A Childhood Memory by Piero Della Francesca

Piero della Francesca'sMadonna del Parto, a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is highly unusual in its iconography. Hubert Damisch undertakes an anthropological and historical analysis of an artwork he constructs as a childhood dream of one of humanity's oldest preoccupations, the mysteries of our origins, of our conception and birth. At once parodying and paying homage to Freud's seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Damisch uses Piero's enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories. He shows that we must return to Freud because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed: in the triangle of author, work, and audience, where is the psychoanalytic component located?

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)