The moulds and matrices of the Letter-Founder are so valuable, if lost, nothing could restore them, it being the work of collecting them of more than the ordinary life of a man. Hence founders keep their matrices in strong rooms of iron or stone, into which they are placed by the superintendent of the foundry as soon as done with and every night.
We often push thoughts of death far out of our awareness, but at the present time they unavoidably re-emerge. Can we learn something helpful from this?
Dürer's Melencolia I is one of three large prints of 1513 and 1514 known as his Meisterstiche (master engravings). The other two are Knight, Death, and the Devil (43.106.2) and Saint Jerome in His Study (19.73.68). The three are in no way a series, but they do correspond to the three kinds of virtue in medieval scholasticism--moral, theological, and intellectual--and they embody the complexity of Dürer's thought and that of his age.
Melencolia I is a depiction of the intellectual situation of the artist and is thus, by extension, a spiritual self-portrait of Dürer. In medieval philosophy each individual was thought to be dominated by one of the four humors; melancholy, associated with glack gall, was the least desirable of the four, and melancholics were considered the most likely to succumb to insanity. Renaissance thought, however, also linked melancholy with creative genius; thus, at the same time that this idea changed the status of this humor, it made the self-conscious artist aware that his gift came with terrible risks.
The winged personification of Melancholy, seated dejectedly with her head resting on her hand, holds a caliper and is surrounded by other tools associated with geometry, the one of the seven liberal arts that underlies artistic creation--and the one through which Dürer, probably more than most artists, hoped to approach perfection in his own work. An influential treatise, the De Occulta Philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, almost certainly known to Dürer, probably holds the explanation for the number I in the title: creativity in the arts was the realm of the imagination, considered the first and lowest in the hierarchy of the three categories of genius. The next was the realm of reason, and the highest the realm of spirit. It is ironic that this image of the artist paralyzed and powerless exemplifies Dürer's own artistic power at its superlative height.
Memoir of a woodworker who aims too high and teeters always on the brink of failure.
There is a class of woodworkers who read Fine Woodworking with all the yearning of the village idiot hopelessly in love with the village beauty, who fondle those photographs of unbelievable masterpieces with longing despair. These are the wood butchers. The wood butcher embarks on projects that are too advanced for his abilities. He aims too high and teeters always on the brink of failure—when he is not already wallowing in disaster. He is not of the home-improvement breed, those who saw weathervanes in the shape of camels and build lawn furniture from packing crates. His projects are Hepplewhite chairs and Goddard block fronts. He is like the high-school art student who copies the Mona Lisa.
The wood butcher always chooses the most difficult way to go, disdaining the obvious shortcut. If he needs to take two inches off a plank, he will plane with long, soul-satisfying strokes, glorying in the aromatic shavings that litter his workshop floor. He won’t saw the piece in one pass through his tablesaw.
He reveres sharp tools. He has a collection of stones and special oils and gadgets to put the precise angle on plane irons. But he hates to sharpen tools. So he won’t lend them, knowing, by looking into his own heart, that the borrower will dull them utterly—if he returns them at all. He is an insatiable tool collector, always hoping to find one that will cut cleanly forever without sharpening. He buys tools that he may use once, or not at all, and they litter his too-small workshop.
The most distinctive characteristic of the wood butcher is his cursing. When he saws a piece one inch short and it won’t fit, he sincerely invokes the gods with a full and heartfelt desire for lightning to melt the ruler, vaporize the saw, and singe the arm that ruined a beautiful piece of wood. Then he splices and patches to make the offending piece do. A wood butcher’s work, once finished, has unexpected joints and unexplained pieces of wood inlaid in odd places.
Patching is an art in itself, not often discussed at the more expert levels of woodworking. If you ask the expert what he intends to do about a flaw, he will respond, coolly, “Sand it out.” But there’s no way, when making a fluted column, to sand out the flute that winds into the next slot because the fitting wasn’t properly clamped down before the errant flute was run. So the column becomes an exercise in patching, with carefully cut blocks squeezed into carefully cut grooves. What about a rabbet on the wrong side of the board? Saw off a sizable hunk of wood, make a lap joint, glue on a new piece, and start over on the rabbet, or else throw away those dovetails cut with fearful expenditure of time at the other end.
Just about anything can be patched. The expert says, disdainfully, “Dumb amateurs. Ought to start over and make a new piece.” Easy for you to say. The wood butcher knows that if he starts over he’ll make a different error on the new piece—and have to patch that.
But to make up for it all, there’s the moment when the project is going together and it looks so good the wood butcher just can’t believe his own two clumsy hands could possibly have turned out such beauty. He drags casual visitors into his shop, where they stare dumbfounded at raw wood and comment, innocently, “I see you took all the finish off.” His voice trembling, the wood butcher replies, “I made it, the whole thing.”
The wood butcher is thankful that few people know where to look for evidence of his failures and can see only the sanded wood, the chair or chest of drawers with a shiny lacquer finish that most think could come only from a furniture store. They are amazed, as when seeing a monkey painting a picture—not so much that the picture is beautiful but that the monkey can paint at all.
The wood butcher delights in seeing thin shavings peel evenly from his workpiece and in the crisp sharpness of a carving in good stock. Of course, the grain is usually crazy and there’s a knot in the panel right where it hurts the most and there’s cursing. But the wood butcher remembers only the beautifully grained stuff that works true and smells wonderful.
After all the tribulations, the pieces that were off a fraction, the saw that slipped so the corners aren’t quite square, the unexpected splits, the gouges in the surface that was to have been so lovely, the wood butcher remembers the tenon joints he tapped in oh-so-gently with his mallet, the sanded surface that felt so smooth, like the finest fabric, and the curves that flow just right. Everybody has to see the completed work and they are expected—maybe forced—to marvel and to compliment, in strained voices, this miracle of the cabinetmaker’s art.
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