In the first two parts of this essay, I strove to define mythic or creative imitation based on my reading of both Iain McGilchrist and J.E. Lendon, considered it in the context of Machiavelli and Durer, wondered if it might have some relationship to Tolkien's idea of "sub-creation," and suggested it is closely allied to the principle of anagogy, which is seeing or moving through and to a higher level of thought or understanding. Having used Durer as an example, I'll continue on with him.
For centuries, one of Durer's most famous and most enigmatic pieces, Melancholia I, has defied full explanation. The tools on the ground are mostly carpentry tools, symbolic of Saturn, who as a god and planet ruled melancholics. The figure of the winged woman is likely to be the soul, while the ladder propped against the structure indicates unfinished work. The sphere, polyhedron, dividers, and magic square may be multivalent, referring to the soul's work, the search for harmony, or the movements of the heavens (specifically Saturn or Jupiter).
The whole engraving may be read allegorically, though all interpretations remain somewhat confused, as is the composition. Wojciech Balus pointed this out and focused instead on the way Durer deliberately manipulated compositional elements in the engraving to create a strong sense of "the undecidable," unsettled, and chaotic sense of melancholy. (See: Wojciech Balus, "'Melencolia I': Melancholy and the Undecidable," Artibus et Historiae, 15:30 (1994), 9-21.) I think Balus is correct without going far enough. The picture is constructed to invite us to share the emotion, move into and through it, and imitate it.
We are being invited into the artist's mind. Put another way, the print becomes a powerful form of non-verbal communication, one dependent not on a "reading" of the symbols but communicated by the disharmonious composition and comprehended by human abilities of empathy and mimesis. These are the means of putting ourselves into the mind of another, of understanding melancholy by imitating the artist's state of mind. Imitation (per McGilchrist) is fundamentally a matter of empathy and mimesis by which we may learn about anything from deep emotions to the skills of the most complex disciplines and professions.
I have pursued the theme of imitation in Durer because he gives it masterful expression, allows us to see different sides of it, and also because he illustrates another theme from McGilchrist essential to understanding the Renaissance: the idea of the "skill that hides itself." This may sound like an odd notion, but we are all familiar with these skills in some basic form. As Sam Willis notes in The Fighting Temeraire (Pegasus Books, 2010, 136-137); these are akin to learning to ride a bicycle: they may be imitated, never taught, and cannot be readily described.
We have a tendency to think of skills as things, precisely definable and measurable, absolutely testable and certifiable. (This misunderstanding of skill is one of the points at which our modern educational system, indeed our whole culture, has begun to crumble.) The ancient, medieval, and early modern world had a different, more organic understanding. Looked at this way, a skill was a mystery mastered over time, an indissoluble portion of a whole body of lore and knowledge; the expression of that skill, whether in a painting, a piece of joinery, a necklace, a book, or anything else was proof of mastery, a matter of quality, not of abstract testing. Most importantly, it became implicit knowledge, very much in the sense of David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1980). What this means is that it was internalized to the point at which the execution of the skill was effortless and "self-hiding" in McGilchrist's formulation. The ultimate self-hiding skill for the Renaissance man or woman was mythic, creative imitation.
So let us return to the example of Durer's Melancholia I. His skill was hidden on multiple levels. We have already seen how he manipulated conventional compositional techniques to create the desired effect. Balus goes into great detail on this, showing for instance, how he raised the vanishing point of the perspective to create a sense of unease, and how he complemented this by removing many of the horizontal lines that would visually point to the vanishing point outside the frame of the picture. The extent of Durer's concealed skills does not end there. The polyhedron that dominates a part of the print is extremely complex and very difficult to draw in perspective, a real virtuoso performance given the tools and techniques of the days, as Terence Lynch observed in the 1980s. (Terence Lynch, "The Geometric Body in Durer's Engraving Melencholia I," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982): 226-232.)
Durer also gives us important clues to how self-hiding skills and imitation declined and were eventually replaced by modern concepts of measurable, certifiable skills and training. After his years in Italy, he had acquired a solid grounding in the new techniques of perspective. He capitalized on the new market for instructional texts that flourished in the last decades of the fifteenth century by publishing books on the proper way to draw in perspective and create mechanical drawing aids. This was part of a flood of books that explained the "mysteries" of many crafts and created an atmosphere in which it became possible to reduce the mysteries to simple sets of skills that could be taught to anyone. The foundations for the rationalization of work had begun.
Once skills could be reduced to instructions, the methods for learning them changed. They could be learned in parts and with a much reduced attention to imitation. The importance of imitation was gradually reduced over the subsequent four centuries, replaced by modern methods of teaching and working, and left as the preserve of small children and certain professions. Method could replace skill and deep understanding. If McGilchrist is correct, then it also represented a transition from a way of learning and understanding that privileged the strengths of the right hemisphere to one that relied more heavily on the left. Whether he is correct about this or not, it made possible key aspects of our modern world, with its emphasis on ease of learning, exact reproduction, rationalization of work and knowledge, and mechanization. We are materially richer for that, but we are in crisis; what comes next?
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