RICHARD AND MARIETTA’S CONCLUSION
HAVING IN THEIR QUIET WAY SUGGESTED so much about Freud—the sides he hid from others, feelings he may have concealed even from himself, his subtle dissembling when it suited him—the Karpes, with the trip to Orvieto as their starting point, have painted an intriguing picture by the time their article is moving toward its conclusion. Even if they have eschewed absolute declarations—with that distance and reserve that is intrinsic to the way psychoanalysts communicate with outsiders—they have entered provocative territory. And while it had prompted me to go off on personal tangents, turn to further sources, and visit Orvieto, and to develop plenty of my own theories about the impact of the name Signorelli on Freud, I remained avid to know where their musing was going to end up.
The termination of their treatise maintains the same quiet tone, scholarly yet ingratiating, with which they conversed with Susie. It takes discretion to an extreme. Fortunately, though, for all its good manners, it does not flinch in the face of the dramatic content of the frescoes and Freud’s reaction to them. It is as if, for all their rationalism, the Karpes readily accepted the forces that are beyond control in our lives. I could fantasize that Richard, especially, would easily empathize with the way that the very sight of Susie, and the sound of her voice, could make my heart race.
The Karpes begin with marvelous understatement: “In summary we can say that the forgetting of Signorelli’s name was highly overdetermined and that at least three points of identification would be possible between Freud and Signorelli.” From there, they proceed to the quaintest of adverbs—“Firstly”—which strikes me as being Marietta’s. (It is a social worker’s word, not a psychoanalyst’s.) What “firstly” precedes is “Signorelli, who populated the walls of a church with nudes, evil passions and many heathen figures was a worldly painter in spite of his membership in a religious brotherhood. He is a pioneer depicting the actions of the nude body. His approach could be compared to Freud’s pioneering in the investigation and honest description of instinctual passions.”
From “evil passions” to “worldly” to “nude” and then back to “passions,” this time “instinctual.” So they understood that what drives us in life—to forget a name, to pull a reprinted journal article off the bookshelf with zeal—can be forces that know no logic, that derive from romantic lust, however unacceptable its form!
But what, specifically, do the Karpes mean by those “evil passions”? Are Richard and Marietta referring to forms of love that are taboo? Do they have something specific in mind? Signorelli shows both the punishments for “evil passions,” and the whispering of them into the ear of the Antichrist, but what are they?
If there is any so-called evil passion on display in these sixteenth-century frescoes, it is the attraction to strong naked men—mainly seen from behind—on the part of men. Signorelli does not actually show acts in which homosexual feeling is manifest, but he reveals his own excitement over the fantasy of lots of nude muscular males, and presents his personal erotica so vividly that few viewers, male or female, can fail to respond to it. Whether or not those physiques turn you on, you cannot help noticing them and the way these proud specimens flaunt them. But the Karpes stay clear, at least for now, of linking Freud directly with any of these “evil passions,” which they consign to Signorelli’s side of the equation.
“Instinctual passions”? Now those are easier.
The suggestion is that these feelings of which Freud provides an “honest description” should inspire no guilt, for they are innate. How wonderful to be let off the hook with that kind and knowing “instinctual.”
The Karpes’ “Secondly” is simply a reiteration of the coincidence of names, the first three letters of Sigmund being the same as those of Signorelli. Here they fail to say precisely why that would induce memory loss. My theory is that in their polite way they are suggesting that he could not bear his own likeness to someone with such obvious homoerotic enthusiasm (which, depending on your school of thought, is either an “evil passion” or an “instinctual passion”). It seems to me that Richard and Marietta are implying that Freud sought a complete separation from the self that was intrigued by all those rippling male torsos twisted around one another; he needed to forget the name Signorelli in order to forget the Sigmund who liked those things. But I suspect that if I’d asked them if that was what they had in mind, they would just have smiled at me benevolently, the way they did at Susie when she expressed her schoolgirl admiration for Freud, their guiding light.
“Thirdly” falls apart. The Karpes point out that “Signorelli experienced the rule of the Anti-Christ in the person of Roderigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI but by placing himself outside the picture he declared his non-participation. Freud suffered from Lueger’s rule but avoided any public expression of his stand.” We are told that Freud wrote Fliess that he “overindulged (in smoking)” when Lueger was not confirmed in office—suggesting that he did nothing productive about the matter, pleased though he was that the emperor rejected the electorate’s decision. In fact, this has nothing to do with what Signorelli did. Yes, he painted himself as peripheral to the world of the Antichrist, standing as if offstage in that large scene in which this heathen and his followers carry on in their false worship, but he also painted the frescoes, and the frescoes suggest that those who follow the devil deserve to go to hell. If Signorelli indeed was representing Borgia in the form of that devil, then he was blatantly declaring and broadcasting the Pope’s corruption and sinfulness; he has by no means “avoided any public expression of his stand.” The scenes in the Cappella Nova are as brave in their way as Picasso’s Guernica was in light of Franco’s evils. Signorelli, in openly illustrating violence as an allegory to contemporary events, hardly shies away from participation—even if he painted himself on the sidelines.
Fortunately, in their concluding three paragraphs, Richard and Marietta get back on track. The next-to-penultimate one contains the clincher. They again quote from a footnote (like most smart people, they realize that footnotes often contain the most interesting information) on page 13 of Freud’s 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and they follow it with their own trenchant observation. These two sentences—one Freud’s, one their own—are the most telling, and at the same time provocative, of the entire article, and it is here that my parents’ friends implicitly link Freud’s obsession with Hannibal and Hamilcar, and his despair over the weakness of his recently dead father, with Signorelli’s presentation of masculine force. “‘After all, if the repressed thoughts on the topic of death and sexual life are carefully followed up, one will be brought face to face with an idea that is by no means remote from the topic of the frescoes at Orvieto.’ He [Freud] did not explain what that idea was and he left it to the reader to fill in the gap.”
However the Karpes’ “the reader” might “fill in the gap,” there is no question of how the visitor to the scene of Freud’s apocalyptic moment will fill it in. It is necessary to repeat, because it is the simple fact that most people persist in avoiding, that what you are “brought face to face with”—to use Freud’s words—at Orvieto are men’s buttocks. Most of them are naked, but even the clothed ones are on display for delectation. Consider the fellow who is at the very foreground of the lunette with the Antichrist, to one side of the pedestal where Jesus’ shady double stands with the devil. With his right foot practically at the bottom of the scene, this character occupies the same spatial plane as Signorelli and Fra Angelico, who are far to his left; he is halfway between the picture space and our—the viewers’—space. He looks remarkably like one of the flirtatious sailors painted by Paul Cadmus or Charles Demuth, two gay American artists of the twentieth century. Cadmus and Demuth, who delighted in showing male hustlers parading and flaunting the goods, surely knew this painting.
Wearing skintight striped trousers, tied with strings just below the knee to assure that they say stretched, the fellow puts his bubble butt and its crack on conspicuous display. Broad-shouldered and burly, he has the sleeves of his sporty pleated white top pushed up so that we can admire his biceps as well as his well-developed forearms. Looking away from us, he has the stance almost of someone in the chorus line of a campy musical comedy.
In combination with all the male nudity of Purgatory, this is the essence of Signorelli’s frescoes, and the well-behaved Karpes have, in their low-key way, implied the nature of Freud’s “repressed thoughts” about “sexual life.”