The images of Alexander deriving from his own lifetime fall into two main categories: on the one hand, representations without attributes, which are more or less what we would now term ‘portraits’; and on the other hand, representations with attributes, which have an allegorical function, their purpose being to give out a message about Alexander, to tell a story about him, rather than merely to convey his likeness. Images of Alexander in sculpture tended towards ‘realism’, while images of him in painting and glyptics tended towards allegorization. The attributes given to Alexander in art during his own lifetime are restricted in their epistemological content, being predominantly of a military sort, such as a spear or armour. But a much richer repertoire of attributes emerges for him in the posthumous representations of the king generated by and for his successors in the Hellenistic age. Above all, these allowed for his direct association with the divine: the aegis associated him with Zeus and Athena; ram’s horns with Zeus-Ammon; goat’s horns with Pan; bull’s horns with Dionysus; the lion-scalp with Heracles; the elephant-scalp with Dionysus; and the radiate crown with Apollo-Helios.

This chapter explores Freud’s publications on Biblical prophets in the new interdisciplinary journal Imago that Freud founded to specifically deal with non-medical applications of psychoanalysis. This chapter analyzes Freud’s anonymously published essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) anew as an extension of and a direct consequence of the disputations over Jung’s Jonah-type and Maeder’s teleological function of dreams. In his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, Freud would take up his defense in Rome, where Pope Leo X had excommunicated Luther in 1521. Disguised as “an untrained layman,” Freud sets up a new hermeneutical arena far from the site of Lutheran Biblical exegetics on Jonah and before the Catholic Renaissance master Michelangelo, an artist Jung claimed expressed the “Jonah-type” in his pietàs. Applying and parodying the aesthetic arguments Jung and Maeder utilized in their recent publicatins, Freud uses the trope of the “artless Jew” by shifting the dialogue from typological interpretations of stubborn Jewish prophets to German-language art historical interpretations of a Catholic representation of Moses.