ABSTRACT
This organic account of form becomes gendered as Stokes, in exploring the great themes of life and birth, connects the Renaissance iconography of the mother and child, and the putto, to the discoveries of Freud and Stokes's own analyst Melanie Klein concerning the sexual life of the child. "In sculpture," he claims in The Quattro Cento (15), "all the fantasies of dynamic emergence, of birth and growth and physical grace had been projected within the stone. The stone is carved to flower, to bear infants, to give the fruit of land and sea. These emerge as a revelation or are encrusted there." In the context of such a charged efflorescence, ornament or sculpture as applique has no place; "the Quattro Cento did not ornament" he insists.14 In light of the Tempio's facade and its "broad stylobate[, where] grows the Malatesta shield quartered with the monogram $" (PI. 27), the term "decoration" utterly fails to describe the organic "quality of growth from the stone slabs" of the Malatesta roses and their "long and gripping leaves." In these pages of Stones of Rimini, the organicism approaches that of the hothouse as Stokes marvels at "the exuberance of this growth: there is something almost monstrous about these turgid stalks! The Malatesta rose is a tropical growth in miniature, an immense trunk with huge subsidiary shoots such as would stifle a deserted town within a year" (102).
