Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

November 28, 1978. THE RONDANINI PIETÀ. MICHELANGELO'S INFANTILE NEUROSIS. (Abraham A. Brill Memorial Lecture.) Andrew Peto, M.D.

Michelangelo's last sculptured work was the Rondanini Pietà which is now in Milan. Dr. Peto proposed that the three stages through which this work is believed to have evolved represent attempts at a creative solution of Michelangelo's most basic conflict—wishing to be united with his mother in eternal love while at the same time fighting against annihilating fusion with her. Dr. Peto related the intensity of this central conflict to two features of the artist's early life: 1) shortly after his birth he had been sent away to a wet nurse, the wife of a stone cutter on the small Buonarroti farm outside Florence; and 2) his mother had died when he was six years old. Drawing upon a statement attributed to Michelangelo by his contemporary biographer, Condivi, in which the artist claimed that his capacity as a sculptor was transmitted through the power of the milk of the stone cutter's wife, Dr. Peto emphasized the important role of the wet nurse in Michelangelo's development. He speculated that a major traumatic aspect of the boy's situation was his mother's frequent visits to the family farm and her abrupt departures. (The length of Michelangelo's stay with the stone cutter's family is not actually known. Dr. Peto, however, assumed that the artist remained as a foster child until age ten.) Thus, the experience of being abandoned over and over again left Michelangelo in a state of insecurity, rage, and depression: each visit must have raised his hopes that the family would take him back to Florence with them; every new abandonment must have increased his feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Out of this childhood situation developed Michelangelo's basic depressive mood, which was expressed in many of his works and reached its pinnacle in the Rondanini Pietà.

Dr. Peto regards the Rondanini Pietà as the last phase in the artist's