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Description of  Perfection s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht D rer s Melencolia I (Zone Books)

Albrecht Drers master engraving, Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about melancholia and an allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences. Zealously interpreted since the nineteenth century, the work also presides over the origins of modern iconology. Yet more than a century of research has left us with a tangle of mutually contradictory theories. In Perfections Therapy, Mitchell Merback discovers in Melencolias opacity a fascinating possibility: that Drers masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly analyses the visual and narrative structure of Drers image, revisits its philosophical and medical contexts, and resituates it within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Drers project in dialogue with that of humanisms founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths the German artists ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated by contemporaries as the Apelles of our age, and ever since as Germanys first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Drer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a project of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, rebalance the passions, remedy the soul, and help in getting on with the project of perfection.