A fallen woman flying on a devil’s back, one of the images by Signorelli that so stimulated Freud

Freud, Orvieto and Signorelli

 Freud, Orvieto, Signorelli: the Renaissance frescoes by Luca Signorelli had a profound effect upon Freud. In the entrance hall of Freud’s last home in London, on the right, is a picture of Tivoli, a reminder that Italy was his favourite holiday destination and his spiritual home.

Gardens of Villa Este, Tivoli

50 years after his death in London a collection of black and white Italian postcards was found in a drawer. Purchased during his first of three visits to Orvieto in 1897 they depict frescoes by Luca Signorelli from the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto cathedral. His encounter with the Renaissance artist from Cortona had a profound effect upon him that profoundly influenced his life and work.

When Freud arrived in Orvieto 120 years ago in 1897 he was going through a turbulent period for several reasons: he was mourning his father who had died in December; partly as a result of this he was in the process of jettisoning his conclusion that hysteria was caused by paternal seduction in childhood turning instead towards the idea of infant sexuality; curiously, the man who sought the source of almost everything in sex had recently set out on a life of celibacy after siring six children in nine years.  Furthermore, two years before he had embarked upon self analysis, then an uncharted journey into the unknown, and in 1896 coined the term psychoanalysis.

Orvieto Duomo and Stars of David

The wonders that Freud saw when he walked into the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto Cathedral. The Fra Angelico frescoes on the ceiling, the Signorelli on the walls.

The frescoing of the walls was undertaken by Luca Signorelli in 1499 aged about 54. Signorelli’s vision is apocalyptic.

The Antichrist panel left and the Elect in paradise right. Fra Angelico frescoes above on the vaulted ceiling.

On the left is the preaching of the Antichrist followed by the elect cavorting, largely naked, in paradise.

Antichrist left and the Elect in Paradise right. Bottom left corner are Signorelli himself left with hat and Fra Angelico behind, both in black.

Other walls and lunettes show scenes of angels smiting the ungodly with death rays – in fact there is a lot of smiting going on all over the chapel, a veritable orgy of sex and violence.

the wicked smitten by death rays from on high

On the wall opposite are two tableau, both a riot of eroticism and naked flesh, not perhaps what what one would expect in a church, the damned thrown into inferno by devils followed by the saved hauling themselves up from their graves to eternal life.

The damned thrown into hell.

The resurrection of the dead

The tableau that seems to have exerted the greatest fascination upon Freud is the Antichrist. An unusual subject, it was commissioned by the powerful Monaldeschi, a Guelf family, always close to the papacy and in opposition to the Ghibellines who supported the Emperor; the scene is a polemic against heresy, especially the Cathars who had been particularly bothersome in Orvieto, but also against Jews.

The devil whispers to Antichrist, probably based on Savonarola. On left the usurious Jew bribes a blonde.

Freud had been aware of antisemitism since his childhood in Moravia when his father had told his young son that he had humbly turned the other cheek when accosted by an aggressive antisemite on the street. Ever since, Freud had admired more martial father-figures like Cromwell, Hannibal and significantly, Moses.

A spectator watches the mayhem above. He is surrounded by ‘grotesques’, painted just after the recent discovery of the grottoes of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome.

The Catholic Church at the time saw Jews not merely as infidels, but Jesus-killing heretics. Freud, who was suffering emotional and intellectual turmoil after his father’s death, stood surrounded by Signorelli’s apocalyptic maelstrom and saw the son, Christ, effectively slaying the father, Judaism.

A smitten Dante figure

Self-portrait of Luca Signorelli surrounded by mayhem looks out of the frame. Behind him stands Fra Angelico or perhaps not – it could be the Archdeacon.

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Freud and a Tale of Three Cities: Vienna, London and……. Orvieto.

The Vienna home in Berggasse 19 is easy to spot – he lived and worked in two modest, dark flats on the mezzanine floor left and right of the long red Freud sign; 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, is by comparison quite understated, just the round Blue Plaque; Orvieto now has a modest grey plaque to the right of the doorway.

The Vienna flat contains little: his hats and cane, a hip flask used on his travels and the furniture of the waiting room where he held his 8.30 Wednesday evening meetings which Anna Freud returned to Vienna.

Freud lived in Vienna for 47 years,  whereas he lived in London for a mere eighteen months till he died an exile just after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, though his daughter Anna lived on in the Freud home in  Hampstead for another 40 years.

The London home contains most of his possessions shipped from Vienna before the war. His chair was specially built for him so that he could read with his leg over the arm. The glass jar above the antiquities cabinet contains his and his wife’s ashes. The original Apulian krater with a Dionysiac imagery was smashed by burglars in 2014.

In Orvieto he never lived at all, but he did stay in the Hotel delle Belle Arti in Corso Cavour 36 in 1897, 1902 and 1907. However, this small Umbrian town was to contribute to the development of his theories quite disproportionately.

The Former Hotel delle Belle Arti in Palazzo Bisenzi (building on right with balcony) where Freud stayed on the main street, Corso Cavour, Orvieto.

Freud admitted to three passions: travelling, archeology and smoking. Freud was an ardent, but anxious, traveller. He did most of his writing while away from Vienna. Italy was his favourite destination, he came here 24 times, seven to Rome alone. Travelling in Italy gave him the freedom and relaxation that he lacked in Vienna which he confessed to his friend Fliess was a city he loathed.

Archeology was more than a hobby, it dovetailed with his delving into the human psyche, in fact he had more archeology books in his library than any other subject. Just before his Orvieto trip he started collecting antique statuettes a hobby that developed in Orvieto when he met Riccardo Mancini who not only offered him newly unearthed antiquities, but invited him to the Etruscan necropolis at the Cimitero del Crocefisso where he preserved a tomb as it had been found with its grave goods and two skeletons. This tomb was to feature in an important dream of Freud’s.

Freud’s dream: “I had already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with two stone benches along its walls, on which the skeletons of two grown men were lying.The inside of the wooden house in the dream looked exactly like it, except that the stone was replaced by wood. The dream seems to have been saying:’If you must rest in a grave let it be the Etruscan now”.

Mancini even offered Freud a plot of land that was guaranteed to give up more Etruscan treasures; after mulling it over a while he declined.

Freud’s third passion was smoking, twenty-five cigars a day, yet he failed to quit even though he knew it was killing him and causing him terrible pain.

Freud’s father Jacob had died in October 1896, prompting a crisis in Freud’s thinking and writing in early 1897 that was to result in his embarking upon self-analysis, something that no one had ever done before. At around this time, he had also decided on chastity after his youngest and last child Anna (destined to become his intellectual heir) was born December 1895. From 1896 he would sublimate his libido into his mission, psychoanalysis, the term he coined in 1897.

When Freud arrived in September, Orvieto had, until the recent opening of the railway to Rome, been an out of the way place, a Bruges La Morte under an Umbrian sun. Olave Potter in her turn of the century book A Little Pilgrimage in Italy 1911 called the chapter on Orvieto, City of Woe; the Pre-Raphaelite painter Burne-Jones passing through in 1871 thought the people striking to look at, but the saddest looking folk he saw in all Italy.

Orvieto at dawn in April

From the station Freud would have taken the new funicular cable car up the precipitous rock and through the dark tunnel beneath the Albornoz fortress, itself a charged experience for someone of Freud’s sensibility.

Next to the funicular is the 16th century St Patrick’s Well, a tourist attraction mentioned in Freud’s Baedecker guidebook. Although Freud does not mention a visit it is unlikely that he would have passed up such a Dantesque experience on at least one of his sojourns.

The well is 62m deep and of a double helix spiral, like DNA, so that the donkey carrying water up did not meet the donkey going down. The increasing gloom during the descent, the marvel of the engineering, the effort of returning to the light up a sort of Jacob’s ladder, the suggestive nature of the spiralling shaft must surely have impressed him; yet he never mentions the well.

Freud though a non-believer was well read in the scriptures and would certainly have known of many references to wells and their importance to a desert people, not least Moses with whom he identified in his quest for a psychoanalytical promised land; indeed, Moses met his wife Zipporah at the Midian well.  The commissioner of the well, Pope Clement VII (the one who gave Henry VIII such a hard time over his divorce), also saw himself as a new Moses, having a commemorative medal struck by Cellini showing Moses striking the rock with water gushing forth and the motto ”Ut bibat populous” (for the people to drink).

However, the letters he wrote to his wife’s sister Minna Bernays with whom he corresponded in the most intimate manner about his work, vacations and thoughts, are all missing from the period 1893 to 1910, the timespan of his three Orvieto visits. There has been much speculation that Freud and Minna had an affair, even that he procured her an abortion, and that their correspondence may have been occulted or destroyed for this reason.
The well may or not have been important to the formulation of Freud’s theories, but the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral by the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli most certainly were.

To be continued……..

Tale of Three Cities Part II

Tale of Three Cities Part III

Tale of Three Cities Part IV

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Orvieto is girded by city walls, fortresses, towers and gatehouses. You can walk the entire circumference below the walls on an easy, well made path in a little over an hour – there are stunning views across the Umbrian countryside towards the Appenines and the golden hills of Tuscany a mere 20km away. There is no country quite like Italy for its processions and street festivals. The townsfolk dress up in gorgeous mediaeval costume for Corpus Domini held every year sometime in June.

Gorgeously costumed knight

Cavalier and………….

Round head

Bolsena on the lake

The festival is part of the celebration of the Miracle of Bolsena. The story goes that a Bohemian monk returning from  pilgrimage to Rome in 1263 had a crisis of faith, he no longer believed in transubstantiation (something similar happened to Luther with quite different results). Stopping to conduct mass in Bolsena on the shores of Lake Bolsena the host bled over the napkin. The bishop was summoned to witness the miracle, followed by the Pope who ordained that Orvieto Cathedral be especially built, starting in 1290, to house the miraculous relic. This is paraded through the city every year  on the nearest Sunday to Corpus Christi  (Corpus Domini), accompanied by knights, dames and damsels ……..and children.

Fresco in Orvieto Cathedral illustrating the legendary events concerning the miracle of Bolsena. The pope, Urban IV then resident in Orvieto, is dressed in starry yellow robes. Kneeling, he meets the bishop who has come from Lake Bolsena (the blue in the background) on the Bridge below Orvieto where he sees the blood stained linen ‘corporale’ for the first time.

Corpus Domini, Orvieto

The Holy Relic of the Bolsena Miracle in procession

Corpus Domini is for all ages

The young dame

The old Dame

Orvieto’s gothic Cathedral from across the valley

Corpus Domini Festival in Orvieto is spread over 2 days. The Dames and Damsels on Saturday afternoon, the knights, notaries and grandees Sunday morning. A wonderful opportunity to photograph costumes, take portraits, revel in folk lore, observe religious devotion and be with people having a wonderful time!  A photography workshop in Italy could not  be based in a more appealing place than Ovieto, and in a better time than June to enjoy the light and the colours. Camera Etrusca Corpus Domini Photo Workshops are held every year but the date varies. In 2019 it will be the weekend of  22/23 June. The workshop starts Friday 20 June.

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Bill Emmott the former director of The Economist and long term thorn in Berlusconi’s side since he was unsuccessfully sued for libel  after the magazine’s front cover said he was unfit to lead in Italy back in 2001, has made a film. The documentary about Italy and its ailing economy and woeful politics is called Girl in a Coma. Emmott travels the length of the country from Turin to Calabria, but the film has several scenes in and around Orvieto.

To illustrate his arguments he pretends Dante is his guide down into the underworld. After starting with a visit to the celebrated frescoes in Orvieto cathedral by Signorelli showing dramatic scenes of Paradise and Inferno as well as graphic images of the Almighty smiting sinners, he descends into the Stygian gloom of St Patrick’s Well. The final scenes of the film are at Vulci  with animated figures, the sufferers of Dante’s Inferno, walking the lake.

But don’t let Emmott’s fascinating documentary put you off coming here! What Italy does best never changes: the friendliness and glamour of the people, the art, the history and culture, the lifestyle. the food, and wine, the sheer beauty and variety of the place. Emmott made the film because he loves the place as do we.

For more information about Girlfriend in a Coma

Discover for yourself the dark secrets of Orvieto, Tuscany and Vulci with a Camera Etrusca photography tour.

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The life of an Italian prince in Renaissance Italy was pretty dangerous and no less so for the clerical prince known as the pope. In 1527 after Rome had been sacked by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s troops, slaying between 6 and 12 thousand, Pope Clement looked to nearby Orvieto on the top of a cliff as a safe refuge. To this end he needed a well to be dug in the fortress, but the water table was a long way down.

the view from PARADISE

The brilliant Florentine architect Antonio San Gallo realised a brilliant solution to reach down the 53m (174ft) to the water. He constructed a double helix so the donkey descending never met the one ascending.

in the water a small fortune in coins plus sun-glasses, iphones and even half dead lizards

A Canadian scientist told me that Francis Crick had visited Orvieto in the 40s – could the revelation of the structure of DNA have had anything to do with the visit?
The well is known familiarly as St Patrick’s as Italians refer to a spendthrift as having pockets as deep as St Patrick’s well. There are 70 windows spiralling right down to the bottom and 248 steps. The stygian gloom and the spiralling steps are so evocative that I used a photo of the well as the background for my image of Danae though she was actually imprisoned in a tower.

The view from INFERNO ” I never saw a man who looked. With such a wistful eye. Upon that little tent of blue. Which prisoners call the sky” Oscar Wilde

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Flooded Orvieto: looking down on the station area

Most people only know Orvieto in the summer and this summer was exceptionally hot and dry. And then the rains came…..

This was the scene of devastation seen from Albernoz Castle on Monday 12 Nov, 2012. Scores of cars lie submerged in the station carpark. Businesses and homes are devastated – the damage is estimated at 50 million euros.

It was very bad in Tuscany too. Camera Etruscans will be familiar with Vulci but they will never have seen it like this.

The river at its height was several metres higher still as you can see from the scoured river bank where no vegetation has been spared. The river Fiora devastated the coast at Montalto di Castro.

Here is the view from the castle. Here the high water mark can be seen about 4m above the river. Thankfully the bridge wasn’t swept away – but then it has stood for nearly three thousand years.

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A photography workshop in Italy could not  be based in a more appealing place than Ovieto, the most beautiful hill town in all Italy. It stands on its high rock plateau in Umbria, on the borders of both Tuscany and Latium.

Orvieto is an ancient city going back to pre-Roman Etruscan times, on the top of a volcanic rock surrounded by hills covered with vines and olives, and in the distance the snow topped high Apennines. It is noted for its wines, especially the Orvieto Classico.

Orvieto by Turner

Orvieto which is supremely picturesque, was sketched from many angles by William Turner who spent some time in the area.  The painting itself was done in Rome and is as one would expect somewhat romanticised. Patrick Nicholas has planted an umbrella pine near the spot of Turner’s pine – it should be mature in about 30 years.  His sketchbooks along with the painting are in the Tate, London. You can see them here

Less than an hour from Rome, it is a bustling place full of street cafés, restaurants for most tastes and pockets and smart shops frequented by equally smart, good looking Italians – there are a few scruffy tourists as well. The centre is largely pedestrianised and there is not a single traffic light in the entire city.

Orvieto's Gothic Cathedral

St Patrick's well Orvieto

The well is a perfect place to practise photography under low light conditions with a broad contrast ranging from the bright sunlight pouring down the shaft and the gloom of the stair well.

Orvieto is girded by city walls, fortresses, towers and gatehouses. You can walk the entire circumference below the walls on an easy, well made path in a little over an hour – there are stunning views across the Umbrian countryside towards the Appenines and the golden hills of Tuscany a mere 20km away. You will also come across Etruscan cemeteries including the unique Cimitero del Crocifisso with its streets of curious tombs built of Tufa stone to resemble the wooden houses of the Etruscans – an eerie place on a foggy morning in April or October.

St Patrick's Well

Orvieto is famous too for its festivals. In winter over New Year’s there is the world renowned Umbria Jazz festival; in August the Umbria Folk Festival and in June the colourful pageant of the Corpus Domini when the townsfolk parade  through the streets for two days in June dressed in Mediaeval costume.

For those who love markets there are two a week on Thursdays and Saturdays in Piazza del Popolo.

You couldn’t find a more attractive town to enjoy yourself in when taking time off from a photography course or to relax in after a day long photo excursion.

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olive picking, October, Orvieto

a family activity

Green oil lasts longer too – up to a year if stored in a cool place in a dark bottle or tin. That said the yellow variety is good too and better in some ways – if you can trust where it comes from. Made from maturer darker olives, yellow oil is sweeter, just as full of flavour but lasts less long as it has less anti-oxidents than the green fruit. Most oil, even the best, tends towards the yellow because the mature olive gives more oil and therefore a better crop. But be warned, yellow oil in a shop could be blended or refined.

underground olive press, Civita di  Bagnoregio

The oil can either be stone pressed, the traditional method, or centrifuged, the latter has a stronger flavour and also costs less. Those with refined tastes inevitably chose the former in blind tests. Cold pressed really means nothing as the heat method only makes low grade cooking oil which nobody wants, but scandalously often finishes in blended oils.

Olive oil is ruined by heat – so it is for pouring onto a dish not for cooking.

If I were ever marooned on a desert island I would hope to find olives.

Beware!

Like wine and malt whisky there is an enormous amount of arcane knowledge involved, but unlike the  jealously guarded malt whisky business there is also an enormous amount of deliberately created confusion and even gross fraud in the olive business. This does the small scale producers no good at all. They produce the best oil but cannot compete with the adulterated oils that find themselves onto the supermarket shelf.

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