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Albrecht Dürer´s famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. In Perfection´s Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia´s opacity, its structural "chaos," and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer´s masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer´s image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer´s therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism´s founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer´s ambition to act as a physician of the soul.

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Mitchell B. Merback is Professor of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.

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