Perfection's Therapy

An Essay on Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I

Mitchell B. Merback (Professor, Johns Hopkins University)

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English

Zone Books
13 March 2018

Renaissance art; Painting & paintings; Individual artists, art monographs

Series: Perfection's Therapy

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact.

Albrecht Durer'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's opacity, its structural ""chaos,"" and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Durer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing.

Merback deftly resituates Durer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Durer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Durer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the ""Apelles of the black line"" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Durer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

By: Mitchell B. Merback (Professor Johns Hopkins University)
Imprint: Zone Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 29mm
Weight: 628g
ISBN: 9781942130000
ISBN 10: 1942130007
Series: Perfection's Therapy
Pages: 360
Publication Date: 13 March 2018
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Mitchell B. Merback is Professor of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews for Perfection's Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I

… many things to savor in Merback's book … it erects an intriguing mode of interpretation … —PopMatters ... highly speculative, erudite, and informed. —LEONARDO Merback's stunning book makes the case for the inception of a new genre of imagery in Melencolia I. —3:AM Magazine