Dürer's Signature

Clinical Depression
Then and Now

Patricia Waldron, M.D.

Renaissance Melancholy
Five hundred years ago, an imbalance in the four "humors" that influence temperament was thought to be the basis of mood and physical disturbance. This concept of four humors or bodily fluids-yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm-goes back to ancient Greece. A predominance of black bile was thought to cause melancholy and madness. Because it involved cogitation and introspection, the state of melancholy became associated with the creative person. The philosopher Plato first postulated the notion that melancholy often followed "the Divine Frenzy" of creativity.

Depression Now
In modern medicine we speak of "imbalances" in neurotransmitters as the cause of many illnesses, both emotional and physical. Our current diagnostic criteria for a major depressive illness, whether "bipolar" (manic depression) or "unipolar" (depression), include a depressed or irritable mood; markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities; fatigue; sleep and appetite disturbances; psychomotor agitation or retardation; feelings of worthlessness or excessive inappropriate guilt; diminished ability to think and concentrate; and recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation.

Dürer's Melencolia I
Even though we are now able to scan the brain and demonstrate the actual effects of mood changes, there is still no more powerful visual image of profound depression and its symptoms than Dürer's engraving of 1514. This print evokes in the viewer a visceral and intellectual response even without understanding the specifics of the iconography.

The gloomy, forbidding figure slumped in a cold, darkly shadowed landscape, appears deep in her own inner world. She seems paralyzed by her thoughts, unable to stir or make use of the tools of creativity and pleasure surrounding her. Her tangled hair and unkempt appearance, her brooding gaze and lack of eye contact convey a riveting sense of despair, as do the starving, moribund dog curled in a fetal position, the scribbling cherub oblivious of all around him, and the bat shrieking against the heavens. This is not transient sorrow but a mediation on the powerlessness and hopelessness of the human spirit overwhelmed by the feelings of life's futility.

"Portrait of the Artist"?
The distinguished art historian Erwin Panofsky memorably referred to Melencolia I as Dürer's "spiritual self-portrait." We know, indeed, that Dürer thought of himself as melancholic and frequently experienced dejection and a sense of "powerlessness" in the face of the staggering intellectual and technical demands he placed on himself. But Dürer's energy and talent clearly turned periods of depression into an exploration of the inner self, which combined with his careful observation of the external world, resulted in works such as this splendid engraving. While not directly autobiographical, Melencolia I does seem quintessentially to define the deeply experienced paradox of the Renaissance artist-philosopher, "who feels inspired by celestial influences and eternal ideas, but suffers all the more deeply from his human frailty and intellectual finiteness."

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