Albrecht Dürer was as much a master of printmaking as of painting — perhaps more. Lines cut into a copper plate with a burin are filled with ink and printed onto paper in a press; hundreds of copies can be taken from one plate. Dürer put the technique into a circulation no painting could reach: he had his prints sold at fairs, distributed them across Europe, cut his monogram into every plate, and sued in Venice against forgery — an early instance of the argument over copyright in art.

Melencolia I of 1514 is among the most interpreted images ever made by this means. A winged figure sits absorbed in thought, compasses in hand; around her lie a plane, a saw, an hourglass, a balance, a sphere, a polyhedron and a magic square whose numbers add to 34 in every direction. The tools go unused, the sand runs, the light comes from a comet behind. The image ties to the period's theory of melancholy — the doctrine of the four humours as reinterpreted by Ficino: melancholy is the temperament of creativity and of blockage alike.

The print's historical importance is technological. As printing multiplied text, engraving multiplied the image; scientific illustration, anatomical atlases, botanical books, maps and architectural treatises could not have spread without it — Vesalius's anatomical plates of 1543 and Palladio's book belong to the same chain. For the artist a new economy appeared: the work stopped being a unique object sold to one patron and became a good multiplied and circulated in a market. The argument photography would reopen in the nineteenth century — whether what can be reproduced counts as a work — appears here first.