Michelangelos Moses und Freuds “Wagstück”. Eine Collage [Michelangelo's Moses and Freud's ‘piece of audacity’. A collage] by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis Frankfurt-am-Main:  Fischer. 2004.  132 p.

The starting-point for this short book was an interdisciplinary conference on Michelangelo's Moses, held in October 2001 during the restoration work, since completed, on the tomb for Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has developed her conference lecture into what she terms a ‘collage’ of psychoanalytic and art-historical lines of argument. Her chosen approach—closely linking the text with the extensive and extremely well-reproduced illustrations—is highly instructive and can be qualified as an overall success, although, in contrast to the author's line of argument, this reviewer found the placement of the captions at the end of the book somewhat cumbersome and distracting. In spite of its brevity, the author has been highly successful in concisely summarising and incorporating into her argument both the relevant art-historical literature—here we might have wished for a little more detail from time to time—and the psychoanalytic literature relating to Freud's (1914) essay. In this sense, the book is perhaps, in fact, less a collage than a thorough piece of interdisciplinary research. The author's psychoanalytic reflections are underpinned by a sound knowledge of the state of art-historical research. This indirectly leads us straight on to the central question posed by the book: how