The Psychoanalytical Implications of Caravaggio’s Feminized Self Portrait
Caravaggio is historically remembered as a queer icon within the art historical world. The queer revision of Caravaggio scholarship has provided strong evidence to suggest his bisexual identity through his deeply homoerotic works and feminization of his own self portraits. A key example of this scholarship is Caravaggio’s self portrait as the severed head of Medusa. The artist’s identification with the female creature provides a mysterious dialogue on Caravaggio’s queer identity and how this portrait can be analyzed in a subconscious light.
Giving it a Freudian tonality, Caravaggio’s placement of himself in the facial countenance of a female mythological figure is a direct portrayal of his own fears of castration. Also related to this imagery is the Oedipal myth and the subconscious desire for a young man to behead his own father. Of course there are problematic realities of Freudian’s theories on castration and the Oedipal myth but given Caravaggio’s identification with a female monster, these connotations can be applicable. Caravaggio’s beheading of himself provides a unique relation to this psychoanalytic myth as it expresses Caravaggio as failing to reach that status of paternal manhood. This is not the only instance of monstrous self portraiture for Caravaggio; the artist does this again in his rendition of David with the Head of Goliath in which the artist places his own features on the severed head of Goliath. Differently than the Medusa, Caravaggio’s self identification with Goliath provides a basis of the Oedipal relationship that Caravaggio perceives between him and his followers as he reaches the end of his career. This relationship between identifying as both Medusa, female, and Goliath, male, reflects Caravaggio’s deep routed connection to the grotesque and the monstrous in his own identity. As these representations are gender fluid, they also provide a queer association as Caravaggio perceives his lack of heteronormativity as an innately monstrous quality. In conclusion, the psychoanalytic relationships of Caravaggio’s self referendum as well as their innately queer interactions show a tension in Caravaggio’s own self identity and their relations to his art and presentation as a male figure.
Reading Sources:
Cothren, Michael, and Anne D’Alleva. Methods and Theories of Art History Third Edition. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2021.
Featured Image:
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Medusa. painting. Place: Galleria degli Uffizi. https://library-artstor-org.libproxy.uoregon.edu/asset/SCALA_ARCHIVES_1039778709.
I really enjoyed your blog post this week, it was very insightful and well thought out. Personally, I don’t know too much about Caravaggio besides his most famous paintings, so reading your thoughts really opened my eyes to a whole section of scholarship about him that I didn’t know existed. I appreciate how well you connected Freud’s Oedipus complex to Caravaggio’s self-portrait and the way you explained it provided an excellent framework of analysis.
I thought your post was a great read this week! I think you’re raising some interesting questions about sexuality and self-expression in art. Freud didn’t analyze Caravaggio but I think he would have a lot to say about this work. Even outside Freudian analysis, I think its pretty psychologically telling to not only portray yourself as a mythical monster, but as beheaded too. I can tell you really know a lot about Caravaggio, great work this week!
I really enjoyed reading through your post, it was very insightful! I think you made a wonderful comparison with Caravaggio’s works and how they related to psychoanalysis in the study of art. I think the ways in which you discussed the struggle and portrayal of identity for Caravaggio was very well done, and I thought it was interesting how you examined it through not only a psychoanalytic lens but also one through queer studies as well. I find psychoanalysis in art to be very intriguing when overlapped with various other theories, like feminist or even Marxist theories. Thanks for the great post!