Edvard Munch, The Scream

Did you know that there is mysterious graffiti scribbled within a streak of the sky in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream (1893)? No one knows whether it was Munch himself who wrote it, or if a disgruntled visitor to one of his early exhibitions scribbled the pencil inscription onto the painting itself.

But the fact remains that, for whatever reason, Munch never removed it from his now famous painting, though he must have been aware of it. What does the graffiti say? In Norwegian: “Could only have been painted by a madman”.

Source Reinhold Heller, “‘Could Only Have Been Painted by a Madman’–Or Could It?”, Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, New York: MoMA, 2006.

Albrecht Durer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving.

Albrecht Durer is one of the most famous artists of the Northern Renaissance. A German painter and printmaker, Durer was incredibly talented at detailed renderings of allegorical figures, as well as portraits and nature studies. See his photograph-like Young Hare, where you can make out the individual hairs on the rabbit’s coat; the story goes that he caught and trained the rabbit to sit still on his drawing table so he could paint a watercolor of it.

Melencolia I is a print made by Durer in 1514, and it’s a constant source of speculation for scholars because Durer includes so many symbols, a staple of Northern Renaissance art. Often interpreted as a representation of artistic “melancholy” or frustration, the print is definitely one worth exploring visually, letting your eyes get lost in the details.