[68] The term melancholy meant in Dürer’s time, as it did also in
Shakespeare’s and Milton’s, “thought or thoughtfulness.” Says Milton in
_Il Penseroso_:
“Hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy,
Hail divinest melancholy
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight,
And therefore to our weaker view
O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue.”—I, 12.
Thought that does not lead to action produces a gloomy state of mind.
Thoughtfulness which cannot find a way out of itself is that melancholy
which engenders weakness,—a truth which is illustrated in Hamlet.
Shakespeare still uses the words thought and melancholy as synonyms,
saying:
“The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Dürer’s melancholy does not represent the gloominess of thought, but the
power of invention. Soberness and even a certain sadness are considered
only as an element of this melancholy, but on the whole the genius of
thought appears bright, self-possessed, and strong.
Dürer represents the Science of Mechanical Invention as a winged female
figure musing over some problem. Scattered on the floor around her lie
some of the simple tools used in the sixteenth century. A ladder leans
against the house, that assists in climbing otherwise inaccessible
heights. A scale, an hour-glass, a bell, and the magic square are hanging
on the wall behind her.
At a distance a bat-like creature, being the gloom of melancholy, hovers
in the air like a dark cloud, but the sun rises above the horizon, and at
the happy middle between these two extremes stands the rainbow of serene
hope and cheerful confidence.