**Links to**: [[Durer]], [[Gravity]], [[Falling ill]], [[10 Bias, or Falling into Place]], [[Pathology]], [[The Normal and the Pathological]], [[Melencolia I]], [[07 Phenomenology of Sick Spirit]]. ![[Dürer_Melancholia_I.jpg|600]] ### Gravity Interpretations of “Melencolia I” are rich and diverse, we offer a gravitational lens here: all the objects and subjects presented are visibly _pulled_, they tend towards a kind of _fallenness_. The exceptions being: the screaming, flying bat, the shooting star and rainbow, the fire. Everything else is pulled down by gravity, and the entire image converges towards the unattainable image of perfection at the pictorial center of gravity: the sphere at the bottom left (coincidentally, a sphere: a planet?). The two “person-like” subjects have wings, so could in principle fly, but do not. The only flying, liberated thing is the howling bat: the ecstatic in the melancholic. The ladder and the rainbow signal the possibility of finding a way out of fallenness. Everything else is heavy: the hourglass, the scale, the millstone, the sphere solid, the bell, the tools. The head is heavy and rests on the hand. The dog lies sleeping. The magic square itself is an object/phenomenon that has _resolution_: that falls into a determined outcome, whichever way it goes.