ONE OF THE REASONS I WAS SO INCLINED to dismiss Freud’s mistake as unimportant is that by the time I had reached the Holbein copy, I had, because of the order of the installation of the paintings in Dresden, already concluded that the father of psychoanalysis was unparalleled in his sensitivity to the true nature of artwork. He had written Martha:
Now, I happened to know that there was also a Madonna by Raphael there and I found her at last in an equally chapel-like room and a crowd of people in silent devotion in front of her. You are sure to know her, the Sistina. My thoughts as I sat there were: Oh, if only you were with me! The Madonna stands there surrounded by clouds made up of innumerable little angel heads, a spirited-looking child on her arm, St. Sixtus (or is it the Pope Sixtus?) looking up on one side, St. Barbara on the other gazing down on the two lovely little angels who are sitting low down on the edge of the picture. The picture emanates magic beauty that is inescapable, and yet I have a serious objection to raise against the Madonna herself. Holbein’s Madonna is neither a woman nor a girl, her exaltation and sacred humility silence any question concerning her specific designation. Raphael’s Madonna, on the other hand, is a girl, say sixteen years old; she gazes out on the world with such a fresh and innocent expression, half against my will she suggested to me a charming sympathetic nursemaid, not from the celestial world but from ours. My Viennese friends reject this opinion of mine as heresy and refer to a superb feature round the eyes making her a Madonna; this I must have missed during my brief inspection.
When I looked at the Sistine Madonna, I realized that Freud GOT it. She is a girl, a teenager! Raphael’s Madonna is more the pretty young lady who modeled for the Virgin than she is the Virgin. [plate 34]
I love the way that Freud paid no attention to the usual cant. Astonishingly few people respond to art with such originality, and allow it to be so personal. For forty years, in public lectures to audiences ranging from kindergarteners to elite groups associated with museums, this is what I have implored everyone to do: not to say what is correct, not to reel off facts, but to look at paintings in the most personal of ways, to allow themselves to react. I never suspected that Sigmund Freud would end up being the ultimate exemplar of someone who did just that.
WHILE FREUD SAW THE Sistine Madonna in a small chapel-like room of its own, with its viewers in “silent devotion,” when I visited Dresden, it was at the end of a large gallery. It has been placed there to encourage traffic flow through the space, the way that the Mona Lisa does at the Louvre, assuring that, as they approach the leading attraction, the flocking tourists will at least glance at the lesser-known work in the rest of the room.
As for the idea of silent devotion: It belongs to another era. I would love to know what Freud would have made of the swarm of Japanese tourists who descended on the painting as I stood there contemplating it. Not a single of the thirty or so people looked at the actual artwork for more than fifteen seconds. Most of the viewers concentrated only on framing shots with his or her digital camera, often with a friend posing for a photo in front of the painting. They were focused more on their camera adjustments than on the Raphael.
Plate 34. Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, 1512, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Zwinger Palace, Dresden
Would Freud have been disgruntled by this? Or, rather, would he mainly have evinced a keen understanding of the human needs that were manifest in this way of looking at artworks, this mind-set that required preserving the experience of having been in the proximity of a masterpiece more than relishing the actual viewing of it? Would his fascination with human behavior have superseded his reverence for the richness of feasting one’s eyes on paintings?
SUDDENLY, I HAD A MOMENT OF SOLITUDE and silence with the Raphael. The shutterbugs had all run off as quickly as they had arrived, leaving me to study the painting undisturbed.
I became aware that the tourists could not possibly have noticed that the clouds are heads. I am not even sure that I would have, had I not read Freud’s description to Martha and looked accordingly. But then I began to have a somewhat different take on the Madonna than Freud did. First of all, I had misread his letter. My initial take on his having written “My thoughts as I sat there were: Oh, if only you were with me!” had been that he was mentally addressing the Madonna, not Martha. I also knew that he had a crucial connection to his own nursemaid, so his comparing Raphael’s young woman to “a nursemaid” invested her with immense force. I imagined Freud coveting the woman in the painting, and I quickly began to feel that way myself.
Like Freud, I found Raphael’s robust young lady to be very much of our own world—rather than a spiritual presence. But to me she was a hoyden, not someone possessed of innocence. Beyond her unquestionable physical vigor, the girl Freud guessed to be sixteen years old has an insolence. This healthy Madonna is nothing so much as a brash teenager, possibly a naughty one.
The angels, while precious, are also slightly mischievous, which is part of what makes them adorable. They are ruffians, and Saint Barbara looks at them as if they are naughty schoolchildren.
As for the Christ Child: In Raphael’s painting, he is an energetic toddler more than an infant. His body is well on its way to being formed, and we feel as if he is ready to walk off on his little muscled legs. This makes good sense. His earthy mother has alighted as if from a run—she could be a counselor at a New England summer camp—and he is made of the same material in his sportiness.
DID FREUD, THEN OR LATER, KNOW THAT FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, about whom he would write in the essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in 1928, and whose Crime and Punishment he considered “the most magnificent novel ever written,” “placed Raphael above all painters and considered the Sistine Madonna the summit of his art?” I only know this bit of information, provided in the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna Grigorievna, because it is in a note to the text of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s splendid translation of Demons (formerly known as The Possessed), in reference to an encomium by the character Stepan Trofimovitch when he writes his wife from Germany to say “it is all quite noble: there is a lot of music, Spanish airs, dreams of universal renewal, the idea of eternal beauty, the Sistine Madonna.” Stepan Trofimovitch’s wife concludes that her husband is not “sitting twelve hours over books” every day as he says; . . .” Oh, well let him have a good time.”
Freud’s main thesis in his essay is that Dostoevsky’s supposed epilepsy was, in fact, a physical symptom of repressed guilt over his father’s death, which is why he only began having the fits at age eighteen, his age when his father died. (The theory would in part be disproved when it was discovered that Dostoevsky’s children were also epileptic, suggesting the biological nature of the illness. A friend of mine who is a psychotherapist, Patrick Dewavrin, has pointed out, however, that this does not mitigate the connection between seizures and their psychological origins.) Whether or not Freud was aware, as he faced the painting Raphael had made between 1512 and 1514 for the high altar of the Church of St. Sixtus in Piacenza, that he was in the space where one of his favorite writers, whose work and life Freud connected directly to his theories of the Oedipus complex, had stood in similar rapture, it makes sense that both were greatly affected by the painting. The Sistine Madonna has the charge of life, the sexual energy, the intensity of emotion Dostoevsky experienced at age eighteen when his father died—all with the fire particular to adolescence. The fetching beauty in the painting—whom Freud imagined as being sixteen—exudes the unrivaled aliveness, the Hannibal-style intensity, of the interlude in one’s existence that follows the onset of puberty and that subsides considerably, at least for most people, when maturity kicks in. This is the same delicious fury I knew as a sixteen-year-old once Susie had entered my bedroom and made me feel I had a romantic power I had never felt before.
THE Sistine Madonna GENERATES A FORCE rare in the history of man-made objects. Nearly a century after Dostoevsky feasted on it, and sixty years after Freud experienced what he called its “magic beauty,” Adolf Hitler deemed the painting so splendid that he had it locked in the museum vault. This is why it survived the bombing of Dresden. Then Stalin, just after the war, put it in a vault in Moscow. (It was returned to Dresden following Stalin’s death.)
Few men could resist this gamin “with such a fresh and innocent expression” who is “not from the celestial world but ours.”