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Christian Gaillard is a psychoanalyst, but also a profound and careful scholar of figurative arts. It is with a combination of these two perspectives that he reviews the image of Woman and grasps changes in the collective imagery which are expressed in art. He favours the image, be it painting, photography, drawing, as a kind of knowledge. An artistic representation is a mise en scène just like a dream. Gaillard looks on a work of art as if it were a dream; he does not seek, as many have done, the psychobiography of the artist, but as if he were actually interpreting a dream, he looks for the hidden meanings. A picture is not only the expression of personal problems, it is also the intuition of a collective problem. If a painting or a picture of centuries ago can - as often happens - still move us, it is possible to believe that in it something is represented which, as part of the Collective Unconscious, is common to the human race and still lives and continues to live in that image. A symbol may manifest itself in various shapes and forms, without exhausting its meaning.
In what forms does that Myth-Symbol-Mystery that is Woman appear through the centuries? Gaillard tries to answer this question using all his knowledge and culture, both psychoanalytical and other. His writing is polished, complex, fascinating; the amplifications and associations between one art work and another are full of suggestion and reminders, sometimes to an excessive degree, though seldom forced or gratuitous. Each of the works that Gaillard examines is a point of view, a visual angle on just one character: Woman.
Following a thread, as it is sometimes followed in a sequence of dreams, Gaillard joins together ‘The Garden of Paradise’, 1410 - 20, by an unknown Master from the Upper Rhine, ‘Madonna in the Garden’, by Stefano da Verona, ‘Nastagio of the Honest’ 1483, by Sandro Botticelli, ‘Melancholia I’, 1514, by Albrecht Dürer and ‘Melancolie’, 1532, by Lukas Cranach. We can then see before us