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| Albrecht Durer, Melencolia I, 1514 |
Another enigma of Melencolia I that puzzles many scholars is the nature of the figure of the melancholic angel. Why is the angel seated like this, why this pose? Would a comparable example from the past that Durer could use as a source of his expression tell us something more about the identity of the seated angel?
To understand the message of the riddle of Melencolia I one has to question the identity of the angelic being seated. Surely an artist, but not only a painter ... why the wings? We have already learned from previous examples that Durer's method of encoding is always very lucid, following the rule - make it to obvious and nobody will get it. As in every case of other "Meisterstiche riddles", is the identity always suggested by the date that Albrecht Durer signed his work. This is the only engraving from Meisterstiche that does not have a cartellino inscribed with the date and monogram AD.
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Magical square of numbers from Melencolia I |
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The engraving is signed twice, in the shaded part of the stone step in lower right corner, and cryptically in a magical square of Jupiter embedded in the walls behind the seated figure. It is containing the date concealed in the last line of numbers: 4 - 15 - 14 - 1. Durer is obviously communicating the date 1514, while the remaining numbers, 4 and 1, stand for the gematric values of D and A, his monogram, whose gematric value is usually added to the inscribed date to produce another date ... 1514 + (AD = 1+4 = 5) = 1519. So, like in case of St. Jerome in His Study is this engraving memorizing the event from 1519: Durer remembers Leonardo da Vinci, since 1519 is the year of his death in Amboise. But this engraving is not commemorating the death of some important figure, since there is no skull present in composition. We have learned from Knight, Death, and Devil and St. Jerome in His Study that a skull is symbolizing simply the death of a hero.
If Durer's metaphors are so direct, we have to pose ourselves a question, who was the most melancholic artist of the Renaissance, an artist that Durer would find prominent enough to depict him on his master-engraving? It seems that Florence was his weak point.
"La mia allegrez' è la maninconia"
The seated figure is wearing a pair of wings, and it seems that some kind of an "angel" is involved. The melancholic angel of Renaissance is only one, the greatest "angel" Michael, better known as Michelangelo! The great master synonymously identified with the archangel Michael is gematrically encrypted in the mysterious title of the engraving. In simple Masonic gematria:
MELENCOLIA I = (13+5+12+5+14+3+15+12+9+1)+(1) = 89+1 = 90
MICHAEL ANGEL = (13+9+3+8+1+5+12)+(1+14+7+5+12) = 90
or in a another manner
MELENCOLIA = 13+5+12+5+14+3+15+12+9+1 = 89
MICHELANGEL = 13+9+3+8+5+12+1+14+7+5+12 = 89
(a variant spelling of Michelangelo)
Michelangelo was known sometimes to be extremely melancholic person, suffering the incarnation into mundane world more heavily then anyone else. Michelangelo wrote in one of his poems
La mia allegrez' è la maninconia - My joy is melancholy
His genius violently imposed the burden of the "ideal" upon his personality, being in constant rage, lamenting in his letters the abomination of his soul and the world with people in general. He was deceived many times, mostly because of his own character. One of his masterpieces was particularly difficult to execute, the marvelous Sistine Chapel in Rome. This commission from Pope Julius II to repaint the ceiling of the chapel caused Michelangelo a lot of troubles, and he worked on the project from 1508 to 1512, when Julius II lost his patience with Michelangelo and insisted on the opening of the chapel. He was not a painter after all, and had a terrible "inhibition" of a genius - he had to do everything by himself. He had many problems with the execution of his projects, since the task he posed to himself was always to great to be achieved in reasonable terms, and his clients had him enough very soon.
By Melancholy, saith he, some men are made as it were divine, foretelling things to come, and some men are made Poets. He saith also, that all men that were excellent in any Science, were for the most part melancholy. Democritus, and Plato attest the same, saying, that there were some melancholy men, that had such excellent wits, that they were thought, and seemed to be more divine then humane. - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa: Of Occult Philosophy, Book I. (part 3)
Albrecht Durer perhaps symbolized the heroic opus executed in the Sistine Chapel by the rainbow above the water, which represents the arch that Michelangelo initially painted. The painting of The Last Judgment above the altar of the chapel was executed by Michelangelo later, between 1535-1541. Another allusion to the martyrdome work of painting the ceiling are also the ladders, on which Michelangelo spent impossible amount of time in order to complete the whole opus.
In line with my interpretation of the angel of Melencolia I as no one else but Michelangelo it is noticable that the pose of the seated angel resembles one of Michelangelo's most famous sculptures. In 1519 (1514+AD = 1519) Michelangelo received a commission for Medici Chapel, where two brothers of Medici family are buried: Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino (1492-1519) and Guiliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours (1479-1516).
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| Michelangelo, Il Pensiero, 1520-1534 |
Durer dated the engraving as made in 1514, the date when he couldn't see the Il Pensiero to represent it as the pose in which Michelangelo is seated in Melencolia I. There are two possibilities: he made the engraving far after the date 1519 when Michelangelo begun to work on Medici chapel, or Michelangelo saw Durer's engraving and copied the pose of "himself" for his Il Pensiero. The first proposition seems somehow more probable, Durer copied the famous pose of Il Pensiero as a metaphor for Michelangelo. Like in other cases Durer is not to be trusted in his datings, since they are more keys to the mysteries than real datings. But even the second speculation is not completely without supportive suggestions, namely Durer was known to send his engravings around, mostly to his friends as a riddles, hieroglyphs, or rebuses to be cracked. It is not impossible that Durer and Michelangelo met, perhaps in Venice in year 1494 when both of them were near there. The angel is holding a compass in his right hand, a sign of Pantocrator, or Christ as an Architect, and Michelangelo also created the architecture of the Medici chapel.
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 "Il Pensiero")
 "Il Pensiero")
