ABSTRACT
In 1914 Sigmund Freud published an essay entitled "The Moses of Michelangelo." In the earlier work, Freud reasons from a mental artifact—the screen memory —to Leonardo's art and character. Freud approaches Michelangelo's Moses as a frequent visitor to the church and a longtime admirer of both the statue and its subject. Liebert credits Freud with having captured the essence of Michelangelo's Moses as expressing "the highest ideal of mental and spiritual achievement through the controlled tension between potential action and restraint, portrayed on a monumental physical level." The sport of turning Freud's Moses essay into a reflection on Freud himself has engaged many scholars and analysts. As in the Leonardo da Vinci controversy, the Liebert-Steinberg encounter has its mistranslation, which Liebert uses as evidence of Michelangelo's homosexual ideation. Michelangelo's fantasy of the phallic mother, whose milk supplies him with hammer and chisels, explains an iconographic detail in the presentation drawing.
