Giovanni Segantini: An Essay in Psychoanalysis

Editor's Preface

by Thom Jenkins

Karl Abraham's Giovanni Segantini of 1911 is the first sustained attempt anywhere to read the entire life and work of a painter through psychoanalysis; Freud's Leonardo of the previous year had analysed a memory and a smile, and Abraham, publishing in Freud's own series, claims the whole oeuvre. It is also, avant la lettre, a founding document of what would become the study of self-narrative: its treatment of Segantini's autobiography as an individual myth, composed on the pattern of Moses, Sargon, Cyrus and Romulus by a man too unlettered to have read them, anticipates arguments made famous decades later. And it is the seed of Abraham's clinical theory of melancholia, which fed Freud's Mourning and Melancholia.

The essay has been available in English only in Hilda Abraham's 1955 version. The present translation returns to the German of 1911 and to the vocabulary Abraham actually used: drives rather than instincts, the soul rather than the mind, the pleasure of looking rather than scopophilia. It is made by a reader of Segantini's paintings for readers of them, in the conviction that the painter Abraham analysed, the pantheist of the high pastures for whom art was "the becoming-flesh of spirit in matter", deserves to be met in English in words as plain and as warm as his own.

Few subjects have offered the psychoanalyst a richer substrate: a life that reads like a case history written before the method existed, and paintings that meet it at least halfway. However, this translation enters the AI the Classics library less for its psychoanalytic merits than for its earnest engagement with the paintings: as a profound contribution to the history of art.

It is said of certain painters that they worked with a lens; that the camera obscura threw the world onto the canvas to be confirmed by their brush. An apparatus, it must be said, uniquely unsuited to the majority of Segantini’s subjects. The camera obscura wants a darkened chamber and a stilled subject; he most often worked in open light at great heights, before moving flocks and turning weather, and his strangest pictures show what no lens could gather, scenes that existed nowhere but within him. No, with Segantini the projection ran the other way, projecting an inner-world outward, and projection is Abraham's own word for it.

All the more reason, then, that the instrument should stand on the viewer's side; and this little book is that instrument. It is a lens held up to Segantini: it gathers the scattered light of an orphan’s early life, the Napoleon road, the single model as a muse for motherhood, the refused doctor, into focus on the surface of the paintings, so that a reader who has finished it cannot stand before The Two Mothers or The Bad Mothers and see what they saw before. Like any lens, it inverts what it transmits; the reader who distrusts the doctrine may correct for the inversion and keep the magnification. And what survives every correction is the attention. No one before Abraham had looked at these paintings so long, so closely, or with such conviction that in them every detail was determined and none accidental. As psychology, that conviction, "the strict causal determination of every symbol", remains disputable; as a way of looking at pictures, it is the whole discipline of art history in a single clause. We offer the book, then, to be used as it can still be used: raised to the eye, between the reader and the man who climbed to the heights of the scenes he painted.

A word on translation itself, which in this literature is never a formality. The warning stands in this essay's own sister publication: Freud's study of Leonardo, issued in this same series a year before Abraham wrote, rests at a crucial point on a mistranslation. The bird of Leonardo's childhood memory, a kite (nibbio), had entered German as a vulture (Geier), and on the vulture Freud raised an edifice of Egyptian mother-goddess symbolism that the kite cannot bear. The error, exposed by Eric Maclagan in 1923, acknowledged in the Standard Edition, and retold in our own day by Walter Isaacson in his 2017 biography, remains the standing lesson in what a single wrong word can do to an interpretation. Abraham wrote in innocence of that lesson; we have translated with it in view.

Let the reader therefore know where the seams lie. Servaes wrote in German, and Abraham quotes him directly. But Segantini wrote in Italian, and every word of his in this essay passed through German hands, Servaes's and the editors of his letters, before reaching ours; his dying words alone stand here in his own tongue. Where those German renderings stray from Segantini, the error belongs to Abraham and his sources, and we have made no attempt to correct it: it is the essay of 1911, not an emended Segantini, that we set before the reader.

Errors in the translation of Abraham's German are ours alone.

Preface

On Segantini's life and art we have a handful of shorter sketches and a single major study, at once biography and criticism, by Franz Servaes. It forms part of the monumental Segantini volume issued by the Austrian government, and has since appeared in a popular edition as well.KA1KA · 1Giovanni Segantini. Sein Leben und sein Werk. By Franz Servaes, Leipzig 1907. All page references in what follows are to this edition.

Servaes gives a portrait of Segantini, artist and man alike, that is excellent in every respect, and it is no ambition of the present essay to outdo him. Its problems lie on different ground: not to depict Segantini's singular nature once again, but to explain it psychologically.

The psychoanalytic researches of Freud and his school cast new light on the life of the soul, in its typical forms and its individual ones. Setting out from the exploration of the unconscious, they have yielded important insights into the laws of artistic creation as well.KA2KA · 2O. Rank, Der Künstler. Vienna and Leipzig, Hugo Heller & Cie., 1907. One of Freud's recent works, "A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci", opened, quite apart from its other findings, a view into the artistic individuality of that master. But no one has yet undertaken to survey the whole life and psychic character of a visual artist through the lens of psychoanalysis, to trace in his art the working of unconscious driving forces.

Among the visual artists of our time Giovanni Segantini towers as a powerful and independent personality. His development, his outer and inner life, his artistry and his works bear so pronounced a stamp that they confront the psychology of the individual with a whole series of unsolved problems. To bring these into the light of psychoanalysis is the purpose of this essay.

It may seem strange that it should be a physician who attempts, by this new method, to analyse the life of an artist's soul. The reason lies in how psychoanalytic research developed. It grew out of a procedure whose original purpose was to seek the unconscious roots of diseased states of the soul, the nervous conditions or "neuroses". And though psychoanalysis soon outgrew that narrow field and has proved a fruitful method of inquiry across the most varied regions of the soul's life, its circle of adherents remains, for that historical reason, chiefly medical to this day. And the physician schooled in analysing the unconscious of the neurotic holds a real advantage over other observers: in the artist he meets a number of psychological traits already familiar to him from the neurotic, traits bound up with the life of fantasy, conscious and unconscious alike.

There is, admittedly, a weighty difference between my undertaking and the medical use of psychoanalysis. The physician of the soul who practises the method joins with his patient in a common labour. He gains, by degrees, a deeper view into the patient's unconscious, and he can wait, filling the gaps in his material from the patient's own associations. The conditions are quite different when the task is to analyse the soul of one who no longer dwells among the living. Here one must explain the surviving facts by the light of what experience has established. And the material Segantini left us, in his works, his notebooks, his letters, or that others gathered, is naturally not without gaps.KA3KA · 3Giovanni Segantinis Schriften und Briefe, edited by Bianca Segantini. Leipzig, Klinkhardt & Biermann. I do not hide from myself, therefore, that this analysis will not answer every question. Should the attempt be given up on that account? Segantini's rich personality offers too much that draws and astonishes us for renunciation to be an option.

An artist of genius, a great human being such as Segantini was, has a claim on those of us who were his contemporaries: that we enter into his singular nature and strive to fathom it. Nor will we be wrong to expect from the effort some enrichment of what is generally known of the psychology of the artist. Let the attempt itself decide, then, how far along the path Freud has opened we can come toward that goal.

Part I

Life · La vita1896–1899Nature · La natura1898–1899Death · La morte1896–1899

Giovanni Segantini, oil on canvas, unfinished at his death in 1899. Segantini Museum, St. Moritz. Select a panel to view it in detail.

When Segantini died on 28 September 1899, death took him in mid-creation. Ten days before, he had climbed the Schafberg above Pontresina to finish, up there, the central panel of his Triptych of the Alpine World.TJ1TJ · 1The work now generally known as the Trittico della Natura or Alpine Triptych: Life, Nature, Death; Segantini Museum, St. Moritz. Elsewhere also referred to as Becoming, Being, Passing Away.

His last and greatest work was to him more than a glorification of the high mountains. For in his conception the task of painting was not exhausted in rendering reality faithfully: it was to give expression to the ideas and feelings that fill the artist's inmost being. So he painted nature the kindly giver: the mother with the child at her breast, and beside the human mother, her sister of the animal kingdom.

He painted the waking of the day, the waking of nature, the growth of man; painted every living thing at the height of its existence; and at last the sinking day, nature stiffening into frost, and the end of man. So in his final work he pointed, more piercingly than ever, to the relation all creatures share with nature, and to the fate they share.

Every one of these motifs Segantini had painted before, singly and in manifold combinations, in variation upon variation. So his imperishable masterworks had come into being: The Two Mothers, Spring in the Alps, Ploughing in the Engadine, The Return Home, and many more. Yet he was driven on toward the work that was to be his last. In this symphony of life, everything that seemed to him life's deepest meaning and worth was to find its united expression.

This intention need not be guessed from the work; he proclaimed it plainly in words. More than once he set down the brush and took up the pen to defend his conception of art's essence against other views. A year before his death he composed an answer to Tolstoy's question, "What is art?", and in it he insists on the ethical root-idea of the work of art. The practice of art is to him a cult, and its office is to glorify and transfigure work, love, motherliness, and death. Here Segantini himself names the springs from which his artistic imagination was fed, ever anew.

Other artists have drawn from these springs, no doubt. But what marks Segantini's individuality is how all of them flow together into a single stream: how these seemingly separate circles of ideas are, for him, indissolubly one.

A glance at Segantini's life shows it ruled by the same powers as his art. Whence, we ask, did his work, did the very conduct of his life, receive this direction? Not from example, not from upbringing; that much is certain. He had lost his parents by the age of five. The world in which he passed his youth could nourish neither his mind nor his moral growth: he grew up with no real schooling, almost illiterate, and neither the years of being shunted among his step-siblings nor those spent in the reformatory can have refined him. His youth, poor in gleams of light, was one long struggle against hostile powers. His artistic ideals, his character, his whole view of the world he had to make almost alone, from what was his own.

Only the psychoanalytic method can do justice to the riddles of such a development, because it takes the drive-life of childhood as the starting point of its inquiry. And if I now set foot on that path, I can call on no lesser authority than Segantini himself.

"You ask me", he once wrote in a letter,KA4KA · 4Page 82 of Bianca Segantini's collection. "how thought and art developed in my almost wild life in the midst of nature. To that I truly could not answer; perhaps, to explain it, one would have to climb down to the roots, and study and analyse every feeling of the soul back to its first and remotest movements of childhood." Following the artist's own hint, I turn to his childhood.

The heaviest event of Segantini's childhood, in its consequences, was the early death of his mother. He was barely five when the loss fell on him.

Seldom has a son tended his mother's memory with such love as Segantini. And the love grew with the years; the mother became, by degrees, an ideal figure, a goddess, and to her cult the son's art was consecrated.

Orphaned so young, he had to go without any loving care through the whole of his youth. Was it this deprivation that made him the painter of motherliness? Did his art raise to an ideal what reality had denied him? The explanation lies close to hand, and its insufficiency will show just as quickly.

Many a child is struck at a tender age by the same misfortune as our artist. It scarcely grasps the reach of the loss, is soon comforted, and thinks of the dead only when grown-ups stir the memory. Here and there, memory and childish feeling may fade less easily. Not so with Segantini. In him the mother's image does not go out; his imagination works it onward, and sets it at the very centre of his world of thought.

A negative factor, the mere absence of a mother's care, cannot by itself explain so ruling a power in the mother-ideal. Segantini himself has pointed plainly to where the roots of that power must be sought. We read at the opening of his autobiography:

"I carry her in memory, my mother; and were it possible for her to appear now, at this moment, before my eyes, I should know her still, after thirty-one years. I see her again with the spirit's eye, that tall figure, walking wearily along. She was beautiful; not as the dawn is, or the noon, but as a sunset in spring. When she died she was not yet twenty-nine."

These words of the grown man make no mention at all of a mother's care! And when we read his account of the sorrowful time that broke upon him at her death, we wait in vain for the comparison he might so naturally draw, how well he was kept while she lived, how wretchedly after. No such word comes.

Segantini speaks of quite other things: of her beauty, her figure, her movement and bearing, of his mother's youth, whose image, he says, is always before his eyes.

Imagine two words, "my mother", struck from the passage above, and try then to say what the lines mean. Only one answer is possible: so speaks a lover of the beloved he has lost. Nothing else matches the tone of feeling that clings to the words.

In the grown man's words, the eros of the child still sounds. Psychoanalytic science has made us familiar with the view that a boy's first stirrings of eros turn, as a rule, toward his mother. These feelings of love, whose character in early childhood, up to about the fifth year, lies open to any unprejudiced observer, gradually change their outward form as childhood goes on. The child's primitive eros is purely egoistic. It aims at the whole and undivided possession of its object; it begrudges anyone else the least pleasure in the beloved's company. And it yields expressions of hate as readily as of love. In that season of still untamed affects and drives, the boy's love carries an aggressive, even a cruel, strain.

The study of the neurotic psyche has shown that in certain people all these stirrings are abnormally strong. The extreme case, in childhood, is furnished by those who in later life fall ill of the so-called obsessional neurosis: their drive-life is marked by feelings of love and hate that cross each other without cease and give rise to grave conflicts of the soul. In them one finds, as a rule, the signs of an extravagant love for the parents alternating swiftly with expressions of hate that culminate in wishes for their death.KA5KA · 5Cf. Freud, "Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis", Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, vol. I, 1909, especially p. 413 ff.

In the period of childhood that follows, in the healthy no less than in the neurotic, the drives are dammed in by the process of repression and sublimation. So are formed the socially indispensable inhibitions, which curb the drives in quantity, or in certain cases bar their exercise altogether, or steer them toward other, altruistic ends. According to a person's mental endowment, part of the sublimated sexual energy is converted into mental work, scientific, perhaps, or artistic. And the greater the original strength of the drives, the more intense and far-reaching the sublimation must be, if the individual is to bend to the demands of the ruling culture.

The primitive feelings toward the parents spring, as we hold against the received teaching, from the child's own sexuality, exactly as other expressions of love and hate do. The individual must bow to culture's demand that father and mother be "honoured". And mark this: the commandment does not order us to love our parents, for that would outlaw only the stirrings of hate. The commandment sets itself equally against love and against hate, since both, in their original essence, are manifestations of the sexual drive. Both offend against the prohibition of incest; and from their joint sublimation arise the feelings of veneration, which are free of any sexual accent.

Can the veneration of the mother, whose utmost spiritualisation is what gives Segantini's works their characteristic stamp, really rest on a sexual ground?

The experience of psychoanalysis lets us answer with a decided yes. That experience, it is true, has mostly been won from the so-called neurotics, so a brief justification is owed before we apply it to Segantini's individuality. Artist and neurotic have much in common in their psychic constitution. In both, the drive-life is of originally abnormal strength, and in both it has undergone a thorough transformation by repression and sublimation of unusual extent. Artist and neurotic alike stand with one foot outside reality, in a world of fantasy. In the neurotic, the repressed fantasies are worked up into the symptoms of his illness; in the artist they find expression in his works, but not in his works alone. For the artist always bears neurotic traits. The sublimation of his repressed drives never wholly succeeds; some part of them turns instead into nervous symptoms. And this holds for Segantini too.

As the psychoanalysis of neurotics teaches, the process of repression works a momentous displacement in the boy's feelings. In his consciousness, a grateful, venerating love for the caring mother steps into the place of the overpowering erotic affection. And while the incest-wish is forced down with might, motherliness undergoes a corresponding over-accentuation.KA6KA · 6Other consequences connected with this process will come up for discussion later.

This compensatory over-accentuation of motherliness is pronounced in Segantini to a most unusual degree, much as we find it in the neurotic. From this, and from other signs to be taken up later, the conclusion follows: in Segantini the childhood libido turned toward his mother in the shape of overmastering stirrings of love and of hate, and then underwent a sublimation of the utmost energy. It was spiritualised, so I hold, into the cult of motherliness, into the inward veneration of mother nature, into that selfless, altruistic love which streams out to every creature.

Just as in the neurotic, so in Segantini: here and there the repressed drives break through. The child's original eros would not let itself be sublimated without remainder; from time to time it reappears, though greatly softened. In Segantini's description of his mother the erotic element is unmistakable, however extraordinary its refinement. Art had to serve him as the means of spiritualising the mother's figure above all earthly feeling. A series of his most beautiful works shows us a mother sunk in tender contemplation of her infant; and each time we are delighted anew by that slender, youthful figure, the gently bowed bearing, the delicate and lovely features.

These pictures date from around the artist's thirtieth year, when he was living at Savognin in the Grisons. He was then producing various works wholly out of his imagination, and two of them have a curious history of origin that is of the highest interest for us.

As Segantini himself relates, the sight of a rose once stirred in him a sensual feeling that would not let him go. As he pulled the petals from the flower, the vision of a rosy, youthful face pressed itself upon him. And the vision moved him to paint over an older canvas, one that showed a woman dying of consumption, until a rosy young woman emerged in her place.

The incident grows clearer beside a second of the same kind, whose description I take from Servaes's biography.

"One day", he himself related, "as Segantini was climbing the last ridge of a high alp, with only a few steps still between him and the summit, he saw a great flower standing out clear and pure against the radiant blue of the sky, sharply drawn upon it. It was a flower of high beauty, of a luminous power such as he thought he had never seen. Lying on his belly on the slope, he gazed at the fair wonder as it stood there, quite alone, in full light against the sky. And then it happened: before his very eyes the flower grew gigantic, and in his imagination it took on enchanting human forms. The great stalk became a bending bough, and on it, full of grace, rested the seated figure of a fair-haired, rosy young woman with a naked child on her lap; and the child held in its hands a dark-red apple, answering to the strong pistil that rose from the flower's heart. This vision Segantini afterwards painted, and called it Of an Alpine Flower. Later he gave the picture another name: The Fruit of Love."

To a flower's beauty the artist at once joins the beauty of his long-dead mother. In that instant, flower and mother are one and the same; before his eyes the flower turns into a Madonna.

The erotic ground of this fantasy will be plainest to the reader who does not overlook certain symbols that appear here, symbols which recur in every product of human fantasy.

Servaes rightly remarks that the child in The Fruit of Love is striking for its bursting health, set against so delicate a mother. It is of the highest interest to explain this trait of the strange picture as well.

Can the artist have painted himself, in this child sparkling with life, at the mother's side? Against it stands the fact that Segantini came into the world so weak he had to be baptised in emergency. And yet another circumstance entitles us to hold to our assumption. The autobiography says: "By my birth I caused my mother a weakness which, five years later, carried her off. To recover from it she went, in the fourth year, to Trent; but the cures did not take." So the young woman never recovered, and wasted away, while the child who had drawn the strength out of her grew, and thrived, and outlived her.

But the words quoted deserve attention on another ground as well. The thought of bearing guilt for the death of a beloved person is one we meet, among neurotics, with great frequency.

As we have said, the childhood libido of the neurotic is marked by strong stirrings of hate. These find expression in fantasies of the beloved person's death, or, should that person really die, in feelings of satisfaction, even of cruel pleasure. When repression later unfolds its power, feelings of guilt appear which the neurotic cannot drive off, though his conscious memory offers no ground for such self-reproach. He accuses himself of his father's or his mother's death, although the whole offence of his childhood lay in forbidden fantasies and feelings. And upon this follow the attempts to make good, after the fact, the wrong once done; in the obsessional neurosis above all, they claim a wide field. The memory of the beloved is now tended with extravagant love, ringed with a halo. Or else the attempt is made to press the fact of death out of consciousness altogether: to wake the dead, in fantasy, to life again.

That for Segantini too the cult of the mother was a counterweight, by which he made good the hostile and cruel stirrings of his childhood, is attested with piercing clarity by an event of that childhood which he himself relates.KA7KA · 7In a letter to the poet Neera; Bianca Segantini's collection, p. 84.

"The first time I ever took a pencil in hand to draw, it was because I heard a woman say to her neighbours, sobbing: 'Ah, if only I had her picture at least; she was so beautiful!' At these words I looked up, moved, into the beautiful face of a young mother in despair. One of the women present pointed to me and said: 'Have this boy make the picture; he is very skilful.' The young mother's beautiful, tear-filled eyes turned to me. She said nothing; she went into the chamber, and I followed her. In a cradle lay the little body of a girl who could not have been much over a year old. The mother gave me paper and pencil, and I began. I worked several hours; the mother wished me to draw the child living. I do not know whether the work had any merit as art, but I remember seeing the woman, for one moment, so happy that she seemed to forget her grief. The pencil stayed in the poor mother's house, and I did not take up drawing again for many years. And yet that was perhaps the seed from which the thought grew that by this means I might give expression to feelings."

It would be simple enough to derive the boy's first act of drawing from a noble and compassionate impulse, the more so as we know how open the grown Segantini was to such impulses. But we should then miss what is truly remarkable in the scene.

Segantini was at most twelve years old at the time; and it seems to me astonishing that the boy should stay for hours alone with a dead body, feeling neither fear nor horror. The soul's responses of fear, of horror, of fellow-feeling arise only gradually through childhood, by the sublimation of the cruelty-component; and where that component is of extraordinary strength, it turns over into its opposite: into a compassion for the suffering of others of unusual depth, and a fearful horror of death. Both traits were pronounced in the later Segantini to a rare degree. But at the time he drew the dead child, sublimation in this direction had advanced strikingly little; whence the conclusion that a cruelty-component of very great strength held out successfully against complete sublimation beyond his twelfth year.

In the scene before us it is the cruelty-component that finds its satisfaction, in the long contemplation of the dead child and the sight of the mother's grief. But pity too receives its due: he draws the picture for the beautiful young mother's sake, to soften her pain.

Twice in telling the story Segantini mentions the young woman's beauty, just as in the description of his own mother. The woman standing before him takes, in his fantasy, at once and by "transference",KA8KA · 8From the psychology of the neuroses we are familiar with the process whereby feelings attaching to the earliest sexual object can pass over to a new person, the latter being identified in fantasy with her predecessor. his own mother's place, and wakes the artist in him. For the love of a mother, he becomes an artist. And if we already begin to suspect that our artist, like the neurotic, is trying to make good upon a stranger-mother what his death-wishes had sinned against his own, another detail of the account turns suspicion to certainty. His hours beside the body Segantini explains by the mourning woman's wish: he was to draw the dead child living. So there existed an art by which the dead could, as it were, be called back to life! In later years, time upon time, he would wake his mother's memory into life by that art. In this lay, as we can now understand, an act of penance, imposed by the grown man on himself for the sins of his childhood; conduct which recalls, to an extraordinary degree, the obsessional neurotics, who likewise, though in other forms, lay manifold penances upon themselves.

After that first groping attempt, years passed in which, under the pressure of desolate circumstances, Segantini had to give drawing up. At last he won entry to the Brera Academy in Milan. And the first pictures he now completed out of his own imagination join so directly onto that earliest childhood attempt that scarcely a single day might have passed between. What he set himself to paint was either death or motherliness.

The pictures of death will have their own discussion later. Here let us recall first the picture that Segantini, as an academy pupil, first finished and exhibited. It was a head of Niobe. It is said to have rendered grippingly the grief of the mother over the death of her children, and the picture caused a stir.

Segantini stood at this time in the age of bodily and mental ripening. We know that this age throws back into uproar everything that had been laid to rest, in the second period of childhood, by repression and sublimation. The growing man must now take his final stand toward those on whom his first love was set: he must decide whether to cling to them with the original feelings, or to loose himself from them so that his feelings may pass to new objects. And in that season it is decided, further, to what degree he will repress and transform his drives.

In Segantini, the binding of his love to his mother, a mother long since dead, now showed itself for the first time in its full strength. Such a fixation of the libido was bound to issue in a mighty repression of sexuality, and its working can be traced everywhere in his life and in his works.

Of love affairs, such as common opinion expects of a young artist above all, the reports of these years tell us nothing. On the contrary: toward women he was reserved and shy. What set him apart from his companions was a great delicacy of feeling, and the avoidance of any coarse word in talk.

From this we see that Segantini's drive-life was bound; and the fact admits no other explanation than the fixation of his libido upon his mother.

Only at about twenty-two did he experience what is commonly called "first love". From earliest childhood to that age, the true first love, the love of his mother, had ruled him wholly; and even now its power showed. We find in Segantini an unusual narrowness in the choice of a sexual object. He could not do what other young people commonly do, form attachments and dissolve them again: the choice once made was, for him, the final one. This monogamic trait, known to us also in the neurotic,KA9KA · 9Cf. my paper "The Place of Marriage between Relatives in the Psychology of the Neuroses", Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische Forschungen, vol. I, 1909. shows itself in Segantini in a remarkable way.

In his twenty-third year (1881) Segantini painted his first picture of erotic content, and, if we set aside a few scenes of herdsmen's life from the years that followed, it remained the only one of its kind. Through his friend Carlo Bugatti he asked Bugatti's sister Beatrice to sit for him. He painted her in the dress of a medieval noblewoman, a falcon perched on her left hand, fed from her right: La Falconiera, the picture is called. Servaes rightly observes that the painter's infatuation shows at first glance. And Segantini did fall in love, and soon afterwards married his beautiful model.TJ2TJ · 2Carlo Bugatti, the furniture designer; his son Ettore founded the motor company. In law there was no marriage: Segantini's statelessness (see Part II) made one impossible, and Bice bore his name by usage. Abraham keeps the word Ehe, marriage, throughout, whether from ignorance or tact, and the translation preserves his word choice.

His love for Beatrice, Bice in the family circle, was fervent and unchanging, like the love for the mother. His marriage answered not at all to the received idea of an artist's marriage, and more is meant by that than that Segantini kept a good household. To his death he clung to his companion with a lover's passion. The letters he wrote her, whenever they were briefly parted, bear witness: they read like the outpourings of a boy in love. And in their tone of feeling they recall those passages of the autobiography that speak of the artist's mother.

We stand, in Segantini, before the unusual case of a man whose entire love-life was lived within a marriage contracted young. But it is clear that drives of such overmastering strength could bear so narrow a channel only on one condition: that in sublimated form they be free to stream out to beings without number. Strictly monogamous in his love, Segantini was compelled to turn his spiritualised love upon all mankind, upon the whole of nature.

Here we must pause. We are on the point of subjecting to analysis the working of these powers in the ripened man's art and life. But we may not leave his youth behind while we have weighed only the mother's significance, and not yet the father's.

Part II

Of his father the autobiography tells us very little. We learn that after the early death of Giovanni's mother he left Arco, his home, taking the five-year-old boy; that he went to Milan, to his grown children of an earlier marriage; and that when Milan gave him no footing, he departed at short resolve for AmericaTJ3TJ · 3Abraham follows Segantini's autobiographical account, also adopted by Franz Servaes in the first major biography (1902), that Agostino Segatini emigrated to America with one of his elder sons after leaving Giovanni in Milan. Modern archival research by Annie-Paule Quinsac, incorporated into the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, instead establishes that Agostino died in Rovereto hospital on 20 February 1866. The relationship between the autobiographical narrative and the documentary record has not been satisfactorily explained. with one of the sons of that first marriage, leaving Giovanni behind with a step-sister. From that day the artist never heard of his father again.

It cannot fail to strike us: Segantini, who lost both parents within a short span, speaks of his mother at length and with devoted love, but of his father tells scarcely more than the bare dates given above. While he summons his highest art to glorify motherliness, while every work raises the mother a fresh monument, we search in vain for one positive expression of whatever feeling bound him to his father. And where a picture happens to hold a father's figure beside a mother's, the father is never once set alone at the centre.

So it might appear that the father left no mark on the son's development or his works, that the son simply stood indifferent to him. But Segantini's silence is eloquent. It rests, as we shall see at once, on the suppression of the most violent enmity toward the father.

It lies in the bisexual constitution of man that a boy's erotic feelings reach toward both parents; but early on, a preference for the mother declares itself, and jealousy and enmity toward the father follow at once. When the mother died, the ground of jealousy fell away, and the boy's whole love should now, by nature's course, have turned to his father. But at just that moment the father did the one thing certain to kill all love for him in the child and to feed the hatred: he took the imaginative boy, whose needs of soul he never noticed, out of the paradise on Lake Garda into the desolation and misery of the great city, handed him to a step-sister with neither time nor love to give, and then abandoned him.

So the feelings of affection for the father were smothered in the seed; and we look in vain, in the young Segantini, for the substitute-formations that normally grow from that love's sublimation.

At puberty a more or less thorough loosening from the father's authority normally takes place; yet even after, its working shows in filial piety and love. The sublimation of a lasting, positive bond to the father tells on the whole conduct of a life: as the need to lean on someone stronger, the readiness to subordinate one's own will, the dependent clinging to what has been handed down. There are sons who stand toward their parents, even past puberty, in a wholly unchanged relation of childish dependence; in them the conservative bent is apt to be greatest, and the forward-driving activity least.

Segantini stands in flat opposition to this last type; he is, so to say, the other extreme. The spirit of subordination, the conservative strain, is wholly wanting in him. "Every development", he once writes, "be it social, religious, or of whatever kind, has for its first goal the negation of the old: nihilism, destruction." Downright revolutionary words. He is taking revenge on the paternal power against which he must have risen in earliest childhood; revenge, above all, for having been left alone in misery after his mother's death. Yet Segantini is not content to negate what stands: by tearing down the old he means to break a road for the more perfect new. And he did not merely demand this in theory; he had acted on it long before he put it into words.

In Segantini, then, we can establish a purely negative significance of the father. And as his love for the mother streams out, sublimated, over the whole of nature, so his hate, which first belonged to the father, passes onto everything that hems his will. The aggressive impulses aimed at the adversary's life are softened, to be sure, by sublimation; what they deliver is the energy with which he stands his ground against every power and prevails. From childhood on, Segantini's life is one living protest against any authority that presumed to lay a hand on his individuality.

Yet however fiercely this energy turns against the father's power, we must not miss that precisely in it Segantini identifies with his father. To the boy, the father is the natural model: superior in stature and strength, in energy and knowledge. Rivalry with him must rouse, with special force, the wish to equal him in all these things; and it gives a powerful impulse to the child's fantasies of greatness.

Revolt against the father's power, and the longing to become self-standing, independent, great: both are stamped on the young Segantini to an unusual degree. And these traits of character open to us his growth as a man and his path as an artist.

It is shattering to read, in the artist's account of his life, how at six years old he must spend his days in a narrow, bare room, alone, locked in from morning to evening. For a while he bears it, as long as the monotony still offers his curiosity some charm and his imagination some spark. Then comes this: "One morning, as I stared dully out of the window thinking of nothing at all, the cackle of some neighbour women reached my ear: they were gossiping about a man who as a youth had left Milan on foot and made his way to France, where he did great deeds... For me it was like a revelation. So one could leave this stair-landing, and wander far away... I knew the road; my father had shown it to me when we walked on the castle square. 'There,' he had said, 'through this arch the victorious French and Piedmontese troops marched in. Napoleon the First had the arch and the road laid out; the road was to run straight through the mountains, direct to France.' And the idea of reaching France by that road would never leave me again."

The women's words recall to the boy an unforgettable tale of his father's, likewise of France, likewise of a man's great deeds. The child's wishes for greatness are awake at once; and his impulsive energy demands action now. The six-year-old runs off, provides himself with a piece of bread, passes through the triumphal arch, and takes the road of the great Napoleon.

Not long before, his father too had one day walked out of Milan without many words. The little boy does as his father did. But he is not content with the fantasy of every boy, merely to match his father: he means to become like that man whose greatness compelled even the father's admiration.KA10KA · 10People whose aggressive drive-stirrings are checked by strong repression still like, even today, to identify themselves in fantasy with Napoleon. Here lies the most important unconscious source of the Napoleon cult.

The artist's further childhood history, as he himself tells it, is rich in remarkable turns of fortune; so rich that doubt stirs in us whether it can all really have happened so. May not the over-rich imagination of the child, and of the man after him, have reshaped, if not invented, much that his own criticism could afterwards no longer tell apart from what was truly lived?

The warrant for such a suspicion comes from our knowledge of certain fantasies produced, in surprisingly uniform fashion, by so many individuals that we recognise in them something typical and universally human. The same ideas appear in the mass-fantasies of mankind, that is, in the myths of the most various peoples and ages. I have shown elsewhere, in my study Dream and Myth,KA11KA · 11Traum und Mythus. Eine Studie zur Völkerpsychologie. Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Heft 4. that myths agree in form and content, to the furthest degree, with the childhood fantasies of the single person; and RankKA12KA · 12Rank, Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden. Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Heft 5. has since treated, in a special study, the myth of the birth of the hero. Every people, in its legends, furnishes the birth and childhood of its hero with wondrous events, and these agree entirely with the fantasies each of us spins about his own childhood. And Segantini's childhood story, as he himself presents it, recalls these hero-legends to a striking degree.

The legends of Moses, Sargon, Cyrus, Romulus and Remus, and the rest, all agree in this: the son of noble parents is, for one reason or another, to be done away with. But he is saved in some wondrous manner, drawn from the water, perhaps, or found by chance by strangers of humble station; he is reared as their son, and must do lowly work. Already in boyhood, at play among his fellows, he betrays gifts that set him apart and mark him as called to higher things. Grown to manhood, he learns the secret of his birth, takes revenge on his oppressors, performs heroic deeds, and comes at last into the honours that are his due.

Now let us hear Segantini's account of his childhood further.

The boy ran on along the highroad until at nightfall, worn out, he sank down at the roadside and slept. He never felt the rain-shower that soaked him through. He woke when country folk, passing that way, shook him; they took him up, lifted him onto their wagon, and drove him home with them. On the way he slept again, and woke only in the house of his rescuers. When they had dried and warmed him, they began to ask him his story. Here the autobiography says: "I remember telling a long tale, full of detail, about an accident that once befell me and that stamped itself on my memory with peculiar force. One day, when I may have been three or four years old, I was crossing a narrow wooden footbridge that led from the main road over to a dye-works, across a dammed mountain stream whose force drives many mills."

On the bridge, Segantini goes on, a bigger boy had met him and, by a careless movement, knocked the little one over the side. A soldier leapt in after him and pulled him from the water when he was already drifting toward a mill.

Then comes the close of the tale. When the peasants heard from little Segantini that he would on no account go back to his sister, they said: "We will keep you with us, poor orphan child; you need sun. But we are not rich; so if you mean to stay and settle in, you must make yourself useful somehow." ... "The next day the woman cut off my long hair, which hung rich and curling to my shoulders. Another woman, standing by, remarked: 'Seen from the side, he is like a son of the King of France'... On that day I became a swineherd: I was perhaps not yet seven years old!"

Only a few weeks was the boy allowed to stay in his new home, where far more care fell to him than at his sister's in Milan. And it is just this brief episode that Segantini paints with the greatest exactness, with loving attention to detail. In this tale we find every important trait of the myth of the hero's birth. There is the separation from the parental house, accomplished here, to be sure, in another way than in the legends. There follows the wondrous rescue by compassionate peasants, who wish to rear the boy as their own. And into the tale of this rescue Segantini inserts a second rescue: as a three-year-old he was drawn out of the water! With his foster parents he must do the lowly work of the swineherd, like so many heroes of legend. He, whose face recalls a royal prince!

In this childhood history it is not possible to draw a sharp line between poetry and truth.TJ4TJ · 4Dichtung und Wahrheit: the title of Goethe's autobiography, and the most famous phrase in German about the fidelity, or otherwise, of memoir. For Abraham's psychoanalytic purposes the poetry is as valuable as the truth, and a number of Segantini's autobiographical and Servaes's biographical errors are preserved in the text that follows. But whoever knows to what degree childhood experience lies under the reshaping power of fantasy will not miss the traces of its work. I point to one passage only. Segantini remembers having heard, at six, the remark that he resembled a son of the King of France. It is hardly likely, in itself, that he kept the wording of a chance utterance in his memory. But its content is identical with the boy's typical fantasies of descent. The father, model of all might and greatness, is readily raised by the child's fantasy to king or emperor; the same recurs in the dreams of adults, where the father not seldom appears as a king. And the boy's hostile stirrings show themselves thus: in fantasy he dethrones the father, raises himself to the son of an imaginary king, and allots his actual father the mere role of foster-parent. To be a prince is among the most common of childhood's fantasies of greatness. It is very probable that little Segantini wove these fantasies together with the talk of the King of France into a single image, which then, by the strength of its wish-character, won in his memory the standing of a real event.

The whole gripping story of Segantini's childhood is an individual myth. People of strong ambition tend to wrap their childhood in such myth-making. That his, in our case, coincides so fully with the legends of the hero's birth shows us from what depth of the human soul Segantini drew.KA13KA · 13We need not suppose that Segantini was influenced in this imaginative production by any knowledge of the hero-legends; his education would hardly have sufficed for that.

As we have said, Segantini soon had to leave his refuge and return to his sister. Of the years that follow only sparse report survives. We know that he was shunted about among his step-siblings: lodged for a while with a step-brother who kept a sausage business in the Val Sugana, then back with the sister, who had meanwhile married a tavern-keeper. In such surroundings the boy had to live; in imagination he dwelt in far countries, and more than once he truly ran away, in the firm confidence that fortune would meet him on the road, as in a fairy tale. When at last no one would trust himself to manage such a runaway and good-for-nothing, they washed their hands of him and put him in a reformatory in Milan. There he was set to patching shoes.

Even the discipline of that institution could not break the will of a boy of twelve. As against every other authority, so against the spiritual: when he was to make his first communion, he stubbornly refused. He served the detention imposed for it, and then ran away. Caught and delivered back, he stayed in the institution until fifteen; and it was his keepers who had to bend, fitting their methods to his nature, whereafter they got on better with him. In the end he carried his long-cherished wish: to be apprenticed to a master of the painter's trade.

The fifteen-year-old apprentice now faced a new master, described as a worthy man but all too vain of his small art. He succeeded no better than his predecessors in forcing his opinions on the self-assured pupil, and Segantini did not stay long. With a stroke of resolve he parted from his master, entered the art school of the Brera, and set about earning his keep with toil and want. By every kind of expedient he scraped a meagre living, which often would not still his hunger.

Yet his superior gifts and force of personality quickly won him standing among his fellows. To those students who rebelled against tradition and the school, he soon became the leader; and as such he drew the teachers' displeasure. After a first success of the young revolutionary at the Milan exhibition, his next submitted picture was assigned a thoroughly unfavourable place. Then Segantini's whole impulsiveness broke through. There followed the scene Servaes reports (p. 34): "He went in, tore his work down, and cut it to pieces. Nor was that enough: meeting in the street the professor whom he scented as author of the wrong done him, he confronted him violently, and found his temper so hard to master that he seized a lamppost and shook it with such fury, and so long, that the panes above shattered."

Now there was no staying here either; and the twenty-year-old, who suffered no power over him, took the bold step into independence. Fighting always against the extremest want, he went his way with unbending energy. He himself summed up the fate of his youth in words that need no gloss:KA14KA · 14Page 72 of Bianca Segantini's collection. "With my body, into which fate laid my soul, I had much to fight. It was abandoned, and orphaned at six; so alone, without love, far from everyone, like a wild dog. In such conditions I could only run wild; and toward the existing laws I was filled, always, with unrest and revolt."

Perhaps the strongest expression of his loathing of all subjection the young Segantini gave soon after, by an act that Servaes considerately passes over in silence. Segantini, an Austrian subject, evaded military service. That the possible consequences could not hold him back shows how wholly the urge to independence ruled him. His punishment was that for long years he might not set foot on the soil of his homeland; and he suffered heavily under it. When he died, he stood close to the fulfilment of his heart's wish: to see the beloved homeland again.

The act seems irreconcilable with the character of a man of such strong moral feeling as Segantini. From the analysis of his unconscious it grows clear. In the soil of his homeland he loved his mother; in the power of the state he hated his father.

Part III

Mother, homeland and nature form, in Segantini's world of thought and no less in his life of feeling, one indissoluble unity. By their inner kinship they fuse, as our term has it, into a single "feeling-charged complex".

The unusual power of this complex is explained by his childhood. When he lost his mother, he had to leave homeland and nature too. At a single blow he was robbed of all his highest goods; and in memory, therefore, they remained bound together, inseparable.

The father took him from the world he loved; the great city, where he remained alone, could give the boy's heart nothing. So he shut himself against the father and against the city both. Because they had left him without love, he turned his feelings from them forever; and by that very contrast, the flood of his love for mother, homeland and nature could only rise.

Through the most wretched years of his youth, Segantini used every free moment to escape the city into nature, which, his friends testify, he loved with a rapt devotion. And when he had found in his Bice a substitute for the mother, Milan could hold him no longer. It drew him back to nature; for the homeland lost so early, too, a substitute had to be found. So he went with his young wife to Pusiano in the Brianza, the country between the two southern arms of Lake Como; and there he became the painter of his simple rural world.

Segantini was then still far from the summit of his art. It moved, as Servaes justly remarks, within narrow bounds. He painted scenes of village life not free of a genre gloss; some betrayed that he had not yet wholly freed himself from the school. He came nearest his later work when he painted the fellowship of man and beast. There is little movement in these scenes: dreaming herdsmen, a shepherd girl quietly at her Ave Maria, a mother bending in grief over an empty cradle. And all of it held in dark tones. In those years Segantini painted the dull light of interiors, moonlit twilight, the black of storm skies, and, with a peculiar fondness, the failing light of sunset.

A particular tone of feeling belongs to many works of this time: man caring for the animals with goodness and fellow-feeling. Full of motherly tenderness, the shepherd girl of the little picture Uno di più holds the new-born lamb in her arms; the shearer of The Sheep-shearing bends mild and loving over the animal whose wool he takes.

To this time belongs, in its first version, a picture whose subject the artist would later take up again and carry to its full form: Ave Maria a trasbordo. A tired stillness lies over it. The man in the boat lets the oars rest; the woman, child in arm, seems sunk in slumber; the flock that fills the boat presses toward the near side, yet the animals' backs make a surface barely stirred. Over the whole lies the light of sunset, the peace of evening.

The picture gathers into itself every trait of the Brianza years; it is perhaps the best work of that period: a whole Segantini. And at this time a change was going forward in him. He ceased to hold technique cheap, ceased to count feeling the one essential of a work of art.

Of this time Servaes speaks as of an unforced outpouring of the artist's self.KA15KA · 15The characterisation of this creative period given here leans closely on Servaes's account. His productivity was great; he yielded freely to the need to give his stirrings of feeling, his sentimenti, artistic expression. In the autobiographical notes Segantini says: "Nature had become for me, as it were, an instrument, giving forth tones that accompanied everything my heart was telling. And my heart sang the quiet harmonies of sunsets, and the innermost essence of nature. So my spirit was fed by a great melancholy, which echoed in the soul with unending sweetness."TJ5TJ · 5The German dieses sang makes it unclear as to whether "the instrument sang" or "the heart sang". Hilda Abraham has the instrument sing, here we side with the heart as suggested by nature's stated accompanying role.

Two things in the life of Segantini's soul at this time must be lifted out: the leaning toward melancholy, and the participating love, the pitying goodness toward every creature. The task falls to us the more urgently because in both respects Segantini was later to undergo a remarkable change.

We recall that in the years of his growth the artist's sexual drive had to suffer a far-reaching restriction. Now where the masculine-active component of the drives is repressed to a high degree, a strengthening of its opposite is wont to follow. A strain of passivity is carried into the whole life of the soul, recalling in more than one respect the psycho-sexual bearing of woman; surrender to suffering is preferred to vigorous aggression. So arise those melancholy dejections, so frequent in neurotics, which regularly, if not always knowingly, harbour a pleasure within the torment. And of this "sweet melancholy" Segantini speaks not as of an evil, but as of a rich spring of artistic inspiration.

In the pictures of these years, passivity and melancholy find their symbolic expression in the grave stillness, the muffled light. The sunset, painted then so often, points us toward thoughts of death, such as belong to every melancholy dejection, and at once toward the centre of all his fantasies: the mother. "She was beautiful as a sunset in spring", he later wrote of her. Death-fantasies that had once been aimed at the mother, and had later turned back upon the son himself, found in the works of this time their sublimation.

The participating love of nature, the "suffering-with" of every creature, we have already traced to the repression of the aggressive stirrings. So at this time the goal of the sublimated drives was suffering itself: his own, and that shared with others.TJ6TJ · 6Mit-leiden: Abraham hyphenates to expose the etymology, which we preserve here as "suffering-with". While neither Abraham nor Segantini cites Schopenhauer directly, the extension of compassion to all creatures, and the pseudo-Buddhist framing of the Nirvana pictures below, reflect the broadly Schopenhauerian current in which Segantini's Milanese circle moved.

Then came the great change in the life of his soul. The tired melancholy ceased to be the ruling mood; it gave place to an enthusiastic joy of creation. Later, it is true, and above all in the last years, the dark mood would often take the upper hand again.

We know this course well from the neurotics. In them too, puberty is wont to bring a thrust of repression beyond the normal measure, whereby their sexuality approaches, to a remarkable degree, the feminine type. They too incline, from the first sexual ripening often into the third decade and past it, toward a murky, world-weary mood, a passive surrender to their own suffering. Only by degrees do they master this stage and swing themselves up into a decided affirmation of life, and into normal, not seldom immoderate, work.

Segantini now succeeded, in the happiest way, in converting his aggressive stirrings into a mighty urge to work, instead of paralysing them, as before, by turning them into their opposite. And as the masculine activity became the ruling principle in him, his conception of nature changed, and with it the character of his art.

From the Brianza Segantini moved first, for a short time, up to Caglio, high above Lake Como. There he made his first painting on the grand scale, Alla stanga (At the Rail): a wide landscape in late-afternoon light, and set through it, now near the eye, now far, rows of cattle at the rail, and among them people about their country work. This was no longer a genre slice of herdsmen's life; it was a bold attempt to embrace, through art, the whole of nature.

Soon after, Segantini set out with his wife to find a place of lasting settlement in the high mountains. After long roaming he chose the village of Savognin in the Grisons Alps (1886). This virgin piece of earth seemed to answer his feeling for nature most perfectly; the quiet mountain village, scarcely known by name in the great world outside, became his new homeland, and there, with wife and children, he lived the life of the mountain people.

The climb from the Brianza foothills to the high valley of Savognin is a milestone in his development. What drew him upward was, first, the mountains themselves, standing as near before him in this new homeland as in the old one of his childhood. He wished, further, as one of his letters has it, to come to a knowledge of nature without remainder. On the artist's eye the transparency of the air up there, the purity of the sunlight, the luminous force of the colours, worked a mighty attraction. But above all, to this lonely creator, the ascent meant, in symbol, the striving upward, toward perfection; the longing, in restless creation, to grow forever beyond himself; the desire to conquer, as artist, the whole of nature, and to rule over her like a king. "In that land", says the autobiography, "I turned my eye more boldly up to the sun, whose rays I loved, and which I meant to conquer for myself."

The work of the years that followed was anything but an "unforced outpouring of self". It was a straining of every force, in which the sublimated pleasure of aggression found its fill. By his own confession Segantini was seized by an excitation that let him feel neither labour nor hardship. Everything in him pressed toward the work, which he called "the becoming-flesh of spirit in matter": an act of creation!

What a change of conception! The same man who for years had said no to life out of tired melancholy now saw himself, in bold flight of thought, as creator, as ruler of nature. He found the way back to himself by taking up again the greatness-fantasies of his childhood.

And the mild, suffering-with love of nature passed over into hot desire, into a violent will to possess. Segantini paints it in burning words, given here in excerpt:

"I am a passionate lover of nature. On a fine sunny spring day, among these mountains that have become my homeland ... I feel an unending jubilation; the blood pounds in my veins as in first young love, before the worshipped girl."

"I intoxicate myself on this love that never satiates; I bend down to the earth and kiss the blades of grass, the flowers ..."

"I thirst, O Earth, and bent to your purest and eternal springs I drink, I drink of your blood, O Earth, blood that is blood of my blood."

Into the language of science we shall translate these thoughts as follows: the sight of nature throws the artist's senses into an intoxication which he himself sets side by side with sexual excitation. The sublimated drives demand satisfaction, and stormily; and their longing will settle on no lesser object than the whole of nature. In this ardent love of mother nature, the love of that mother celebrates its resurrection who was "blood of his blood".

The first year at Savognin brought forth works that stand among Segantini's best.KA16KA · 16In what follows, the account again leans closely on Servaes. Some take up motifs of the Brianza period again, and it is just these that show most plainly how far his powers had grown. First among them is the Ave Maria a trasbordo. With a master's hand he gave the picture a slightly altered division of space and a new light; above all, he made here his first trial of a new technique, the dividing of colour, to which we shall return. To the same time belongs the delightful picture of the Knitting Girl at the Fence. When he first painted this motif in the Brianza, there was for him only murky, twilit light. Now everything is flooded with blinding sun.

A note on this version

Shown here is the luminous 1886 version, remade at Savognin with the altered division of space and Segantini's first trial of the divisionist technique. The darker Brianza first version of 1882 is lost, so the passage's before-and-after now survives only in the leap of light from the one to the other.

In this period of upheavals there was one resting pole in Segantini's art: the mother-complex. Whatever thought or feeling belonged to its realm seemed exempt from every change. Nothing shows it better than this trait, characteristic of the man. The young peasant girl he had painted as the Knitting Girl he did not let go again. "Baba", as she was called, had to move into his household; through all the years that followed she remained his only model, and, besides, the faithful house-companion of him and his family.TJ7TJ · 7"Had to move into his household" can strike a modern ear as more suggestive than the documented arrangement was. Baba was Barbara Uffer (1873–1935), a Savognin carpenter's daughter. Segantini met the thirteen-year-old kitchen main in August 1886, at the inn where he first lodged. She was engaged as nanny and household help, raised the four children, followed the family to Maloja in 1894, stayed with Bice and the children after the painter's death, and married only in 1905, after nineteen years in the family's service. She was not an adult model installed as a quasi-mistress but an adolescent servant who became family; the reader will meet her twice more on these pages, making the last climb to the Schafberg beside the youngest son, and named by the painter's own wife, telling the waking-dream story, as "our Baba". The chronology, far from troubling Abraham's argument, is its quiet confirmation: his claim is precisely that the pictures of motherliness required a figure the painter's eros left alone. In her he had found the type he needed for the pictures of motherliness and of work. Here no change was wanted; and so he held fast to the one model.

The idea of motherliness itself he embodied, in the time that followed, in a great masterwork of overwhelming power: The Two Mothers. A servant girl sits on a stool in the stable; her arms are round her sleeping child, and her own head has sunk in slumber. Close beside her stands the massive body of a cow, a young calf lying at her feet. A hanging lantern throws its muffled, reddish light on the woman and the child and on the hind quarters of the cow; all else lies in a dim half-glow. A solemn stillness lies over the group; and one can only agree with Servaes's fine observation that it is precisely by this stillness, common to every figure in the picture, that the artist drives home the sameness in essence of the two mothers. The effect is strengthened by a second means, just as simple: the leading of the lines. Servaes writes: "The cow stands with level back, her head sunk quietly in the trough. And where the cow's back ends, the head of the young human mother appears; her back takes up the strict horizontal and lets it glide gently down. Not far above, the picture is cut, so that one sees plainly (and yet only darkly feels) how the frame's edge runs parallel with the cow's back. The discreet solemnity of this ordering converts itself, in the beholder, unconsciously into a value of feeling. With so quiet a hand does the artist steer our souls."

Around 1890 Segantini's unceasing labour brought the dividing of colour to the completion he had longed for. The glorious painting The Ploughers (in an earlier version called The Sod) was its first ripe fruit. Now he had done what none before him could and none after him has matched: he had set down the transparent clearness of the air at those heights, the very vibration of the colours. Man, with his faithful companions the beasts of the household, stands wonderfully solid in the foreground; every detail of the landscape is carried through with a love that was his alone; the long chain of the Alps behind gleams in endlessly changing rock and snow; and over it all lies the trembling blue of a luminous, clear sky.

To this perfection of the divisionist technique Segantini came entirely on his own. The same problem was occupying painters everywhere at the time, and they sought its solution along many paths. Independent of them all, Segantini went his own way with quiet sureness, until he had reached his goal.

It was not his towering gift alone that showed him the way. The search for light and colour lay deep in his drive-life. His eye thirsted for light and colour; and so, obeying an inner urge, he was bound to bend his highest striving toward their perfect rendering.

Already in one of his earliest student works he had set himself a problem of light and solved it on his own. Afterwards, in the years of melancholy, he went over wholly to painting darkness. And when the heights drew him and he willed to master nature, his victor's mood found its voice in the longing for that radiant sunlight which unfolds its full splendour only up there.

What feelings the sight of all this glory stirred in him, his own words have already told us. He looked on nature with the eyes of a man in love; she threw him into an intoxication of bliss. It needs no further proof, then, that we have here a far-reaching sublimation of that component of the sexual drive which we call the pleasure of looking.TJ8TJ · 8German Schaulust, literally "looking-pleasure"; the drive, Schautrieb, is the "looking-drive". The Standard Edition's term is "scopophilia". This drive serves the kindling of the libido through the contemplation of the sexual object's bodily properties, which we commonly call its "charms". Its sublimation contributes largely to the building of that sexual inhibition we know as shame; and it is, beyond this, capable in high degree of artistic and aesthetic sublimation.

Yet Segantini's looking-drive, for all its eminent strength, was turned away from the frankly sexual to a striking degree. Only by rare exception does a nude appear in his work. So in the later painting The Source of Evil, where a naked female figure, mirrored in the water, presents Vanity in allegory: here the nude itself serves an ethical purpose! The Dea pagana, the heathen goddess of sensuality, he wraps in a transparent veil. And, tellingly, neither work stands among the master's strongest. A wholly different power lives in the Dea christiana, the kindly mother with her child: into that picture, one feels, he could breathe the whole force of his feeling. Of the coarsely sensual there is in Segantini's work nothing at all; where he paints an erotic scene, he paints it tender, inward, chaste.

It was to nature that his sublimated pleasure of looking turned; light and colour were his spring of ecstatic happiness. He tells from his childhood how the sight of a house-painter at work with brushes and colours filled him with burning curiosity. Spellbound, the boy watched the craftsman's artless daubing, and in the patches of colour discovered fantastic figures, beasts and men, apparition dissolving into apparition. The later scenes of his childhood show with what greed he drank in optical impressions and held them fast. And the visual vividness of his telling is remarkable: every scene of the autobiography works like a painting. Segantini was no mere loving observer of nature; what his eye drank in of form and colour, his imagination shaped into a single whole.

He himself never lost the feeling that in this watching, shaping labour he was living out his eros. Explaining once why he never made a sketch before a painting, he wrote: "An artist who first dashes off a sketch is like a young man who, thrown into delight at the sight of a beautiful woman, must possess her on the spot; who would revel at once in embraces, cover mouth and eyes with kisses, and tremble in the bliss of the embrace. Well: then he has his sketch... I would rather let love ripen; I caress my ideas in thought and cherish them in my heart; and though half-mad with desire to see them take shape, I chasten myself, and am content to make them a good home; meanwhile I go on beholding them with the spirit's eye, in this light, in that posture, in some new connection of feeling."TJ9TJ · 9Mit den Augen des Geistes, with the spirit's eye: word for word the phrase Segantini used of his dead mother at the opening of the autobiography.TJ10TJ · 10Segantini's claim should not be taken literally as a description of his practice in every case. Preparatory studies survive for several works, among them a drawing associated with Alla stanga (reproduced here for want of a public domain version of the completed work). Importantly, the word here is Skizze, the rapid summary sketch, contrasting with the slower studies his surviving drawings typically represent. Indeed, many of his finished sheets repeat compositions after the paintings rather than before them. That noted, the passage likely idealises his own working method, evidence that the man who mythologised his childhood could mythologise his adult output. As before, whether poetry or truth, what Segantini chose to claim about his method is relevant to Abraham's analysis.

Yet it is telling that the painter who scorned the preparatory sketch would, once a canvas was finished, take up its theme again many times over, to give it this or that variant, to win new sides from it. The complex in whose paths the work moved ruled him so completely that the feeling remained with him that he had not yet expressed every finest stirring of his soul.

Part IV

With the whole force of his drives Segantini had wrested the mastery of light and colour. And now dark moods began to mix into the joy of victory, of the same or a kindred character to those that had so often overcome him in the Brianza. The inner grounds of this fresh reversal cannot be made out with certainty; still, general experience permits some conjecture.

This swaying between extremes grows intelligible from the drive-life of the neurotic. Drives at war with one another come to no lasting settlement. Let one gain the mastery in consciousness, and the counter-drive, pressed down into the unconscious, gives no rest: under the mask of neurotic substitute-formations it makes its way back in. Where, say, the masculine activity holds the upper hand and is about to assert itself with all the impulsiveness proper to neurotic drives, just then the suppressed component finds its opening. Into the mood of triumph, melancholy steals.

In Segantini a further factor joins in. Straining every energy, he had carried his technique through to completion; he had wrested from nature the secrets of colour and light. And with the longed-for goal attained, the tension suddenly slackens. The drives whose sublimation had made such feats possible stand suddenly robbed of a goal. They demand a new one, new expansion, for success has only made them more exacting; and if the demand cannot be met at once, dejection sets in. The man feels poorer than before, poorer in hopes, and the joy of victory gives way to melancholy dejection.

Gloomy Hour is the name of the first painting made in this state of soul, and it stands in hard contrast to what went before. For the first time we meet the evening twilight again! "Before a small smoking kettle, under which a red fire glimmers, a young peasant woman sits of an evening on a stony field, shivering, sunk in gloomy thought. Opposite her stands a dappled cow, stretching its neck and lowing." (Servaes.)

The picture's mood is comfortless loneliness. Yet with wonderful mastery the artist binds woman, beast and landscape into one close relation by the leading of his lines; and so a comfort sounds from the picture after all: man is not forsaken if he feels himself one with nature. That was the creed of an artist who knew no personal, fatherly, caring God.

Not long after this picture was finished, solitude drew him. And now it showed how deeply every work of this artist rose from the life of his feeling. The solitude that answered his mood he found high above Savognin, in the hamlet of Tusagn, where he housed in a hut through the summer of 1895. Rich alpine growth surrounded him there; he could have feasted on light and colour; instead he climbed on, hours further, to a high pasture where lush grass and flowering were no more. This desolation he painted, with a small flock of grazing sheep. "A sad herdsman sits by them, almost a boy still, yet strengthless and weary as an old man. The face the sun has burnt red has fallen forward in half-sleep; the hands lie slack and idle on his thighs. Ever greyer and blacker the ground climbs away upward." (Servaes.) The picture is called Alpine Pasture. Every trait recalls the melancholy of the Brianza years. And in the woeful forsakenness of the Alpine Pasture Segantini finds one single comfort. There, where nature grants her creatures scarcely a few dry blades of grass, motherliness reveals itself to him in all its greatness: into the foreground he sets a ewe suckling two lambs. A mother's love, the symbol tells us, is for beast and man alike the last sure refuge in abandonment.

In the years 1890 to 1893 arose the series of works that has been given the name of the Nirvana pictures. As so often, Segantini worked the one idea through variation after variation. The first version (titled The Hell of the Lustful, now in the museum at Liverpool) and the last (The Bad Mothers, in the modern gallery in Vienna) stand, as painting, among his most significant creations. But in their content, the Hell of the Lustful above all met resistance: no one understood it, and every attempt at a full and satisfying interpretation failed.TJ11TJ · 11The Liverpool picture hangs in the Walker Art Gallery as The Punishment of Lust, previously mistranslated as The Punishment of Luxury; the Vienna canvas, Le cattive madri, is in the Belvedere.

This happened at a time when Segantini's art had long since won its due standing. A picture that had to be interpreted? From him, no one had met such a thing. His earlier works, think of the pictures of mother-love, spoke plainly and clearly to every human heart. To this day the riddle of these paintings has not been fully solved. Will psychoanalysis succeed in unveiling the secret?

We know that Segantini drew the idea of the Hell of the Lustful from Buddhist mythology.TJ12TJ · 12Not even pseudo-Buddhist, as it turns out. The chain runs: the Visio Alberici, a twelfth-century Latin vision from Montecassino in which mothers who denied life to their children expiate it in a frozen purgatory; then Luigi Illica's thirty-one-line Nirvana of 1886, which reworked it and, appealing to the prevailing European taste for pseudo-orientalia of the time, passed itself off as a translation from the Pandjavalli of an Indian monk named Maironpâda, poem and monk alike pure inventions; then Segantini's six canvases, their painter knowing perfectly well that the "ancient" verses were his friend's, as he told Alberto Grubicy in May 1895; then Servaes, who reported the source as Buddhist mythology; then Abraham, who analyses it here as the myth of a people. We are back in the territory of Leonardo's kite and Freud's vulture. Yet Abraham's argument is not simply void: his parallel between dream and myth required genuinely traditional material, collectively transmitted, and in the Visio that is what, unknowingly, he had. There he found the teaching that women who have given their lives to sensuality, instead of living for their calling as mothers, are condemned after death to drift without rest over desolate fields of snow. So he painted a wide snowfield on which the eye can scarcely find a place to rest, a dark chain of mountains nearer, a blinding white one far behind; and over the comfortless plain, ghostly, corpselike bodies of women drift motionless along.

The later version, The Bad Mothers, holds in its foreground a single drifting figure whose hair has caught in a low bush. "The whole bend of her body is like a weeping lamentation; the outstretched arms are like helpless despair; the streaming hair, snared in the tree, is like the agony of a suicide; and the death-pale face, the twisted mouth, the sunken eyes, are like the torture of remorse. But most shattering is the seeking, thirsting little head of the abandoned child, bent over the naked, cold mother-breast that lovelessness has withered." (Servaes.) The child is the addition. In place of many women, one alone drifts in the foreground; far off, a train of other penitents glides away over the snow.

The loveless mother and abandoned child stand, as Servaes remarks, in sharp contrast to the ewe and lambs of the Alpine Pasture; and both pictures were made at Tusagn. Segantini's aim, he later wrote himself, was to punish the bad mothers with his hell, because their lives offended against the highest principle of nature. That this intention stood before him as he worked, we need not doubt. But it can be shown that the innermost and truest motives that made him create the work escaped the artist's own consciousness.

In every product of human fantasy, healthy or sick, a latent content can be distinguished, as Freud has shown, beside the obvious or "manifest" one. Consciousness knows only the manifest; the latent escapes it. And yet the latent is the true and weightiest content of any work of fantasy; without it the manifest is mostly not intelligible at all. To these hidden springs psychoanalysis opens the way: it uncovers the repressed stirrings of the drives, which are admitted to consciousness only when far-reaching distortion has made them unrecognisable.

Segantini's mystical-fantastic works have never been fully understood, because only their manifest content has been looked at. To psychoanalysis falls the task of searching out the repressed wishes that found expression in these obscure symbols. And deeply repressed they must be, wishes peculiarly offensive to consciousness; otherwise Segantini would have set them down clear and plain, as was always his way. Had punishment of bad mothers been the whole purpose, he could have achieved it without riddles, and better. For unintelligible as they stand, the pictures miss that purpose entirely: they cannot speak home to the hearts of those women.

Segantini, as we learned, had suppressed the cruelty-component of his drive-life with great intensity; and it was the aggressive, cruel stirrings against his mother, above all, that had had to be turned into their opposites. In every work he had appeared as the mild one, the kindly, the suffering-with. And now he shows cruel punishments from the world beyond! And the punished are mothers! It is the old hostile stirrings, the child's death-wishes against his own mother, that we see here returning from repression.

The Hell of the Lustful, it is true, shows several figures drifting past, and the viewer does not feel the painter singling out any one of them. Not so the later version! There he bends our gaze wholly on the one penitent in her comfortless solitude, and on the abandoned child. And had not Segantini himself been abandoned, like this child? The loneliness after his mother's death had roused the first torments of dread in him. Behind the wish to punish bad mothers in general there now stands forth the unconscious wish to punish his own mother: to take revenge upon her.

All the dread and melancholy he had himself endured in his abandonment, Segantini projected out of himself onto the penitent mother. The Buddhist legend that hung the torments of loneliness upon the bad mothers had touched kindred thoughts in his soul. For no other punishment could make those mothers feel, so exactly, what an abandoned child must endure.

The boy who clings to his mother with all the passion of childish eros, and watches her every step with jealousy, feels abandoned if she turns from him even for an hour. Dread comes over him, jealousy of his rivals, hostile thoughts against her. Let her give him ever so much love: to him she remains a bad mother, because she never gives enough.TJ13TJ · 13Melanie Klein, Abraham's analysand, who credited him with teaching her the importance of aggression, would later hold the infant's own aggressive insatiability accountable beyond any maternal defect or deficit. The unconscious of the grown neurotic, psychoanalysis teaches, still demands its revenge on the mother, because once she gave the father more love than the son; in certain symptoms of the neurosis that retribution is carried out. And such retribution upon his own mother is the office of Segantini's Hell of the Lustful.

That the loveless mothers are banished, for their coldness of heart, to desolate fields of snow is easy to understand. What remains to be explained is why, in the Buddhist conception, the bad mothers hover over the snowfields. The obvious answer says: the drifting women are condemned to the torment of unending restlessness, and just this endlessly uniform motion over the empty plain deepens the impression of an eternal punishment. But the myth could have said as much with other symbols, an endless trudging through desert sand, for instance. The exact analysis of a myth, as of every formation of fantasy, teaches us the strict causal determination of every symbol.KA17KA · 17Cf. my work cited above, Dream and Myth. For Segantini, too, there must have been a particular ground for adopting just this image from the myth; his creative fantasy needed no such loan otherwise. We must therefore seek a deeper connection between the mothers' guilt and the manner of their punishment.

A work of our artist's from the very period of the Nirvana pictures gives us the key. It is the Dea pagana, already mentioned. Segantini painted the goddess of sensual love floating. Her head laid easefully in the crook of her own arm, she seems to savour the sweet pleasure of a gentle drifting; while the madonna-like Dea christiana has settled quietly to earth, sunk in blessed contemplation of her child.

We stand before the at first bewildering fact that the same motion symbolises, in one picture, the highest bliss, and in the other, the worst torment. To the psychoanalyst the paradox is familiar and explicable: he knows that in dreams, too, floating is felt now as a state of utmost pleasure, now as one of dread.

Many people clearly remember that the most primitive sensual feelings of their childhood came when they swept through the air: in swinging, in the leap from a height, in the many other motions a child performs at play. These are expressions of childhood "autoerotism": pleasure produced by stimulation of one's own body, needing no second person, as adult sexuality does. Some children are insatiable in such play. And to the pleasure a feeling of anxious tension easily joins itself; Freud's researches have taught us that this dread stems from the repression of the drive.

To the repressed stirrings the dream offers asylum. Long after autoerotism has been curtailed, dreams appear in most adults, perhaps in all, in which the dreamer flies through the air, falls into a depth, or passes through some kindred motion. The feeling-tone of these dreams swings, according to the degree of repression, between bliss and dread, or mingles the two. Here we watch, directly, the highest pleasure pass over into the highest torment.KA18KA · 18The reappearance of autoerotic wishes in dreams has, however, a further significance. Not seldom they stand as deputies, symbolic substitutes, for erotic wishes that find no fulfilment in the adult's present life. The dream, a wish-formation like all human fantasies, presents the fulfilment of such wishes; only the present erotic longing, which must not be named, is replaced by the childhood, autoerotic one. The unconscious preserves the memory of that original activity as the prototype of the gaining of pleasure.

The symbolism of the dream is the symbolism of the unconscious itself, and so is common to every formation of fantasy: to the work of an artist as to the myth of a people. Segantini's symbolism of floating now lies open. The Dea pagana gives herself, unashamed, to the sweet pleasure of drifting. The bad mothers have lived after the pattern of this "heathen" goddess, instead of striving toward the ideal of motherliness, the Dea christiana. And we know that Segantini aims this reproach, unknowing, at his own mother. He calls to her, as it were: "You clung to my father in sensual love; to me you gave nothing!" His repressed thirst for revenge is slaked in the cruel fantasy on which the picture rests. The highest sensual bliss, embodied in floating, turns, for the mothers, for his mother, into the most frightful dread, whose torments they must suffer after death in the hell of the lustful. To be given over to this motion, without end: that is their torture. Do not the few seconds of a dream in which we believe ourselves falling seem to us an eternity?

Through the period of these symbolic-mystical pictures, a strong turning-inward showed itself in Segantini. His flight into solitude was its outward document; his art took on a visionary, fantastic strain. But the more a man turns from reality, the more he sets the fantasied fulfilment of his repressed wishes in actuality's place, the less can others understand him: his utterances can no longer set kindred feelings vibrating in us. So it went, then, with Segantini.

He chooses to speak in symbols who may not utter his thoughts freely, and yet cannot keep them wholly silent. Symbolism hints and veils in one breath; now the one tendency prevails, now the other. The dark speech of the Nirvana pictures tells us that Segantini's deepest complexes demanded some expression; that the artist yielded to the demand; but that in the end the power of repression was strong enough still to veil the innermost meaning of the work.

Segantini sent the first of these pictures, the Hell of the Lustful, out into the world without caring whether it would be understood at all: which itself shows how far he then stood from reality, tuned only to his complexes. Stranger still, in painting the drifting women he offended against reality itself, against the laws of nature. He painted the lustful, as Servaes puts it, "as if lying in the air, almost as on a cushioned bed one cannot see; and he painted them too heavy, too bodily, for ghosts". And more: he who had always valued the counsel and criticism of his friend Vittore Grubicy flew into the most violent heat at Grubicy's opinion of this work, and never afterwards quite forgave it.

Narrowing upon a single complex, estrangement from reality, always brings heightened irritability in its train: we see it daily in the healthy, most crassly in the neurotic. In Segantini it found expression, at just this time, in one memorable incident. In 1891 he exhibited the Hell of the Lustful in Berlin. The picture was without question of outstanding quality, whatever objections might justly be raised against its conception. The jury did not judge it worthy of the highest award, but granted Segantini an "honourable mention", which to him could only be an affront. At another time the master might have passed over the verdict with a smile or a shrug. But this work held a place apart: whoever attacked it touched his tenderest complex. And so, for once, the whole impulsiveness of his drives broke through unchecked, in the answer he gave his judges. He reports it himself, in a letter to Vittore Grubicy so characteristic that it must stand here whole:KA19KA · 19Cf. p. 85 of Bianca Segantini's collection.

Savognin, 5 August 1891.Dear Vittore,I have your card, and thank you many times over. I did not hesitate one moment to refuse the "laudatory mention". The very instant the news reached me, it was the 29th, I sent this telegram to Berlin:"Berlin. To the Board and Jury of the International Exhibition.In no exhibition in the world, wherever I have shown from my first day to this, has there ever been a commission that thought it necessary to insult me, excepting this Berlin jury. I ask of you one single favour: strike my name publicly from the list of your prize-winners.Giovanni Segantini."Nota bene: I sent the telegram reply prepaid; but these ... did not think it necessary even to answer me. It is enough to drive a man mad.Farewell, your G. S.

Part V

As we said, Segantini finished the last version of the Nirvana motif in 1893. Soon after, a process set in of the same tendency as the reversal that closed the Brianza period. A letter to Vittore Grubicy of 21 December 1893 shows the passage out of dejection into joy of life and work. Referring to an earlier letter, the artist writes: "That letter you call melancholy was dictated by one of those moral moments which are like a shin struck on a sharp edge, and make us cry out! And as it is my habit to write only what I feel, I wrote with the loud outcry of my soul." Then, after a word on his plans, he continues: "Yes, true life is one single dream: the dream of drawing gradually nearer to an ideal that is as far off as may be, but high; high, up to the very extinguishing of matter."

The most striking trait of the artist's constitution was, beyond doubt, his quite extraordinary capacity for sublimation. So he took another run at it, to master the repressed drives once more, as he had done, and successfully, seven years before. But for him too there was a limit in this direction that could not be crossed unpunished. From now on he could not banish those drives for long. From about 1891, the year of the Hell of the Lustful, they pressed forward again and again; and the years remaining to his early death were filled with an inner wrestling whose mark was the constant changing of his moods. He who now stood in the flower of his years, at the summit of his powers, was given over to swings of mood whose meaning was the denial of life. He mastered them, time after time; but each victory cost enormous sacrifice of psychic energy, and often enough only violent means could hold the advancing melancholy down.

From this time on Segantini took refuge, more than ever, in the realm of fantasy; he had confessed himself that life in the dream-world seemed to him the life most worth desiring. And beside the Bad Mothers, the years 1891 to 1894 brought forth various other works of fantasy that lay outside painting altogether.

First among these is the draft of a music-drama, which Segantini describes to his friend Vittore in a letter. And it is of particular interest that in this draft there stands a passage betraying the same stirrings of cruelty that I have traced in the Nirvana pictures. It is the description of a fire, and the artist has charged it with affects so violent that we suspect at once a voice speaking from his deepest unconscious. The passage runs: "A woman comes rushing in flight from the fire, half-naked, her hair wild about her shoulders, two children at her neck, one of them burnt through. When she sees the burnt child she begins to scream frightfully, falls on her knees before a wayside chapel, and there laments and prays, lifting both her children up toward the holy image. Then she lays them down again. The burnt child was dead! She stares at it dully, utters two cries of pain, rises, stretches her fist in threat against heaven, and falls backward to the ground."

There is no doubt that Segantini is working through, here, a memory of earliest childhood charged with the strongest affect. A son of his parents, born before him, had died in a fire. Whether Giovanni witnessed it I do not know; but certainly he saw his mother's grief over the dead child. And we shall not go wrong in supposing that at that early age the impression roused cruel feelings in the boy, and satisfied the sadistic component of his drives. Recall that Segantini's first attempt at drawing was joined to the death of a child and the grief of a mother. Only now does it become fully comprehensible why that scene worked so mightily upon him: it set the repressed memory of a childhood satisfaction sounding again. And now the ripened man's production stood under the rule of those same repressed childhood wishes; under their influence he made the Bad Mothers, and the draft of a music-drama.

Other products of his fantasy from these years serve to over-compensate the toilsomely repressed cruelty. There is the Dream of a Worker, a utopian fantasy.TJ14TJ · 14Dream of a Worker (Il sogno di un operaio) was not a completed painting but an unpublished literary or dramatic fantasy by Segantini, surviving among his papers. Abraham cites it as evidence of the artist's imaginative life outside painting. To the dreamer appear, first, visions figuring the class struggle of the day. Then he plunges from his watching-place, but never strikes the earth: he stays hovering in the air, floats onward, and comes to a land whose people live in the happiest social order. In this utopia the poet lives the fulfilment of his socialist ideals, ideals which reverse the original cruel and egoistic constitution into its perfect opposite. And remarkable, in this dreamlike fantasy, is the feeling of floating: here, it is pure pleasure.

Mention must be made, too, of his fantastic sketch of an ideal community of artists. All these productions show how strongly Segantini inclined, in those years, to spin himself into reveries of far and high ideals. But not every fantasy let his own person retire so far into the background as the utopian dreams just described. On the contrary! I have already shown that from the repressed stirrings of aggression, of the lust to rule, arise fantasy-formations that lift the individual high above his world, indeed set him at its centre. Fantasies of greatness of this kind Segantini carried in his bosom all his life. And now they pressed, more than ever, for expression.TJ15TJ · 15A verb has dropped from the 1911 printing at this point. Nach Ausdruck is half of the idiom nach Ausdruck drängen, to press toward expression, so we supply drängten, "pressed".

In the descent-fantasies of his boyhood he had made himself a kingly father, and so raised himself. Now he glorified his mother as a divine ideal. I tried at first to explain pictures like The Fruit of Love and the Dea christiana from the mother-complex alone, as expressions of the sublimated eros, and of those over-compensated "sadistic" stirrings which in early childhood had been aimed at the mother. But one thing must not be overlooked: the apotheosis of the mother exalts the son as well. I have already remarked that the child in those pictures is the artist himself. And Segantini did not stop at painting himself as the Christ-child: soon after the Dea christiana (1895) he painted a self-portrait that bears, entirely, the character of an image of Christ. The dreamy eyes speak of suffering and melancholy; their gaze turns, full of longing, toward far ideals.KA20KA · 20The greatness-complex shows itself in Segantini in various small traits which mostly go unnoticed. While, for example, the artist's older pictures are signed with his initials, a number of the later ones lack any such mark. The self-portrait mentioned above bears only the year. Evidently his self-feeling had risen to the point where he no longer thought it necessary to append to the work a note of who had painted it. Several of the mystical pictures show a strangely S-curved tree, whose form must strike the beholder. I suspect that Segantini set this form, recalling the initial letter of his name, upon the pictures as an emblem. He thereby placed himself into nature, and so declared how deeply he felt himself grown together with nature, which to him meant the mother.

There is no contradiction at all in the fact that Segantini, wholly averse to religious dogma, denier of any personal God, painted himself as Christ. What let him identify with Christ was his ethic, his deification of mother-love, and his suffering. And here we see, as in so many another case, the feeling of greatness grow up out of the deepest melancholy, a melancholy that went as far as the denial of life.

Yet Segantini did not become an idle dreamer. It was precisely work, rather, by whose help he sublimated, as before, a good part of the repressed drives. Indeed there came a time when he gave himself to work beyond all measure. When in 1894 he left Savognin and moved to Maloja in the Upper Engadine, he entered the last period of his life: the period in which he became, in Servaes's phrase, a fanatic of work.

Eight years had passed since Segantini climbed to Savognin. He had come then as a seeker; in constant, immediate touch with nature he had ripened into a master. Now the heights drew him again, just as when he shook the Brianza melancholy from him. He was thirty-six when he moved to the Upper Engadine. He dared into the heart of the high mountains, for in the sure knowledge of his powers he might now set himself the highest tasks. He conceived a burning love for the valley where the last five years of his life would be spent; and to the mountains of that land he brought a religious veneration. He once wrote to a friend: "On many a morning, gazing at these mountains for minutes before I so much as take up the brush, I feel driven to throw myself down before them, as before altars raised beneath the open sky."

It could not fail: Segantini took root here at once, and grew henceforth wholly into the land, its nature, its mountains and its people. He feasted on the shimmering gleam of firn and glacier, the flickering blue of the sky and the brilliance of the sun that are the Engadine's own; he watched with delight the rich flowering that a short summer here drives up in a splendour of colour like no other. For all this glory of the Engadine his eye longed. But his temperament and his character, no less than his eye, were attuned to this land as to no other.KA21KA · 21The remarks that follow may help explain the curious fact that among the passionate friends of the Alpine world there exists the particular species of the Engadine enthusiast. This enthusiasm seems to coincide with certain traits of character that were also unusually pronounced in Segantini. If alpinism in general often serves the exercise of sublimated drives, that special form appears to be conditioned by the complexes to a particular degree. The valley keeps an old, independent culture: in centuries of seclusion its people have preserved their own language, their own customs, their own way of building. It had taken hard work and unbending energy to make this high valley a dwelling-place for men. To these people, to this land, Segantini felt himself kindred in essence.

In Maloja he made, first, a work over which the painful, downcast mood still broods; but the mystical, the visionary, is gone. With shattering truth the artist has set down a scene of everyday life, letting the melancholy of the years just past die away, as it were, into an elegy. A family is bringing the body of a son home. An unending sorrow lies over the picture, and in it all are joined: the father who leads the horse by the bridle, head bowed; the two women who have settled themselves upon the coffin; the horse, drawing its load wearily through the mountain country; and the dog that creeps sadly after the procession. This is The Return to the Homeland, one of the most gripping of the artist's works. Here again is the evening light of all his pictures of death; but Segantini has won new sides from it. The colouring of the softly clouded evening sky is of wonderful splendour: it works like a soothing consolation against the mourning that rules the train below.

There followed a series of great masterworks, as remarkable for the depth of the ideas dwelling in them as for their perfected technique. Let a few be named; they show, most plainly, the changing moods to which their creator was subject. There is Love at the Well-spring of Life: a young pair walks toward the spring of life, where an angel keeps watch. The picture belongs among the symbolic ones; but unlike the earlier works of that kind it keeps itself free of dread and gloom, and shines with brightness and luminous colour. Of a calm and serene temper speaks Spring in the Alps (1897), which Segantini himself held to be his best work: it is carried wholly in the lightest, most luminous tones. Graver is the Hay Harvest: women at heavy work in the meadows, recalling Millet's Gleaners, while dark storm-clouds begin to draw over the sky, chasing one another like ghostly figures.

The Comfort of Faith takes up the theme of death once more. A father and mother stand at their child's grave in a small churchyard deep in snow; and in the bearing of both, Segantini has intimated with great delicacy how they find their comfort in faith. But the picture holds, beside its realistic content, visionary elements. "On the grave-cross nearby appears the vision of a Veronica's veil with the head of the Redeemer. And if we send our gaze up over the jagged mountains into the clear ether, high, high up, we perceive (a separate lunette panel is set on for the purpose) a consoling heavenly apparition: two great-winged angels bearing the little naked body of the child lovingly upward, into the kingdom of everlasting joy" (Servaes). The leaning toward mysticism, toward the supersensible, of which more will be said shortly, had once again won the upper hand.

The line of the great Maloja works closes with the triptych Nature, Life, Death (also called Becoming, Being, Passing Away). This mighty creation shows the artist's longing to balance the drives at war within him, to reconcile them, to bind life and death into one harmony. He proclaims, in the language of art, the unity of all being; and so his last, unfinished work becomes a monistic confession of faith.

The Maloja years were years of the most strained work. His need of work, which we understand from all that has been said, grew ever stronger. "My soul, greedy as an old miser, longs burningly, tremblingly, with fixed eye, to lift its outspread wings toward the horizon of the spirit, where the works to come are born." So he had written to Vittore Grubicy shortly before the move to Maloja; and in the years that followed he proved these were no empty words. His enthusiasm for his work was boundless, and drove him to the utmost straining of his powers. In summer he went to work in the earliest morning hour, often covering long distances to reach the spot, which he changed as the need required, and there pressed his work on, untiring, until evening. In winter he was seen working in the open in cutting cold. And before one work was finished, new designs and plans for the future already filled him.

It was the enthusiastic urge to create, and with it the devoted love of nature, the reverent worship of her beauty, that had, above all, to keep him from sinking into the melancholy moods, as often as they approached. But to this shattering struggle of the soul, a near end was appointed.

Of the triptych's parts, Nature was as good as finished. On the two others Segantini was working, in September 1899, with great ardour: Life was mostly complete, and Death he was pressing forward in the very last days he spent at Maloja. That painting was left unfinished when, on 18 September, accompanied by Baba and his youngest son Mario, he climbed the Schafberg. The next day the central panel was carried up after him: it was on this that he meant to work. His impetuous urge to create had driven him, heedless of the advancing season, to this height (2,700 metres), where a modest stone hut was to lodge him. On a clear evening he arrived at this, his last station.

There he stood now amid the great ones of his kingdom. The peaks of the Bernina blazed before him in the evening light, and roused him to the words: "I will paint your mountains, Engadiners, so that the whole world shall speak of their beauty!"

For one day he worked at the picture of Life; then, falling together in time with a break in the weather, a feverish illness seized him, and set in with great violence. The attic chamber of the little house, whose poor construction gave only the most imperfect shelter against storm and cold, became the sickroom.

Strange indeed is what we learn of the illness's further course. In the night Segantini rose and went out, repeatedly, scantily clothed and despite his fever, into the snowstorm. Next day he dragged himself to the picture, which stood a short way from the hut, and tried to work. Weakness overcame him and he fell asleep; he was woken, and only with difficulty led back to the house. Wholly exhausted, he now lay down. But he refused to let a doctor be sent for, although a personal friendship bound him to the nearest one within reach, Dr Bernhard of Samedan. Mario, who had to go down to Samedan on another errand, was permitted to speak to the doctor only of an indisposition of his father's. Soon after, the doctor sent word by messenger that he was ready to come up to the Schafberg at once; Segantini declined. Only when his state had worsened yet further was Mario allowed, at last, down to Pontresina; he summoned the doctor by telephone, and the doctor arrived, up there, through night and storm, when there was nothing left to save.

The dying man, with his family gathered round him, seemed never to grow conscious of the threatening danger; on the contrary, at times he was disposed to jest. Then the sky cleared before him once more. He asked that his bed be moved to the little window: "Voglio vedere le mie montagne", and those were the last words of his longing.TJ16TJ · 16"I want to see my mountains." Abraham leaves the Italian untranslated, and so do we: they are the only words in the book spoken in the dying man's own tongue. "There he lay then, his gaze sunk without wavering into the chain of mountains opposite, the same he had meant to finish painting in his picture. But in that gaze lay no melancholy farewell; in that gaze lay the whole ravening hunger of the painter and the lover: he drank in the colours, the forms, the lights and lines, because out of them he still thought to shape something that should be highest art" (Servaes).

Segantini's conduct in these last days throws a glaring light on the division of psychic forces within him. In the full consciousness of his strength he climbs to the Schafberg; in words of enthusiasm he proclaims, up there, the goal of his striving; with burning zeal he sets to work at once. And directly after, when a raging illness falls on him, he endangers himself by walking out into the night snowstorm, spends the strength he needs most in the fight against the sickness, and stubbornly refuses the help that is offered him! We ask ourselves: was it only his hunger for deeds and his joy of creation that took him to that height? Did he climb only to live and work there, or was there, beside these motives known to him, an unconscious longing for death that drove him? We can grow clear on this question only by gaining the fullest possible survey of what the thought of death meant in the life of Segantini's soul.

Early he came to know death's working around him: he lost the brother, then the mother. He learned that the mother's death hung together with his own birth; he was told how he himself had come into the world so weak that they scarcely thought he could be kept alive; he remembered twice escaping death as by a miracle. So he was bound to reach, early, the insight that death stands near to man at every hour, and his conception of life was bound to take a grave cast from it.

But these dark experiences of childhood do not explain the enormous power of the thoughts of death in Segantini. We must reach back, rather, to the inner motives discussed before. The sadistic stirrings, the feelings of hate, the death-wishes, had to be withdrawn from the objects at which they had chiefly aimed. In part they were thrown back upon the subject himself, as thoughts of his own death; in part they fell to sublimation and, by the way of "reaction-formation", were turned into their opposites. And the whole weight that the sublimation of death-fantasies carries in Segantini shines clearest from this: that his first attempt at drawing and his last, unfinished painting are both pictures of death.

Soon after leaving the Brera school he gained entry to the anatomy theatre and made his first studies from nature there: from corpses. As, years before, he had held out untiring beside the body of a child, so now too the sight of death drew him. So arose one of his earliest pictures, called Il prode, "The Dead Hero". And at the work an incident befell him that left a deep mark. He had stood the corpse that served him as model upright against the wall; and while he was sunk in his work, the body, exposed to the sun's rays, lost its rigor, began to sway, and pitched forward. The young Segantini read an evil omen in the event, and for a long time could not free himself from the fear of death.

This leaning to superstition, very pronounced in our artist, recalls once more the peculiarities of the obsessional neurotics, whose doubts busy themselves above all with the span of their own lives and their fate after death, and who stand always ready to believe in omens on that head. Segantini did just the same, as we shall shortly see more closely. Upon the Prode followed other pictures of death: from the early time, For Our Dead, The Empty Cradle, The Orphaned; then the world-sorrowing mood-pictures of the Brianza years; in Savognin the thoughts of death spoke through the Nirvana pictures; in Maloja, at last, arose The Return to the Homeland, The Comfort of Faith, and finally Death itself, as a panel of the great triptych. And all these are but examples from the great number of his pictures that deal with death.

The forebodings of death did not leave him. He fought them off, yes; but they returned, returned out of the depth of his unconscious. Among Segantini's papers, under the heading "An Ugly Dream", stands the account of a dream that sets the battle of opposed drives before our eyes with great vividness. I give the first half here:

"Sadly I sat in a mysterious place that was room and church at once. A strange figure stood facing me, vacant, a being of foul and repellent forms. It had white, glassy eyes; its flesh-tones were yellow; half it seemed a cretin and half Death itself. I rose, and with a commanding look I drove the creature away; it looked at me sidelong and slunk off. I followed it with my eyes to a dark lurking-hole, where it vanished. To myself I thought: this apparition of a corpse must bode ill for me. As I turned to sit down, a trembling ran over all my limbs, for that desolate apparition stood before me again. I rose like a fury and cursed it with threats. Humbly it vanished once more. Whereupon I said to myself: perhaps I did wrong to drive it off in this way; it will take its revenge."

Here, in narrow compass, everything stands together: the horror of death; the attempt at defence; the return of the scarcely banished thoughts; the explosion of the pent affect; the second victory over the thoughts of death; and at the last the resigned recognition: they will take their revenge, and in the end I shall be the one overcome.

To such dreams, as to certain other occurrences, Segantini attached an ominous meaning. But the more often the omens of death frightened him, the more he needed a counterweight; and so it becomes understandable that he lent a willing ear to prophecies of every kind. He clung, above all, to a prediction once given him that he would reach Titian's age; and it is told that he leaned on this prophecy hardest exactly when the dark thoughts rose in him with the greatest power.

But he went further, taking here too the road we know from the analysis of the obsessional neurosis. The most effective defence against thoughts of death, be they aimed at one's own person or at others, is the negation of death. There is no death: that has been mankind's wish-fantasy in every age. But those cling hardest to a life after death whose lives are perpetually disturbed by fantasies of death: the obsessional neurotics. We know in them a religiosity all their own, in which belief in immortality plays a great part. For if there is a life beyond, then the torturing reproaches those people make themselves fall away: the ones whose deaths they fear they caused have not died at all, but lead their life in another place.

Once before we saw Segantini negate the fact of death in his own peculiar way: the picture of a dying consumptive he painted over into a picture of blossoming life! In the later years his needs went further. A leaning to the supersensible formed itself, and it was spiritualism, above all, to which the artist gave himself; and at the same time part of his work took on that mystical strain of which we spoke before.

As in the "ugly dream", so it went with him in waking life. The thoughts of death took hold of him more and more. He compensated them, it is true, with a mighty expense of strength; but while he consciously turned to new plans and creations, while he told of his programme of work in words of enthusiasm, there rose from his unconscious, ever more audibly, the call of death.

Segantini himself told of an incident, which must have occurred about a year before his death, as proof that a connection with the departed exists. On a winter walk he had lost his way; wearied, he had settled down in the snow, and fallen asleep. He would surely have been given over to death by freezing, had not a voice called him at the moment of danger, a voice he recognised as his mother's. To this event he himself traced his belief in a world beyond.

Through the study of the unconscious we have learned that many a small "accident" of life carries a deeper meaning than is commonly supposedKA22KA · 22Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 3rd ed., Berlin 1910.: not, indeed, as an omen of the future, but as determined by unconscious influences flowing from the repressed complexes. Of special interest to us are the not infrequent cases of unconscious suicide, attempted or completed. People under a depressive mood quite commonly let fall the simplest precautions that were second nature to them before; and to the field of unconscious suicide belong, for example, not a few of the accidents so frequent in the high mountains.

Now it is striking that Segantini, at home in the mountains, who as painter, walker and hunter roamed that country at every season, should lose his way, and then be careless enough to settle down in the snow in winter cold. The straying and the falling asleep in the snow rouse in us the suspicion that an unconscious attempt at suicide lies here. To this conjecture we are entitled by the fact that dark thoughts rose from Segantini's unconscious especially often in just that time, that a longing for death made itself only too plainly felt. But it remained an attempt. The opposing will to life still succeeded in asserting itself, in the form of the voice that broke the beginning sleep. The mother's voice, which came from within him but which he projected outward, called the sleeper back to life. And exactly that carries its deep meaning: for motherliness was, to him, the principle of all life.

May we draw conclusions from this incident for Segantini's death, which followed not so very long after? Hear what happened shortly before the climb to the Schafberg. The artist's wife tells us this story:

"On the last Sunday he spent at Maloja, he stretched himself out on some chairs in his workroom to rest. I stayed outside, talking with the children. When I came in I thought he was asleep, and said: 'Oh, I am sorry to have woken you, you needed sleep so badly!' And he at once: 'No, my dear, you did well to come in. Imagine: I was dreaming (and believe me, I dreamed with open eyes, of that I am certain) that it was I whom they were carrying on the bier out of that hut (and he pointed to the picture Death); one of the women standing near was you, and I saw you weeping.' I told him, naturally, that he had been asleep and it was a dream. But he held to it, firmly convinced he had been awake and seen it all with open eyes. What he had said to me he told, soon after, to our Baba. Well: what he saw then, in twelve days it became truth. His picture of Death showed his own end; out of that hut they carried his coffin. The landscape was as he painted it in his picture; the woman one sees weeping in the picture, near the bier, was I. And mark that at the time of that vision he was perfectly well, so well that on that same Sunday he went on with his writing. The day after, he worked from four in the morning until nine, then carried the picture, shut in a crate, from the place of his painting all the way home; and that same evening he was able to make the three hours' hard march from Pontresina to the top of the Schafberg. He believed so firmly in spiritualism that after that vision he would certainly never have left Maloja had he not felt himself in the most perfect health."

In this waking dream I see no premonition in the common sense, but an expression of the longing for death, forcing its way into consciousness with power. And comparison with the "ugly dream" quoted earlier yields a remarkable difference: then, in the dream, a lively, even passionate fighting-off of death; now, only the frozen horror at its nearness.

His wife describes vividly how, the day after this waking dream, he did work that was all but superhuman; and arrived on the mountain, he spoke those proud words that seemed to spring from an unbounded feeling of strength. But we understand: the urge to life could withstand the storm of the death-thoughts only by the utmost sublimation of every driving force still at its command.

It is said that those around Segantini noticed, up to the last, only occasionally that he had dark moods to fight off; and it might therefore seem an exaggeration to give this inner wrestling so great a weight. But the fight against the repressed driving forces is a silent fight, of which a man of such fine feeling as Segantini let as little as possible be heard. Until shortly before the end, victory had stood with the affirmation of life; only when the longing for death gained the upper hand did the signs of the struggle show outwardly.

So things stood with Segantini when he climbed the Schafberg. And then came the illness that became his doom. Perhaps, on that height, in sight of all that glory, he would have drawn new courage for life, won new strength of deed, to fulfil what he had vowed to the Engadiners: had the illness not come. But when it surprised him, him who had never before known what it was to be ill, the unconscious powers used the moment. His conduct, described above, may indeed at first give the impression that, trusting his health, he simply paid the bodily suffering no heed; and so Segantini himself understood his own conduct. But is that a defence, which opens the gates to the enemy who means to breach the wall? As we so often see, consciousness claims as its own work an action that has flowed from unconscious springs, and supplies its motives after its own sense, while in truth other grounds were at work, foreign to consciousness and wholly opposed to it.

Segantini succumbed to the treacherous illness; but not to it alone. Perhaps he would have overcome it. But the dark powers of his unconscious came to the illness's aid, eased its work of destruction, and themselves called death to come.

Meanwhile, in his consciousness, he clung with glowing love to all that meant life to him. And while death drew near, he cast looks of longing across to his mountains, whose beauty his art had meant to praise still further. We are reminded of Moses, who at the close of his life climbed the mountain from which he was permitted to look across into the promised land. But it was his last road up.

"Quenched are the humble and worthy eyesin which infinite beauty found its home;departed is the soulin which shadow and light,life and death,were as a single prayer;and the melody of the brook,and the lowing of the herd,and the thunder of the storm,and the cry of the eagle,and the groan of man,were as a single word."

TJ17TJ · 17D'Annunzio's verses on Segantini's death are given in Italian in the original ("Spenti son gli occhi umili e degni..."); the English is ours.

In these wonderful verses on Segantini's death, Gabriele d'Annunzio remembers the all-embracing love of the master, a love that recalls to us Francis of Assisi.

But we know it now: the same man who wished to embrace all that lives in unending love carried, in his innermost self, the will to destroy his own life. The psychoanalytic view, granting us a sight of the battle of conscious and unconscious forces, lets us grasp this inner division, and suffer with it. It unveils to us the whole tragedy in the life of this man who died too soon: that the shadow of death walked beside him, the untiring creator, on all his roads.

The End

Glossary of Rulings

House style: British spelling; no em dashes; Abraham's letter-spaced emphases rendered in bold; Abraham's footnotes marked [KA], editor's notes marked [TJ].