132 - Michelangelo: A Psycho-Analytic Study of His Life and Images

Michelangelo: A Psycho-Analytic
Study of His Life and Images
By Robert S. Liebert
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983. 447 pp. $29.95.

Even to attempt such an ambitious interdisciplinary study as this calls for double specialization. This the author possesses as one who taught art history at Columbia University and is presently Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. More than

133 - Michelangelo: A Psycho-Analytic Study of His Life and Images

this, the author is clearly familiar with the various biographies and characterizations of Michelangelo from the Renaissance to our own day, and has scrutinized the 480 letters, 327 extant poems, and the innumerable visual artifacts created by his subject. In addition to all this, Dr. Liebert is an expert in the theory and practice of Freudian psychoanalysis. It is a formidable expertise he brings to the study of this artistic genius.

Liebert's modesty is engaging. He is the first to acknowledge that he is at a very serious disadvantage in attempting to psychoanalyze his patient because of the fact that Michelangelo died more than four hundred years ago. Historical reconstruction is difficult for any biographer, partly because so much of the evidence has been eaten by the teeth of time, and partly because explanations of events differ from era to era. The danger of such interpretations was convincingly shown by Roland Bainton's critique of Erik Erikson's psychobiography of Luther. Erikson made much of a vision Luther supposedly experienced while in the bathroom and which his diary located by the abbreviation in clo (acis). Bainton pointed out that it could be in the cloister, or in clo (istro). Yet it was Erikson's insistence on Luther being an anal type that led to his interpretation of the abbreviation, at least in part.

On the other hand, in all fairness, it can be argued effectively that as evidence there is a plethora of visual images executed by Michelangelo, and there are even differing drawings at various stages of the work, showing how alternative solutions were attempted, and, incidentally pointing to difficulties faced.

What does Liebert claim to do? "What I am interested in exploring is the nature of the artist's conflicts, their origins and the forms of their expression through his art and in the conduct and subjective experiences of his life."

The underlying theory is that Michelangelo as an infant was terrified by being taken from his mother, placed in the hands of a wet-nurse for about two years, returned to his mother, and then felt utterly abandoned when she died when he was only six. Certainly this would go far to explain his exclusive reliance on males as well as his suspicion of females, until at a late age he became friendly with the austere widow Vittoria Colonna.

More intriguing is Liebert's discovery of an inner psychic civil war that raged in Michelangelo in which the image of a Madonna struggled with the evil image of a Medea. This inner conflict reappears even in his ostensibly Christian paintings and sculptures and can be seen in the way he uses the gestures and postures of mythical pagan images for pictures of Christ, the Virgin, or the saints. It is found even in the great Sistine Chapel painting of the Last Judgment in the icon of the Virgin.

Throughout his life, Liebert argues, the lack of feminine warmth made him transfer the need to the image of a powerful caring male, as in the case of successive Popes or secular patrons, or as in his friendship with Tommaso de' Cavalieri as an idealized tender male. These, says Liebert, "also contained the image of the archaic mother."

Liebert is equally intriguing in his account of the endless fascination of Michelangelo for a resolution of the tensions between mother and son, which helps to explain the fact that the artist both early and late was intrigued with Pietas, showing the reconciliation of the Divine Mother with the Divine Son. The fascination also shows the artist's fear of death. It is interesting that Liebert shows that Michelangelo develops his credo from a lengthy period of Neo-Platonism to a final passionate acceptance of faith in the crucified and risen Savior.

While it would be difficult to assert categorically that the psychoanalyst's thesis is proven, it would be harder to pass a verdict of "not proven." There is no doubt that this superbly written psychobiography sheds much light on the struggles and difficulties of Michelangelo, as well as on his choice of themes and interpretations. It is-

134 - Michelangelo: A Psycho-Analytic Study of His Life and Images

to offer a variation of the title of a more popular life of Michelangelo-a case of successful illumination of the Agony rather than of the Ecstasy, and a needed corrective.

Horton Davies
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.