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PSC 49:365-393 (1994)

A Psychoanalytic Appreciation of Giotto’s Mode of Artistic Representation and Its Implications for Renaissance Art and Science

Author: Sidney J. Blatt Ph.D.

Abstract

This paper applies developmental psychoanalytic and cognitive psychological principles to an evaluation of Giotto’s Padua frescoes as pivotal in the transition from a medieval to a Renaissance mode of thought. The formulation stresses the importance of the emergence of triadic or operational thinking involving the coordination of multiple dimensions and the capacity for transforming them with reversibility, reciprocity, and

Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, Yale University; member of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute and Society; member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
This essay was written in honor of the eightieth birthday of Mrs. Ayala Zacks Abramov. An earlier version was written while I was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1988-89 as the Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis and the Sam and Ayala Zacks Professor of the History of Art, and presented at the conference on Psychoanalysis and Art at the Hebrew University in June 1989. An expanded version of this essay was presented as the Freud Lecture at Yale in October 1990.
I am indebted to Professors Moshe Barash and Avigdor W. G. Poseq of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Professors Walter Cahn, Creighton Gilbert, and Lawrence Marks of Yale University; Professor Kim Veltman of the University of Toronto; and Dr. John Auerbach, Camile Serchuk, and David S. Blatt for their helpful comments and criticisms. I am also indebted to Dr. Theodore E. Stebbins, curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, whose kind comments a number of years ago encouraged me to explore more systematically my thoughts about the Padua frescoes.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 49, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright © 1994 by Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).

Page 365

PSC 49:365-393 (1994)

A Psychoanalytic Appreciation of Giotto’s Mode of Artistic Representation and Its Implications for Renaissance Art and Science

Author: Sidney J. Blatt Ph.D.

Abstract

Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, Yale University; member of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute and Society; member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
This essay was written in honor of the eightieth birthday of Mrs. Ayala Zacks Abramov. An earlier version was written while I was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1988-89 as the Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis and the Sam and Ayala Zacks Professor of the History of Art, and presented at the conference on Psychoanalysis and Art at the Hebrew University in June 1989. An expanded version of this essay was presented as the Freud Lecture at Yale in October 1990.
I am indebted to Professors Moshe Barash and Avigdor W. G. Poseq of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Professors Walter Cahn, Creighton Gilbert, and Lawrence Marks of Yale University; Professor Kim Veltman of the University of Toronto; and Dr. John Auerbach, Camile Serchuk, and David S. Blatt for their helpful comments and criticisms. I am also indebted to Dr. Theodore E. Stebbins, curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, whose kind comments a number of years ago encouraged me to explore more systematically my thoughts about the Padua frescoes.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 49, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright © 1994 by Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).

Page 365