Melencolia I

Albrecht Dürer's engraving 'Melencolia I' (1514) is one of the most studied images in Western art history and a summit of Renaissance printmaking. A winged, pensive woman sits slumped with a compass in her lap, surrounded by the tools of geometry and measurement — a truncated polyhedron, scales, hourglass, bell, ladder, and a magic 4×4 square — all strewn in creative disarray. Drawing on the ancient theory of the four humours, the print became the iconic image of the 'melancholy of genius': the intellectual paralysis that accompanies the highest flights of creative imagination. Rich impressions survive across most of the world's major print rooms.