Michelangelo's Early Works—A Psychoanalytic Study in Iconography

We cannot account for Michelangelo's endowment as a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. No one in the Buonarroti family line

had ever been concerned with such matters, and his early inclinations toward art were actively opposed by his father. We can, however, address ourselves to the content and form that his art assumed by reconstructing his childhood and its later psychic representation. Michelangelo was profoundly shaped by the early terror with which he filled the void left by maternal disappearances. The bewilderment of what happens to the body—to his own as the abandoned, helpless one and after death—haunted him and, in time, became translated into an artistic vocabulary by which all meaning was expressed largely through the representation of the nude male. In contrast with the spirit of these Herculean beings, he suffered an unrelenting preoccupation with death. His hope, and sustaining unconscious belief, which informed so much of his art from the first to the last, was the reconciliation of son and mother. From the Madonna of the Stairs to his final Rondanini Pietà, waves of yearning, pity, and rage coalesced and broke forth in creative rushes, only then to recede. When they returned, it was with renewed intensity, artistry, and wisdom.