Looking At Art From The Inside Out. The Psychoiconographic Approach To Modern Art.: By Mary Mathew Gedo. Cambridge /New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 311 pp.

Almost ninety years ago Freud made his initial excursion in a psychoanalytic exploration of visual art with Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Using Leonardo's journals, the biographical material available at the time, and iconographic and formal patterns he discerned in Leonardo's oeuvre, Freud constructed explanations for certain enigmas in Leonardo's life and character. In his only extended psychobiographical study, Freud artfully demonstrated his talent for psychoanalytic reconstruction. Candidates at psychoanalytic institutes read the Leonardo essay to learn about Freud's early theorizing on childhood sexuality, memory, narcissism, and, in particular, a narcissistic type of homosexuality. On the other hand, the essay is sometimes offered to art history students as a cautionary exercise in the dangers of applying the theories garnered from one discipline to another. For Freud-bashers from any discipline it has served as a straw man—the small and medium-sized flaws in it are held up as proof of the irrelevance of the artist's inner life to his work, or worse, as confirmation that psychoanalysts are interested only in