Dürer's Signature

High School Is Not a Place for Moping

by Neil Anstead, Los Angeles Unified School District's "Humanitas Program"

Interdisciplinary humanities programs at the high school level are most successful when organized around historically important themes, so that students can understand through history, literature, art, philosophy, and other disciplines how such ideas have evolved and changed. And to understand the ethical consequences of such shifts in sensibility and interest. One particularly important concept that distinguishes the European Middle Ages from the Renaissance - and from us - is that of individualism. This new, evolving sense of self was so important that it influenced every aspect of Renaissance culture and still deeply affects today's students. Its impact was - and is - both beneficial and problematic.

In politics we find the individualistic spirit operating in the quarrels between cities and states but also in the dynamic leadership of princes and heroes. Therefore, Machiavelli's shrewd advice on governance in The Prince (published 1532; written 1514) would be useful to study in an interdisciplinary curriculum devoted to this topic. In literature one sees Renaissance individualism run amuck in Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606) but more humane and effective in his Henry V (1597). In philosophy Montaigne (1533-92) wrote hundreds of pages of incisively honest self investigation. In the visual arts Dürer expressed a new sense of self by signing and marketing his works and by using his craft to explore the complexity and humanity of interior life. During the Middle Ages, the creative artist was likely to assume that only God could create; but during the Renaissance, Michelangelo would declare with titanic confidence of his statue of the Pieta: "I made this."

Dürer's Melencolia I (1514) provides insight into a particular dimension and consequence of this new Renaissance individualism. In the whole of the preceding Middle Ages, we never see an individualized and self-absorbed figure such as his Melancholy - lost in thought and unable to take up her tools and act. In the Medieval play Everyman, for instance, the characters remain almost purely symbolic representatives of this world and the next - Good Deeds, Death, and God - but at least they do something; they don't just sit and mope.

So it's important for students to see that interiority can lead to stasis as well as activity and to psychological dysfunction as well as creative introspection. In Renaissance England, many of Shakespeare's most intriguing characters revel in dangerously self-dramatizing melancholy-notably, the love-sick, self-indulgent Count Orsino in Twelfth Night, or, most famously, Prince Hamlet, moodily dressed in black and speaking in bitter soliloquies: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world." Individualism and self-consciousness have their price!

The study of the development of such a topic in an interdisciplinary fashion can teach both students and teachers a great deal about the past and about themselves. And it does so in ways that provide enriched contexts and standards for evaluation and judgment.

Continue reading this topic:

Home | Dürer's World | Languages of Printmaking | Melancholia in the Present Tense | Bibliography | About This Website