IT HAPPENS MORE AND MORE AS ONE GETS OLDER that one is desperate to pose a question to someone no longer alive. What I want to ask the Karpes at the moment is what they knew about Maud Cruttwell.
Did they just pick up her book on Luca Signorelli in the West Hartford Public Library, find out what they wanted to know, and then return the volume to that nightmarish, dust-smelling place on the town’s main street? Or did Richard and Marietta devote months to studying the entire oeuvre of Maud Cruttwell? Now that, because of the Karpes, I have investigated this art historian, previously unknown to me, I think she is worthy of a great biography; I would like to know if the Karpes turned to her as their source because they were familiar with her in general, or because her book was all they could find.
I am fascinated, of course, that Richard and Marietta, who seem so meticulous, got the spelling of both the first and the last name of Maud Cruttwell wrong, making her Maude Crutwell in all of their many references to her. This error makes me think that, alas, they knew nothing about her. They probably just got the book in the dreaded library staffed by white-haired biddies and pale, shoulderless young men, diligently made some notes, and returned the volume before the two-week lending period was over. If the book had been in their house while they were actually writing their paper, Cruttwell’s name would have been in front of them, and they would not have added an e to her first name and removed the second t from her family name.
In any case, the name Maud Cruttwell was an invention. She was really Alice Wilson—of which, one assumes, she could not stand the plainness. In 1894, Cruttwell, who was a young English art historian and had met Bernard Berenson and his future wife, Mary Costelloe, in England, became their housekeeper. Initially, she lived with them in the apartment Berenson was then renting in San Domenico, near Fiesole, on the outskirts of Florence—before they moved to the legendary I Tatti.
Cruttwell was openly lesbian. It is said, inexplicably, that she was personally responsible for Mary Berenson, who was overweight to begin with, becoming even fatter. No source gives the reason for this, although I assume the implication is that Mary—known as an advocate of free love, with Bertrand Russell among the men with whom she had had affairs, and Oscar Wilde a close friend—might have felt a need to develop a physical barrier against another object of her desires. Cruttwell left the Berenson household in 1899, when she was asked by the London publisher George Bell to write her volume on Luca Signorelli for their Great Masters series. She was, nonetheless, a witness at Bernard and Mary’s wedding the following year, after the Quaker Mary’s husband had died, and she was free to marry the Lithuanian Jew. (Berenson’s name at birth had been Valvrojenski. Born beyond the Pale, he grew up in Boston, where he later did his best to de-Jewify himself. De-Jewification is my own term, derived from my adolescence, when I became a keen observer and sometimes practitioner of the process.)
The book Cruttwell wrote at age thirty-nine about Signorelli was such a success that she was commissioned to write numerous others afterward. These include well-regarded texts on Mantegna, Pollaiuolo, the della Robbias, and Madame de Maintenon. The last, one of her best-known books, was published a few years before she died in Paris, at age seventy-nine.
The Karpes probably turned to her book because it was the only monograph they could find on Signorelli. They must have been pleased to discover a text that was written only a couple of years after Freud’s visit to Orvieto. That coincidence of dates means it would have reflected the theories about the frescoes prevailing at that time. But did the Karpes realize not only that their key source was far above the norm for the spirited way in which she viewed art, no doubt impacted by her connection with the Berensons, but that her choice of Signorelli, and the way she viewed his work, may have been a by-product of her own sexuality?
THE INFORMATION THAT CRUTTWELL SUPPLIED for the Karpes became the basis of their diagnosis of what the issues were for Freud in these paintings. Having taken us to the idea of the importance of the sig, and to the way that Freud could remember the imagery but not the name—yet once he knew the name could not retain his vision of the imagery—and going from there to the conclusion that Freud’s unconscious identification with Signorelli will lead us to understand the nature of the underlying issues that he felt a need to repress, they next turn to focus on the meaning of the Antichrist for the Italian painter.
The Karpes now provide the fascinating information that the Pope at the time Signorelli painted the frescoes, “Alexander VI, the infamous Roderigo Borgia . . . could be considered the most perfect model for Anti-Christ. He had cast aside all show of decorum, living a secular and immoral life, indulging in indecent orgies.” It was, they explain, Pope Alexander VI who brought on the “fanatical” opposition of the renowned monk Girolamo Savonarola. Eventually, the Pope excommunicated Savonarola; then, in 1498, he had the monk hung on a cross and burned to death. The papal crime wave did not stop there. Savonarola’s followers were soon executed in droves. The Catholic hierarchy had different rules back then, and the Pope had a son, Cesare Borgia. Caesare’s father appointed him as “Protector of Orvieto,” and this man in whose cathedral Signorelli was painting his frescoes was considered the likely suspect “of many unsolved murders whose perpetrators were never found. Countless victims of these atrocities were pulled out of the River Tiber. Signorelli might well have had the Borgia clan in mind when he painted the fresco of Anti-Christ. Freud, in his letter to Fliess, calls the frescoes ‘powerful.’ Their power lies mainly in an increase in anxiety in the viewer.”
What, exactly, are Richard and Marietta saying here? After all, they did not, it seems, see the frescoes. Nor did they consider the way, for example, that Freud succumbed to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden—he suggested in a letter to his fiancée, Martha, that the young woman in the painting was so sexy and earthy that it made him long to be with her, and that for this reason the painting failed in its attempted religiosity. Freud went so far, with the Raphael, as to liken the Madonna to a “nursemaid,” an interesting choice, since it is no secret that his nursemaid was a more central figure in his early life than was his mother. In these reactions to the Raphael, Freud demonstrated his highly personal reactions to paintings. I maintain that when he wrote to Fliess that Signorelli’s work was “powerful,” Freud may have been referring less to the anxiety the Karpes describe, which would have required a knowledge of Luca Signorelli’s attitude toward the Borgias as well as of the representational meaning of the Antichrist, than to more immediate issues of his own. Receptive as Freud was to the intrinsic qualities of the particular artwork in front of him, when he was surrounded by the Signorellis, he would have felt a deep response to their forceful forms and colors, a keen awareness of the impact of looking at muscular naked men thrust against one another in various modes of action, and a wish to reevaluate, in his own way, the concept of the Last Judgment. His anxiety would have been linked less to the history of the Borgias than to his own private fears.
While the Last Judgment is a central tenet of Catholicism, it was contrary to the teachings of the Judaism with which Freud had been raised. But viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, the underlying concepts of which were already in Freud’s mind when he was in Orvieto, the Last Judgment has great relevance. Freud was fascinated by the way desire plays out in the human psyche—even if he paid relatively little attention to the Christian notion of God’s determining either the punishment or rewards people merit for the way in which they responded to those desires in their actual behavior. For Freud, the great judge was the self. Torture took the form of self-imposed guilt—not of the hammerholds and neck snapping that Luca Signorelli depicts as the fate of people destined for hell. But whatever the form of the consequences, there is a price to pay for many types of lust and other incarnations of what is conceived of as “sin.”