ABSTRACT
The pictorial form of La Metterza is well represented in the tradition of Tuscan painting. The Proustian trinity maternity abolishes the distinction between the mother and the daughter, making them interchangeable for the son. At the time when Marcel Proust was busy writing La Recherche, the father of the psychoanalyst was fascinated by the unfinished work of Leonardo entitled La Metterza. The lily and the smile are two Leonardesque 'details' that indicate the association, itself fragile, between the painter and the grandmother. The trinity of 'Saint Anne with her daughter and her grandson' is, says Sigmund Freud in his study, an original subject and rarely treated by Italian painting. The chapter concludes with three variations of the strange and the Proustian uncanny stemming from his metterza: three portraits that Proust gives of the grandmother, the mother and the son; the name and the country of Gomorrah; and the 'metterza' of Odette, Gilberte, Mlle de Saint-Loup.
