Melencolia I (1514): Art, History and Details

Melencolia I (1514) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A crowning achievement of Albrecht Dürer’s engraved works, Melencolia I captivates the viewer with abundant variety. Melancholy, or sadness, was associated with introspective, creative minds, and here, Dürer personified it as an immobilized, winged figure, unable to use the tools scattered around her. A magic square whose numbers total 34 in all directions, an emaciated dog, an hourglass, and a ladder evoke time, order, suffering, life, and death. Despite its implication of inner turmoil, the engraving demonstrates Dürer’s expertise in capturing visual perception. Light behaves differently against a transparent hourglass, a bursting comet, a rainbow, and a geometric stone.

Object facts

• Title: Melencolia I
• Date: 1514
• Creator attribution: Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Dimensions: Platemark: 23.8 x 18.9 cm (9 3/8 x 7 7/16 in.); Sheet: 24.5 x 19.4 cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1926.211

Collection credit

Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr., in memory of Ralph King

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sims, Lowery Stokes. The persistence of geometry: form, content, and culture in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2006.
• T. S. “Dürer’s Melancholia.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 13, no. 7 (July 1926): 157–159.
• Francis, Henry. "Engravings by Albrect Dürer." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 22, no. 4 (April 1935): 59-64.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.