figure 1 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I. Engraving, 1514.
figure 2 Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study. Engraving, 1514.
In his great book on the artist Erwin Panofsky points out that the engraving must not be looked at in isolation. Dürer engraved two important works in 1514, Melencolia I and St Jerome in his Study [figure 2], and in every instance except one he gave them away as a pair. Indeed, Panofsky shows, they represent two contrasting views of life. The saint sits in his study, flanked by his animals. The room is bathed in warm sunshine. On the desk are only a crucifix and an inkbottle, while the saint's hat hangs on the wall behind him. Dürer has done everything within his power to render the room glowing, comfortable and warm. Even the hour-glass next to the hat and the skull on the table are less a threat than a reminder of man's natural end. The engraving represents a man redeemed from time not through the denial of time but through its acceptance; the saint who gave the Latin West its Bible is here shown at one with himself and with his God as he works, absorbed in his great task of transmission.
Even to the untrained eye the contrast with the Melencolia could not be greater. Panofsky's brilliant analysis of the iconography merely confirms one's instinctive feeling when faced with the two works. In every respect, he suggests, Dürer seems here to have wished to invert the St Jerome. The female figure with her useless wings represents art in competition with God. The Melencolia is a terrestrial craftsman cut off from all tradition and therefore incapable of productive work. ‘As for geometry,’ Panofsky quotes Dürer as saying, ‘it may prove the truth of some things but with respect to others we must resign ourselves to the opinion and judgement of men.’ This might appear a rather bland and neutral statement, but one can see what Dürer thinks of ‘the opinions and judgements of men’ when he says: ‘The lie is in our understanding, and darkness is so firmly entrenched in our mind that even our groping will fail’ — a full-blooded expression of the sense of solitude and desolation which, Luther is to suggest, only an awareness of the saving grace of Christ can overcome.
This coexists in Dürer with a Humanist belief that the mastery of art consists of a combination of theoretical insights with practical skill. The one without the other is no use, he says, in a tone very like Leonardo's. Yet the fact remains that in this engraving what we have is something very different from the optimism of Florentine art. Melancholy is obviously thinking furiously, but is incapable of action, while the putto is scribbling furiously but we sense that what he is doing is of no value since it is quite without authority. Both the putto and Melancholy herself seem to be locked in a world in which there is simultaneously endless time and no time at all. They remind me of the mad energy without direction of Swift's Grub Street Hack in A Tale of a Tub, and of Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos, hoping that by returning to the Ancients he will find a way out of his crisis, but
I was unable to reach them … They were only concerned with each other, and the deepest, most individual part of my thought was excluded from their dance. In their company I was overcome by a feeling of terrible solitude; I felt like someone who had been locked into a garden full of eyeless statues.
Hence it seems to me that Panofsky is wrong to try and assimilate the engraving to the neo-Platonic theory of Saturnine genius so popular amongst the Florentine thinkers and artists. To them divine frenzy is all; though it brings melancholy in its wake it can nevertheless achieve great things. Indeed, melancholy is the hallmark of genius. This view of art and the artist has of course passed into the mythology of the Western world — think of our sense of Beethoven as the archetypal artist, a notion derived not from his music but from a vague memory of the rousing sound of his symphonies and from the endless reproductions of the busts and portraits of the deaf composer clearly in the grip of forces more powerful than himself. For Dürer, on the other hand, Melancholy is inactive, and this not because she is lazy but because all work has grown meaningless to her. Her considerable energy is paralysed not by sleep but by thought. She is reduced to inactivity and despair by the awareness of the insurmountable barrier separating her from the realm of Truth: ‘The lie is in our understanding, and darkness is so firmly entrenched that even our groping will fail.’
It is no surprise to discover that Dürer's engraving, complete with hour-glass and magic square, figures in Mann's Doctor Faustus. Here the desire, even the need, to create comes to be seen not as a gift but as a curse. For while the desire to create seems to be the most natural thing in the world, something we are all born with, what is it in a world without sure relation to either tradition or authority but a meaningless self-indulgence? When the social trappings of art fall away, when patronage disappears and the artist is forced to compete in the market-place for the sale of his goods, can there be any justification for art other than the desire for money and fame? ‘Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?’ asks Leverkühn (Mann's italics). Feeling himself to be destined for music, for the rich and creative life of the composer, he quickly becomes aware of the fact that in today's world there is no place for natural, spontaneous creation; everything we do seems false, laboured, second-hand; it feels like padding, pretence, a lie perpetrated by those who like to think of themselves as artists, in collusion with a market which knows that enough people need to feel they are in touch with some higher truth to make the art business profitable. In such a world the honest artist must either stop composing or seek in some way to deflect the terrible truth and, by a deal with the Devil perhaps, find again the springs of spontaneous creativity.