The Dying Slave at Berggasse 19

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 his sixteenth-century Treatise on Painting (1956, 42). But in Freud's visual imagination, sculpture was far from inanimate.

A photograph, probably taken by one of his sons around 1912 (E. Freud et al. 1998, 200), portrays Freud seated on his veranda with a framed reproduction of The Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha from the fresco cycle of Saint Peter Healing (Brancacci Chapel, Florence) by Masolino and Masaccio above his head, and a reduced copy of Michelangelo's Dying Slave (Louvre) at his side (fig. 1). This photographic portrait was arranged casually; its visual structure reads like a snapshot. But as much as any classically inspired Renaissance portrait, it is meant to define the interior mind of the sitter by his association with certain venerable objects. The Healing of the Cripple and the miraculous Raising of Tabitha by the bearded Saint Peter may have been relevant to Freud in his role as a physician. But Michelangelo's sleeping tomb figure, or “Dying Slave” as he has come to be nicknamed, has an even more