拍品專文
Impressions of the first state are of the greatest rarity. The list of sales which are published in Hollstein which cover the years from 1880 record a single impression on the auction market in the sale of R. Peltzer at H.G. Gutekunst, in Stuttgart in 1913. The British Museum has a first state impression acquired in 1912. A comparison reveals similar use of tone across the plate, although the Seilern impression is inked more strongly, especially around the areas of the skirt and on the shoulders of the figure. The details of the face are particularly fine in both first state impressions.
The symbolism in Melencolia I has intrigued art historians across the ages. Panofsky offers this interpretation:
'Thus, Drer's most perplexing engraving is, at the same time, the objective statement of a general philosophy and the subjective confession of an individual man. It fuses, and transforms, two great representational and literary traditions, that of Melancholy as one of the four humours and that of Geometry as one of the Seven Liberal Arts. It typifies the artist of the Renaissance who respects practical skill, but longs all the more fervently for mathematical theory - who feels 'inspired' by celestial influences and eternal ideas, but suffers all the more deeply from his human frailty and intellectual finiteness. It epitomizes the Neo-Platonic theory of Saturnian genius as revised by Agrippa of Nettesheim. But in doing all this it is in a sense a spiritual self-portrait of Albrecht Drer'.
All previous images of Melencolia, mostly found in medical treatises, had expounded this temperament as the most undesirable of the four humours. Drer's interpretation, however, derives from Neo-Platonic thoughts circulating in the humanist circles at the time, where the melancholic condition was considered an important part of human creativity. This was asserted by Ficino in his De Vita Triplici, and then reiterated by Agrippa who, in his Occulta Philosophia, followed the former's theory in which the mental faculties were arranged in a hierarchy: mind as the highest faculty, then reason and finally imagination. Agrippa furthered the theory by claiming that the furor melancholius could produce geniuses at all three levels. Drer's contemplative figure perhaps embodies the artist, where imagination predominates, the first level of the hierarchy, and 'she finds no comfort in her exceptional gift belonging in fact to those who cannot extend their thought beyond the limits of space. Hers is the inertia of a being which renounced what it could reach because it cannot reach for what it longs'.
The symbolism in Melencolia I has intrigued art historians across the ages. Panofsky offers this interpretation:
'Thus, Drer's most perplexing engraving is, at the same time, the objective statement of a general philosophy and the subjective confession of an individual man. It fuses, and transforms, two great representational and literary traditions, that of Melancholy as one of the four humours and that of Geometry as one of the Seven Liberal Arts. It typifies the artist of the Renaissance who respects practical skill, but longs all the more fervently for mathematical theory - who feels 'inspired' by celestial influences and eternal ideas, but suffers all the more deeply from his human frailty and intellectual finiteness. It epitomizes the Neo-Platonic theory of Saturnian genius as revised by Agrippa of Nettesheim. But in doing all this it is in a sense a spiritual self-portrait of Albrecht Drer'.
All previous images of Melencolia, mostly found in medical treatises, had expounded this temperament as the most undesirable of the four humours. Drer's interpretation, however, derives from Neo-Platonic thoughts circulating in the humanist circles at the time, where the melancholic condition was considered an important part of human creativity. This was asserted by Ficino in his De Vita Triplici, and then reiterated by Agrippa who, in his Occulta Philosophia, followed the former's theory in which the mental faculties were arranged in a hierarchy: mind as the highest faculty, then reason and finally imagination. Agrippa furthered the theory by claiming that the furor melancholius could produce geniuses at all three levels. Drer's contemplative figure perhaps embodies the artist, where imagination predominates, the first level of the hierarchy, and 'she finds no comfort in her exceptional gift belonging in fact to those who cannot extend their thought beyond the limits of space. Hers is the inertia of a being which renounced what it could reach because it cannot reach for what it longs'.