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This drawing by Freud is a rendering of Michelangelo’s Moses. In his private letters, Freud describes numerous profound encounters with the biblical figure of Moses in front of the sculpture, part of the base of the unfinished funerary for Pope Julius II at San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. He would later use the sculpture as the title for his famous essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914). Freud theorized that Michelangelo had rendered the figure of Moses as holding the tablets of the ten commandments upside down, an act which suggested a narrative of paternity, castration, and the law. His interest in Michelangelo, and in art more generally (including works by, among others, Leonardo, Goethe, Wilhelm Jensen, and E.T.A. Hoffmann), forms part of the larger foray of psychoanalysis into art and culture, where Freud utilized psychoanalytic insights to articulate larger claims about society and politics.
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