Transcript to Podcast 3 – Why did Durer Create Melencolia? And how do his times compare to ours?

Durer created Melencolia after his mother died, after caring for her for a year in his house. In his words, she “died hard”. He was a devout Catholic, like his mother, but, surrounded by all the Renaissance’s turmoil of ideas about how religion, philosophy and science all fit together, Durer was anxious about his mother’s journey, and his own, into the afterlife and needed to clarify it all.
Which he did in Melencolia. He reviewed everything from scratch. He went to a big library, most probably that of his best friend, Willibald Pirckheimer, and made a list of key quotes from the literature of his time that he felt were relevant, which are listed in Book 1. He then did as an artist would do, he illustrated these, in layers of stories, using the symbolic objects, all in one picture. Which simplified and clarified it for him. 
So he created it first, to clarify his own creed, and secondly, very probably, to use it as a discussion document with his very closest fellow Humanists, who thought the same way he did. And, thirdly, he made it a ‘Question picture’, ie one that people would never forget, to ensure someone sometime would decode it, so that the whole world would eventually understand it. Such openness, however, meant that he had to disguise its content in order to avoid being named a heretic and burnt at the stake.

So how do his times compare to ours?
Our times are better than his, right? We’ve got open debate, democracy, freedom of speech, original ideas, tolerance – right? And we haven’t got burning at the stake? Maybe.

Were Durer’s opinions his own? Who were his influencers?
The Church and the Emperor at that time in Nuremberg had total control over what everyone said, wrote and how they lived. Learning was by the medieval way, by rote, unquestioning, without curiosity. Durer’s main influencers were a group of philosophers called the Humanists, who, in turn, were influenced by ancient authors such as Plato and their emphasis on open debate about everything. So his ideas were all influenced by someone else? How about ours? Durer’s Melencolia has given us many things to think about.