An Encylopedia of Archetypal Symbolism, Vol. 2: The Body by George R. Elder (review)

BOOKS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHETYPAL SYMBOLISM, VOL. 2: THE BODY by George R. Elder. The Archive for Re­ search in Archetypal Symbolism. Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA, U.S.A., 1996. 452 pp. ISBN: 157062 -096-2. Reviewed by Istvan Hargittai, Budapest Technical University, Szt. Geliert ter 4, H1521 Budapest, Hungary. E-mail: . This is a beautiful large-format book, whose 100 entries can be read and en­ joyed one by one. It is the second vol­ ume of the Encyclopedia; the first vol­ ume appeared in 1990. The collection of color images and text in the first vol­ ume was organized around mythic themes, from cosmos and creation to death, transformation and rebirth. The second volume deals with artistic occur­ rences of the human body. This is a fo­ cused collection in which various de­ tails get a lot of attention. The material is divided into 12 sections of an almost anatomical arrangement: Primordial Body, Bones, Skin, Head and Hair, Eye, Ear, Hand and Arm, Respiratory and Digestive Systems, Heart and Blood, Sex Organs, Foot and Leg, and Trans­ formed Body. One hundred color plates represent artifacts distributed with apparent care among a wide range of techniques, time periods, geographic locations, reli­ gious affiliations, and probably many other, less conspicuous considerations. Each section devotes its opening page to relevant poetry. Within the sections, each entry includes a color plate with some technical information and a sum­ marizing description of the illustration. Each illustration includes a brief intro­ duction followed by the backbone of Leonardo Digital Reviews Editor-in-Chief: Michael Punt the material, a two-part discussion en­ titled Cultural Context and Archetypal Commentary. Each entry concludes with a short bibliography. Individual selections might be easy tar­ gets to question, but the collection is so comprehensive, the pool to consider so vast, and the obvious considerations so multi-faceted that nothing short of "rich and fortunate" would be a fair character­ ization. Yet I would have loved to have seen an image in which learning, itself, about the human body is depicted. Of the two parts in each entry's main text, the Cultural Context is most infor­ mative and helpful. We learn about the sculpture or painting, about the artist, and about the cultural and historical circumstances of the creative work. I feel ambivalent about the second part, the Archetypal Commentary. While I realize that this is the basic motivation and purpose of the whole collection, at times, I think, less might have been more helpful. It may have been difficult for the author to decide to omit some famous scholars' opinions and discus­ sions from the present overview. A case in point is Awakening Slave by Michelangelo Buonarotti, one of his fa­ mous "unfinished" sculptures. Elder quotes an interpretation of the piece by American psychiatrist Robert Liebert, without identifying himself with it. Ac­ cording to this interpretation, "On the one hand, it symbolized his wet nurse, daughter and wife of stonecutters, from whom the artist himself said he im­ bibed the milk of working with marble; but on the other hand, the stone was the sickly biological mother who died in the artist's early childhood, failing to provide him with genuine nurture. Working with marble, Michelangelo fell into a tragic ambivalence, says Liebert: he would begin with a passionate antici­ pation of returning to the breast of his foster mother, yet eventually, painfully, encountered the absent mother and so two thirds of the sculptor's figures re­ mained incomplete." I find this an overextension of the inferences such a sculpture may provide, to say the least. Another reference Elder makes is to C.G.Jung, concluding thatJung would have approved of Michelangelo's unfin­ ished Slaves. He bases this conclusion on Jung's critique of some of Michelangelo's "finished" works—a rather indirect approach indeed. Scat­ tered among the thoughts of Liebert and Jung, there are patches in the Ar­ chetypal Commentary on Awakening Stove by Elder himself and they are both helpful and imaginative. I wish only that he had shifted the balance to favor his own commentary over that of the others. To me, Awakening Slave has never ap­ peared unfinished. I find...