ThoughtGallery.org > Mitchell B. Merback : Dürer’s “Melencolia I” and Therapeutic Images Before Modernity

Mitchell B. Merback : Dürer’s “Melencolia I” and Therapeutic Images Before Modernity

Deutsches Haus at NYU and the NYU Department of German present “Dürer’s Melencolia I and Therapeutic Images Before Modernity.” Prof. Merback will discuss in a dialogue with Christopher S. Wood (Department of German, NYU) the concepts and inspiration behind his new book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I (Zone Books, 2017), placing Albrecht Dürer’s famously inscrutable engraving Melencolia I at the intersection of Renaissance art, medicine, and philosophy.

About Perfection’s Therapy

Albrecht Dürer’s famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history’s own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection’s Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia I‘s opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer’s masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing.











When: Fri., Apr. 13, 2018 at 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Where: Deutsches Haus at NYU
42 Washington Mews
212-998-8660
Price: Free
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Deutsches Haus at NYU and the NYU Department of German present “Dürer’s Melencolia I and Therapeutic Images Before Modernity.” Prof. Merback will discuss in a dialogue with Christopher S. Wood (Department of German, NYU) the concepts and inspiration behind his new book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I (Zone Books, 2017), placing Albrecht Dürer’s famously inscrutable engraving Melencolia I at the intersection of Renaissance art, medicine, and philosophy.

About Perfection’s Therapy

Albrecht Dürer’s famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history’s own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection’s Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia I‘s opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer’s masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing.

Buy tickets/get more info now