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(2003). American Imago, 60:9-20

The Dying Slave at Berggasse 19

Mary Bergstein

In his introduction to “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Freud stated, “Works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting” (1914, 211). Sculpture, with all its ambivalence as a surrogate for the human body, and its uncanny potential for “coming to life,” is at the heart of Sigmund Freud's writings about visual art. This is exemplified in his essay on Michelangelo's Moses as well as his interpretative study of Jensen's Gradiva. For Freud, who dealt on a daily basis with the soft, spectral material of memories and dreams, sculpture seemed to belong to a superior order of historical monumentality. Malcolm Bowie, for instance, has stated that sculpture was for Freud “a fixed physical structure which, in its fixity, explains” (1987, 22-23). Sculpture may well possess the advantage of fixity and durability, as another of Freud's favorite protagonists, Leonardo da Vinci, stated in

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