"The Virgin on the Crescent Moon" was a copper-plate executed also in 1514, showing the graceful and charming Mary, treated with an idealism which almost suggests Raphael. This is one of the best of the seventeen Mary-pictures (_Marien-bilder_) which Dürer executed in copper. Other copper-plates of 1514 represented Sts. Paul and Thomas, the Bagpipe-Player, and a Dancing Rustic and his Wife. "The Melencolia" is the most weirdly fascinating of Dürer's works, and the most mysterious and variously interpreted. It represents a woman, goddess, or devil, fully clad, and bearing keys and a purse at her girdle, her head wreathed with spleenwort, and great wings springing from her shoulders; the while she gazes intently, and with unutterable melancholy, into a magic crystal globe before her. On one side a drowsy Cupid is trying to write, near a ladder which rises from unseen depths to unimagined heights; and on the wall are the balanced scales, the astrological table of figures, the hour-glass running low, and the silent bell. The floor is strewn with scientific and necromantic instruments, and a great cube of strange form lies beyond. The prevailing gloom of the picture is but dimly lighted by a lurid and solitary comet, whose rays shimmer along an expanse of black ocean, and are reflected from a firm-arched rainbow above. Across the alternately black and blazing sky flies a horrible bat-winged creature, bearing a scroll inscribed with the word MELENCOLIA, before the blank negations symbolized by the disastrous portent of the comet and the joyous sign of the rainbow. Under the guise of this mystic black-browed woman the artist probably typifies the profound sorrow of the human soul, checked by Divine limitations from attaining a full knowledge of the secrets of nature or the wisdom of heaven. The discarded implements of natural and occult science are alike useless; and nought remains but gloomy introspection and a consciousness of insufficiency.