Agrippa in art: from Dürer's Melencolia I to the images of Faust

Agrippa's thought did not leave traces only in books. His ideas on melancholy, on numbers and on the proportions of the human body met, or perhaps inspired, some of the most studied images in European art. In other cases it was artists who gave a face to the legend of the learned magician. Reconstructing these relationships requires the same caution needed for the texts: alongside documented links there are suggestive hypotheses that remain just that.

Melencolia I and inspired melancholy

In 1514 Albrecht Dürer engraved Melencolia I, one of the most enigmatic prints of the Renaissance. A winged figure sits pensively among measuring instruments, a polyhedron, an hourglass, a pair of scales and a four-by-four magic square, in which the sum of every row, column and diagonal is thirty-four and the two central cells of the bottom row form the date 1514. The same kind of square is associated with Jupiter in the second book of De occulta philosophia.

In 1923 the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl proposed that Dürer knew the theory of inspired melancholy set out by Agrippa in the first book of the work, which had circulated in manuscript since 1510. According to this theory, the melancholic humour, under the influence of Saturn, can raise the soul to three degrees of inspiration: imaginative, rational and mental. The numeral I in the title would indicate the first degree, that of artists.

The hypothesis was developed in the great book Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, published in its definitive form in 1964. Other scholars have questioned whether Dürer could really have read Agrippa's manuscript, and today the link is considered possible but unproven. The fact remains that the two works share the same idea of melancholy as the condition of genius.

The human body and geometrical figures

In chapter twenty-seven of the second book, Agrippa illustrates the proportions of the human body, inscribed in a circle, a square and other figures. The woodcuts of the sixteenth-century editions show a man with arms and legs outstretched, at the centre of geometrical schemes and planetary signs. These images recall the Vitruvian tradition, the same from which Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing arose, although that drawing remained unpublished and Agrippa could not have known it.

For Agrippa those figures were not merely an anatomical fact or an exercise in geometry: they showed that man, the measure of all things and the image of God, reproduces in his own body the numerical harmony of the cosmos. It was an ancient idea, of Pythagorean and Platonic origin, that Robert Fludd would take up and develop visually in his great engravings of the seventeenth century.

The face of the magician

The early editions of De occulta philosophia carry a woodcut portrait of the author, and other engraved portraits accompanied later reprints and translations, including the English one of 1651. It is harder to identify works explicitly devoted to Agrippa. An etching by Rembrandt from the 1650s, traditionally known as Faust, shows a scholar contemplating a luminous disc full of letters; the title is not the artist's, and the subject is debated.

In 1790 an engraving after this etching accompanied Goethe's Faust. Ein Fragment, and once again the real magician and the literary one overlapped. Agrippa's artistic legacy is made of such overlaps: figures of scholars, of melancholics and of cosmic men who, without always naming him, speak the language of his occult philosophy.