This print is one of Dürer's three so called 'masterworks', representing both his technical ability and his own creative brilliance. The numerous symbolic objects in the work relate to the title ‘Melancholia 1’or melancholy which in the 1500s, was thought to balance madness and genius. The ‘1’ relates to the first sign of melancholy - the linking of creativity and imagination according to the contemporary book ‘De occulta philosophia’ by Cornelius Agrippa. Many of the symbols relate to the 'Liberal Arts', the creative arts of Dürer’s time. For example, the sphere and polyhedron relate to geometry, the tools and dividers relate to architecture, the crucible and scales relate to goldsmithing or alchemy. The magic square relates to mathematics. All of these tools are unused due to the figure’s melancholy, and as the hour-glass suggests, time is passing. This is perhaps emphasised too by the faint skull shape in the polyhedron. The dog, a symbol of intelligence and the cherub-like figure that assists the genius (himself sitting on a mill-stone suggesting the burden of its task) have gone to sleep, waiting for the genius' melancholic mood to pass.
John Christian (Early German Sources fro Pre-Raphaeite designs, Art Quarterly, 1973) mentions a description of a drawing made in 1854 which appears to be derived from Durer's "Melencolia" in Memorials Vol 1 p 103 "Yet I know that it is an allegorical portrait of himself which exists in an early drawing that I will try to describe. It shews that figure of a man seated in mournful dejection before a desk where lies an unfinished drawing of an angel. A small broken statue of an angel also lies at this feet. The man's eyes are closed, and his head rests wearily upon one hand, while in the other he holds an hourglass from which but few of the sands have run. the background is of heavy rain falling into a dark sea, and underneath it is written "When shall I arise and the night be gone?" Memorials Vol 1 p 287 In a letter to William Allingham c.1865 "...And this luck has happened to me, of all lucks the best that could have happened, Ruskin has given me the four great engravings of Albert Durer - the Knight, Melancholy, St. Hubert, and Adam and Eve - all perfect impressions; also many woodcuts of the same and the great designs of the Apocalypse, glorious to behold."