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Before earning the status of a great original, Michelangelo began his career as a forger. Vasari (1568) recounts that the young artist made copies of Old Master drawings, smoking and staining them to give them an authentic appearance. He later fashioned a statue of a sleeping Cupid, which Lorenzo di Medici allegedly encouraged him to pass off as an ancient artifact. Vasari argues that the believability of his forgery was a major catalyst in establishing Michelangelo's reputation (421-23). Subsequent biographies of Michelangelo include fascinated descriptions of the artist as forger, attributing other fakes to the master's corpus. According to one of these accounts, after making a bust of the goddess Ceres, breaking off its arm, and burying it, Michelangelo informed a group of archeologists that he had discovered an ancient statue, which, upon examination, they attributed to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. As they were admiring their find, Michelangelo produced the broken arm, showed that it fit the amputated body perfectly, and exclaimed, “I am Praxiteles!” (Eudel 1884, 387; Demeure 1951, 120-21). Whether this seductive narrative of the birth of Michelangelo as artist is itself true or feigned, it presents authorship as a category that must be dismantled before it can be established. As the statue must first be broken before it can be recognized as a whole, so the author or artist needs to fragment his identity in order to monumentalize it; “I am Praxiteles” thus becomes the most direct way of asserting, “I am Michelangelo.”
Freud adopts this “deconstructionist” model of authorship in “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914). The essay is