Albrecht Dürer: Malmesbury's Legend
In the 12th century legend by William of Malmesbury, we hear about a young man of senatorial rank who returns to Rome after a long absence. He marries and after a feast full of drinking goes to exercise with his friends to aid digestion. While exercising, he places the wedding ring on the finger of a statue. When he returns for it after the fun is over, he sees that the statue’s finger is clenched tight to the palm. The man tries with all his might but he is unable to remove the ring. That night, he returns to get the ring and finds the finger extended and the ring gone. The man goes back to his marriage bed and attempts to have sex with his wife, only to find that each time he tries, a strange sensation blocks him:
When the hour of rest arrived, and he had placed himself by the side of his spouse, he was conscious of something dense, and cloud-like, rolling between them, which might be felt, though not seen, and by this means was impeded in his embraces: he heard a voice too, saying, “Embrace me, since you wedded me today; I am Venus, on whose finger you put the ring; I have it, nor will I restore it.” Terrified at such a prodigy, he had neither courage, nor ability to reply, and passed a sleepless night in silent reflection upon the matter. A considerable space of time elapsed in this way: as often as he was desirous of the embraces of his wife, the same circumstance ever occurred; though in other respects, he was perfectly equal to any avocation, civil or military.
The scene is about impotence and the inability of the young man to fulfill his marital duty to his wife. The lost ring symbolizes the loss of his procreative powers, his ability to perform within the structures of the marriage. It could be that his flippancy with the ring represented a thoughtless, casual attitude of a boy – and its loss, coupled with the loss of his manhood, is meant to deny him passage into mature adulthood. In order to earn this passage, he needs to embrace the teachings of a marginal priest who specializes in the art of necromancy. The young man descends down into the underworld and there the devil tells him that he must wrestle the ring from Venus by force. Venus, scantily clad, eventually yields the ring after fierce resistance. At that, the young man is able to return to his marriage bed and consummate the marriage. The message is clear: in order to fulfill his godly duty within the sacred institution of marriage, the young man must overcome his youthful, impulsive sexual drives, which stand ready to seduce him at all moments of inattention or weakness. A real man, the story implies, controls his fate by the vigilance of his spirit and channels his lusts into the sanctified realm of procreative marriage.
How does the Malmesbury story relate to Dürer’s print? Judging from the ring and the figure of Venus, we can conclude that the sleeping doctor is standing in for the young Roman senator. Though this doctor is old, but he is still, Dürer implies, a slave to boyish desires, laziness and frivolity and thus susceptible to the infiltration by demonic impulses. Moreover, Venus dominates the scene and still possesses the ring, meaning that the sleeping man is nowhere near exerting his mastery over his base desires. In fact, the powerful Venus standing erect only adds to the sense of the doctor’s general impotence, a reference to the Roman young man’s lack of sexual aptitude in Malmesbury’s account.
The dream world in Dürer’s "Temptation of the Idler" is the setting for the struggle of sin against righteousness. Sin travels down the following path: speculation on mundane matters leads to idleness; idleness leads to laziness, laziness to unnecessary daytime sleep; this gratuitous sleep provides the opening to the devil or a devil’s minion, who infiltrates the idler with lustful, sexual thoughts; these thoughts bind the idler fully to the mundane realm of pleasure and its fulfillment and prevent the access to the higher spiritual realm and contemplation of higher truths. Unlike the Roman youth who eventually outlasts Venus and wins back his volition, the doctor seems fated to live a passive, idle existence – a slave to his physical urgings.
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