Guided Pathway

Dürer, according to Panofsky, “shifted his aims towards a purely anthropometric science which he believed to have an educational rather than a practical value, so he pursued the study of proportions as an end in itself to the point that his studies “lost almost all connection with artistic practice” (Panofsky, 135). The Northern artist created a closed geometric microcosm populated by human “types” that are fixed by numerical proportions and, contrary to earlier microcosmic representations, were shielded from the volatility of Medieval astrological influences. But then how can we account for the regression into the brooding skepticism ostensibly splintering the same geometric objects in the artist’s Melencholia I? It would appear that traces of the influences of Medieval similitudes survive in this new rational world and that the same circles that limit the human figure inside a rigid geometric pattern in #8 also reverberate as the aftereffects of earlier epistemological systems.