WHILE ART SCHOLARS AND OTHERS versed in connoisseurship would have questioned the authenticity of the “Holbein,” Freud can hardly have been expected to realize that the painting was a copy. Yet, still, one wants him to have been more perceptive than most people, and also to have been more alert to the facts. For in 1848, the original of this Madonna had been discovered in the city of Darmstadt. Once that painting came to light, specialists realized that the version that had entered the Dresden royal collection in 1743 was made by someone other than Holbein. The original, which hangs today in the Schlossmuseum Darmstadt, was painted in 1528 for Jacob Meyer zum Hazen, the former burgermeister of Basel (he had held the post from 1516 to 1521); the copy in Dresden was painted in around 1635 by an artist named Bartholomäus Sarburgh, who was born in 1590.
There had been a Holbein exhibition in Dresden in 1871 where the real Holbein from Darmstadt and the Dresden copy were shown next to one another, with the Sarburgh identified as such. Nonetheless, in 1883, when Freud was there, the museum in the Zwinger still identified it as a Holbein; it was only in 1905 that the label was changed to reflect the truth. While Sarburgh’s name was not given, the work was from then on called “a copy.” This remains the case today—still with no mention of Sarburgh or the date of the copy.
My reactions to Freud’s error were the same as on the rare occasions when I had doubts about something Dr. Solnit had said. Initially, I could not accept the idea that the fount of wisdom could ever be wrong. Even when I disagreed with his opinion about a given subject, I justified his position in my mind. Similarly, on those occasions when I thought that the Karpes had either gone down the wrong path or not taken one they should have taken, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. In the same vein, I concluded that Freud’s mistake about a painting he treated as an original, but that was a copy, was insignificant. “Pious German minds” had been what interested him, not the art of Hans Holbein. He had a right to react to a painting whatever its authorship was; what counted was the artwork, not who had made it. His lack of knowledge of the correct authorship was, I assured myself, a detail of little significance.
Nonetheless, I wonder what Freud himself would have thought if he knew about his own mistake with the Holbein. In “The Moses of Michelangelo,” he addresses the issue of artistic copies.
Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis, I learned that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff [whose writing was translated into German in 1874] had caused a revolution in the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty, and constructing hypothetical artists for those works whose former supposed authorship had been discredited. He achieved this by insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, or the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way. I was then greatly interested to learn that the Russian pseudonym concealed the identity of an Italian physician called Morelli, who died in 1891 with the rank of Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations.
Of course, Freud never claimed to look at art psychoanalytically. He considered himself an amateur when it came to paintings. As a simple art lover and observer, he cannot have been expected to uncover secrets as he did with his patients.
It’s interesting, nonetheless, that he offered such strong ideas on the matter of the difference between an original and a copy in this text he wrote in 1914 without having any idea that thirty-one years earlier he had scrutinized a painting in depth, considering also the audience to which it appealed, without recognizing that the attribution next to it was incorrect. When he was making his pronouncements about the Holbein that was not a Holbein, and when he was comparing Morelli’s craft to his own, how would he have felt about his failure to have done enough research to know that this particular Madonna had already been determined to have been painted a century later, and by a different artist, than was stated on the label that identified it?