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Perfection's Therapy - An Essay on Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I (Hardcover)
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Perfection's Therapy - An Essay on Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I (Hardcover)
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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.
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