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The Horse’s Eye

Animality, Humanity, and the Unconscious in Renaissance Art

The Horse’s Eye cover

The Horse’s Eye

Animality, Humanity, and the Unconscious in Renaissance Art

Quantity
Pre-order. Available 15 Oct 2026
$32.39 RRP $40.49 Website price saving $8.10 (20%)

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Description

This compelling book explores the depiction of horses and other animals in Renaissance painting through the lens of psychoanalysis.

In The Horse's Eye Giuseppe Civitarese, a seasoned clinician and psychoanalyst, delves into the profound connections between animality, the unconscious, and the human condition, providing a unique perspective on classical art. By examining the gaze of horses in art, the book raises provocative questions about free will, identity, and the nature of humanity.

This is a truly interdisciplinary work that combines the author's formidable erudition in classics, philosophy, literature and literary criticism, film studies, art history, and theology with his unique psychoanalytic sensibility. Offering profound meditations on the paintings that he observes so keenly, Civitarese illuminates how these artistic representations reveal the tensions between our instinctual drives and the illusion of self-control.

This narrative, enriched by personal reflections and emotional resonance with the artworks, gives us a fresh and thought-provoking exploration of art, psychology, and the timeless question of what it means to be human.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Optical Unconscious
2. Black and Dehallucination
3. Recognition
4. The Visible and the Invisible
5. Indifference of Nature
6. Animot
7. Splitting
8. Perspective
9. Fear and Dream
10. Intersubjectivity
11. Automaton
12. Trieb
Conclusions
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 15 Oct 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 224
ISBN 9798765145265
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 34 illustrations
Series Psychoanalytic Horizons
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Giuseppe Civitarese

Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist an…

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