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Successful interdisciplinary work demands enormous erudition and the power to integrate it. Robert S. Liebert obviously has both. This beautifully illustrated, referenced, and indexed volume fulfills its stated promise: it adds a psychoanalytic (unconscious, personal) dimension to the art historical (cultural-stylistic) understanding of Michelangelo's artistic images. The result is art historical
pathography, or pathographically oriented art history. By either name it makes for absorbing reading.
The facts available about Michelangelo's early life are few. The second of five sons, he was boarded out with a wet nurse, the daughter and wife of stonecutters, to whom Michelangelo later attributed his love of the stone chisel. After he was returned to his biological parents at about age two, his mother was pregnant for half of the next four years and died when he was six. His father remarried when Michelangelo was ten. He appears to have been an ineffectual man who opposed his son's desire to become a sculptor. On his part, Michelangelo always resented that he never was appreciated, even though he supported the whole family. He felt dependent, deprived, bitter, and envious, and he carried this over into feelings of intolerance for all upcoming artists. His sense of ambivalent bondage to his father was carried over to all his patrons, successive popes included.
The inferences of psychoanalytic interest stem from the fundamental importance to Michelangelo of the early maternal deprivation he experienced. It led to a splitting and lack of integration among self- and object representations and their associated affects of love and hate: idealized images of Madonnas, victim-son Jesus, and powerful father figures are juxtaposed with images of murderous mothers and sons and denigrated fathers. Also, as a result of the maternal deprivation, he was left with a deep uncertainty concerning the integrity of his own body image and turned from women toward men.
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