As for the last of the three, "Melencolia I," representing intellectual virtue, it is the most astonishing of all. Peter-Klaus Schuster, author of a book solely devoted to it, calls it das Bild der Bilder, the picture of pictures. It has also been called the most written-about work in all art history. Whether or not that is so, it is surely one of a very few graphic creations that could be discussed from now until the end of time without exhausting its meanings. Unlike the other two prints, this one is wholly secular in its subject matter, which goes some of the way toward explaining its special appeal for modern viewers.

The subject of the picture is, of course, melancholy, which to us means depression to us and to ancient Greek and medieval writers meant one of the four "humors" or bodily fluids that were thought to influence character. Melancholy, literally black bile, was considered the least auspicious of these; in excess it would induce gloom, miserliness or even insanity. But during the Renaissance, melancholy acquired a new, more positive connotation.

The Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino for the first time linked the depressive temperament with creativity and inspiration, an idea that is now common currency. Ficino believed that in certain cases, melancholics (in which category he included himself) could triumph over their despondency and inertia to gain access to what Plato called the "divine frenzy," indeed, that their struggles with darkness made them more sensitive to the light. For Ficino, the inspiration in question was purely scholarly and literary; Dürer, a creative melancholic himself, here expands the idea to encompass the visual arts.

In keeping with this new, ennobled conception of melancholy, Dürer has portrayed its spirit as an imposing winged woman, like a grounded angel. She is sunk in contemplation or perhaps just brooding depressively, head in hand. While her face is appropriately dark, her eyes have a glowing intensity; in fact, the whole print conveys a paradoxical mixture of darkness and light. In her right hand the woman holds a compass, and scattered on the ground are various tools of architecture and building, including a straightedge, a plane, a saw and nails. The polished sphere and the huge, strangely truncated polyhedron represent geometry, the ability of the human mind to master space, which the Renaissance saw as essential to art. While the spirit of melancholy pays no attention to the book on her lap, the little putto seated on a cracked grindstone above her is busy writing on a slate. Together they may represent the two melancholic poles of creative activity and creative paralysis.

Geometry, for various abstruse reasons, was associated with Saturn, which Renaissance astrology considered the patron planet of melancholy. The scrawny dog sleeping by the woman’s side and the bat whose wings form the scroll reading "Melencolia I" are both Saturnine creatures, according to a highly influential treatise of the day, Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia.

Dürer knew this manual for aspiring magi, and it is almost certain that the Roman numeral "I" in the title refers to Agrippa’s elaboration of the Ficinian system in which there are three realms of melancholic genius, the first being imaginative or artistic, the second that of reason, the third spiritual.

The key to the magic square on the wall is also to be found in the curious pages of Agrippa. Ficino had advised Saturnine temperaments to counteract the planet’s potentially baleful rays by surrounding themselves with talismans of cheerful and wholesome Jupiter, and Agrippa supplies this magic square—whose rows, columns and diagonals all add to 34—as a Jovial emblem. (Incidentally, the two center boxes in the bottom row contain the date of the print, 1514.) According to the historian Frances Yates, the whole of "Melencolia I" could be construed as a talisman of Saturn, just as Botticelli’s "Primavera" could be a talisman of Venus.
 
For all the arcane symbolism, this print is a very personal statement, and Panofsky aptly described it as "a spiritual self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer." While Dürer pushed graphic art to very limits of human ability and transcended the traditional role of artist to become an art theoretician and a student of science, he was deeply troubled by his final inability to grasp the infinite. The brooding, defeated soul in the picture is him, eyes downcast as the spiritual sun blazes in the far distance. "What absolute beauty is, I know not," he wrote, around the time he made this magisterial print. "Nobody knows it except God."