Focus on this artwork and discuss the Legacy.
Artists from the sixteenth century used Melencolia I as a source, either in single images personifying melancholia or in the older type in which all four temperaments appear. Lucas Cranach the Elder used its motifs in numerous paintings between 1528 and 1533. They share elements with Melencolia I such as a winged, seated woman, a sleeping or sitting dog, a sphere, and varying numbers of children playing, likely based on Durer's Putto. Cranach's paintings, however, contrast melancholy with childish gaiety, and in the 1528 painting, occult elements appear. Prints by Hans Sebald Beham (1539) and Jost Amman (1589) are clearly related. In the Baroque period, representations of Melancholy and Vanity were combined. Domenico Fetti's Melancholy/Meditation (c. 1620) is an important example; Panofsky et al. wrote that "the meaning of this picture is obvious at first glance; all human activity, practical no less than theoretical, theoretical no less than artistic, is vain, in view of the vanity of all earthly things."The print attracted  nineteenth-century Romantic artists; self-portrait drawings by Henry Fuseli and Caspar David Friedrich show their interest in capturing the mood of the Melencolia figure, as does Friedrich's The Woman with the Spider's Web.The Renaissance historian Frances Yates believed George Chapman's 1594 poem The Shadow of Night to be influenced by Dürer's print, and Robert Burton described it in his The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Dürer's Melencolia is the patroness of the City of Dreadful Night in the final canto of James Thomson's poem of that name. The print was taken up in Romantic poetry of the nineteenth century in English and French.The Passion façade of the Sagrada Família contains a magic square based on the magic square in Melencolia I. The square is rotated and one number in each row and column is reduced by one so the rows and columns add up to 33 instead of the standard 34 for a 4x4 magic square.Works influenced by Melencolia I
The Woman with the Spider's Web Passion Sebald Beham Domenico Fetti Vanity Hans Sebald Beham magic square melancholia James Thomson The Shadow of Night Frances Yates Caspar David Friedrich poem of that name Lucas Cranach the Elder Henry Fuseli Sagrada Família Putto City of Dreadful Night The Anatomy of Melancholy four temperaments George Chapman Jost Amman Robert Burton temperament