Melancholia and architecture from two perspectives: Albrecht Dürer’s reflections on  creative genius in the Hypnerotomachia​

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Tracey Eve Winton

University of Waterloo, Canada​

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​At the end of certain editions of Albrecht Dürer’s book on perspective and geometry appears a  horizontal engraving depicting a seated draughtsman using a perspective machine in the form  of a vertical, wooden window gridded with strings to draw a sleeping woman. He copies his  drawing onto a similar, horizontal grid on his desk. 

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The draughtsman sits beside a wide open window looking out onto countryside bordering a  large lake, and so your gaze as the viewer is perpendicular to his, while both pass through  windows. In the engraving two windows, perhaps correlated to our two eyes and binocular vision as an embodied means of depth perception, form the backdrop for the woman, on the left,  and the man, on the right. She is profoundly corporeal, sleeping or dreaming, unconscious and  enfolded by fabric which partially covers her. We see both faces in profile. He is on the other  hand stays profoundly riveted in his attention to the subject of his drawing.  We see a few accessory objects. The wall is carved and rendered to express thickness,  materiality and corporeality. The desk, like a small ping-pong table, is a solid surface divided in the middle by the perspective window which perpendicularly abuts the wall between the  windows. It sits on a base in which two ring pulls indicate large drawers, perhaps a repository  for drawings. The artist holds a pen, and a small inkwell sits in front of his reticulated tracing. On  the wide windowsill to his right are a small Roman style urn, and a dense potted plant whose  branches have been tied for support to stakes using thin rope. Directly before him on the desk,  a miniature obelisk stands with its sharp apex at a height corresponding to his eye, used to  gauge precision in his measuring, a sort of perspectograph. Attached to his belt is a medieval  javelin with ocular hilts along the needle. Behind the sleeping nymph are two hills forming a visual analogy to her exposed breasts, suggesting that her body is also a landscape, and on the  water can be seen little boats, a medieval symbol for the vehicle of the soul’s journey. The  shadows in the image reveal that the artist is looking in the direction of the Sun, while she  sleeps turned to face in the direction of the shadows. 

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We know Albrecht Dürer possessed a copy of the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In its 7th chapter, the storyteller Poliphilo, dreaming within his dream, has narrowly escaped death. He descends through a ring of forested hills, to find a garden whose properties stimulate all the bodily senses. Hot and thirsty, he discovers a white marble bath house on the rear of which a lifelike fountain depicts a nymph sleeping under an arbutus tree whose narcotic fruit inspires her dream. The scene is represented in a woodcut. The nymph’s position and body, while not identical to Dürer’s, bear similarities. Standing over her, an aroused satyr, his face persuasively the model for Dürer’s draughtsman in all but the goatish ears. He pulls the tree’s thick, fruit-laden branches downward with his left hand, while with his right he draws a sheet fastened to the upper branch of the tree with rope, in order to cast shade on the beautiful dreamer, and draw out her dreaming. Between the nymph and the satyr prance two little satyrs, one holding a pair of  snakes as from a caduceus, and the other clasping to his chest a heart shaped urn. The  fountain is set on a base, surmounted by an entablature, and flanked by Corinthian columns. Its  pediment frieze simply shows a laurel wreath surrounding a vase (resembling the one on the  artist’s windowsill) from which two birds are drinking symmetrically in profile. Poliphilo describes  the architecture in detail. This white marble is named galactite, meaning milkstone, and the  sculpture is a working fountain inset in the outer wall of the baths. From the nymph’s left breast  runs hot water, while a stream of ice cold water spouts from her right breast. Both hot and cold  mingle temperately in a basin on the ground. Poliphilo takes a long drink of the cold water, and  when he looks around again, his new descriptions of the garden setting are finer, and more  detailed. Once inside, the hot spring baths also ceremonially purify his bodily senses. Then, in  an architectural prank using a moving step as a trigger, Poliphilo will be sprayed in the face by  another jet of icy water, in a popular joke called giochi d’acqua. 

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When Poliphilo begins his chronicle, his actions, words, and architectonic settings allude  regularly to the condition from which he suffers: melancholia, an imbalance of the four humours or radical fluids composing the spiritus which carries mental images or phantasms. The slow,  heavy planet Saturn governed earthy black bile, which provided the positive quality of slowing down the flux of ephemeral images, giving the phantasmagoria weight and stability enough to  endure. To be saturnine was to have the capacity to visualize and thus design and create in the  architectural sense. Many scholars wrote treatises on melancholy and how to keep it in balance,  by a sort of internal alchemy, including Marsilio Ficino’s Three Books on Life, and Robert Burton’s famous The Anatomy of Melancholy.  

 

Comparing the illustrations, it’s clear that Dürer’s reinterprets the objects and the two major  characters in the original woodcut: he is reframing the sleeping nymph fountain and through it  he has something important to disclose about perspective, but also about melancholy and materiality, natura naturans, phantasia, tempering, sollertia, and the dreaming imagination.  Going back to the Hypnerotomachia this paper re-reads the image in its original context of  events (the icy drink that restores his memory) and commentary, supported by paintings and  books of the era, and reinforced through Dürer’s interpretation.