ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysing artists could be seen as a continuation of the process of seeking to understand art in terms of the biographies of its creators as in Giorgio Vasari's 1568 book, Lives of the Artists, about some of those most involved in the renaissance of art in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. S. Freud followed this, in 1914, with an article, initially published anonymously at his request, in which he sought to understand the "powerful effect" of Michelangelo's Moses statue in Rome. This interpretation by Freud of Michelangelo's Moses was in turn psychoanalysed by Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones. It reflected, said Jones, Freud's wrath with Jung for abandoning his psychoanalytic teaching and Freud's more or less unconscious identification, in this respect, with Moses's wrath with his followers for abandoning his religious teaching in worshipping a golden calf. Adrian Stokes's psychoanalysis of Michelangelo has likewise been criticised as reflecting more about Stokes than about Michelangelo.
