The engraving Melencolia I, 1514, by Albrecht Dürer is an allegorical composition of Melencholia Imaginativa, in which the ‘imagination’ predominates over ‘mind’ or ‘reason’, which he believed artists to be subject to. Erwin Panofsky proposed that this was Dürer’s “spiritual self portrait”. Panofsky also considers many of the objects of the picture to be Saturnian, the planet associated with melancholy; the magic square is a reference to Jupiter and alleviates the melancholic influence of Saturn. Mathematical knowledge is referenced by the use of the symbols: compass, the polyhedron, magic square, scale and the hourglass. It has been suggested that the engraving is much indebted to Plato’s Hippias Major and even more to Luca Pacioli book De Divina Proportia. It was also the inspiration for Anselm Keifer’s installation Volkszalung, 1991, in which a glass polyhedron sits in a towering library made of lead.

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