A PERSONIFICATION of Geometry, unable to conceptualise the
metaphysical; or an angel who is too fat to fly? Who is the figure
who dominates Albrecht Dürer's cryptic print Melencolia I?
In a splendid half-hour of radio, the art historian Dr Janina
Ramirez investigated this most enigmatic of Renaissance images in
Melencolia (Radio 4, Monday of last week).
As well as the angel, the picture is full of bric-a-brac:
compasses, books, a magic square, a lump of stone. The confusion of
stuff brings on the instinctive melancholy of anybody who likes
things tidy. It is, as one commentator here put it, "like a
skip".
One question I had of the programme, and which I hardly dare
ask, since it sounds so childishly simple, is this: Why is this
number 1? Did the artist already know that there was going to be a
sequel? But the programme dealt in high-concept theories, the most
recent of which comes from the scholar Patrick Dooley. The key to
Melencolia, apparently, lies in Plato's Hippias dialogue,
which deals with the subject of The Beautiful.
In that text, we read of the despair that results from the
realisation that we cannot define beauty per se, only identify
examples of it. Our angel is experiencing that despair; her books
and protractor are useless in the face of the immeasurable.
If, on the one hand, Dürer's work embodies an impotence in the
face of beauty, it also displays humanity's ability to create it;
and one of the fascinating elements of this programme was hearing
about the techniques by which the artist created this print.
Dürer's Nuremberg was a centre of Renaissance art and technology;
and a small insight into the technical challenge of producing
something like Melencolia is illuminated by way of a
mistake in the magic-number square therein depicted.
In the first version of the print, the number "9" is rendered in
reverse - a reminder that the entire plate from which prints were
made would have had to be etched in reverse. If you are the type to
get melancholic in the face of other people's brilliance, then
Melencolia I may not be for you.
Reasons to be cheerful and sad, in almost equal measure, were
provided by the World Service's Assignment programme last
week. Educating Ulster (Thursday), presented by Andrea
Catherwood, gave us an update on the trend towards non-segregated
schools in Northern Ireland - something that the political parties
in Stormont pay only lip-service towards, but which is driven on by
determined parents.
These parents include people with more reason than most to shun
the other community: people such as Jim McConville, whose mother,
Jean, was the victim of a notorious shooting by the IRA in 1972. Mr
McConville is a strong advocate of integrated schooling, even when,
as we saw at Cliftonville Integrated Primary School, Belfast, the
religious-education classes are still segregated.
"God doesn't make religion,men do," was nine-year-old Jordan
Bell's response when asked what he thought of the arrangements.
But, in a society where such schools as his are only seven per cent
of the total, his opinion still finds little recognition at the
institutional level.