Marino Marini: Le tre figlie del carrozziere
Milan, Museum of Modern Art at Villa Belgioioso (Villa Reale)

May 30, 2006

We use up too much artistry in our dreams - and therefore often are impoverished during the day.
(F.Nietzsche, II Human All Too Human, 194)
 

Freud has shown that the number 3 is the symbol of the penis[1].
Therefore, three women are equivalent to a female penis, which in children’s fantasy is like the one of the male. In Western mythology the representation of three women recurs in an obsessive way peculiar to a neurotic symptom. It is the expression of the rooted unconscious conviction that the woman possesses, or had possessed in the past, a penis similar to that of the male. The obsessive repetition relieves through the process of catharsis the anxiety suffered at the stressful discovery of its absence, which did activate the child own castration anxiety.
However, in Marini’s painting there is something more; one of the three women wears a sock.

Jean Baudrillard, dealing with the strip-tease, writes:

…when she is naked she is much more adorned than when she is dressed […]. She wears gloves, which cut her arms. She wears green, red, or black socks, which also cut her legs at the level of the thigh […]
The body that the woman worships through a sophisticated manipulation, and through an intensive narcissistic discipline without any weakness, transforms her and her sacred body itself into a living penis, which represents the woman’s castration. To be castrated means to be covered with phallic symbols. The woman is covered with them, and she is constrained into transforming herself into a living penis, if she aspires to be desired [2] .
 

Therefore, the sock cutting the woman’s leg represents also her own castration, as in every hint which associates with “cuts” and “cutting”. It is not casual that in the painting the woman wearing the sock is represented with her back turned to the spectator, at difference with the other two women, and she does not shows her genital like her two companions. The castration’s symbol equivalent to the lack of a penis is already expressed by the “cutting” of the sock.

Furthermore, the third woman, showing a “cut” (the sock cutting her leg), explains the lack of a penis in the other two women: “They do not have a penis because it was cut”.

Works of arts are like dreams. They “explain” through the associative link between the different elements. As Freud said, our unconscious knows no grammar. If it wants to deliver a message, it works by associating components. It does not use particles, symbols of denials or other grammatical devices. The first two women display a female genital lacking a penis, and the third woman explains what happened: it was cut.

The child, when he discovers the lack of a penis in the woman, side by side with a tentative of denial, he also gives to himself an explanation that the father was responsible for that mutilation[3]. He cut her member, and in this way he “made” of her a woman[4].

Facing Marini’s painting, the spectator is confronted with an unconscious content, which was repressed, but was also pressing for recognition. This work of art speaks to him to the degree in which this content was indeed pressing for recognition. If the repression is total and completely successful, this great work of art hardly says anything to him.

However, if the energetic investment is still active, the work of art will deliver a relief from the sufferance inherent to the process of active repression. Seeing outside what is pressing inside ourselves represents a relief, even if there is no conscious realization, and the all process is worked in the underground. Consciousness may be aware only of the subsequent enjoyment.

The enjoyment of a work of art is a function of its capability to bring relief to the sufferance inherent to the energetic effort invested in order to repress psychic contents charged with anxiety. It can be done only through the vehicle of a language that can be understood by our unconscious. This language is the music of the work of art, and as such communicates directly from unconscious to unconscious. The language, namely the lines, the forms, the colours of the painting are the notes of that music. Without it, it will lack the catharsis' vehicle. Our unconscious does not understand words, but their music, the tune accompanying them. If we praise a child  by a threatening voice, the child does not understand the praise but the threat. Therefore, it is the tune of the work of art, which expresses the true contents, namely the sentiment. If the tune is artificial and not sincere, there is a shortcut in the communication, which results in an isolation of  the sentiment. The work of art is not such, but only a declaration, and no relief can be expected.

Marini’s “Le tre figlie del carrozziere” is indeed a great work of art.

The archaic inference

”The Coachmaker’s Three Daughters” reminds the archaic phallic triads of Greek mythology: the Erinnyes, the Harpies, the Graiae, and particularly the Gorgons.
The most famous among the Gorgons was Medusa, who was decapitated – castrated by the hero Perseus (See: S. Freud, Medusa's Head, 1940). Here we have a Greek marble dating 600 B.C. representing Medusa, to day at the Museum of the Acropolis in Athens, which seems to have inspired Marini for his painting.
The archaic reference unconsciously reconnects to our own archaic history; the first nebulous years of infancy, which are removed but are the source of all later anxieties, those same anxieties that the work of art comes to relieve.

               

Marino Marini: Scenario

Links:

Three Women: the Penis
Caravaggio and the Deposizione nel sepolcro