Between January 1972 and December 1973 French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro exchanged forty-four letters. During this short period, the two scholars discussed many issues concerning the state of art history and its relationship to semiotics and psychoanalysis. A recurring topic was Freud's famous lapse of memory concerning the name of the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli—what to make of the lapsus in art-historical terms and how to make use of it in analyzing Signorelli's cycle of frescoes at the Cathedral of Orvieto in Italy. Damisch was then beginning to work on a book devoted to the subject while Schapiro was writing a small essay on the topic.

Between 1960 and 1980, American art-historian Meyer Schapiro's thoughts returned frequently to the first page of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , in which the author discusses forgetting the name of Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli. In his conclusions on the subject, unpublished until now, Schapiro considers how Freud's explanation of his lapse of memory may have itself suffered from a repression of sexual anxieties.