A Childhood Memory by Piero Della Francesca: (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Taking Freud's seminal essay A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci as his starting point and opposite, Hubert Damisch uses the preposition 'by' instead of 'of' in the title of his book to indicate that he is searching for a way of doing psychoanalysis with art that does not amount to psychobiography. The book is in some respects a parody of Freud's work on art. The return to Freud was necessary because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed. Damisch studies Piero della Francesca's painting Madonna del Parto as a construction by the artist of what viewers throughout history may have pursued on the basis of their unconscious fantasies involving what Freud considered the most characteristic question of human beings: where do children come from, and how did they get there?

Table of Contents:
@fmct:Contents @toc4:List of Figures iii @toc2:Chapter 1 1 Chapter 2 000 Chapter 3 000 Chapter 4 000 Chapter 5 000 Chapter 6 000 @toc4:Notes 000

About the Author :
Hubert Damisch is a French philosopher and art historian and is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Among his books published in English are The Judgment of Paris, The Origin of Perspective, Skyline: The Narcissistic City (Stanford, 2001) and A Theory of /Cloud/: Towards a History of Painting (Stanford, 2002).

Review :
"This book is a brilliant postmodern discussion, grounded in art history, of an enigmatic and perennially fascinating Renaissance painter and his art. Focusing on a painting of stunning originality and psychological nuance, the Madonna del Parto, it is an inquiry into the relations between a referent and a name, a person and an artist, a life and a work. Damisch probes the questions posed by Piero's image, drawing not only on contemporary sources but also on modern ideas of art and aesthetics." - Ellen Handler Spitz, author of Art and Psyche and Museums of the Mind "Hubert Damisch is among the few authors whose books both transform our understanding of the specific work at hand and also intervene critically in the histoy of art by excavating the tradtional ground on which the discipline has been erected...Although short in length, this is a complex and self-aware book that unfolds in myriad ways and on many levels...This is a book, to be sure, for art historians. part of its brilliance lies in what it suggests not only about method, but also about how we write, and why history matters." - Bronwen Wilson, University of British Columbia