Then and Now: Melancholy as divine inspiration
Art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote of Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I , that its influence “extended all over the European continent and lasted for more than three centuries”; that the engraving “combines the traditional iconographies of melancholy and geometry, both governed by Saturn”. I was still unfamiliar with Dürer’s off-center polyhedron and brooding protagonist angel in a stark landscape when I was at my stone dealers and was drawn to the weird shape, the spalts, the greens of the large emerald slice. I made of it an almost monochrome piece and engraved on the back of the stone, ‘Then and Now’, a hidden-from-view plain reminder, a vow to keep the dialogue between the past and present flowing.