ONCE I HAD READ THEIR LITTLE TREATISE—known only to readers of the March 1979 issue of The Israel Annals of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines, which is where it first appeared, or to the circle of friends to whom the Karpes had given the imprint—I became determined to get to Orvieto. I was eager to see the art central to this text, which is so brilliant in its questions yet seemingly self-censored in its answers. Several years after finding the document at my parents’ house, I had the chance to visit the Italian hill town when I was traveling from Rome to Florence.
What had moved Freud so deeply was a shocking group of paintings. Signorelli’s frescoes, which narrate the end of the world, were unlike anything I had ever seen.
The scenes depicted in the frescoes are intensely crowded, the loud colors overpowering. Yet these busy compositions are organized so masterfully that even when a devil is pushing down on the butt of a naked man who is being carried upside down over the shoulders of another horned and naked man, with similarly engaged nude brigands pressed into the mélange from all sides, we know exactly where each person is positioned; there is utter clarity about who is near and who far.
One has no doubt of the reality of it all. Every hair of the brutes’ loincloths, made from the tails of wild animals, is articulated with perfect verisimilitude. Some of the naked men cascade, while others ascend; the motion is real, and the life of the bare flesh authentic. The older fellows’ testicles sag in a way that is all too plausible.
Human skin is rendered in a lurid green, the purple of raw meat, or a reflective gold, as if it is being lit by bright flames. The colors terrify us. The amount of death and violence is destabilizing. This is both the end of life and the start of a miserable afterlife. One scene depicts paradise, but we don’t notice it at first, and the majority of Signorelli’s broad-shouldered wrestler types with sinewy muscles are either in hell or a horrific version of purgatory. Standing in the chapel, one feels the force of an earthquake. The powerful connection between sexuality, punishment, and death in this violent world of musclemen leaves the viewer whirling. [plate 2]
It was a brief visit, but the sight of the artwork alone struck me as ample reason for a memory loss. At the time, I had read only the Karpes’ treatise on the subject, and had done so fairly quickly, but it was clear there was a lot in Signorelli’s frescoes that would want to make one cover one’s eyes or turn away.
I assumed that Freud, like me, perceived paintings as if they were life itself—which is why he subsequently had to forget something about these wrenching paintings. I had my theory about Freud’s responsiveness confirmed last spring, when, after I told my younger daughter, Charlotte, then a student of psychoanalysis in London, about the Karpes’ study, she sent me copies of some unusual letters that Freud had written his fiancée, Martha, more than a decade before his visit to Orvieto. In this highly personal correspondence, Freud discusses the impact on him of several paintings in Dresden: a Raphael that disappointed him, a Holbein he preferred to it, and a Titian that overwhelmed him. What he divulged in private to the woman he was soon to marry reveals the psychoanalyst to have had a rare appreciation of art.
Plate 2. Detail of The Damned Cast into Hell
On the other hand, he suffered from some surprising misperceptions. In the intense emotional state with which he viewed these paintings in Dresden, he did not realize that the Holbein was a copy. That in itself would be no big deal, except that it makes some of Freud’s observations about the work fallacious and discredits a text Freud later published in which he claims to be able to distinguish fake paintings from authentic ones.
What becomes apparent through the letters and the Karpes’ writing, nonetheless, is that certain masterful canvases and frescoes, by using the power of form and color to enrich their subjects, and by organizing and framing phenomena with meticulous measure, allowed Sigmund Freud to apprehend truths that are more elusive in actual people. The personages in paintings also seemed to get inside him more than did his patients or even his friends and family. Seeing particular individuals rendered in paint affected him viscerally. An observer more than a connoisseur, Freud was impassioned by what he saw.
Freud was also fascinated by public taste. In Dresden, he was intrigued—as he surely would be today—by what the mobs flock to, and what they ignorantly overlook. He saw artworks as vessels of human understanding in part for what they were intrinsically, but also for the way that they evoke or don’t evoke responses according to the alertness or blindness of the people looking at them.
Those reactions to art—whereby spectacular paintings excite emotions in a direct and personal way—have always been the ones that matter for me. What a pleasant surprise it was to discover that Sigmund Freud was among the rare people who have a consuming, irrational, response to visual imagery.
My first visit to Orvieto had been exploratory but short. I was intrigued by the Karpes’ text and by Signorelli’s chapel but had not considered them in depth. More recently, though, perhaps as a result of being in my seventh decade of life, certain subjects have seemed more important to me, others less. I had a brief but unforgettable conversation with Philip Roth one day on the rue du Bac in Paris in which he said, with a quirky smile, that the main topics of my biography of the painter Balthus—“sex, art, and being Jewish”—are “all that matters in life.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the older I have gotten, the more obsessed I have become with all three. I became compelled to go further in trying to understand Freud’s powerful reactions to the Signorellis and a few other paintings.
Plate 3. Sigmund Freud, c. 1905