Michelangelo's mutilation of the Florence Pietà: a psychoanalytic inquiry.

Abstract

When psychoanalysts have ventured into art history their reception has often been less than congenial. The differences between the two disciplines have largely revolved around the issue of what are to be considered the relevant evidence and methods for interpreting images. The psychoanalytic method emphasizes the representation of unconscious conflicts, often repressed and dating back to the artist's childhood. We treat such unconscious material as a fundamental determinant of both the form and content of creative images.1 Thus, psychoanalysis provides an approach to the understanding of those distinctive and personal aspects of an image that allow a connoisseur, with relative certainty, to identify the artist who created it, no matter how commonplace the theme: that is, its individual style. Further, in the case of a strange piece of behavior, like the one that we are considering—Michelangelo's mutilation of the late Pietà, now in the Cathedral of Florence—the psychoanalyst tries to probe into the unconscious meaning of the image for the artist in order to understand why the behavior occurred at that time, and not some other time, and in that form rather than another.