Entre astros, cometas e constelações: percepções de uma organização do espaço mítico nas gravuras renascentistas de Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

Abstract

Comets, planets, moons and constellations, were throughout civilizations, represented by painters, architects and sculptors through pictures, celestial maps and zodiacal maps. In Renaissance culture these images were, for instance, in the vaults of the Schifanoia Palace in Ferrara, as well as in several prints by Albrecht Dürer as pointed by Aby Warburg and later, Erwin Panofsky. In this writing, we point out that the pictures, namely, The Syphilitic (1494), Astronomer (1500) and The Woman with Zodiac (1502), Melencolia I (1514) attributed to Dürer could be part of subjects, especially, astrology, recurring in other prints in hisage. In order to develop this idea, we start from the relationship between picture and text present in the listed images, according to the perspective of WJT Mitchell. Thus, we aim to understand how pictures can through their visuality helped the composing of a time when the thought was conceived by certain correspondences between man and the stars, from the idea of mankind as a microcosm. Therefore, to understand this given way to organize life through a corresponding space or through a worldview in which the stars had a specific place, we point to the category mythical space as it is presented in the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s perspective.