The Monument of Ornament The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses Laurence Simmons The human figure is the ideal ornament for the niche. Michelangelo Buonarroti There is no culture without the tomb and there is no tomb without culture. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World just as the archaeologist builds up the walls of a building from the foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and position of the columns from depressions in the floor and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behaviour of the subject of the analysis. Both of them have an undisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains. Both of them, moreover, are subject to many of the same difficulties and sources of error. Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” 1937 INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 1 Let me begin with the only ornament which most readers already have of this essay: my title. The Monument of Ornament immediately raises an essential problem for the grounds and conditions of ornament itself. Can ornament as a topic ever be the subject of an ornament that any discourse on ornament must of course be? It is the dynamics of this complex predicament which I wish to examine here on several different levels. There is no critical theory of art that does not in some way question the determination of the borders, the frames, imposed upon art by theory or projected by art with its own representation of self. “The philosophical,” says Jacques Derrida, “encloses art in its circle but also lets discourse on art be caught in a circle.”1 The question here that I wish to pursue is how to break out of the enclosure determined by a traditionally established inside/outside opposition of this nature. First of all, it will probably not come as a suprise if I admit that my title, The Monument of Ornament, is not my own at all. I have borrowed it from the title of a n a r t i c l e b y a contemporary Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo. Vattimo leads a current Italian school of philosophy known by the rubric il pensiero debole o r ‘ w e a k t h o u g h t , ’ a weak thinking which does not attempt to categorise things but instead to indicate the trajectories, directions, paths and possibilities of certain ideas and, as such, takes a polemical stance towards Western rational metaphysics and totalising systemic philosophies like that of Kant. In borrowing this title here I have naturally also translated it for you from the Italian original of Ornamento monumento2 but, as those readers who understand a little Italian will see, in the process of translating I have added my own little ornament, that of a “the” and an “of,” such that the “Ornament monument” of the original Ornamento monumento will become in my discussion “The Monument of Ornament.” We could even ask, thinking weakly, and risking the charge of mere game playing, but recognising, too, that ornamentation is itself a serious game, if the ‘o’ at the end of the Italian word ornamento ( f i g 1 ) should not be seen as a continental flourish, an ornament, on that rather plain English word ‘ornament’... I Whatever, it is clear that what is ultimately at stake here as the first issue of ornamentation is the problem of translation, of the translation of meaning from one language system to another. As my borrowed title suggests, translation is never simply a matter of the transference of meaning, ideally intact, from one language to another. What Jacques Derrida has called “the metaphysics of presence” is closely related to this whole problematics of translation and linguistic difference, and he has shown that notions of the transparent transference of meaning have played a dominant role in “logocentric” Western philosophy. In this tradition there has been a strong predeliction among philosophers to believe that their concepts and categories are not in any fundamental way language- dependent and, as a consequence, translation (and style one may add) become minor issues having INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 2 nothing to do with that which is thought to be properly philosophical. This belief that the casting of thoughts into words is a form of secondary labour, and that the effects of language must be minimised to preserve the economy and validity of philosophy as a discipline, has formed the basis for philosophy setting itself apart from disciplines like rhetoric or literary criticism in traditional terms. What Derrida has consistently argued is that not only is thinking in some sense always language-dependent but that there is an irreducibility of writing to any kind of straightforward, univocal sense, even before the issue is raised of translating from one language to another. Thus, according to the succinct formulation of Barbara Johnson, it is “precisely the way in which the original text is always already an impossible translation that renders translation impossible.”3 As an example of those disruptive elements of non self-identical meaning that resist all attempts to reduce language to a stable economy of sense, Derrida cites the use of the word pharmakon in Plato, a word whose contradictory meanings (‘medicine,’ ‘remedy,’ ‘poison,’ ‘drug,’ ‘charm,’ ‘spell’... ) resist all attempts to determine or reduce it to a secure univocal sense.4 T h e f a c t t h a t P l a t o o n m o r e t h a n one occasion refers to writing as a pharmakon - making it the focus of these contradictory significations - is, for Derrida, an index and reminder that philosophy is a written discourse, a use of language that allows of no reduction to self-sufficent concepts. As with Plato’s pharmakon , so too the term ornamentation conjures up a conflict of interpretations and is overdetermined, signifying in so many ways that the very notion of signification gets overloaded. To invoke the secret service, ornament or parergon (to give it its Kantian nomenclature) is a double agent, always operating in more than one direction. The traditional view which holds a work of art, or architecture, to be an organic unity always assumes it possible to distinguish between what is essential and indispensible (the work) and what is secondary or insignificant (the ornament), the work existing on the level of the primary in a hierarchical relationship to that of the secondariness of ornament. In such a system of enclosure and exclusion the critical act of interpretation would necessarily share the features of ornament. Derrida moves to displace such a view using the notion of the supplement to suggest that ornament is not an index of inferiority, nor something unnecessarily tacked on to something already complete in itself. For, he says, there are two contradictory meanings of the term supplement only one of which squares with the traditional idea of the relation between art object and ornament: the supplement is an inessential extra something added on to something that is complete in itself, but it is also something added in order to complete or compensate for a lack in what was supposed to be complete. Such a logic of supplementarity makes the w o r k o f a r t t h e p r i o r t e r m , t h e p l e n i t u d e t h a t i s there at the start, but also reveals an inherent lack within it so that ornament, the additional extra, becomes the essential condition of that which it supplements.5 Derrida begins this revision with the criticism of ornament expounded by Kant in the fourteenth paragraph of his Critique of Judgment.6 For Kant, ornament is “only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent.” It is that which can be detached from the work, that which has been added to it, an external addition, a supplement subservient to the work, in the service of the work. Furthermore Kant blames ornament for becoming an end in itself, a purely sensual attraction which detracts from the total representation of the object and one which reduces the judgment of taste to a sensation of pure and simple pleasure. It is important to mention here that in this brief Kantian paragraph are condensed with clarity all the motives of aesthetic legitimation that can be propounded in favour of positions counter to ornament and, as such, the polemic against ornament conducted by architects and critics belonging to the Modern movement may be traced back to the values of ornament as superfluous and sensualising decoration deplored by Kant. One other chapter of that polemic and another example of the denigration of ornament in the history of Modernism is that of Adolf Loos in his essay Ornament and Crime (1908).7 For the Modernist Loos, ornament is the unfinished trace of the infantile, an insult to history and to progress. The Modern is progress demonstrated by simple, essential and rational forms and “the evolution of civilisation is synonymous with the elimination of ornament from objects of use.” Finally, because of ornament, immense and useless efforts have been expended in the fabrication of goods that have resulted in an inhuman exploitation of human labour: “Ornament is not merely produced by criminals, it commits a crime itself by damaging a national economy and therefore its cultural development,” thunders Loos. Both these rejections of ornament, on the part of Kant and of Loos, have a Platonic origin and may be seen as part and parcel of the Platonic depreciation of the ornaments of discourse (rhetoric), the inert remains of the spoken word (writing), and the INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 3 unfaithful copies of ideas (artistic production). Derrida argues that all philosophical discourse on art (from Plato to Heidegger) attempts to draw the distinction between the inside and the outside of the artwork, between its internal meaning and external circumstances, and that this is disturbed by the category of ornamentation (parergon) which is neither simply inside nor outside the work (ergon). There is always a lack, a gap, a crack in the structure of the w o r k w h i c h m u s t b e f i l l e d b y the ornament and what links Kant’s three examples of ornament (the frame on a painting, drapery on a statue, the colonnade on a palace) is that they cannot be detached without destroying the work. The work not only admits the external ornament into its interior, but is constituted by that very entry, made possible by that which is excluded from it, that which serves it, that which it masters. The ornament is “an outside which is called inside the inside to constitute it as inside,”8 an outside that always already inhabits the inside as an intrinsic constituent. Derrida, as I have mentioned, sees Heidegger, and naturally himself, at the end, as the ends, of this Platonic tradition and it is here that we might find Gianni Vattimo’s paper relevant. In his essay “Ornament monument,” Vattimo rereads a little- known minor later lecture of Heidegger which, as he demonstrates, is of great relevance to the disciplines of architecture and sculpture. This lecture, entitled “Art and Space” of 1969,9 Vattimo believes, must be reread with reference to two central questions of Heideggerian aesthetics: a) First of all that from the publication of Being and Time of 1927, the discourse that Heidegger conducts on Being, which appears to privilege its relationship with Time and temporality as the guiding dimension for an understanding of the problem of Being; b) Secondly that Heidegger’s most systematic essay on the problems of aesthetics, The Origins of the Work of Art , affirms the poetical (dichterisch) character of all the arts, giving a primacy to poetry as the art of the word above other possible forms.10 “Art and Space” is important, Vattimo suggests, because at a later stage in his career it puts these critically accepted tenets of Heidegger’s thought in question. In this text, Heidegger recognises space as a sort of Ur-phenomenon and attempts to describe existence in spatial terms. As a natural consequence, the primacy of poetry among the arts is also questioned given the new centrality of this role of space, which, in the later writings, Heidegger gives to sculpture the site of the happening of truth. This rediscovery of the dimension of spatiality is a decisive step taken on Heidegger’s path towards a philosophy that is truly beyond the metaphysical. This shift of emphasis has significant consequences, Vattimo believes, for aesthetic discourse on ornament, not simply because the earlier insistence on the truth c h a r a c t e r o f t h e w o r k o f a r t i n H e i d e g g e r w o u l d appear to be contrary to the recognition of ornament, but because the arts of decoration function in a double sense by attracting the attention of the observer and by sending attention beyond the work to its living context, that is, it is a displacing of the relationship between centre and periphery. As Vattimo says, “For Heidegger, it would appear, it is not merely a question of defining decorative art as a specific type of art ... rather, he seeks to acknowledge the decorative nature of all art.”11 The implications of this are that all art, in so far as it is a realisation of truth, is decorative and decoration becomes the central phenomenon of Heidegger’s aesthetic such that each monument of the work of art is ornament, every ornament a monument. II I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman. I have often observed that the subject matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities ... Nevertheless works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, that is to explain to myself what their effect is due to ... This has brought me to recognise the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us ... But why should the artist’s intention not be capable of being communicated and comprehended in words, like any other fact of mental life? Perhaps where great works of art are concerned this would never be possible without the application of psychoanalysis. The product itself after all must admit of such an analysis, if it really is an effective expression of the intentions and emotional activities of the artist. To discover his intention, though, I must first find out the meaning and content of what is represented in his work; I must, in other words, be able to interpret it. It is possible, therefore, that a work of art of this kind needs interpretation, and that until I have accomplished that interpretation I cannot come to know why I have been so powerfully affected. INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 4 These are the introductory pages of an essay by Freud entitled “The Moses of Michelangelo,” an essay w h i c h c o u l d a l s o b e c i t e d a s t h e f i r s t e x a m p l e o f psychoanalytic art criticism ever written.12 I t w i l l b e clear, too, I hope, that in my discussion on ornament I have still remained with that ornament, the title, more precisely with the second part of my title “Michelangelo’s Moses.” I was quoting selectively from Freud’s essay so as to dwell on the way that for Freud discourse on art, interpretation (and it is significant that the verb ‘to interpret’ is underlined in Freud’s account), bears an intrinsic relation to the work of art itself while at the same time appearing to be something extra, something superfluous, something that really never “says anything that solves the problem for the unpretending admirer.” But at the same time, Freud suggests, because the work of art is in some way incomplete, insufficent, it needs criticism, a special kind of criticism, it needs psychoanalysis. It cannot convey its intentions without the psychoanalytic critic. The situation is t h a t t h e p o w e r o f t h e a r t o b j e c t i s r e d u c e d to a position of powerlessness where it needs the critic, but even so for Freud there remains “the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still riddles to our understanding.” In a situation where the work of art cannot communicate its intentions without the psychoanalytic critic it is no wonder that Freud, despite his disclaimer to be only a layman, a point which he uses to secure our initial indulgence, proceeds in this essay with remarkable and confident authority in discussing the issues of aesthetics. There is another curious way in which a ‘scene of interpretation’ is also played out at the beginning of Freud’s text on Michelangelo. Freud in this essay is not writing as himself, that is as the founder of psychoanalysis, but he is writing under an assumed identity. “The Moses of Michelangelo” was originally published anonymously in Imago, an official psychoanalytical journal, in 1914, where it was accompanied by the following footnote obviously drafted by Freud himself: Although this paper does not, strictly speaking, conform to the conditions under which contributions are accepted for publication in this Journal, the editors have decided to print it, since the author is personally known to them, moves in psychoanalytic circles, and since his mode of thought has in point of fact a certain resemblance to the methodology of psychoanalysis.13 This article, the founding piece of psychoanalytical criticism, the model for the genre, is thus born under the shadow of illegitimacy and anonymity. The author is a layman in matters of art he tells us and he is presented as an anonymous layman in matters of psychoanalysis. He “moves in psychoanalytical circles,” says the footnote, an uncanny statement when we consider that in reality Freud moved those circles as his disciples only too clearly came to discover. Jane Gallop has teased out the suggestiveness of this situation when she states: A certain legitimacy by association pervades this article, which is neither legitimately psychoanalytic nor art criticism, but resembles both. At the same time that association is accompanied by and oddly militant illegitimacy and a puzzling question about authorship. The founder of psychoanalytic art criticism disguises his authorship, rendering it questionable, as if there were some profound intrication between psychoanalytic art criticism and a radical question about its legitimate author-ity.14 Freud, the layman, Gallop maintains, feels he has something to contribute to the understanding of art, something that the ‘connoisseurs’ have not been able to come up with. If he unabashedly proclaims that his is a lay opinion, it is because he considers it an excellent opinion. He is not just any old layman; he prides himself on being a good lay.15 The very structure of the beginning of Freud’s essay on Michelangelo’s Moses invites us to read that text as we would read a work of art, in the sense that “every text is a tissue that masks at the same time that it reveals.”16 Freud claims that he is no connoisseur, but if we read on there is a connoisseur in his text, as he says again dissembling: Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis [and that is a very curious phrase itself!], I l e a r n t that a Russian art connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff, 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.17 The activity of a connoisseur consists in determining the author of a work of art on the basis of its visual characteristics and the connoisseur in performing such a function is like an archaeologist or a philologist. But in a curious turn Freud also finds a parallel between his efforts to solve the riddles of meaning repressed in the unconscious and INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 5 Lermolieff’s detection of the authority of the artist’s hand, and in so doing he becomes the connoisseur he says he is not. It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis, [claims Freud] 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.18 What exactly was Giovanni Morelli’s method? (For Morelli was the anagrammatic Lermolieff’s real name as will become clear in a moment)19 ( f i g 2 ). Morelli believed that the museums of his time were full of incorrectly-attributed paintings and that the task of ascribing masterpieces correctly or distinguishing copies from originals was doomed, since in many cases the paintings were unsigned or painted over, or in poor repair. Morelli maintained that one should abandon the convention of scrutinizing the most obvious characteristics of a painting since these were the ones that could most easily be imitated. Instead he held that it was necessary to concentrate upon minor details, especially those least significant in the style typical of a painter’s own school. These might be, for example, the way in which the painter draws hands and ears, earlobes and fingernails, or the shapes of fingers (f i g s 3 , 4 ). The connoisseur must observe these morphological details rather like a graphology expert observes and compares the forms of letters of the alphabet. Using his method Morelli was particularly successful, some discoveries he made were even sensational such as his identification of a reclining Venus by Giorgione, which until then had been displayed at Dresden as a copy of Titian done by Sassoferrata. He was also the first to reconstruct the early life and works of Correggio and was to be a formative influence on the work of Bernard Berenson. It is a curious thing then that a man whose life work is dedicated to the assignment of proper names to art works should be so concerned about hiding his own and Morelli’s first publication was presented under the following rubric: The Galleries of Rome. A Critical Essay by Ivan Lermolieff, translated from the Russian by Dr Johannes Schwarze. In these writings Morelli presents himself as a young Russian critic at the beginning of his career, yet it will be obvious to present day readers, just as it must have been obvious to the restricted circle of art connoisseurs, that behind the Russified anagram of the supposed author and the Germanised parody of the pretend translator lurks the Italian of Giovanni Morelli. But the nominal accretions do not end here! Morelli was born in Verona in 1816 and his family was originally of French protestant origin, so Morelli itself was already an Italianisation of the French Morel. Being protestant in origin Giovanni Morelli was sent to school in Switzerland and susequently undertook medical studies in Munich and, indeed, there is much in common between his method of drawing hands and ears and the medical semiotics of current manuals of comparative anatomy. After a period of study in Paris, where he moved in artistic circles, Morelli returned to Italy in 1848 and joined Cavour’s circle and the political movement of the Italian Risorgimento and in 1873 he was nominated a Senator for Life in the new Italian Parliament. Despite his political ambitions Morelli remained closely involved with cultural and art historical concerns, helping, among others, the collectors who formed what was to become the National Gallery Collection in London. If ‘Lermolieff’ was a novice, a debutante in cultural circles, one could definitely say that Morelli was not such an unknown. The comparison with Freud’s anonymous presentation of himself as moving in but not the mover of psychoanalytical circles is indeed an u n c a n n y o n e , a n d F r e u d c o u l d be thought of as playing out that scene again in his presentation of Giovanni Morelli. However, in the anonymity of playing at being Morelli, Freud denounces the ideology in which he (Morelli) is trapped, the ideology of attribution, of the search for the paternal name of the author. It is precisely the theological conception of a work of art, that which posits an autonomous conscious subject who is the f a t h e r o f h i s w o r k s , a s G o d i s o f c r e a t i o n , w h i c h Freud sets out to unmask.20 Freud was correct to see that Morelli had a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and that the implications of Morelli’s method lay elsewhere and w e r e m u c h r i c h e r . O n e o f those implications has been developed recently by the Italian historians Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg21 w h o d r a w a parallel between Morelli’s methods of classification and those attributed by Arthur Conan Doyle only a few years later to his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. The art connoisseur, the detective and the psychoanalyst can be compared since each makes discoveries from clues that go unnoticed by others, u n c o v e r i n g t h e a u t h o r i n o n e c a s e o f a crime, in another of a painting, in the third of the self. Ginzburg cites a curiously Morellian tale entitled “The Cardboard Box” (1892) to illustrate his point.22 We find Watson observing Holmes the expert at work thus: [Holmes] was staring with singular intentness at the lady’s profile. Suprise and satisfaction were both for an instant to be read upon his eager face, though when she glanced around to find out the cause of his silence he had INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 6 become as demure as ever. I stared hard myself at her flat grizzled hair, her trim cap, her little gilt ear-rings, her placid features, but I could see nothing which would account for my companion’s evident excitement. Later on Holmes explains to Watson the course of his unusual deduction: As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the human body which varies so much as the ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones. In last year’s Anthropological Journal you will find two short monographs from my pen upon the subject. I had, therefore, examined the ears in the box with the eyes of an expert, and had carefully noted their anatomical peculiarities. Imagine my suprise then, when, on looking at Miss Cushing, I perceived that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected. The matter was entirely beyond coincidence. There was the same shortening of the pinna, the same broad curve of the upper lobe, the same convolution of the inner cartilage. In all essentials it was the same ear. Of course, I at once saw the enormous importance of the observation. It was evident that the victim was a blood relation, and probably a very close one. Watson cannot account for the intrinsic (“the enormous importance of the observation”) in the apparently extrinsic (“trim cap” and “gilt ear-rings”). It is clear that the problem which Watson has difficulty grasping here is the problem of ornament, the implications of ornament as supplement in Derrida’s terms. I want now to try and follow some of those implications for Freud’s text and psychoanalysis, and for Michelangelo’s statue of Moses itself. III Initially in his essay Freud cites a variety of late nineteenth-century interpretations of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses (f i g 5 ) and shows how they fall into two groups: those which maintain that Michelangelo intended to create “a timeless study of character and mood;” and those which argue that Moses was portrayed at “a particular moment of his life.” Most of the commentators Freud cites favour the latter reading and the majority think that they can identify the moment in question. As Freud phrases it: The majority of judges ... are able to tell us what episode in his life it is which the artist has immortalised in stone. It is the descent from Mt Sinai, where Moses has received the tables from God, and it is the moment when he perceives that the people have meanwhile made themselves a Golden Calf and are dancing around it and are rejoicing. This is the scene upon which his eyes are turned, this is the spectacle which calls out the feelings depicted in his countenance - feelings which in the next instant will launch his great frame into violent action. Michelangelo has chosen this last moment of hesitation, of calm before the storm, for his representation. In the next instant Moses w i l l s p r i n g t o h i s f e e t - h i s l e f t f o o t i s a l r e a d y r a i s e d from the ground - dash the Tables to the earth, and let loose his rage upon his faithless people.23 The distinguished art historian and connoisseur Heinrich Wölfflin held this view when he spoke of “inhibited movement” and saw the statue as depicting “the last moment of self-control before (Moses) let himself go and leaps to his feet.”24 B u t F r e u d n o t e s how these nineteenth-century accounts contradict each other and that “a figure in the act of instant departure would be utterly at variance with the state of mind which the tomb is meant to induce in us.”25 Following on from his discovery and discussion of Morelli, but proceeding we should note in a non- Morellian fashion since he does not make a comparison with other works by Michelangelo, Freud focuses on what he perceives as two troubling details concerning Michelangelo’s Moses - the attitude of the right hand and the position of the two Tables of the Law. Let us begin with the right hand (f i g 6 ), essentially Freud believes that the way the fingers and the strands of the beard are related can only be understood as the consequence of a prior movement, as he puts it: “Perhaps his hand had seized his beard with far more energy, had reached across to its left edge, and, in returning to that position in which the statue shows it, had been followed by a part of his beard which now testifies to the movement which has just taken place.” 26 W i t h r e s p e c t t o t h e T a b l e s (f i g 7 ), Freud argues that “a protuberance like a horn” on their lower edge indicates that they are upside down and this peculiar position also indicates prior movement. Linking his analysis to these two Morellian details of the statue he proposes a cinematographic sequence of the figure’s movement which he has an artist draw for him (fig 8). The first diagram shows Moses sitting sedately with the Tables firmly under his right arm supported by his right hand. The second depicts him after he has seen the Israelites on his left looking towards them in a state of rage, the Tables have now swiveled upside down and he grasps his beard in anger. The third presents the statue as it is, Moses has drawn his right hand back across his beard to regain control and overcome his fury of which only a few traces remain. 27 Freud concludes: INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 7 What we see before us is not the inception of a violent action but the remains of a movement that has already taken place. In his first transport of fury, Moses desired to act, to spring up and take vengeance and forget the Tables; but he has overcome the temptation, and he will now remain seated and still, in his frozen wrath and in his pain mingled with contempt. Nor will he throw away the Tables so that they will break on the stones, for it is on their especial account that he has controlled his anger; it was to preserve them that he kept his passion in check. In giving way to his rage and indignation he had to neglect the Tables, and the hand which upheld them was withdrawn. They began to slide down and were in danger of being broken. This brought him to himself. He remembered his mission and for its sake renounced an indulgence of his feelings. His hand returned and saved the unsupported Tables before they had actually fallen to the ground. In this attitude he remained immobilised, and in this attitude Michelangelo has portrayed him as the guardian of the tomb.28 From what remains of Michelangelo’s various designs for the tomb of Julius II and the biographical accounts of Vasari and Condivi, it is clear that the statue of Moses was first intended to take up a position other than the one in which it is placed today. As is well-known, Michelangelo’s tomb for Julius II was first commissioned in 1503, and when Michelangelo left Rome for Carrara in 1505 to quarry marble for the tomb we know that decisions about its form and scale had been made.29 The tomb was to be freestanding for it was intended that it should stand in the new Basilica of St Peter’s where Julius is in fact buried. It was also designed in imitation of classical sepulchral monuments, imposing i n s i z e , a b o u t 2 3 f e e t b y 3 6 f e e t a n d s o m e three levels high, the three tiers deriving possibly from those of the Imperial ceremonial immolation or rogus, and the unfinished tomb would itself contain over forty sculpted figures (f i g s 9 , 1 0 ). The Moses was originally planned as one of four figures on the cornice of the second level of the tomb. The other three, according to Vasari were to have been St Paul, the Active Life and the Contemplative Life. However, Michelangelo carved almost nothing of this initial design and he did not really begin to work on the tomb until 1513. In fact this was after the death of Julius II when a second contract was drawn up, this time with Julius’ heirs and we do have some surviving drawings, one of 1513, found today in Berlin and its accompanying version which is a reconstruction by Panofsky (figs 11, 12 ). This revised tomb is the one, most scholars believe, for which the statue of Moses was carved between 1513 and 1516. It is clearly no longer the grandiose freestanding project of 1505 with all its classical connotations, the rear face now abuts against a wall and so it becomes a more modest Renaissance wall- like tomb with a far more explicitly Christian and Marian iconographic content, also associated with this revised project is an explicit Neoplatonic allegory (f i g s 1 3 , 1 4). At the very top we find the M a d o n n a a n d C h i l d i n t h e Empyrean heaven and then the Pope’s body born by a joyful and a weeping figure (figures of angels) representing Heaven receiving Julius’ immortal soul, joyfully, and Earth weeping at loosing him, since Earth will retain only his corruptible remains in this very tomb. Then, on either side, we have an allegory of the contemplative and active life with the figures of Moses and St Paul. These figures are not in some form of contrastive opposition to each other but each contains within it both active and contemplative elements if we follow Vasari’s account.30 T h e n d o w n b e l o w o n t h e t h i r d level we have a series of bound male prisoners, b o u n d t o columns which have heads upon them called termini. Terminus, the figure of an aging and ugly god, was traditionally put up to mark and protect boundaries and here these termini can be seen as dividing the heavenly allegory above from the earthly one played out below. In the niches between them and the bound prisoners under them we have a series of female victories (winged victory figures in the Greek and classical style). At the very bottom of the tomb then there would appear to be some sort of triumph, a triumph of Victories and the binding of those who are taken prisoner. For Michelangelo’s other contemporary biographer Condivi, the Winged Victories are the Virtues and the bound prisoners the Arts which Julius II practised and fostered.31 The Arts are bound as prisoners because they are subject to death in this world as was Julius, the one who had released them and whose death is now the occasion for their binding again. The final, incomplete and unsatisfactory tomb, a mixture of several styles and hands, was not achieved until 1545 and finally unveiled in 1547 (fig 15). Michelangelo’s Moses is now found in the centre of the bottom of two tiers flanked by two of the weakest figures that Michelangelo ever carved, those of Rachael a n d Leah; the two completed slaves or bound prisoners, which are to be found in the Louvre today, no longer had a part to play and were given away to be replaced by huge volutes under the termini heads; above Moses is the stark and frozen architecture of the upper level containing the bland, inexpressive and indifferent work of Michelangelo’s assistant, Raffaello da Montelupo. And so, rather miserably, and to his great dissatisfaction, Michelangelo finished t h e t o m b h e h a d b e g u n s o confidently forty two years earlier, a tomb that is today remembered or visited not for its monumental qualities, nor for its INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 8 ensemble of figures but for the one sculpture of Moses. In fact, it was Anton Springer, a critic whom Freud cites, who was the first to suggest that the anomalies and defects perceived by critics in the statue of Moses would disappear if it were placed up high and viewed from below as Michelangelo might have intended.32 More recently Earl Rosenthal has reproposed a viewing of the statue from below and p r o v i d e d a m o c k u p o f a p l a s t e r c a s t t a k e n f r o m various angles to approximate what the statue would look like if it were placed on a platform fifteen-feet high (fig 16). And indeed, when seen from below, the figure appears less rigid and more relaxed, the left foot drawn back along the side no longer suggests an intention to rise (fig 17 ), the much- questioned Tables seem more firmly tucked under a p o w e r f u l a r m a n d a l o t l e s s p r e c a r i o u s f r o m this angle. It is now that the contemporary description of the statue by Michelangelo’s biographer Condivi seems far more plausible: Moisé duce e capitano degli Ebrei; il quale se ne sta a sedere in atto di pensoso e savio, tenendo sotto il braccio destro le tavole della legge, e colla sinistra mano sostenendosi il mento, come persona stanca e piena di cure (fig 18).33 I believe that this rethinking of the relationship between the sculpture and the architectural monument that contains it may be taken even further. That is, the redimensionings and changes successive to the first project of 1503 are partially a testimony to the lack of interest on Michelangelo’s part for the complex as a whole, as are the indifferent work on the figures of Leah a n d Rachael and the final assigning of the upper portions to the second-rate efforts of Raffaello da Montelupo. Or more correctly perhaps we should redimension that lack of interest itself, to see it as a change of interest: it seems clear that the idea of the condensation of the entire monument into one figure, at the outset merely one of its ornaments, begins to take place in Michelangelo’s mind from the project of 1513 onwards. The redimensioned 1513 project has one side with its back placed against the wall echoing the form of the sculptural figure of Moses which was not sculpted to be viewed from the rear. The figure of Moses t a k e s o n gigantic, architectural proportions, like that of the David. There are many syntactical correspondences to be found between the Moses a n d Michelangelo’s work in architecture itself, in particular in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo and the vestibule of the Laurentian Library. The volutes below the termini figures of lower section of the tomb bear a striking resemblance to those used in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library. The columns of the Laurentian Library are constructed almost sculpturally by a process of removal, ‘per via di levare,’ r a t h e r than being modelled or ‘built up’ in relief, and are inserted like autonomous members into the wall, corresponding to the massiveness of right leg of Moses (fig 19). The columns of the New Sacristy, too, are white legs of marble and it is no coincidence that the same material as the sculptures, marble, characterises all of Michelangelo’s early architectural works as Ackerman notes (f i g 2 0 ).34 Only architecture could offer Michelangelo the possibility of reading the enormous dimensions of the human figure which became his obsession after the sculpture of David and the painted figures of the Sistine ceiling, together with his Moses.35 Only architecture could become so central to this sculpture of Moses, initially as the monument of ornament and finally the inseparable ornament of its monument. IV I c o u l d h a v e finished here with something of an ornamental flourish, but it is the nature of all ornamentation to keep on going on, as Michelangelo was to discover to his dismay. So let me see if I can bring a few more threads together with respect to Freud’s essay remembering too that Freud would argue in one of his last essays that all analysis is inherently interminable since the dynamics of resistance and transference at work can always generate new beginnings in relation to any conceivable end. In contrast to the psychobiographical model of Freud’s essays on art and literature, such as the monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, the object of Freud’s analysis in “The Moses of Michelangelo” is not the creator of the sculpture, and it has often been objected that he has nothing at all to say about Michelangelo Buonarroti when there w a s s o m u c h t h a t c o u l d h a v e b e e n s a i d , s o m u c h agony or ecstasy about him to express. Curiously and significantly in this essay the object for analysis is the figure which furnishes the model for the sculpture, that is the historical figure of Moses. The result of this shift of attention is that in the sculpture itself we have a re-presentation of the theoretical model of psychoanalytical cure as Freud was beginning to elaborate it. Michelangelo, the sculptor in the role of the analyst, gives form to the Biblical tale of Moses, enunciates that history with its hesitations, contradictions, obscure details, permits us to follow a hidden meaning; he places, we might say, the ornament of Moses’ life within the monument of history. One can see here exactly the relationship proposed by Freud nine months later in a text which INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 9 is rich in secret harmonies with this essay on Michelangelo, the case study known as the Wolf Man, written up with the title “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” between 1914-15 but only published in 1918.36 Freud at the threshold of this case history warns us he is dealing with an infantile neurosis analysed fifteen years after its termination: “An analysis of a childhood disorder through the medium of recollection in an intellectually mature adult ... necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing to which a person’s own past is subjected when it is looked back upon from a later period.”37 L e t m e l a y o u t t h e s a l i e n t p o i n t s of the dream, the frightening dream of the six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree, which came to name the case and the patient himself and which Freud retained as the cornerstone of his analysis. The Wolf Man drew a diagram (fig 21) and gave this account of his dream: I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed ... Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.38 For the Wolf Man, recounting this dream as he did on various occasions, two elements remain invariable and of great significance: the action of the opening window and the fixed attentive gaze ascribed to the wolves. For Freud the opening window becomes the young dreamer waking up, opening the window of his eyes, the strained attention of the wolves is a displaced representation of the intense looking of the dreamer himself, and the motionlessness of the wolves points by contradiction to the most striking feature of the scene he observes, its agitation. According to Freud for the Wolf Man: “What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious memory traces was the picture of copulation of his parents.”39 This dream by deferred action produces a neurotic reaction to the ‘primal scene’ witnessed by the child two and a half years earlier. The dream both records the past events, it is a rememoration, and itself in the past is a decisive present event in the adult Wolf Man’s story. The dream is a text which explains but which also alters the reality to which it refers.40 Freud in his relationship with the Wolf Man is in a position analogous to the Wolf Man with his own buried past, and the Wolf Man’s case history is in turn analogous to the dynamics of the contemporary essay, “The Moses of Michelangelo”: Freud : Adult Wolf Man :: Adult Wolf Man : Child Wolf Man Freud : Michelangelo :: Michelangelo : Moses. Both texts dramatise the narrative situation and in both the narrative procedures uncovered are the same, both exhibit a desire to actualise the past, to make it present, moving back from present symptoms to the traumatic events and their subsequent revival in the patient’s life. The patient comes to the analyst like the artwork comes to the critic with a story to be told, a story that is incomplete and untherapeutic, but which when told is curative and satisfying. Michelangelo’s Moses demands decipherment, the unpacking of a dense and overlaid text, by reordering its components as narrative in a cinematographic sequence, finding the implications of the (hi)story behind it. As in Freud’s reading of Michelangelo’s Moses, in the Wolf Man’s dream the thematic material only makes sense when ordered as a sequence of events or narrativised. In both cases it is clear that the plot is not straightforward: the constitution of the present narrative in relation to the past is complex, the notion of causality confusing and problematic, the actual part played by the event or its phantasmatic imagination difficult to unravel. More importantly, these two texts of Freud are both texts which demonstrate the value of the transferential model and they document Freud’s progressive discovery of the importance of the transference in analysis, bringing into play the dynamic interaction of the teller and listener of a tale, the dialogic relation of production and interpretation. The traditional transferential model is that of transference as a distinct space created between the analysand and analyst where the past affective life and erotic impulses of the analysand are reinvested in the multiple dynamics of the interaction with the analyst. These key concepts on transference by Freud are expressed in two early essays, “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912) and “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914) both written before the case history of the Wolf Man and the essay on Michelangelo’s Moses. These two latter works contain, I believe, the beginnings of a reworking and rethinking of those early ideas on transference which then culminate for Freud in the two essays “Constructions in Analysis” INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 10 (1937) and “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), and are then to be subsequently elaborated in the work of Jacques Lacan. If the transference necessarily elicts interpretation, it is equally true that the potential and promise of interpretation (the countertransference) on the part of the analyst, the figure whom Lacan rephrases as “the subject supposed to know,”41 triggers the transferential relation, the analysand’s entry into the interpretative space of transference. Lacan sees transference as the entanglement of two desires: The transference is a phenomenon in which subject and psycho-analyst are both included. To divide it in terms of transference and counter-transference - however bold, however confident what is said on this theme may be - is n e v e r m o r e t h a n a w a y o f avoiding the essence of the matter.42 In Lacan’s more radical view of the transferential relationship interpreting is what happens on both sides of the analytic situation: What needs to be understood regarding psychoanalytic experience is that it proceeds entirely in a relationship of subject to subject ... What happens in an analysis is that the subject is, strictly speaking, constituted through a discourse, to which the mere presence of the psychoanalyst brings, before any intervention, the dimension of dialogue.43 Thus the unconscious is not simply the object of psychoanalytical investigation, but also paradoxically its subject; it is not simply that which must be read, it is also that which reads. As Peter Brooks, to whom I am indebted for many of the insights here, notes writing about the Wolf Man’s narrative: The logic of his interpretative work moves Freud to an understanding that causation can work backward as well as forward since the effect of an event, or of phantasy, often comes only when it takes on meaning ... which may occur with considerable delay. Chronological sequence may not settle this issue of cause: events may gain traumatic significance by deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) or retroaction, action working in reverse sequence to create a meaning that did not previously exist.44 In his text on Michelangelo, protected by both the extrinsic subject matter and the doubly deferred anonymity of address, Freud risks proposing this radical hypothesis, one that he will not dare offer in such explicit terms within the formality and legitimacy of the Wolf Man’s case study. In interpretation it is not simply a question of finding proof for a hypothetical event in the past, but of making that history, of establishing the history of a cure. This is to say that the path the analyst follows has its origins in the goal proposed. There is no cure without a project and every project finds its justification in its theoretical precedent. The space of criticism is in fact a meeting place, like the meeting place of the two voices of the patient and the analyst in the transitional realm of transference, a medium of the inbetween, a space that is artificial but nonetheless the place of real investments of desire. The true narrative of criticism/analysis is the product of two discourses playing against one another, often warring with one another, a perpetually reversing counterpoint of origin and process. What this implies in its most extreme version is that whoever interprets out of his or her unconscious, is an analysand even when the interpreting is done from the position of the analyst. There is no ornament of theory that is not already some monument of analysis. NOTES 1 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 27. 2 This essay was first published in Rivista di estetica (1982), n. 12 p. 36-43 with the title “Ornamento e monumento” and then reprinted in the collection La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), p. 87- 97, as “Ornamento monumento.” It is now available in English as “Ornament/Monument” in Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture trans. Jon R. Synder (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), p. 79-89. For “il pensiero debole” see Il pensiero debole eds. Pier Aldo Rovatti and Gianni Vattimo, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983). 3 Barbara Johnson, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically,” Difference in Translation ed. Joseph F. Graham, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 146. S e e a l s o Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” Derrida and Differance ed. David Wood, (Coventry: Parousia Press, 1985), p. 1-8, where he states “I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text.” 4 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in his Dissemination trans. Barbara Johnson, (London: Althone Press, 1981), p. 61-156. 5 For Derrida’s notion of supplement see Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana Modern Masters, 1987), p. 108-113, 118-121. 6 Derrida, The Truth in Painting p. 15-147. INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 11 7 Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” Yehudra Safran and Wilfred Wing, The Architecture of Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition Catalogue (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), p. 100-103. 8 Derrida, The Truth in Painting p. 63. 9 Martin Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum (St Galen: Erker Verlag, 1969). A not entirely reliable English translation of this essay by Charles H. Seibert exists as “Art and Space,” Man and World ( 1 9 7 3 ) , n . 6 , p . 3-8. 10 An English translation of this essay is contained in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 11 Vattimo, The End of Modernity p. 85. 12 Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo (1914),” The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 14, Art and Literature trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). On Freud’s essay see: Hubert Damisch, “Le gardien de l’interprétation,” Tel Quel ( 1 9 7 1 ) , n . 4 4 , p . 7 0 - 8 4 , and (1972), n . 4 5 , p. 82-96; Gerald L. Bruns, “Freud, Structuralism, and ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism ( 1 9 7 4 ) , n . 3 3 , p. 8-13; Rudy Bremer, “Freud and Michelangelo’s Moses,” American Imago (1976), n . 3 3 , p. 60-75; C l a u d e l e Guen, “Un discours de la méthode psychanalytique: Le ‘Moïse de Michel-ange’ de Sigmund Freud,” Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse (1977), n . 4 1 , p. 489-502; Peter Fuller, “Moses, Mechanism, and Michelangelo,” in his Art and Psychoanalysis (London: Writers and Readers, 1980), p. 26-70; Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics trans. Winifred Woodhull, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 8-13, 92-94; and Laurie Schneider Adams, “Michelangelo’s Moses and Other Michelangelo Problems,” in her Art and Psychoanalysis (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 155-175. 13 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 253. 14 Jane Gallop, “Pyschoanalytic Criticism: Some Intimate Questions,” Art in America (1984), p . 1 3 . Now reprinted in a slightly different form as “A G o o d L a y ” i n h e r Thinking Through the Body ( N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p . 1 3 5 - 149. 15 Gallop, “Pyschoanalytic Criticism,” p. 13. 16 Kofman, The Childhood of Art p. 9. 17 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 265. 18 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 265. 19 For biographical details of Morelli’s life see Sir A. H. Layard’s introduction to vol. 1 of Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works; The Borghese and Doria-Pamphili Galleries in Rome trans. C. J. Foulkes (London: J. Murray, 1892). This was also most probably the source of Freud’s biographical information. On Morelli’s ideas see Edgar Wind, “Critique of Connoisseurship,” in his Art and Anarchy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 32-51; Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (Cleveland: A. A. Knopf, 1959), p. 109-110; Richard Wollheim, “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship” in his On Art and the Mind, Essays and Lectures (London: 1973); Hubert Damisch, “La partie et le tout,” Revue d'Esthetique (1970), n. 23, p. 168-88; Jack Spector, “The Method of Morelli and its Relation to Freudian Psychoanalysis,” Diogenes ( 1 9 6 9 ) , n . 6 6 , p. 63-69; Henri Zerner, “Giovanni Morelli et la science de l’art,” Revue de l'art (1978), n. 40, p. 209-15; Giovanni Previtali, “A propos de Morelli,” Revue de l'art ( 1 9 7 8 ) , n . 4 2 , p. 27-31; Jaynie Anderson, “Giovanni Morelli et sa définition de la ‘scienza dell’arte’,” Revue de l'art ( 1 9 8 7 ) , n . 7 5 , p. 49-55; and Jack Spector, “The State of Psychoanalytic Research in Art History,” The Art Bulletin (1988), n. 70, p. 49-76. 20 Kofman, The Childhood of Art p. 10. 21 “cette méthode se ressent nettement des tendances du temps, son caractère scientifique est indéniable mais, d’autre part, elle semble suivre un méthode parallèle à celle des enquetes policières de Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” Enrico Castelnuovo, “Attribution,” Encyclopaedia universalis II (Paris, 1971), p. 782; see also Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: C l u e s a n d Scientific Method,” History Workshop (1980), n . 9 , p . 5 - 3 6 . Ginzburg gives some evidence to suggest that the parallel was possibly more than mere coincidence: A n u n c l e o f C o n a n D o y l e ’ s w a s d i r e c t o r of the Dublin Art Gallery and met Morelli in 1 8 8 7 a n d apparently used his method in compiling the catalogue of the gallery in 1890. The first English translation of Morelli appeared in 1883 and the first Holmes story was published in 1887. Recently the connections between Freud’s methods and those of Sherlock Holmes have been suggested and elaborated upon by Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p. 269, who notes comments in the Wolf Man’s memoirs that specifically attest to Freud’s knowledge and interest in Sherlock Holmes. 22 A . C o n a n D o y l e , “ T h e Cardboard Box,” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (London: E. M u r r a y , 1 9 2 8 ) , p . 9 3 2 , 9 3 7 (for another striking example of congruence of method see “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” in the same volume). A footnote by Ginzburg “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes,” p. 30, offers a further tantalising INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 12 complication: “‘The Cardboard Box’ first appeared in The Strand Magazine V , J a n - J u n e 1 8 9 3 . From The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. W.S. Baring- Gould, 1968, we learn ( p . 2 0 8 ) that The Strand several months later published an unsigned article on the varieties of the human ear (“Ears: a chapter on,” The Strand Magazine VI, July-Dec. 1893). Baring-Gould thinks the author likely to have been Conan Doyle, publishing Holmes’s anthropological treatise on ears.” 23 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 258. 24 Heinrich Wölfflin, Classic Art (London: Dover, 1952), p. 72. 25 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 263. 26 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 267. 27 Recently Peter Armour has argued that Freud’s “proposed reconstruction of Moses’ pose is unecessary, for a simple experiment will prove that the figure could not possibly s t a n d u p f r o m this position as can be verified by anyone who cares to reproduce the pose ... As Freud’s theory implies, if Moses did spring to his feet, he would break the Tablets by accident, even carelessly, for they would simply topple over and fall to the ground.” Peter Armour, “Michelangelo’s Moses: A T e x t i n Stone,” Italian Studies (1993), v. XLVII, p. 31. 28 Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 273. 29 For good accounts of the details of the composition and chronology of Michelangelo’s work on the tomb of Pope Julius II see Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno Contardi, Michelangelo architetto (Milan: Electa, 1990) “Tomba di Giulio II - Primo progetto, 1505- 06,” p. 49-54, and “Tomba di Giulio II - Progetti successivi, 1513-42,” p. 67-77; Martin Weinberger, Michelangelo the Sculptor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), v. 1 , p . 1 2 9 - 2 3 4 , 253-280; Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1943-60), Vol. IV: The t o m b o f J u l i u s I I ( 1 9 5 4 ) ; Erwin Panofsky, “The First Two Projects of Michelangelo’s Tomb of Julius II,” The Art Bulletin (1937), n. 19, p. 561-79; and Enrico Guidoni, Il Mosé di Michelangelo (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1982). 30 “On the corners of the first cornice were to go four large figures, representing the Active and the Contemplative Life.” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists trans. George Bull, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 344. 31 “These represented the liberal arts, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, each with its attributes so that it could easily be recognised for what it was, signifying thereby that all the artistic virtues were prisoners of death together with Pope Julius, as they would never find another to favour and foster them as he did.” Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo trans. Alice Sidgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 33. 32 Anton Springer cited, Earl E. Rosenthal, “Michelangelo’s Moses, d a l d i s o t t o in sù,” The Art Bulletin (1964), n. 46, p. 544-550. 33 “Moses, the leader and captain of the Jews, who is seated in the attitude of a wise and pensive man, holding the tables of the law under his right arm and supporting his chin with his left hand like a person who is weary and full of cares.” Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo p. 77-79. 34 James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p . 7 4 f f . Ackerman also points to Michelangelo’s practice of making clay models of his architectural projects and concludes “his buildings ... are concieved as if the masses of a structure were organic forms capable of being moulded and carved ... like a statue.” F o r t h e sculptural qualities of Michelangelo’s architecture see also Pietro C. Marani, “Michelangelo’s Architecture as Monumental Sculpture,” The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo’s Work ed. Denise L. Bissonette (Montreal: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), p. 449-467. Paolo Portoghesi, Michelangelo architetto e d s . P a o l o Portoghesi and Bruno Zevi (Turin, 1964), p. 14-17, in contrast argues against this sculptural reading of Michelangelo’s architecture. 35 On ‘gigantismo’ in Michelangelo see Guidoni, Il Mosè di Michelangelo p. 18-24. 36 Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 9, Case Histories II: ‘Rat Man,’ Schreber, ‘Wolf Man,’ Female Homosexuality trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). 37 Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” p. 235. 38 Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” p. 259. 39 Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” p. 267. 40 See Jean Laplanche “Notes on Afterwardsness,” in his Seduction, Translation, Drives e d . John Fletcher and Martin Stanton, (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), p. 217-223, and passim, for a discussion of the concept of Nachträglichkeit . 41 Embedded in this “subject supposed to know” there is of course another connoisseur: ‘connoisseur’ from the French connaitre, connoting a certain kind of INTERSTICES 4 The Monument of Ornament: Michelangelo’s Moses 13 knowledge, knowledge which you cannot learn by rote, and knowledge which gives its possessor, the connoisseur, a certain aura. 42 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977), p. 231. 43 Jacques Lacan, “Intervention on Transference,” trans. Jacqueline Rose, In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism ed. Charles Bernheimer and Clare Kahane, (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 93. 44 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot p. 280.