Michelangelo's Pietà and a Neglected Memory of His Childhood

It has always been clear that psychoanalysis could be used to further our understanding of literature, mythology, and art. The Interpretation of Dreams itself established the nature of the insights that psychoanalysis could provide, by seeking to explain the popular appeal of literary works like Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. But quite apart from its ability to explain the popularity of particular works of art, psychoanalysis has also allowed us to develop a new understanding of the link between the individual artist and the things that that artist creates. Early on Freud (1910) himself set the pattern here with his study of Leonardo da Vinci. My concern in this essay is with one of Leonardo's contemporaries, Michelangelo.

Although Michelangelo has been the subject of several earlier psychoanalytic investigations, my contention will be that previous investigators have overlooked some significant aspects of Michelangelo's early life that can provide new insight into what has always been one of his most popular statues, namely, his very first Pietà. The decision to focus upon this particular work results from two considerations.

First, for most of his life Michelangelo thought of himself as first and foremost a sculptor, not a painter, and his friends and associates felt the same way.1 Prior to 1518, for example, correspondents addressed Michelangelo exclusively as “sculptor,” and he continued to sign himself as “Michelangelo the sculptor” until well into the 1520's (Clements , 305). This attitude was not at all changed by his having painted the much-admired paintings in the Sistine Chapel in 1508-1512. If the content of Michelangelo's art, at least his early art, were indeed being influenced by unconscious