Albrecht Dürer's master engraving, Melencolia I, has stood for
centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about melancholia and an
allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences. Zealously
interpreted since the nineteenth century, the work also presides over
the origins of modern iconology. Yet more than a century of research has
left us with a tangle of mutually contradictory theories.
In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback discovers in Melencolia's
opacity a fascinating possibility: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only
an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative
instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly analyses the visual and
narrative structure of Dürer's image, revisits its philosophical and
medical contexts, and resituates it within the long history of the
therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's project in dialogue with that of
humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths the German
artist's ambition to act as a physician of the soul.
Celebrated by contemporaries as the "Apelles of our age," and ever since
as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter
here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to
the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a
key reference point in a project of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work
designed to exercise the mind, rebalance the passions, remedy the soul,
and help in getting on with the project of perfection.
