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The Archetypal World of Henry Moore, by . Bollingen Series. New York, Pantheon; London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. pp. 135. 35s.
Is it necessary to know when we look at an artist's work which archetype he is expressing? Does knowing intensify our experience, increase our understanding, enlarge our vision? Neumann makes a case that it does.
In the Archetypal World of Henry Moore and in “Leonardo and the Mother Archetype”, the first of the four essays brought together in Art and Creative Unconscious, Neumann develops the theme that the archetype round which both these artists “circle” and by which they are “gripped” is the great mother. We must ask whether the truly great artists are ever completely “gripped” by an archetype and whether it is not their very capacity of control in their creation of the adequate symbol which is their essential quality. Neumann would appear to deny this: Leonardo is like “all creative men fixated in the matriarchal stage of the psyche … his life and work are instruments and expression of his inner situation”. Neumann, following on Freud, bases much of his argument on Leonardo's description of his earliest “memory”. “It seems to me … that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me and opened my mouth with his tail … and struck me many times with his tail against my lips.” In this recollection of fantasy, Neumann considers that Leonardo constellates his receptivity to the creative unconscious of which the fertile great mother is the archetype; he amplifies this theme in the mythology of Greece and Egypt.
That the many-sided activities of Leonardo which make of him the very paradigm of the Renaissance should be thus explained is, one feels, to limit our understanding of Leonardo and with him of the Renaissance. The quintessence of the Renaissance was probably the attempt to get in touch with the primary reflexes of men confronted with life after the etiolating effect of mediaeval idealism had been thrown off. To call in