Unfinishedness: At the Heart of the Creative Process

Révélations de l'inachèvement (Revelations of the Unfinished) is a gem of a book by André Green, recently and masterfully translated into Italian by Valter Santilli and published by Alpes Italia. It is Green's tribute to the profound complexity of Leonardo da Vinci's work, most notably the Burlington House Cartoon depicting the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist.

What makes this book unique is its clear exposition of Freud's interpretation of Leonardo and his work, which is seen as dominated by the inhibition of desire and, subtly for Freud but far more explicitly for Green, as the concealment, or repression, of Leonardo's homosexuality.

Examining the Cartoon, Green believes he has uncovered something that Freud himself missed, namely that through the unfinishedness of his work Leonardo encodes a rich phantasmic repertoire tied to infantile sexuality theories, centred chiefly around the theme of castration. These psychoanalytic themes have since branched into other outlets and further evolved but, in this book, they are especially interesting because they powerfully juxtapose two different methods.

Freud aimed to decipher the unconscious drives behind artistic expression through the method of interpreting observational data, whereas it seems that Leonardo was chiefly concerned with “representability”, that is, with finding new ways of composing forms; Leonardo was thus less interested in expressing what was important to him than in finding ways to compose images.