Albrecht Duerer's Melencolia I engraved in 1514, seems an open invitation to the cryptolo-gist. Packed with occult symbolism from alchemy, astrology, mathematics and medicine, it promises hidden messages and recondite meanings. What it really tells us, however, is that Duerer was a philosopher-artist of the same stamp as Leonardo da Vinci, immersed in the intellectual currents of his time. In the words of art historian John Gage, Melencolia is "almost an anthology of alchemical ideas about the structure of matter and the role of time". Duerer's brooding angel is surrounded by the instruments of the proto-scientist: a balance, an hourglass, measuring calipers, a crucible on a blazing fire. Here, too, is numerological symbolism in the 'magic square' of the integers 1-16, the rows, columns and main diagonals each adding up to 34: a common emblem of both folk and philosophical magic. Here is the astrological portent of a comet, streaming past an improbable rainbow, a symbol of the colour-changing processes of the alchemical route to the philosopher's stone. And here is the title itself: melancholy, associated in ancient medicine with black bile, the same colour as the material with which the alchemist's Great Work to make gold was supposed to begin.
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