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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Near Orvieto on a ridge looking over a deep valley into Southern Tuscany stands a sinister looking castle in the mock-Gothic style of the late nineteenth century. It once belonged to the immensely rich Cahen family, still remembered in Orvieto where a square is named after them. The castle was intended to be the country home of Conte (later Marquess) Edoardo Cahen and his beautiful Anglo-Greek wife Christine, but neither of them were ever to live there. Édouard Cahen d’Anvers died in Rome in 1894 before the castle was completely refurbished; she separated from him and died in Meran in 1884. Now Castle Cahen in Torre Alfina is uninhabited, used only for private functions.

Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Cahen Castle, Torre Alfina, Orvieto, Italy

Edoardo Cahen, scion of the Cahens d’Anvers, belonged to the cosmopolitan Jewish European aristocracy – akin to royalty but with a lot more cash – that moved effortlessly from one country to another, spoke several languages fluently, had branches of the same family in several capitals, and having made their fortunes in banking, commerce and insurance were happy to devote themselves to cultural pursuits rather than huntin’, shootin and fishin’ which were the most common pastimes amongst the older established aristocracies around Europe. The Cahens d’Anvers became rich through the novel idea of using the pigeon post between Antwerp and Amsterdam to steal a march on their stock market rivals. Edoardo Cahen was granted a concession to build part of the Prati neighbourhood of Rome after the Unification of Italy.

Alice (L) and Elisabeth Cahen (R) by Renoir. Elisabeth was murdered in Auschwitz.

Edoardo’s three nieces were painted by Renoir. However, his brother Louis disliked the painting of Alice and Elisabeth so much it was hung in the servant’s quarters; what is more he quibbled and stalled over paying the bill, 1,500 francs (about 10-15,000 Euros today), arousing a previously un-manifested anti-Semitism in the artist. The Cahens may have been notable patrons of the arts, but this incident perhaps demonstrates that their taste was possibly rather arriviste.

Irène’s daughter Béatrice along with her husband and two young children died in Auschwitz as did her sister Elisabeth and other members of the family. The painting became part of Herman Göring’s illicit collection.

Irène Cahen, Eduardo’s neice by Renoir

Edoardo’s father Joseph Mayer Cahen d’Anvers had lent considerable funds to finance the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, and a grateful nation bestowed upon him the title of Conte. The influence of capital on the fate of nations is often underestimated. Edoardo Cahen then developed a large area of Rome, even before it became the capital of Italy, near the Vatican an area that was to be known as Prati.

After these exertions, he decided to retire with his wife to a tumbledown castle near Orvieto in the wilds of the Umbria-Latium borders. She was Christine Spartali the younger of two highly educated and beautiful sisters who moved in the artistic beau-monde of 1860s London. Christine’s sister Marie was considered by the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘one of the most beautiful women of her generation’. Indeed the poet Algernon Swinburne was so smitten he exclaimed, ‘She is so beautiful I feel as if I could sit down and cry.’ It has to be said however that he was quite wont to weeping.

La Principesse, now in the Peacock Room, Freer Collection, Washington D.C.

Marie Spartali had been painted by Rossetti and went on to become a notable professional painter for the rest of her long life, whilst Christine modelled for Whistler in 1864 – she was the ‘Principesse du Pays de la Porcellaine’ possibly his most famous painting. She was photographed by the most famous portrait photographer of her day, Julia Margaret Cameron sometime between 1865 and 70 probably in the Isle of White where they were neighbours. Exposures were long in those days so it was hard to manifest unbridled joy, but there is no denying that she has a more than usual Pre-Raphelite mournfulness about her.

The long exposures required by Cameron’s photography were as of naught compared with posing for Whistler: twice a week for 6 months till eventually Christine fell ill and had to be replaced with a stand-in to finish the picture. Besides the Whistler picture (which Spartali père did not like and refused to purchase) many of Marie Spartali’s paintings of typically Pre-Raphaelite subjects seem to portray her younger sister. This obsessive interest in one model was common amongst the Pre-Raphaelites.

Christine Spartali, Julia Margaret Cameron about the time she met Cahen

Both Spartali girls were exceptionally tall (Marie was 190cm) and highly educated, but whereas the elder sister studied painting under Ford Maddox Brown and became a noted painter for the rest of her long life, Christine never pursued a career. Marie fascinated Edward Burne Jones who portrayed her in his Cupid Delivering Psyche – in both male and female roles; he was known for his exotic sexual tastes.

Cupid and Psyche, Burne-Jones

Christine married Cahen in 1869 in Chelsea despite the opposition of her Greek Orthodox father, the Greek consul general in London. How did they meet? Did Cahen move in the arty world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their like? We have no picture of him and I cannot find any account of his time in London. One of his brothers, Albert, was a reasonably well-known composer in France who studied under César Franck.

Path leading to the Cahen mausoleum through The Sasseto wood

At first they had enjoyed the cosmopolitan life in Naples, Rome and Paris where their 2 boys were born, but it seems in Rome the marriage began to go wrong and by 1880 she was attempting – unsuccessfully – to divorce Cahen. Her health deteriorated, possibly owing to the depressing prospect of a chatelaine’s life in darkest Umbria, but at least this illness brought about a partial reconciliation with her father. She took to chloral hydrate and alcohol. According to Rossetti’s brother Michael she died miserable and alone in Tirol of catalepsy in 1884, though it is more likely that the chloral carried her off aged just 37.

Edoardo Cahen, lover of Greco Roman art, took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery.

Cahen bought Torre Alfina in 1881, but it took 20 years to make it truly habitable by which time Cahen and his wife were both dead and there was practically nothing left of the original mediaeval building – what we see today is a mock gothic pile.

Cahen Mausoleum

Cahen Mausoleum in Sasseto Wood

Rather like the fictional Moisè Finzi-Contini who built a monstrous sepulchre looking like a set from Aida that all Ferrara’s Jewish community found absurd, Edoardo Cahen lover of Greco Roman art took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery (where incidentally Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Sidall is buried).

It lies in the forest a kilometre or so below the mock Gothic castle which he never lived to see completed – he died in 1894 aged 62.

Peeking through the door to the open tomb

The earthly remains of Édouard Cahen d’Anvers, Born 1832 died, Rome, 3 May 1894 in the 62nd year of his life as it says on the coffin.

His body was embalmed by the Vatican’s own undertaker; his coffin placed on the top shelf in a vault designed to host generations of Cahens, it lies alone. The sons never brought their mother’s remains to the sepulcher. She was buried in the Spartali vault in London. The two sons left Italy with the introduction of the racial laws in 1938 when Jews were banned from owning property amongst other restrictions.

Edoardo Cahen’s coffin amongst on the top of otherwise empty shelves in the Mausoleum

photographer Patrick Nicholas is reflected in the water

The Writing on the Wall

The two Cahen sons left Italy following The Racial Manifesto of 1938 when Jews were stripped of their citizenship, barred from the professions, excluded from banking, education and the civil service; they were also liable to have their property confiscated. Italian Jewry had been emancipated during the process of the unification of Italy between 1860 and 1870, but now Mussolini determined to cement the Berlin Rome Axis by bringing Italian racial laws into line with Germany’s. 6,000 Jews emigrated 1938-1943. Of those that stayed something over 6,000  perished out of a pre-1938 population of  46,500.

Racial Laws in cartoon form with evident racialist stereoptypes in a fascist paper.

Rome Berlin Axis, Castiglione del Lago station, Trasimene

In 1943-4 the castle was used by the Germans as a command centre and suffered bomb damage as a result. The contents were auctioned off in 1969. Neither Cahen sons had children.

During wartime the mausoleum sacrificed its iron railings and recently the tomb was broken into, the grave stone smashed, the coffin desecrated.

The castle until recently belonged to an absentee landlord, the uncouth, corpulent, criminal bankrupt, Luciano Gaucci who starting from humble beginnings with a cleaning business in Rome, graduated to money laundering on a grand scale and onto wholesale corruption in the football business. He lists his enthusiasms as sex, horses and football.

The castle is now in the hands of a trust and is visitable.

The Cahen mausoleum

The abandoned swimming pool in the Sasseto grounds near the castle. Neither of the two Cahen sons had children.

Garden sculpture, the grinning faun in the Hermetic garden

The Hermetic garden

For those who have a taste for the sinister, we can include in our tour of places to photograph in Tuscany, the creepy Castle Cahen and its mock Gothic tomb in the woods.

Contact me for more info.

The post Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Castle Cahen, a Mock-Gothic Style Mansion of the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Castelluccio di Norcia is well known the world over amongst photographers for its picturesque vales of wild flowers at all times of the year – except when it is under snow which at 1500m is for most of the winter.

It is a bit of a trek to get there from Orvieto (around 2.5 hours) but we do pass through some of the most spectacular scenery in Italy not to mention the beautiful Umbrian city of Spoleto, home of the Two Worlds Festival every July.

Castellucio on the hill in the distance

The gentle slopes and olive groves of lower Umbria give way to furious rivers beloved of rafters rushing through deep limestone gorges flanked by mysterious dark forests worthy of Dante. This is the Umbria of Renaissance artists and pious people, saints …….and swine, after all the town of Norcia (Nursia) is famous all over Italy for its pork products known popularly as norcineria.

Spoleto Porta Fuga from which Hannibal’s army was repulsed in 217 BC

Brancaleone da Norcia pork-butcher’s shop

Curiously Norcia was once famous all over Europe since mediaeval times for its itinerant surgeons.  Surgery was prohibited amongst the clergy so the pig farmers of Norcia and nearby Preci who were already experienced castrators of livestock, turned their hands to gall bladder and cataract surgery and after 1588 with Pope Sisto’s ban on female opera singers, castration of boys. In fact the history of castration may go back much further into prehistory when ritual castration was carried out in these Sibilline Mountains as part of the cult of Cibele.

Gall stones were excruciatingly painful and extremely common amongst populations given to eating predominantly vegetables and pulses. Even a highly experienced surgeon was unlikely to achieve a success rate of 30% in gall stone removal.

It was a Norcia surgeon who operated successfully on the cataracts of Elizabeth I of England.

Siculo Coronation of the Virgin 1541

Surgery and butchery, not necessarily combined, brought wealth to the area and one of the delights of Italy is the way Italians even in out of the way places invested that money, not in the equivalent of BMWs and fancy watches, but in magnificent works of art. We opened the door of a church and there above the altar was Siculo’s Coronation of the Virgin. Absent for 25 years after the ruinous 1979 earthquake, it was restored only in 2005 by which time the locals had despaired of ever seeing it again.

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The Rome workshop started on the first day with a visit to The Vatican a short walk from our B&B in Prati. We arrived at St Peter’s at 9 to avoid the crowds and only had to queue for the metal detectors for about 10 minutes.

The Bernini columns like embracing arms either side of St Peter’s Basilica

St Peter’s Basilica so impressive, the cost of construction so huge, that the church resorted to selling indulgences, a practice that  was to so upset a young monk, Martin Luther that he nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg church – the first volley of the Reformation.

The Bernini Baldachin reputedly stands over St Peter’s tomb

Some of the most notable architects and artists of the age contributed to its design: Bramante, Sangallo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini to name just a few; while some of the great surviving buildings of Ancient Rome contributed materials: the Colosseum half demolished to provide stone, marble stripped from various thermal baths, and the bronze from the Pantheon portico used to build Bernini’s Baldachin over the altar

under the papal crossed keys a mother suffers the pains of childbirth beneath the Baldachin

One of the curiosities of St Peter’s is this series of sculpted faces of a woman. Each column  has a pedestal with the Barberini coat of arms (Urban VIII) above which is visible a mother undergoing the progressive pains of childbirth; the eighth and last is a cherub. Could this curious and not to mention out of place series be an analogy not to the nine months, but the nine years it took Bernini to realise the monument?

Vatican superstar: Michelangelo’s Pietà

The undeniable superstar is Michelangelo’s Pietà, the only work of art that the modest artist ever signed, and subsequently regretted, in marked contrast to the popes themselves who put their names, and often coats of arms, everywhere. Sadly the vandalisation by a maniac in 1972 means it is impossible to approach the sculpture. Mary’s nose was hammered off and replaced with a marble transplant from her back. The Pietà was designed as a monument for a French cardinal and belongs to a northern European rather than Italian tradition. David’s iconic painting Morte de Marat lying stabbed in his bathtub was modelled upon it.

narrow stairs to the cupola

As we climbed the stairs to the top of the cupola I remembered Anita Ekberg’s call of “Marcello, Marcello!” in La Dolce Vita.

In fact the film shows Marcello Mastroianni descending several spiral staircases, a metaphor one presumes for his Dantesque descent into the moral underworld of 1950s Rome.

Observation platform around the lantern at the cupola’s summit

No chance of throwing yourself off here.

a fallen umbrella lies on the Vatican roof

Outside the cupola’s lantern you can see the serpentine queues winding below to the entrance. Pope’s names adorn every corner of the Vatican, even here on the lead roof, every window has an embossed papal coat of arms.

Saints wave from on high, my lens hood in the foreground

This is where I dropped my lens hood through the bars, only to roll down the roof out of reach – to be retrieved by a kind custodian.

sculptor on the roof with pugilist’s nose

A modest sized bust of a modest man – Michelangelo, sculptor, painter, poet and architect.

All year round we run private tours with photo workshops in Rome. These tours can be customized according to your needs.
You can see an example of a typical weekend photo workshop in the Eternal City, starting first thing Friday morning, finishing Sunday late afternoon, on my Rome Private Tour photo workshop. If you are in Rome for only a short time, our private photo tour will help you to really appreciate having such a fun and interesting encounter. With much to see and a great deal to learn in just three days, the Rome workshop will intensify your experience.

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