visualizing the mind: looking at titian’s ‘the flaying of marsyas’

VISUALIZING THE MIND: LOOKING AT TITIAN’S ‘THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS’

Melanie Hart

abstract This painting prompted me to wonder whether it is possible to findthe capacities and structures of the mind, as described by psychoanalysis, rep-resented unconsciously in visual form. I explain why this exceptional paintingseems to be one worth exploring for this purpose and, although there aremyriad ways of approaching such a rich work of art, lay particular stress on itsabstract, structural aspects. Doing this seems to reveal that Titian would havehad no difficulty in understanding psychoanalytic formulations about mentalstructure had anyone been able to describe them to him verbally. Perhaps thehuman mind records its own activity, and understands itself, at a depth we havenot understood.

Writing this paper has given me the happy opportunity to do two things.One is to try to understand this painting. The other is to try to understandmore about unconscious, nonverbal, knowledge. We are probably all familiar with those moments in clinical work when our patients seem to beusing verbal metaphors to describe the current status of their psychic struc-ture. A patient recently told me, for instance, about how far he discoveredhe can now climb up into the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. He used not tobe able to get even into the Whispering Gallery, it was so frightening to beso high up. His father, of course, could go to the top. . . . That sort of thing.Where do these structural images come from and how complicated can theybe? Does the human mind have a capacity to reflect deeply about itself –about its origin, development and experience – without recourse to words?How might we discover whether this is the case or not? And what might itadd to our understanding of ourselves if it turns out that what goes on inour unconscious minds is not just proto thinking, as is usually assumed, butthinking that can be highly evolved and complex? I didn’t know, when Ibegan to look seriously at Titian’s work, how interwoven these two topicswould become.

I first saw ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’ years ago in exhibitions in Paris andLondon. I was astonished by its power and by the way it seemed to affect

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The painting can be viewed online by web link [Image: Titian – The Flaying ofMarsyas.jpg – Wikimedia Commons]

melanie hart is a member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and the LincolnClinic and Centre for Psychotherapy. She edited Generations: Poems BetweenFathers, Mothers, Daughters, Sons, published by Penguin Books in 1998. Address forcorrespondence: 1 Offerton Road, London SW4 0DH. [email: [email protected]]

© The authorJournal compilation © 2007 BAP and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

268 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2007) 23(2)

The Flaying of Marsayas, Titian (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image: Titian_-_The_Flaying_of_Marsayas.jpg)

people. There was always a crowd near it, but a peculiarly still and silentcrowd that maintained an unusual semicircular distance from the work. Ihave never seen another painting produce such an effect.The image hauntedme. Some time later I visited the small Czech town of Kromeriz, the charming backwater that, for quirky historical reasons, so surprisingly playshost to Titian’s masterpiece. In Kromeriz we were able to spend hoursalmost alone with the picture, in the sort of ideal conditions that it’s rare tofind now in the galleries where most paintings of this stature are shown. Ithangs there in a very beautiful room with huge windows open, that day, toa sunny park where a cuckoo was singing.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

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The rural idyll of the setting is in extraordinary counterpoint to thesubject of the work. You may well know the painting already but, as you cansee, it is not an obviously easy image to contemplate. It illustrates a mythfrom Ovid. Marsyas, a shepherd and a satyr, finds a set of pipes which thegoddess Hera has crossly thrown down from heaven, upset about the wayher cheeks puff out when she plays them. Marsyas, less narcissistically inhibited than she, becomes so expert a musician with them that he arousesthe jealous interest of Apollo, god of music and the arts, and Marsyas chal-lenges Apollo to a musical duel. Marsyas will play his pipes and Apollo willplay his lyre. Apollo asks King Midas to judge the competition. Now Midashas already been a judge for Apollo once before, when the god had a musicalcontest with Pan.That time Midas awarded the prize, honestly, to Pan, whichso infuriated Apollo that he changed Midas’ ears into the ears of an ass.Thistime, unsurprisingly, Midas gives Apollo the victory.The terms of the contestare that the winner can do whatever he likes to the loser. Of all the thingshe might do with Marsyas (have music lessons, arrange a joint concert!),Apollo’s choice is to flay him alive.

The idyllic setting of Kromeriz would be less at odds with another versionof this story made a hundred or so years later by Claude Lorraine, who leftFrance in the early seventeenth century to go to Rome as a pastry-cook andstayed there as a painter for the next 40 years. One of the very few otherartists to have dealt with this subject, which doesn’t seem surprising,Claude’s decisions about presentation are in marked contrast to those ofTitian. In Claude’s much smaller version we are offered an idealized,light-filled landscape. Just too far away for the naked eye to make outclearly, or be disturbed by, there are figures in this landscape, gathered in adarker area where we know something awful is happening, or has just happened. There is cruelty in nature, Claude seems to be saying, our livesare ringed by unknown terrors, but we must keep our knowledge of this ata distance. For life to be sun-filled, just ignore the darkness. Titian, on theother hand, spares us nothing. The body of the tortured satyr hangs almostthe entire length of the canvas surface, right up against the picture plane.We cannot avoid the truth of what is happening unless we close our eyes orturn away. Why has Titian depicted it like this? What does he want us tounderstand that Claude Lorraine believes we cannot? And how does hemake it tolerable, if he does, while Claude believes it is intolerable?

Susan Sontag shares something of Claude’s view. In her interestingextended essay, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003, p. 36) she discusses thedifference between invented images of horror and photographs of actualatrocity. Photographic depictions, she says, are ‘a record’ and ‘nothing else’.Perhaps the only people who really have a right to look at such a recordedimage, she thinks, are ‘those who could do something to alleviate it . . . orthose who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not wemean to be.’ She believes we are protected from the charge of voyeurism

when regarding invented images of atrocity because ‘[there] horror has itsplace in a complex subject . . . that displays the artist’s skill’. She makes oneexception, however. ‘I . . . find it difficult’, she says, ‘to look at Titian’s greatpainting of the flaying of Marsyas, or indeed at any picture of this subject’(p. 36).

Sontag’s response has been echoed by many people I have spoken toabout this work. Why spend time contemplating an image of cruelty andwhy want others to contemplate it too? On the other hand, why is it that,despite the difficulty in staying with the image, this painting is routinelydescribed as ‘great’? What does ‘great’ mean?

It is clear that Titian intends us to be shocked. He was far too experiencedan artist not to know the impact he was making, and there is somethinghugely challenging about his deliberation. What may be even more shocking to realize is that this is not an unfamiliar image. The immediateassociation to it is the Crucifixion of Christ. This religious icon, vast in itspower and dominating Titian’s cultural landscape, lurks inescapably behindthe figure of the tortured satyr. Marsyas, half-human, half-beast, is, after all,dual natured like Christ.There are similarities to the form of death for each.Midas then takes on the role of Pilate, turning a blind, political eye to thebarbarity he has unleashed. We routinely scotomize the fact that our cultureactually idolizes terror. The Christian image is every bit as cruel as Titian’sand is ubiquitous in the West, whether or not Christianity is one’s personalcultural home. Familiarity and orthodoxy deaden us and let us eliminatefrom our conscious experience the awful reality behind the representation.No such well-worn cultural context protects us from the savagery of Titian’simage. Furthermore, he ensures an increased sense of shock and challengeby standing the crucified figure on his head, with all the extraordinarily complicated philosophical implications of this move. At the simplest level,Titian has found a subject through which, consciously and unconsciously,he can articulate something of the meaning embedded in the cruelty of theCrucifixion, but he wants us to be looking at this with freshly shocked eyes.He has fresh meaning to find. What is this new meaning and is it enough to justify so painful an image?

This complex work could lead in a multitude of directions. It would befascinating, for instance, to look more closely at the religious meaning, or atvarious interpretations of the figure of Apollo, or to concentrate on whatTitian seems to be telling us about what it meant to him to be the artist hewas. I have limited myself, however, to a rather different approach. Thedynamic structures of the mind are the elements that are least conscious tothe mind’s owner, hence our clinical struggles.What might we find if we lookat this painting as we might listen to a patient? In other words, what mightthe painting reveal to us if we concentrate on its structure, the most profound and least conscious level of its making?


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Psychoanalysis has made oddly little use of the visual arts as a resourcefor imagining the mind. This may be largely an inheritance from Freud, whohad difficulty in identifying thought processes when they are visuallyexpressed, and really just wanted visual artists to be writers instead, so thathe could understand them. He confesses how at a loss he felt in the face of,for instance, Michelangelo’s Moses. If only the artist had been able to usewords to convey his meaning! But perhaps it is wrong to extrapolate fromFreud’s sense of bafflement and to assume generally that, without words,our thinking cannot get very far?

Contemporary neuroscience has confirmed for us the vast capacity of thehuman mind for unconscious learning. Moreover, shape and form are the earliest vehicles for thinking and underlie all subsequent cognitivedevelopments of the mind (Arnheim 1969). This is revealed particularly inthe drawings of children, for whom the visual is a natural way not only toexpress themselves emotionally but to begin, at the same time and with theidentical formal means, to develop concepts from their perceptions – big,bigger, biggest, baby, mummy, daddy: inside, outside, loved, unloved, forexample. Formal, visual structure and the expressive structure of feeling arein this sense co-determined and interactive right from the start. Languagehas been accorded its role as the pre-eminent tool of psychoanalysis, and ofhuman communication in general, not because we do not think without it,but because of its efficient clarifying and defining capacities when weexpress such thoughts as we have. To this end, we encourage our citizens tostop developing their visualizing capabilities and to develop a reliance onspoken language instead. Freud’s difficulty with works of art was culturallyorthodox, in this respect, rather than exceptional.

At the same time as privileging language, psychotherapists hold, in contradistinction, to a profound clinical understanding that nonverbal,preverbal and sensory modes of communication are the bedrock of theirwork: that these constitute the most powerful agents for both patient andtherapist in creating the environment in which any new understanding can happen: that they pose the most important and interesting problems forboth psychoanalytic theory and practice. How could they not be so crucialwhen, notwithstanding the vital importance of verbal interpretation as themain engine of structural shape-shifting, these nonverbal modes carry morethan 90% of all communication between human beings? We tend, however,because of our clinical interest and experience, to use the terms ‘nonverbal’and ‘preverbal’ with a rather automatic presumption of the skulking presence of pathology. This is a sort of dull echo of what Freud felt aboutartists – why can’t they speak about whatever it is? – and perhaps con-tributes to a marginalization of the nonverbal arts as a source of informa-tion about the mind. Michael Parsons has written a very interesting paperthat looks again at the important differences between what in the mind is

quite naturally and positively nonverbal, and what has become inexpress-ible in words because of repression. I should like to make the case for asimilar distinction to be made in respect of what is preverbal. It seemsimportant in general, and particularly in any discussion of the plastic arts,to hold on to the idea that our preverbal subjectivity underlies all that webecome in our lives and everything we become able to think, consciouslyand unconsciously. In our clinical work we encounter the damaged aspectsof this subjectivity. Such encounters are intrinsically sad because we owe tothis essential substrate the sources of our spontaneity and our creativity. Ifthe personality is to recover the free use of these attributes, our preverbalselves have to be helped to recover from a premature propulsion into therealm of the verbal.

Ironically, the use of metaphor is so important in our work, for bothpatient and therapist, because metaphor invites the widest possible set ofassociative links, and so enables us, to some extent, to break out of this tendency language has towards definition. In our search for the unexpected,for new meaning, verbal metaphor – which works by conjuring up complex,interrelated pictures – helps us stir into life what lies on the dark side of language in the domain of wordlessness and image. The expressive life ofthe self develops in this interior domain and seeks exterior forms amenableto bearing its unique repertoire of meaning. Verbal metaphors, then, workas bridges for these emergent expressions of the self. It is two-way traffic,interior and exterior domains becoming mutually enriched with new ideasin the process. The language of the visual arts is formally especially close tothis interior domain, as we have seen, and has its own system of metaphortoo. Like verbal metaphor, this serves to link up conscious with unconsciousmeaning, a bit like psychic French knitting! This language can be highlysophisticated if it has been allowed to develop and evolve.Words put to theirmost highly developed use, in poetry, help us to think what has not beforebeen thinkable by drawing on the energy compacted in verbal imagery.Visual art can do the same, producing powerful imagery, as in this painting,whose metaphorical meaning reverberates on the borders of language,waiting for the signals to be picked up so that it can invade the world ofwords with new meaning.

The relative neglect of the visual in psychoanalytic thinking is even moresurprising in view of the consanguinity between the tools available to theartist and to the dreamer, dreaming being only a particular sort of thinking.Although we speak of ‘reading’ a painting when we are trying to understandit fully, this is closer to the analysis of a dream than it is to the reading ofwords, where we cannot escape the demands of chronology and sequence.While music enables us to listen to several ideas being expressed at once,again, we have to listen through time before the whole can be apprehended.The synchronicity, displacement and compression that Freud first established as being intrinsic to the language of dreams are, however, also


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intrinsic to painting.We can ‘see’ everything at once. Past, present and futurecan all be represented simultaneously, as can any number of ideas. The narrative means available to a dreamer – form, shape, texture, colour andstructure – are the very tools with which an artist works.

Visual art, then, has an extraordinary, expressive affinity with those areasof the mind that do not tolerate language, but from which language takes its energy. Having ascribed the major role to language, however, we tend notto enlist artists, in the way we do writers, to the enterprise of elucidating,supporting and challenging psychoanalytic ideas. Much very creative workhas, of course, been done on the communicative qualities of the art ofpatients and the therapeutic rewards its appreciation and understanding canprovide. Marion Milner’s (1969) early contribution to this field, The Handsof the Living God is an outstanding example. Child therapy makes use ofsuch understandings routinely. There are plenty of interesting studies whichenrich and enliven our understanding of professional works of art by linkingthem sensitively to psychoanalytically informed biographies of the artist(Prophecy Coles on Archile Gorky, for example). But professional artistshave spent their lives developing a mature capacity for whatever nonverbalthinking may turn out to be capable of. What may we be missing with thisone-sided approach? Art seems well placed to add to our understandingabout how the mind works at unconscious levels, if we can understand theart. Might the structures of works of art, for instance, apparently so differ-ent from the structures of conscious verbal language, but so wedded to theearliest forms of creative thinking and expression, link in a revealing waywith the hypotheses we have about the structures of the mind? In particu-lar, might visual structures elucidate, isomorphically and dynamically,psychic structure? To explore this, we need to be in very good hands.

We are in excellent hands with Titian. Titian is to painting what Shakespeare is to drama. If any artist is worth consulting about these ideas,it is him. He lived much longer than Shakespeare, dying aged nearly 90 inVenice, which he only rarely left, in the hot, plague-ridden August of 1576,when Shakespeare would have been 12 years old and growing up in dampStratford-upon-Avon. Unlike Shakespeare, Titian never abandoned, oroutgrew, his art, evolving as a painter right to the end, the year in which ‘TheFlaying of Marsyas’ was completed. But just as Shakespeare, in his last play,The Tempest, leaves us with something more personal to the playwright thanin any other of his works, so does Titian in ‘Marsyas’. There is nothing elselike it in his entire output. Stylistically it is of a piece with other paintingsof his extreme old age, such as the marvellously sensuous ‘Nymph and Shepherd’ in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In each, he appliespaint not only with a brush and palette knife but also with his fingers, inastonishingly energetic touches. He restricts his palette and largely doesaway with line. This approach transforms the canvas surface into a turbulent sea of mainly muted colour which can be read as a more or less

homogeneous abstract surface, and from which the representational objectsemerge. This is remarkably close to some contemporary ways of applyingpaint and links him with, for instance, Lucien Freud, via Delacroix and VanGogh, painters with a similar passionate involvement with the medium ofpaint itself. But in ‘Marsyas’, the stylistic features common to this period ofTitian’s work are maintained with a particular intensity and reveal, not onlyTitian’s strenuous physical involvement with the making of this work, but afusing of idea and form of the highest order. The manner appears so fresh,so spontaneous, that we seem to be in the presence of a highly complexwhole which has just erupted entire onto the canvas, much as thoughtsappear in our minds.

Titian’s personal commitment to this painting is emphasized by the inclusion of himself in a crucial role. The seated figure on the right, with thegorgeous and relatively conventionally treated crown and robe, representsKing Midas, and has been generally accepted, on the basis of similarity toother known self-portraits (particularly the Prado self-portrait), to be Titian.Why should Titian choose to represent himself in this way, in this particu-lar story, at this particular time? Not that it was strange for him to choosea myth from Ovid. Titian had used these stories throughout his career,notably for a series of paintings for his great patron, King Philip II of Spain.But ‘Marsyas’ is strikingly unlike the romantic, poetic themes he had usedbefore, and quite different in temper from the ‘Nymph and Shepherd’ of thesame period. A friend of Titian’s, Giulio Romano, had made use of the storyof Marsyas for a fresco in the Palazzo del Te, in Mantua. Titian may haveseen this on a visit there. Or perhaps Giulio talked to Titian about it or gavehim a preparatory drawing of his fresco design. Venice at this time was infierce rivalry with the Ottoman Empire for control of the Mediterraneantrade routes and in 1571, shortly before the painting was begun, Marc-antonio Bragadin, a Venetian naval captain, had been captured by the Turksand flayed alive. This horrendous event constituted a collective trauma forthe inhabitants of the Venetian State, and may well have played its part inTitian’s choice of subject. But even if these were both prompts for Titian tolook again at this myth as a possible basis for a painting, they cannot accountfor his choice. Given the high level of personal investment he has clearlybrought to the work, given the large size of the canvas which denotes amajor piece, given that he knew there was not going to be time for muchmore painting at all, something extremely important to him must have beenat stake in this unusual decision.

The themes embedded in the iconography are elusive, and the meaningof the painting has been referred to by art historians as ‘hidden’. Some havetaken it to relate to neo-Platonic ideas, to the Orphic tradition, to allegoriesto do with the triumph of divine art over human. But Titian is not a painterof encoded meanings and secret messages.Above all, as was recognized evenin his own lifetime by his great friend, the writer and critic Pietro Aretino


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(1609), Titian is a painter of emotional truth. Gentili (1990) seems closer tothe mark when he interprets the work as a ‘dramatic meditation by the artiston his own life’ (Pedrocco 2001).

‘Meditation’ seems to be the right word. Midas/Titian sits in the positionRodin was perhaps later to remember for his sculpture, ‘Le Penseur’. Ourattention is drawn to him by the gleam of his crown and robe, both pickedout with a realism and attention to detail that distinguishes this figure. Thedifference in treatment signals that he occupies a different order of realityfrom the rest of the characters. He is not involved in the action that galva-nizes the others. His gaze is vacant. He seems lost in his own thoughts. Hisseparation from the central scene is formally declared by the division of thepicture plane into two halves by the body of poor Marsyas. All the terribleactivity takes place to the left of this figure, the side away from the king. Inaddition, the king is further removed from participation in the action bybeing formally excluded from it by an extraordinarily complex pattern ofangled limbs. The arms of the Pan figure, who carries a bucket of water,together provide a diagonal barrier between Midas/Titian and the body ofthe suffering satyr. The bent arm of the little faun, and Midas’ own left armand leg, lock Midas/Titian even more securely into a private space. We areable to look at this painting, with its horrifying content, because this aspectof its formal scaffolding guides us to a powerful, unconscious interpretationthat the events we see are imaginative events. This is in a larger sense thanthe recognition that what we are looking at is an artefact, a work of theimagination. The structure tells us that what we can see represents privatethoughts, Midas’s thoughts, projected onto the screen of the canvas. It seemsreasonable to believe that Titian will have chosen to portray himself in thispicture in order to emphasize just this aspect of the work’s meaning. We arenot in the unenviable position of witness or voyeur as Susan Sontag seemsto fear. Through the use of the self-portrait we are urged to understand thatwhat we can see is the content of the artist’s mind. This is Titian’s final testament. We are looking at thinking.

But what does ‘thinking’ mean? We have to come at Titian’s ideas aboutthis obliquely, and there is a terrible clumsiness about their verbal expres-sion (as I understand them) compared to the subtle, complex compressionof their visual description. However . . . the pattern of chevrons set up bythe angled limbs surrounding Midas is echoed on the other side of thecanvas. There we see it principally in the pan-pipes hanging from the tree,in the bent arms of Apollo and his helper, in the angles of the knives in theirhands, in the angles of Apollo’s legs. This patterning creates a horizontaltension across the canvas surface to set against the vertical stress made byMarsyas’ body. Moreover, the legs of the poor satyr form a dramatic chevronacross the top of the canvas, while his elbows echo this at the bottom. Withthe addition of these top and bottom elements of the pattern, Titian sets upa dizzying circle of incomplete triangles that twist with massive energy

around the black hole of the umbilicus of the dying body in their midst.Here is the absolute centre of the work both formally and metaphorically.This is the biological point that links us to the source of life, to generation,to birth, to our mothers and fathers. This is the mark that witnesses our vulnerability, our dependence, that links us to history and so to death. As inastronomical black holes, time collapses here. Past, present and future areall registered synchronistically through so powerful a use of visualmetaphor. With astonishing confidence and simplicity, Titian places all thismeaning at the heart of the formal composition, the density of the collectedideas registered visually by the powerful pull exerted by this centre on thecircling movement of chevrons.

However, outside this circle is another one that contains it, just like thebubble that encloses a thought in a cartoon.This circle is picked out throughthe very spare use of warm colour in this painting and is nudged along byformal elements. It follows along the wonderful rose curve of the king’scloak, reappears under the belly of the dog, moves across Midas’ toes, alongthe puddle of blood below Marsyas’ arms, up the pink boot of Apollo, tothe rosy figure of the musician. It follows along the lines of his bow andinstrument, along the edge of the pan-pipes hanging in the tree, across thetop of the canvas through the device of the repeated rosy bows of ribbon,down to the Pan figure via a helpful branch, through his raised shoulder, tocome finally to rest again with the curve of colour in Midas’ cloak.

So we have two circles, one within another. It is important that the outerone is formed principally through the use of colour, and that the chosencolour is warm. What is going on inside it? What we see is the divine musi-cian, enraged by the musical ability of a creature not even fully human, andhumiliated by the ambiguity of his hollow triumph, taking envious revenge.Titian represents Apollo literally stooping to torture in order to discoverwhat goes on under the skin of such an artist. He wants to know how it isthat a mortal creature can rival himself as a music-maker. The irony of theimage is that, in unfeelingly choosing to inflict suffering, Apollo unwittinglylays bare the answer to his crazed curiosity. Suffering is the one thing Apollocannot know about and will not endure. He is omnipotent, immortal. Thevulnerability of ordinary mortality, powerfully symbolized by the umbilicuswhose covering he has stripped, is what he despises. This renders him helpless to understand that the power of human art, whose secret hesearches for, is rooted in this same vulnerability. We value art for its capacity to move us emotionally, and to the degree that it expresses and contains the complexities of the conflicts inherent to the vulnerability ofhuman existence, conflicts between life and death, joy and grief, pleasureand pain, love and hate. Unable to feel sympathy or empathy, ignorant aboutdeath and loss, forever denied access to the world of ordinary humanemotion, Apollo, god of the arts, is actually shut out from the only world of art we know. It is Titian’s insight that this exclusion makes Apollo mad.


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The concrete form taken by Apollo’s search for an object of enlightenmentis a psychotic form of enquiry.

The impressiveness of this painting, however, lies in more than the deeptruth it expresses about the necessity of suffering to art and the perceptionthat a failure to relate to the emotional basis of art is an indication of severedisturbance. Titian’s depiction of Apollo as mad is acute. He actually showsus what such a state of mind is like – the impulsivity, the vengefulness, thelack of sympathy, the concrete thinking.We are also made aware of both theunderlying poignancy and the causes of such a state. Everything the umbi-licus symbolizes is of no account to Apollo. His divinity means that he hasnothing to provide him with an authentic sense of connectedness betweenhimself and the human world. Behind his omnipotence, the inability to bevulnerable, lies isolation, an absence of responsive feeling which denies himany understanding of ordinary creative expressiveness. This evokes in himcatastrophic envy of the other who seems free of such limitations. His profound, enraged bafflement has no outlet other than retaliatory cruelty,the offspring of this injury to his sense of himself as complete. He cannot distinguish between experiences of differing emotional valency – between,for instance, injury to his narcissism and injury to another’s body, or betweenthe body as object and the body as object for in-dwelling – which is the func-tion of sympathetic imagination and a prerequisite of creative thinking.

Titian gives us here an Apollo who represents the problem of the immature, undeveloped mind, the difficulty posed by non-completion of theordinary, human, psychic structures required to think and to imagine. Healludes to it brilliantly in the abstract, structural device of the chevrons,the series of open, or uncompleted, triangles that jump across the canvas,disturbing the picture surface and threatening to break loose from the confines of the outer circle of colour. Moreover, the agitation these elementsbring to the dense centre of the painting allows us to understand somethingelse. Besides the profound insight into the painfully incomplete nature ofthe thought processes available to Apollo, this agitation is the experientialquality of them. Titian conveys what it feels like to be in their grip.

The outer containing membrane of colour is the crowning, metaphoricalachievement of the painting. Desperate to annihilate the experiences offrustration and humiliation engendered by recognizing another’s enhancedcapacities, Apollo’s solution is to annihilate the other in an attempt to robhim of those capacities and find them for himself. Titian portrays Apollo inthe act of doing this, turning his back on the warm outer circle and bendinginwards towards death and towards his psychotic conclusion. Implicit in thisportrayal is Titian’s emotional understanding of the dual function of thecircle of warmth. Formally it subtly contains the internal energy of the work,represented by the open triangles. It provides what the structure of thepainting requires in order to remain intact under the pressure exerted bythese open forms to burst beyond the boundaries of the canvas. Psycholo-

gically, this warm surround embraces the internal images of death, crueltyand madness and enables us to look at the painting without feeling over-whelmed by these elements.The circle of colour is the warm, containing skinof the complex ideas Titian is conveying, the skin he has himself opened outfor us to look beneath.

At the same time, this containing outer layer is the medium through whichTitian tells us more about thought itself. It represents the real solution toApollo’s predicament, the solution he cannot grasp. Limitation of the self,vulnerability, loss, frustration, shame, humiliation, all these emotional real-ities can be felt without mental collapse, without destruction of the capac-ity to think, provided that the structures of the mind are robust enough tomanage the anxiety these realities arouse. The strength of a mental struc-ture depends upon its capacity, under stress, to maintain internal links withthe warmth and colour of being alive, with hopefulness. Apollo’s omnipo-tence cuts him off from such experience. In showing Apollo bending awayfrom the world of warmth and colour, repudiating it, Titian reveals his deepunderstanding of the mental links involved in sanity. The figure ofMidas/Titian is actually wrapped in warmth. His body emerges from hiswonderful rose surround without losing contact with it. Both formally andpsychologically, he and the warm outer circle are integrally a part of eachother. In the self-portrait here of the meditating artist, Titian shows us whatsuch internal connectedness enables – the contemplation of difficult,dangerous feelings within the self in order to gain understanding of them.In this sense, whatever there may have been that was Apollo-like in Titianhimself – his own wishes, perhaps, for greatness, wishes to know more, wishesnot to have to die – was contained by a tolerance of limitation, knowledgeof death and a capacity to love.

Because he thinks visually, Titian is able to demonstrate synchronisticallyboth the content and the structure of this contemplation, both what itenables and what enables it to happen. By developing the outer circle ofwarm touches of colour that contain and render manageable the inner contents of cruelty, death and despair, Titian pictures for us at once the conditions for, and the condition of, reverie. He shows us what it can meanto be an artist, or even an analysing therapist, at work.

In a completely different register, just in case this helps to convey what Imean, Titian has given us an image capable of representing the states ofmind involved in paranoid-schizoid and depressive functioning. He alsodescribes dynamically their internal structures, their causes, the relationshipbetween them, the function of oedipal triangulation, the causes of its failure,the result of its failure. I would only like to add that I think he gives anemphasis in this painting that we sometimes forget. This is particularly registered in the figure of the musician, the figure that has seemed most enigmatic to art historians. For some, this figure represents Orpheus. Forothers, the face is reminiscent of that of Titian’s late painting of St Sebastian.


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Or is it a double for Apollo, revealing a different aspect of the god? Noneof these enquiries seems to me to lead to the heart of the problem, but allare picking up on something about this figure that is important, especiallythe last one.

While closely linked to Apollo, indeed, seeming to grow out of his back,the musician is as essential to the warm containing membrane as theMidas/Titian figure, whose weighty presence to the right of the canvas themusician balances. He is, too, every bit as integrated a part of it, constitu-ting the largest area of warm colour in the painting, a column of rosiness.At the same time, this is the only figure that, although structurally integralto the meaning of the central activity, seems to have no role to play in it.While the gaze of Midas is focused in a preoccupied fashion on this centralcore, the gaze of the musician is directed beyond the confines of the canvasalong the upward lines projected by his instrument. In this position of out-sider, the musician is portrayed as attending to some absorbing sound thathe is making but which only he can hear, something that grows out of whatwe can see, but is different from it. Formally this figure has the strength andcolourfulness to move the structure of the painting up and over the plain ofthe canvas, to prevent the image getting stuck within its confining rectan-gularity. Psychologically, this dynamic movement conveys a refusal to beemotionally bound by suffering, however rooted in it. This is an ecstatic portrait, or rather a portrait of the ecstatic state, in the fullest sense of theword. Linked, through colour and along a powerful diagonal, to the figureof Midas, and as linked as Midas to the scene of suffering, the musician operates as the ecstatic aspect of the artist. With this figure, Titian revealswhat Apollo longs to understand but turns his back on, the ordinary humanprocess of the transformation of thought and feeling into art. With it, Titianurges recognition of the profound importance of free, creative expressionof the self for the mitigation of psychological pain. Discovering, developingand expressing personal meaning, commenting on our own experience asthe musician does, as Titian is doing in this painting, is what allows us mortalsto remain spiritually alive. In reminding us that such freedom and creativ-ity are found through an attachment to what is warm, colourful and toler-ant of life,Titian offers us the deepest guidance in our attempts to be helpful.

It seems probable that our cultural description of this painting as ‘great’,despite the rebarbativeness of the image, depends on a common, uncon-scious awareness of the importance of the complex meaning it represents.Without flinching from what has been terrible in himself, from what is terrible in us all, with melancholy, compassionate, yet optimistic acceptance,Titian lays bare the unconscious, dynamic structures of mature humanity. Indoing so he demonstrates the ordinary, extraordinary capacity human beingshave, to pay unconscious attention to, and to represent unconsciously, thedeep origins, development and structure of their moral subjectivity. In clinical work we encounter the damaged aspects of this structure, along with

the sorrow such damage causes human beings. We are creatures who haveunconscious consciousness of our creation and we generate images of theunfolding and structuralization of this, images that represent its develop-ment – its disruption, its failure, its maturation. Throughout our lives weunconsciously record the progress of this potential for maturity whose fateis so important to us. As Titian makes clear, to be unable to be the subjectthat there is the subjective potential for being, is intensely painful.

If we return briefly to our starting point of the Crucifixion, we can seewhat an extraordinarily radical painting this is.The stories of the advent, lifeand death of Christ mark a hugely important step in the psychological evolution of the culture that created them and continues to hold them dear.The incarnation of Jesus Christ augments divinity with precisely the qualityof human sympathy Apollo lacks. From this point on, the psychological,developmental achievement of oedipal triangulation, unconsciously regis-tered, valued and represented in the new tri-partite nature bestowed on Godin these stories, is stabilized as a social aspiration. Everything this develop-ment implies, in terms of the understanding and treatment of others, couldnow be reliably symbolized in the Crucifixion as a social, ethical value. Butwith his reworking of the Crucifixion in ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’,Titian doessomething astonishing, something he is able to do because he knows howto put visual structure to work isomorphically, in the service of his large,unconscious understanding.While keeping intact the psychological meaningof the Crucifixion, as we have seen, he turns the Crucifixion on its head, heplaces it in a pagan context, he secularizes it. The crucified subject is nolonger part human part divine but, more familiar to us and more Freudian,part human part animal. At his great age, and member of an intensely orthodox religious society, Titian makes his most complex, final statementone that frees thinking from the confines of religion and places it fully, andpoignantly, in the realm of the human, where, hundreds of years later,psychoanalysis has worked it out with words.

References

Aretino, P. (1609) Del primo libro de le lettere di M. Pietro Aretino, 6 vols. Paris.Arnheim, R. (1969) Visual Thinking. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Gentili, A. (1990) Tiziano, in Arte e Dossier No. 47. Quoted in Pedrocco, F. (2001),

Titian: The Complete Paintings. Munich: Prestel.Milner, M. (1969) The Hands of the Living God. New York: International

Universities Press.Parsons, M. (unpublished) Psychoanalysis, Art, Listening, Looking, Outwards,

Inwards, p. 7.Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p. 36.


visualizing the mind: looking at titian’s ‘the flaying of marsyas’

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