On Freud's Forgetting of “Signorelli”

Between 1960 and 1980, American art-historian Meyer Schapiro's thoughts returned frequently to the first page of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which the author discusses forgetting the name of Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli. In his conclusions on the subject, unpublished until now, Schapiro considers how Freud's explanation of his lapse of memory may have itself suffered from a repression of sexual anxieties.

Letters, 1972–1973

Between January 1972 and December 1973 French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro exchanged forty-four letters. During this short period, the two scholars discussed many issues concerning the state of art history and its relationship to semiotics and psychoanalysis. A recurring topic was Freud's famous lapse of memory concerning the name of the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli—what to make of the lapsus in art-historical terms and how to make use of it in analyzing Signorelli's cycle of frescoes at the Cathedral of Orvieto in Italy. Damisch was then beginning to work on a book devoted to the subject while Schapiro was writing a small essay on the topic.

Die Zerstörungskraft der göttlichen Liebe: Empedokles im XII. Gesang von Dantes Inferno

RiassuntoIl canto XII dell’Inferno si apre con l’evocazione del terremoto che, poco prima dell’arrivo di Cristo agli inferi, aveva causato una frana al di sopra del settimo cerchio. Virgilio ricorda che egli stesso, per spiegare tale avvenimento, aveva dapprima fatto ricorso alla teoria del filosofo presocratico Empedocle, secondo il quale l’amore divino condurrebbe il mondo, ciclicamente, nel caos. Se questo tentativo di spiegazione è stato recentemente interpretato come un errore pagano-razionalistico, il presente contributo si propone di mostrare che Dante, attraverso la bocca di Virgilio, interpreta la dottrina del ciclo cosmico proposta da Empedocle come prefigurazione della corrispondenza fra la discesa di Cristo agli Inferi e il suo ritorno nel Giorno del Giudizio. Tale interpretazione fu già espressa da Luca Signorelli verso il 1500 negli affreschi del Duomo di Orvieto.

The Age of Time according to Carlos Fuentes

Born on 11 November 1928, Carlos Fuentes on 15 May 2012 met on Parnassus the princes of word and vision that one of his deceased characters dreamed of in El naranjo (1993; The Orange Tree). If, as he wrote in Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (1990; “Constancia” and Other Stories for Virgins), readers are the ghosts of writers (296), the author of Terra nostra (1975) was, for his part, a ghost of Cervantes and disciple of Erasmus who rewrote La Celestina, Don Quixote, the successive Don Juans of Tirso de Molina, Zorrilla, and Mozart, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Luca Signorelli, the gnostic gospels, and the texts of the Jewish mystical tradition.

The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina, and the Decadent Sublime

In this article, Jenifer Presto argues that the 1908 Messina-Reggio Calabria earthquake had an impact on Aleksandr Blok no less significant than that which the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had on writers of the Enlightenment and proceeds to demonstrate how it shaped Blok's aesthetics of catastrophe. This aesthetics can best be termed the “decadent sublime, ” an inversion of the Kantian dynamic sublime with its emphasis on bourgeois optimism. Following Immanuel Kant, Blok acknowledges the fear and attraction that nature's forces can inspire; however, unlike Kant, he insists that modern man remains powerless in the face of nature, owing to his decadence—a decadence endemic to European civilization. The decadent sublime is manifested in a host of Blok's writings, ranging from “The Elements and Culture” to Lightning Flashes of Art and The Scythians; it is intensely visual and is indebted to images of ruin by artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Luca Signorelli.