Michelangelo’s The Four Prisoners: Autoethnographic Analysis of Self and Communion With Father(s)

Abstract

Novelist Henry James illuminated the enigmatic nature of the human condition when he wrote, “The whole of anything is never told.” This autoethnographic research project was initially conceptualized to interpret the content of a profound personal encounter with Michelangelo’s four marble statues known as The Four Prisoners on June 8, 2022, at the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy. My septuagenarian life pilgrimage aggregated seemingly disparate events—marriage; parenthood; divorce; vocational and avocational pursuits; two visits to Florence, Italy (in 1970 and 2022); and an exploration in 2022 of eight World War II (WWII) European Theater airfields where my father served in England, France, and Germany—that merged into an integrated journey of transformation, culminating in a profound existential experience. This research project examined, at least in part, the process of meaning-making wherein The Four Prisoners functioned as a symbolic catalyst for transformative self-understanding; existential intersubjective communion with my long-deceased father; and existential transgenerational intersubjective communion with Michelangelo and his father, Lodovico Buonarroti, and Sigmund Freud and his father, Jacob Freud. Additionally, this study investigated the relationship between Michelangelo’s artistic expression in The Four Prisoners and the practice of psychotherapy. The research embraced multiple areas of investigation and specific questions focused on the inquiry. This study’s unique lens of inquiry added to the extant published research on the impact of Michelangelo’s The Four Prisoners on applied psychology and the conscious and unconscious dimensions of our shared human experience.