Referential orientation in the cycle Wild horses in the forest is primarily intertextual: Baldung It is not (so) important to create a parable about, say, animalistic urges that are impossible to resist, but rather, by taking on a figure that has been essentialized as a symbol, to once again - in an obscene, perverted or even psychotic framework - dramatize, playing on the very edge of respectability, one's own relationship with I am Durerom, this time at the end of his career, when some conclusions became even sharper. The symbol through which this subsequent discussion takes place is, of course, the horse, which was already the subject of Baldung's significant provocation in the early period of their poetic interaction, and now gained in allegorical breadth, but also in authorial determination. Namely, two important and clearly programmatic engravings, which is also evident from the fact that they were created in the same year 1505, Little horse i Big horse function as a kind of metatextual study in which Dürer - by choosing an animal that connotes wild nature and a strong sexual instinct - shows how the artistic procedure itself, specifically the process of 'framing', or more precisely the precise arrangement of the body within visual and narrative spatiality, is perhaps the best guarantee that the potentially chaotic animal libido can be rationally controlled and channeled. Art is precisely that frame which, if the postulates of evenness, proportion and harmony are respected, can 'tame' every presence within its own frame so that even an inherently disruptive object is properly centered in the mise-en-scène: artificiality overcomes nature.
Baldung reacts cynically and humorously to Dürer's example of the supremacy of painting, emphasizing precisely those elements that are conveniently obscured in his Master. While in To a little horse i To the big horse, ultimately, the very boundaries of artistic intervention regulate who 'leads' and calms an animal that could get out of control (in both versions, the soldier is also 'forced' into the frame, and is consequently deprived of agency in the architectonics of the scene), to Baldung's response in the form of an engraving The groom reins in the horse. from 1510-11. the awkwardness of the whole process emerges: the ideal of proportion is undermined by a comical 'crouching'. In the humorous reinterpretation, in order to maintain the required pose of the horse, the groom has to 'bury' his feet with both legs - which seem to be deliberately unnaturally stretched and as if they do not actually belong to the man's body - in order to hold the horse, whose eye - as the cycle subsequently confirms - possesses an almost demonic obscurity. Thus, what was left unspoken in Dürer (both when it comes to biology and when it comes to the artist's falsification in every naturalism), in Baldung's creative retort becomes a source of caustic mockery and discomfort. Moreover, in Baldung's well-tuned rhetoric that 'restrains' pathos and self-satisfaction, the very segment that was suppressed in Dürer appears in an unexpected place. Denied sexuality (which must always be rejected in the design of sublimation) breaks out in To the groom who reins in the horse as not only an anamorphic, but also an anthropological stain: while the protagonist tries with all his might to restrain the unruly animal, above its head - in an emphasized placement that testifies to the repressiveness, even anxiety, of the artistic script that 'squeezes' the object being described - the tree trunk becomes a female torso with a navel beneath which lies an open, gaping vulva, because under the forces of suppression, libido can be displaced or even rebelled in various de-formations.
In that sense, Wild horses in the forest are a huge deformation in which Baldung, relying on the aesthetics of the previous Master, reactualizes the above-mentioned ambivalent relationship with his model as - regardless of the fact that his figure within the scene is mature, presumably armed with accumulated wisdom - a radically distorted primal scene that testifies to the author's I will conceive., but of course with extreme irony. Hence, the cycle itself, which is brought from an infantile perspective in which there is still no difference between dream, nightmare and fantasy, acts not as a narrative sequence, but precisely as a signifier formation: the setting of symbols, signs and newly constructed metaphors is an existential situation or, even, a constellation in which Baldung, engaging in the consideration of his own originality, anticipates, that is, creates an irresistible association with the case that will Freud analyze - literally with the help of the father's notes, which almost sadistically describe the experiences and reactions of his 3 and a half year old son - some 370 years later. Which is to say that Baldung - using the figure of the horse, which comes from the most important repertoire of the Name-Father - in a text that argues with its own origins, nevertheless constructs a hermeneutic paradigm that, read in a psychoanalytic key, will become among the most important in general for the study of psychological development and the entire constitution of the person: Hans, Dürer's favorite student, thus grows (sic!) into before la lettre Little Hans, one of Freud's five key cases. The cycle, therefore, from a seemingly unbridled perversion of bestiality, from a sick fantasy that, in the most blasphemous, voyeuristic way, surreptitiously supervises animal sexuality, from an example that is too extreme to be interpretatively generalized, legitimately becomes a constitutional history of the psychological structure of the (male) personality, all of which is motivated by strictly metapoetic reasons: Baldung's symbolic staging based on imaginary surplus.
Freud's (re)evaluation implied that in the case of Little Hans, three structural dimensions were particularly emphasized: entry into the gravity of the Oedipus complex, the fundamental distinction between anxiety and phobia, and the pivotal importance of the phallic signifier for the description and determination of one's own position in the social environment as a marker around which every semantic network is shaped, a network for communication, understanding, and, ultimately, the multiple creation of desire. All of these three crucial determinants are in fact hysterically energized in Wild horses in the forest, which in their mutual intersection creates an extremely dense text of Baldung's allegory.
In Little Hans' universe, the prevailing rapper is what he calls Wiwimacher (pees): the penis, or phallus, has been, from the very beginning, a sign through which one tries to determine the meaning of the world, first as a factor that divides the living from the inanimate, then for projection into the relationships that exist between animals and, most importantly, for outlining the sexual difference that always turns out to be a traumatic fact. It is particularly interesting that the aforementioned problem also has its indicative 'painterly' exposition, confirming that it is constantly reflected in scopic space, that it necessarily also has a visual explication or expression that will surface: when a boy asks his father to put a pee on a drawing of a giraffe (which is, of course, primarily a drawing of a horse), to which he tells him to do it himself, Little Hans 'cuts' a smaller line under his belly, and obviously dissatisfied, adds another one, because: 'Her piss is bigger'. In the phantasmatic mapping, the original, 'ordinary' vaginal slit grows (sic!) into an 'adequate' length which produces, in the infantile vision, the corresponding, real phallus: the phallus is a quantification, an addition, an addition - we would almost say: a manneristic elongation or prolongation - to the female vacuum.
Bonus video:
