THE IDENTITY OF THE ANTICHRIST
IT WAS THE BOOK WRITTEN ON LUCA SIGNORELLI in 1899 by the charmingly named Maud Cruttwell that served to tell the Karpes who my Christ/Freud/Dr. Solnit figure really was.
Of course I wonder if, learned as they were, Richard and Marietta had seen the Orvieto frescoes, whether reproduced or in the flesh, without having done research, they would have made the same mistake I committed about the identity of someone who so closely resembles thousands of Jesus images.
It isn’t only out of embarrassment that I maintain that Andrea and I cannot have been the only untutored people who assumed that the man cornered by the devil was Christ. Surely there are many others who enter the Cappella Nova and respond to the fantastic energy of Signorelli’s figures and the powerful sensation of momentous events without knowing the precise story line.
This is not to deny how interesting the iconography is once we understand the narrative. In my swirl of reactions—to the energized and muscular men engaged in furious and often violent action all around me, to the devil whispering to the character I misconstrued as Jesus in imagery I instinctively read as caricatures of myself and my psychoanalyst—I was grateful to be corrected by the Karpes. They elucidate the facts of the scene with the same refreshing calm and clarity they had in the swirl of my parents’ cocktail party. The Karpes quote their preferred source, Cruttwell, explaining that, in the scene before us, “The foreground is filled with followers of the false prophet—Anti-Christ—who, with the features of Christ, stands on a little raised dias listening with an eveil [sic] expression as the devil behind him, unseen by the crowd, whispers into his ear what he shall say.”
My own subsequent research would inform me that, in this fresco cycle where Luca Signorelli depicts the story of the end of the world, this first scene is a foreshadowing of Armageddon that occurs when Christ is asked what will indicate that the world is going to end. He replies (in Matthew 24:4–5) “Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.”
So at least Andrea and I were not the only ones deceived; we were simply among the many to have been tricked, just as the Bible predicted. And since my traveling companion was Catholic, I did not have to worry that it was only Jews like me who were blind to the truth.
While I am grateful to have learned from Richard and Marietta what I was really looking at, I do not agree with Maud’s judgment of the scene in their citation from her. I have no doubt that this is the Antichrist; I am not, however, convinced that his expression is “eveil.” Did the Karpes make that spelling mistake because they were thinking medieval rather than evil, or because they were unconsciously acknowledging the “veil” many of us wear? The Antichrist may, according to theory, embody evil, but when you face Signorelli’s version of him in Orvieto, he does not look evil. Rather, he appears deeply pensive, as if the devil is telling him something profoundly fascinating.
How right Maud is, though, that the crowd does not see him. Or sees neither the Antichrist nor the devil. The placement of Maud’s descriptive phrase leaves her intention unclear. She may well have meant that it is only the devil who goes unobserved; on the other hand, she could have been saying that it is the Antichrist who is unseen. Or else she meant both of them. Regardless, when one considers the entire scene, part of what is utterly fascinating is the way that the dozens of characters in the foreground, busily negotiating or disputing this or that, appear totally unaware of a phenomenally interesting event taking place right in their midst. This act of having their eyes shut to the obvious would surely have fascinated Freud. “You are requested to close the eyes.”
WERE THIS NOT ALL PAINTED WITH PANACHE, the depiction of this whispering of sins and of the mob’s blindness to the heathens in their midst would not be nearly as effective as it is. We believe we are actually witnessing the event because the position of the figures has been articulated so surely, and the grouping of people in fantastic costumes has great verisimilitude. Moreover, our emotions are stirred by the colors, being in splendid harmony throughout the composition, with the blues and purples and golds scattered in carefully calculated proportion over the whole. The pulsating rhythm quickens our breathing. The artistic flair, whereby everyone and everything is infused by a gust of life-giving force, like a fire that has just burst into flames after a great blow from a bellows, makes the experience of seeing the fresco a confrontation after which one is no longer the same.
RICHARD AND MARIETTA DEEMED MAUD CRUTTWELL’S further description of this large fresco vital to our understanding of Freud’s eventual memory failure. Even if I disagree with Maud’s evaluation of the expression on the Antichrist’s face, I think they did well in their choice of source, for she is a superb iconographer. Maud spells out the significance of what is going on all around these two central figures. She cites the reasons for the hideous scenes of beheadings, the men stepping on other men’s heads (and, in one instance, directly on a supine man’s balls), the dead people on horses’ backs, and the profusion of soldiers in combat. Maud explains that these scenes represent, among other things, “the false teachings and miracles of Anti-Christ and . . . the fall of the false prophet and the destruction of his followers.” That information, which would elude the ordinary viewer, is essential to our understanding the anxiety the Karpes will amplify as a major cause of Freud’s parapraxis.
Maud also identifies the troop of men, all hooded and dressed from head to toe in black, in the distant background. And she gives meaning to the impressive structure with its many ionic columns in front of which these Ku Klux Klan–style characters do their hideous dance. Viewers like me, while riveted to this tour de force of painting—whereby contrasting forms and colors, and heighted light effects on circular forms, bring the visual intensity to a fever pitch—and who delight in the classical architectural folly with all those columns and wings, would not have a clue as to what it is without Maud or some other savant’s guidance. Fortunately, the Karpes quote her explaining that this is the Antichrist’s “‘temple with armed men going in and out of its open portico.’” Here, too, Richard and Marietta are laying the groundwork for their explanation of Freud’s trauma.
The design of the vast temple to the Antichrist has something wrong and crazy about it that encapsulates the spirit of all these horrors. The events that precede the end of life are terrifying in a way that could only have exacerbated Freud’s anguish following the intensified recognition of mortality that inevitably came with the death of his father. This was especially true because, as the Karpes will explain, the Antichrist could be regarded as emblematic of Jewish belief, with his miserable followers being Freud’s coreligionists.
What Maud Cruttwell, and the Karpes fail to mention, however, is that there are few women in the scene. Moreover, most of the cast of characters sport very tight pants and substantial codpieces. The Antichrist himself is oddly androgynous in an image where he has his hand out to take a bribe. Here the heathen has flowing blond tresses and wears a smart red tunic with a gold-lined blue wrap around it—he holds it up like a skirt, the way a lady might pull up her skirt to avoid tripping on it—although his large hands and feet and flat chest are male. The man from whom he is taking bribes is the quintessential olive-skinned, hooked nose Jew, who carries his money in a sack with two Stars of David embroidered on it. The knuckles of the Antichrist’s left hand are practically touching one of the most globular of all of Signorelli’s male butts. The price for all of these weaknesses is exemplified in the torture shown in the image on the right below [Plate 18.]
Plate 18. Detail of Deeds of the Antichrist