Freud, Morelli ja kerronnan kudelma

Tutkivan taiteilijan näkökulma syntyvän teoksen havainnointiin

Abstract

Connoisseur Giovanni Morelli’s (1816–1891) book Della Pittura italiana (1897) found its way to Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) library while he was writing The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). In his book, Morelli used the tools of writing prose. Drawing its inspiration from him, my article ponders upon the narrative tools of a painter and the knowledge that can be produced by combining the approaches of a painter and an art historian. As Freud only visited the art collections described in Morelli’s book through reading his text, I will quote the works of the Finnish painter Ellen Thesleff (1869–1954) – who worked in the gardens of the same museums only half a year before – to trace the mental images (ideational representations) that Freud might have created while reading Morelli’s book. Moreover, I will examine whether Freud was influenced by Morelli as he himself mentions in his essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) and how those effects were visible in his early publications. Finally, I will propose the fragments of creative writing as research material for examining an artist’s mental images before artwork has come into being, propose a correction for a common misconception in the field of art history by separating Freudian slips from symptoms and lastly, argue that Freud made a distinction between empirical perception and psychological perception in his essay on Moses. There, at the intersection of Morelli’s and Freud’s ways of observation, a theoretical base emerges for analysing both the empirical perception a researching artist practices by their unfinished piece of art and the interpretation of the experience it invokes.