Melencolia I

A winged figure sits slumped with head on fist, compass idle in hand, surrounded by the abandoned tools of geometry and craft: a polyhedron, a millstone, an hourglass, a magic square, a sleeping dog, and a bat unfurling the word MELENCOLIA I across a strange dim sky. Dürer engraved it in 1514 at the height of his technical powers, and it has drawn more scholarly commentary than any other print in history. Impressions are held by the great print rooms, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the image fixed melancholy as the temperament of intellectual and artistic genius for the next four centuries.