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Under certain pressures the mind escapes from the usual limitations. In David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive‘ Diane Selwyn is abandoned by her lover Camilla and at the moment of shooting herself fantasises she is Betty Elms, a young Hollywood hopeful in a mysterious plot involving Camilla’s shadow double, Rita. It is only when the fantasy takes Diane to a surreal magic show and she listens to a song that she is ejected from the fantasy and back into the reality of her suicide.

Durer worked inside the pressures of his age, inside collisions of spirit and nature, good and evil and the majesty and vomit of existence that marked his time. Between hot derangement and ice-cold boredom he reconfigured the relationships between Renaissance metaphors. Rebirth and revival, darkness and light and Renaissance misery’s peculiar character – Melancholia – were all altered. In so doing he raised painting to the rhetorical level of Petrarchan poetry. Merback’s stunning book makes the case for the inception of a new genre of imagery in Durer’s Melencolia 1, that of the allegorical-speculative image. It was an image in the service of cognitive-spiritual exercise.