Описание: An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him. --New Yorker
Freuds Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired. --John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar
This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freuds response to Signorellis frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty. --Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster
After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorellis frescoes the greatest artwork hed ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldnt recall the artists name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his minds eye. This is known as the Signorelli parapraxis in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freuds own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues.
What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freuds biography. As he sounds the depths of Freuds feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman.
Freuds Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes arts singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires.
Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.
