The Anagram and the Threshold​

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Don Kunze

Penn State University, USA​

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Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia§1, is as polymorphic as his name, which in the original  

Hungarian of his father, was Ajto (“door”), another form of Ajtás, the family’s original home. Dürer never ceased to play with words as much as he did with images, and much of what he thought went into the themes and tricks of Melencolia§1. Even the intentional misspelling of melancholy played a role in the elaborate codes and ciphers that held this manifesto in reserve for only “those with eyes to see.” One of these clues is about the geometric secret of the door. 

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David Ritz Finkelstein, a physicist, developed his interest in Melencolia§1 once he realized the image’s anamorphic potential. He surmised that Dürer used this image to be a calculus about art, science, and geometry. Ritz notes that there is no “behind” to a Dürer image. Everything is about the experience of facing  something opaque, and having no other option than, in 3-d space, of moving around the solid  object only to encounter more faces. Within this series, however, the project of truth emerges.  Each facet is both a “ghost” and a “door,” each requires a password. e password is itself a limen,  not to the imagined other side but to a topological interior concealed within the transformational  logic of this boundary.  

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is is not a matter of finding “two sides of the same coin.” It is about finding a coin with one  side. Inversion is conversion, in the thinking of Dürer’s time, when the rules of perspective drawing ran up against the limit of Euclid where a new geometry made itself felt. Just as the discovery of the New World coincided with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, a purely intellectual momentum coincided with revisionary ideas about space and time. ought and place became interchangeable. 

 

Ritz may not be the first to notice that Dürer intentionally misspelled melancholy to allow it to function as an anagram spelling “l-i-m-e-n c-o-e-l-a,” but he was the first to understand the relation of melancholy to the general role of liminality in the arts. In this era, anamorphosis became a means of making images that took the art of the emblem book to another, more ambitious level. In this short essay, I hope to build a case for how the limen is what is called an inversion circle, a cut that duplicates the inside on the outside, and/or vice versa. Although inversive geometry was officially first discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner in 1824, Dürer’s engraving shows that the idea was in the air before 1514. By the time of Holbein’s famous painting involving anamorphic skull (e Ambassadors, 1530), inversive geometry had already begun to ally itself with thresholds, liminal cuts, and ritualized passages of the thinker, from abjection to truth.  

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When we theorize melancholy, we must not leave out its humoristic legacy, its medical status, or its psychological relations to the minds of artists, known since Aristotle’s Problemma XXX.i. Geometry does not depart from these themes; rather it shows how, from the beginning, melancholy is about the transformation of space  and time by the idea, encountered both as failure and as truth. is essay avers that the  multidimensional relations of diverse meanings has a single geometry that, once mastered,  becomes a clavis universalis.