You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Reflections on Art and Life: Aspects of Michelangelo by , New York University Press, 1986, 120 pp.
The publication of Nathan Leites's book, three years after Robert Liebert's (1983) Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images, provides an occasion for asking what a psychoanalytic approach has contributed or can contribute to our understanding of works of visual art produced in a culture and society about whose values and patterns of behavior we know relatively little and by an artist about whom our information on matters crucial for such a study is at best fragmentary. The question that Leites's book raises is not, or at least not primarily, the validity of a psychoanalytic approach to art as such. Rather, it is the serviceability of this approach for the study of an artist of the Renaissance. Ellen Spitz (1985) has made a useful distinction among three models for the psychoanalytical interpretation of art: (1) the “pathographic” model, which explores the artist's experiences and intentions by examining his life and