A Slight Detour: Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia and Old Master Prints

Near the end of Part 3 of Chapter 2, Suzy's makes the following remark:

“Maman, what is that? The face immediately makes me think of Dürer's Melancholia which I love so much. Who painted this?”

Here, we see that Suzy brings up a very specific piece of artwork, one that happens to be an engraving. Feel free to follow the link to see where I pulled this image from, but I'll give a little background on this specific engraving and a little info on old master prints in general.

Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia I, 1514

This specific engraving is titled Melancholia I and was created by Albrecht Dürer in 1514. It is considered a piece from the German Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries) and is one of the most well-known of the "old master prints." Master prints are considered works of art produced by a printing process in the Western tradition. These types of prints grew rapidly from the 15th century and were created over a period of 600 years, ending in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They are considered "old master prints" because of their rareness and crudeness in design. Along with Albrecht Dürer, other great European artists in this category include Rembrandt and Francisco Goya. Different artistic techniques were used, but the main ones included woodcut, engraving, etching, mezzotint, and aquatint.

Going back to the image I've added, according to the LSU Museum of Art, Melancholia I references one of the four "humours" or moods of Humourism, which dates back to Ancient Egypt and Greece and remained a popular way for describing personality and health up into the 1800s. With this engraving, 

Art historians consider Melencolia I to be a psychological or spiritual self-portrait where Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) shows the struggles of the creative process, even for an artist of his extraordinary skill. For Dürer and other Renaissance artists and theorists, the question of how to capture perception, how the eye translates the physical and emotional world, was a central pursuit (A Closer Look).

Check out the links at the end of this post if you'd like to learn more about what is seen within the engraving and what everything represents. I think I'd have to do a whole other post on this one piece to go through everything we see in the picture! But really, it's pretty fascinating how Dürer intentionally added each object and individual in the engraving.

If we take a look at how this specific piece of art is referenced in Suzy's Dream, then perhaps we can start to see a clearer picture of why it exists in the novel. We see that André Vilbert -- or "old André" as Suzy likes to call him even though he is twenty-seven -- is the artist behind the painting displayed in the Douvry's sitting room. But who is André Vilbert to this family? And why would the family so willingly accept a painting like this left for Suzy to see? Finally, why does André Vilbert give a strange, sad beauty to the portrait he has painted...

Come along with me to the final installment of Chapter 2 and you'll see why!

Christie's
LSU Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Wikipedia



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