Freud’s Signorelli Parapraxis & Luca Signorelli’s Renaissance Masterpiece the End of Days
The Signorelli parapraxis represents the first and best known example of a parapraxis and its analysis in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The parapraxis centers on a word-finding problem and the production of substitutes. Freud could not recall the name (Signorelli) of the painter of the Orvieto frescos and produced as substitutes the names of two painters Botticelli and Boltraffio. Freud's analysis shows what associative processes had linked Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio. The analysis has been criticized by linguists and others."--Wikipedia
You are brought to total, 100 percent attention. The impact of the frescoes is that of three shots of espresso, a bar of intense dark chocolate, and a double dose or Ritalin—all consumed simultaneously. – Nicolas Weber Fox
Course Overview
This course aims to uncover the meaning of Freud’s famous Signorelli Parapraxis. We will do this by first reading what Freud himself said about “what happened at Orvieto,” and then we will take a look at what other thinkers have written about the incident.
Sigmund Freud traveled to Orvieto in September of 1897. It was mere months after the death of his father, when he was still in the early days of his own self-analysis. He would later pronounce the frescoes, “The finest paintings I have ever seen.”Not only would Orvieto be one of the most significant pilgrimages of his life, but it would make a profound mark on his work, in the theory of repressed memories.
Has that ever happened to you? Where, not only do you forget a name or a person's face, but another image floods into your mind, making it doubly hard to recall the forgotten person or thing. The way we sometimes substitute one name for another is known to us today as Signorelli Parapraxis. A form of “Freudian slip,” it transports us back to the days before Google, when people used to get tripped up by temporary forgetting, mis-readings and mis-writings. Nowadays, we just grab our mobile phones and “google it!” –when someone can’t come up with a name. But back in Freud’s day, people had to wait it out until someone could help them remember --or the person finally recalled the name for themselves. This was the origin of the Signorelli Parapraxis: when a year after seeing the frescoes in Orvieto, Freud, in casual conversation with someone he had met on a train, was unable to remember Signorelli’s name. He could visualize the colors and figures in the frescoes, but for the life of him, he couldn’t recall the name of the painter. It took several days, which Freud described as being an “inner torment,” before he remembered the Signorellis name.
But how could Freud forget the name of his favorite painter?
Engaging the texts and the frescoes, we will seek to come up with our own creative understanding of how great works of art can exert a profound power over us. Seminar components will include weekly reading responses and contemplative writing experiments about memory and art. There are no exams or final papers, as our focus will remain on discussions.
Main Pedagogies: Creative thinking, deep reading and embodied looking, as opposed to seeing, works of art.
Extra Credit: I’m really interested in comparing Signorelli's frescoes to Bosch's Garden of Heavenly Delight in terms of Carlos Fuentes novel Terra Nova. In the novel, we see the Orvieto frescoes flying off the walls of the cathedral in Orvieto and landing as paintings in El Escorial, where Philip II proceeded to gaze on them and obsess on them. In real life, Philip II ordered the Garden to be brought to the Escorial so that he could meditate on the painting as he lie dying. A perfect choice. So we need to consider why Fuentes felt the need to swap Garden for the frescoes. What does this say about Signorelli’s frescoes?
Artworks under consideration
- Luca Signorelli’s frescoes of the Last Judgment in Orvieto Cathedral
- Michelangelo’s Last Judgement Sistine Chapel
- Bosch’s Garden, Prado
- Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait and Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (1500?)
Personae Dramatis
- Sigmund Freud (The Great Man)
- Luca Signorelli (Artist at Orvieto)
- Fra Angelico (First artist to work on frescoes)
- Piero della Francesca (My favorite Artist & Signorelli’s Teacher)
- Michelangelo (Artist & person of interest)
- Nicolas Fox Weber (Author of class main text & person of interest)
- Maud Cruttwell (Author of first monograph &person of interest)
Main Texts:
- Freud, S. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, chapter 1, "Forgetting of Proper Names"
- Freud’s Trip to Orvieto | Nicholas Fox Weber
- Artist Monograph: Life and Art of Luca Signorelli | Tom Henry
FURTHER READING
- Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art | Patricia Lee Rubin
- Luca Signorelli --written in 1899 (to enjoy how different art history was back then) |Maud Cruttwell
- Luca Signorelli: The San Brizio Chapel, Orvieto |Jonathan B. Riess
- The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Frescoes |Jonathan B. RiessHow Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World
by Creighton E. Gilbert - Jo Walton's novel, Lent and Confessions of the Antichrist (A Novel) |Addison Hodges Hart
- The Etruscans |Lucy Shipley
- Dante's Journey to Polyphony |Francesco Ciabattoni
- Notes from an Apocalypse |Mark O’Connell’s
Articles
- Forgetting Signorelli: Monstrous Visions of the Resurrection of the Dead , MARGARET E. OWENS Source: American Imago, Vol. 61, No. 1, Picturing Freud (Spring 2004), pp. 7-33 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable
- Sign/or/Sigm: Freud and the Name of Signorelli by Hubert Damisch
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