
In contemporary culture, outside of professional medical practice, talk of melancholia tends to refer to a form of pensive sadness, a somewhat gentle form of unhappiness, rather than an acute depression or anger. We no longer consider the experience to be determined by the excess of fluids – “black bile” – in the body, although there are no doubt pharmacological treatments for this form of mental illness, that try to rouse the sufferer by altering the balance of chemicals at work in the brain. But if the modern understanding of the melancholic mood is primarily of someone who is gloomy and joyless, the sense that is captured by Dürer’s print is rather different. His image shows a woman suffering from loneliness and lassitude; not so much sad as uninterested; she is motionless, inert, entropic.
Around her waist the woman wears a belt, from which hangs a bunch of keys. Will one of these unlock the door to the meaning of the engraving for us? I have no informed view about what was in Dürer’s mind when he made his print, nor do I possess the art-historical skills to de-code the symbols that abound in the image; and I have no professional expertise in medicine or psychiatry. When I study this Renaissance print, I do so with my modern eyes and my amateur insight.
My first observation is that the woman seems to be obviously less confident about and less excited about all the tools and instruments that surround her than do the men who stand bold and confident, facing the viewer, in Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors, made twenty years after Dürer’s engraving, which, co-incidentally, also hangs in London’s National Gallery. These two men seem to be defined for posterity by what they own, by their easy familiarity with the tools of modern science, of geography and astronomy, by their acquisition of knowledge through the technical control of nature. By contrast, the woman makes no attempt to exercise control through measurement and management; she seems bored by her surroundings, despite her proximity to a vast, calm sea and the night sky lit up by a bright comet with a giant penumbra.
Second, she is – just as Robert Burton was – “silent, sedentary, solitary”. Holbein’s ambassadors were in each other’s company, but she is alone for she cannot converse with a sleeping dog, nor with a dozing putto. She does not stand upright, projecting male presence and energy, but sits slumped on a seat, a woman of inaction. Her eyes remain open, but whatever she sees does not move her. She sits stationarily, an object comparable to the many-sided stone that balances her presence within the picture. She is disengaged from life, she is organic but is becoming geological, she is petrified.
Why, amidst the many wonders of nature and science, would a person abandon an active life for a passive life? What is the meaning of this modern form of melancholy that I project onto Dürer’s work? It is a lethargy that is born of frustration and fear: there is so much for us to know and yet too little that we can do; we are exhausted by the thought of how much more we might yet learn, and at the same time worried about the small impact we will be able to achieve. The world is vast, and its mode of operation is beyond us. Animals and children can sleep peacefully, unperturbed by what they do not know and cannot do; but we adults can only gaze into the distance. Our knowledge continues to grow but it merely disempowers us; we are frozen by the fear of our powerlessness; slowly, we turn to stone.
I do not think melancholia irrational. Rather it seems to me to be a condition that grasps a part of the truth, namely that the world is vast, and the process of knowledge acquisition is interminable; and that our power to understand is not matched by an equal power to change, to reorganise, to make good. One part of the truth is that the universe is vast, both in space and time, whereas we are small, and our lifespan is brief. Nonetheless, this is not the whole truth and to dwell on these aspects, to become petrified by the awareness of our insignificance, it not our destiny but only a choice. And it is a choice that we can decide not to make.
How might we follow in Robert Burton’s footsteps, and distract ourselves from the temptations of melancholic listlessness? Thankfully, we do not need to spend the whole of our lives in Oxford. Instead, there is salvation in work, in taking pleasure in the world around us, and in the conversation that is the mark of good company. Rather than gaze into the distance, we should focus our attention on what is immediately in front of us and find meaning and purpose in those tasks that we have some control over. Doing well the things that we can do is sufficient for a meaningful life. Worrying about the things over which we have no control is unwise and unhealthy.
Spending an hour and a half at the National Gallery in London, admiring Dürer’s work with a friend, was as good a way as any to re-affirm my belief in the good life.