Albrecht Dürer Creates Engraving Melencolia I

Packed with meaning and symbols, Melencolia I features a depiction of Dürer’s solid (the eight-faced stone to the left) whose points form the Dürer graph. The solid is a geometric shape discovered by Dürer and used in his art. It was instrumental to the development of perspective and proportion in art history as well as these mathematical concepts in geometry. In the top right we see the “magic square” where the numbers in each row, column, diagonal and quadrant all add up to 34.

This work was highly influential to Vera Molnár. She developed systematic variations on the “magic square” from this piece. Molnár first encountered Dürer at the age of 14 or 15 and would say this about her experience to Hans Ulrich Obrist: “That was something very important to happen upon Dürer’s magic square in Melancholia. I was very young and was looking for a foundation, something that I could hold onto in making non-figurative painting." Here, Molnár reveals how Melencolia led her to abandon figurative work for good.

Continuing, Molnár explains how her experience with Dürer led her to focus on the abstract, beginning a life-long love affair with the square:

“I was looking for a rule, something hidden, a secret, and felt that I’d found it in the magic squares system.... The magic square was like that. I liked Dürer’s work very much. As I was courageous, hard-working and methodical, I said to myself that I would try with other magic squares.”