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[Illustration: LEONARDO DA VINCI]
Leonardo da Vinci
A PSYCHOSEXUAL STUDY OF AN
INFANTILE REMINISCENCE
BY
PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D.
(UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA)
TRANSLATED BY
A. A. BRILL, PH.B., M.D.
Lecturer in Psychoanalysis and Abnormal
Psychology, New York University
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
ILLUSTRATIONS
Leonardo Da Vinci _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Mona Lisa 78
Saint Anne 86
John the Baptist 94
LEONARDO DA VINCI
I
When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with
frail human material, approaches the great personages of humanity, it is
not impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by
laymen. It does not strive "to blacken the radiant and to drag the
sublime into the mire"; it finds no satisfaction in diminishing the
distance between the perfection of the great and the inadequacy of the
ordinary objects. But it cannot help finding that everything is worthy
of understanding that can be perceived through those prototypes, and it
also believes that none is so big as to be ashamed of being subject to
the laws which control the normal and morbid actions with the same
strictness.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was admired even by his contemporaries as
one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, still even then he
appeared as mysterious to them as he now appears to us. An all-sided
genius, "whose form can only be divined but never deeply fathomed,"[1]
he exerted the most decisive influence on his time as an artist; and it
remained to us to recognize his greatness as a naturalist which was
united in him with the artist. Although he left masterpieces of the art
of painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and
unused, the investigator in him has never quite left the artist, often
it has severely injured the artist and in the end it has perhaps
suppressed the artist altogether. According to Vasari, Leonardo
reproached himself during the last hour of his life for having insulted
God and men because he has not done his duty to his art.[2] And even if
Vasari's story lacks all probability and belongs to those legends which
began to be woven about the mystic master while he was still living, it
nevertheless retains indisputable value as a testimonial of the judgment
of those people and of those times.
What was it that removed the personality of Leonardo from the
understanding of his contemporaries? Certainly not the many sidedness of
his capacities and knowledge, which allowed him to install himself as a
player of the lyre on an instrument invented by himself, in the court of
Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, the Duke of Milan, or which allowed
him to write to the same person that remarkable letter in which he
boasts of his abilities as a civil and military engineer. For the
combination of manifold talents in the same person was not unusual in
the times of the Renaissance; to be sure Leonardo himself furnished one
of the most splendid examples of such persons. Nor did he belong to that
type of genial persons who are outwardly poorly endowed by nature, and
who on their side place no value on the outer forms of life, and in the
painful gloominess of their feelings fly from human relations. On the
contrary he was tall and symmetrically built, of consummate beauty of
countenance and of unusual physical strength, he was charming in his
manner, a master of speech, and jovial and affectionate to everybody. He
loved beauty in the objects of his surroundings, he was fond of wearing
magnificent garments and appreciated every refinement of conduct. In his
treatise[3] on the art of painting he compares in a significant passage
the art of painting with its sister arts and thus discusses the
difficulties of the sculptor: "Now his face is entirely smeared and
powdered with marble dust, so that he looks like a baker, he is covered
with small marble splinters, so that it seems as if it snowed on his
back, and his house is full of stone splinters, and dust. The case of
the painter is quite different from that; for the painter is well
dressed and sits with great comfort before his work, he gently and very
lightly brushes in the beautiful colors. He wears as decorative clothes
as he likes, and his house is filled with beautiful paintings and is
spotlessly clean. He often enjoys company, music, or some one may read
for him various nice works, and all this can be listened to with great
pleasure, undisturbed by any pounding from the hammer and other noises."
It is quite possible that the conception of a beaming jovial and happy
Leonardo was true only for the first and longer period of the master's
life. From now on, when the downfall of the rule of Lodovico Moro forced
him to leave Milan, his sphere of action and his assured position, to
lead an unsteady and unsuccessful life until his last asylum in France,
it is possible that the luster of his disposition became pale and some
odd features of his character became more prominent. The turning of his
interest from his art to science which increased with age must have also
been responsible for widening the gap between himself and his
contemporaries. All his efforts with which, according to their opinion,
he wasted his time instead of diligently filling orders and becoming
rich as perhaps his former classmate Perugino, seemed to his
contemporaries as capricious playing, or even caused them to suspect him
of being in the service of the "black art." We who know him from his
sketches understand him better. In a time in which the authority of the
church began to be substituted by that of antiquity and in which only
theoretical investigation existed, he the forerunner, or better the
worthy competitor of Bacon and Copernicus, was necessarily isolated.
When he dissected cadavers of horses and human beings, and built flying
apparatus, or when he studied the nourishment of plants and their
behavior towards poisons, he naturally deviated much from the
commentators of Aristotle and came nearer the despised alchemists, in
whose laboratories the experimental investigations found some refuge
during these unfavorable times.
The effect that this had on his paintings was that he disliked to handle
the brush, he painted less and what was more often the case, the things
he began were mostly left unfinished; he cared less and less for the
future fate of his works. It was this mode of working that was held up
to him as a reproach from his contemporaries to whom his behavior to his
art remained a riddle.
Many of Leonardo's later admirers have attempted to wipe off the stain
of unsteadiness from his character. They maintained that what is blamed
in Leonardo is a general characteristic of great artists. They said that
even the energetic Michelangelo who was absorbed in his work left many
incompleted works, which was as little due to his fault as to Leonardo's
in the same case. Besides some pictures were not as unfinished as he
claimed, and what the layman would call a masterpiece may still appear
to the creator of the work of art as an unsatisfied embodiment of his
intentions; he has a faint notion of a perfection which he despairs of
reproducing in likeness. Least of all should the artist be held
responsible for the fate which befalls his works.
As plausible as some of these excuses may sound they nevertheless do not
explain the whole state of affairs which we find in Leonardo. The
painful struggle with the work, the final flight from it and the
indifference to its future fate may be seen in many other artists, but
this behavior is shown in Leonardo to highest degree. Edm. Solmi[4]
cites (p. 12) the expression of one of his pupils: "Pareva, che ad ogni
ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipingere, e pero no diede mai fine ad
alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell'arte, tal che
egli scorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad altri parevano miracoli."
His last pictures, Leda, the Madonna di Saint Onofrio, Bacchus and St.
John the Baptist, remained unfinished "come quasi intervenne di tutte le
cose sue." Lomazzo,[5] who finished a copy of The Holy Supper, refers in
a sonnet to the familiar inability of Leonardo to finish his works:
"Protogen che il penel di sue pitture
Non levava, agguaglio il Vinci Divo,
Di cui opra non e finita pure."
The slowness with which Leonardo worked was proverbial. After the most
thorough preliminary studies he painted The Holy Supper for three years
in the cloister of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. One of his
contemporaries, Matteo Bandelli, the writer of novels, who was then a
young monk in the cloister, relates that Leonardo often ascended the
scaffold very early in the morning and did not leave the brush out of
his hand until twilight, never thinking of eating or drinking. Then days
passed without putting his hand on it, sometimes he remained for hours
before the painting and derived satisfaction from studying it by
himself. At other times he came directly to the cloister from the palace
of the Milanese Castle where he formed the model of the equestrian
statue for Francesco Sforza, in order to add a few strokes with the
brush to one of the figures and then stopped immediately.[6] According
to Vasari he worked for years on the portrait of Monna Lisa, the wife of
the Florentine de Gioconda, without being able to bring it to
completion. This circumstance may also account for the fact that it was
never delivered to the one who ordered it but remained with Leonardo who
took it with him to France.[7] Having been procured by King Francis I,
it now forms one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.
When one compares these reports about Leonardo's way of working with the
evidence of the extraordinary amount of sketches and studies left by
him, one is bound altogether to reject the idea that traits of
flightiness and unsteadiness exerted the slightest influence on
Leonardo's relation to his art. On the contrary one notices a very
extraordinary absorption in work, a richness in possibilities in which a
decision could be reached only hestitatingly, claims which could hardly
be satisfied, and an inhibition in the execution which could not even be
explained by the inevitable backwardness of the artist behind his ideal
purpose. The slowness which was striking in Leonardo's works from the
very beginning proved to be a symptom of his inhibition, a forerunner of
his turning away from painting which manifested itself later.[8] It was
this slowness which decided the not undeserving fate of The Holy
Supper. Leonardo could not take kindly to the art of fresco painting
which demands quick work while the background is still moist, it was for
this reason that he chose oil colors, the drying of which permitted him
to complete the picture according to his mood and leisure. But these
colors separated themselves from the background upon which they were
painted and which isolated them from the brick wall; the blemishes of
this wall and the vicissitudes to which the room was subjected seemingly
contributed to the inevitable deterioration of the picture.[9]
The picture of the cavalry battle of Anghiari, which in competition with
Michelangelo he began to paint later on a wall of the Sala de Consiglio
in Florence and which he also left in an unfinished state, seemed to
have perished through the failure of a similar technical process. It
seems here as if a peculiar interest, that of the experimenter, at first
reenforced the artistic, only later to damage the art production.
The character of the man Leonardo evinces still some other unusual
traits and apparent contradictions. Thus a certain inactivity and
indifference seemed very evident in him. At a time when every individual
sought to gain the widest latitude for his activity, which could not
take place without the development of energetic aggression towards
others, he surprised every one through his quiet peacefulness, his
shunning of all competition and controversies. He was mild and kind to
all, he was said to have rejected a meat diet because he did not
consider it just to rob animals of their lives, and one of his special
pleasures was to buy caged birds in the market and set them free.[10] He
condemned war and bloodshed and designated man not so much as the king
of the animal world, but rather as the worst of the wild beasts.[11] But
this effeminate delicacy of feeling did not prevent him from
accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution in order to
study and sketch in his notebook their features, distorted by fear, nor
did it prevent him from inventing the most cruel offensive weapons, and
from entering the service of Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer.
Often he seemed to be indifferent to good and evil, or he had to be
measured with a special standard. He held a high position in Cesare's
campaign which gained for this most inconsiderate and most faithless of
foes the possession of the Romagna. Not a single line of Leonardo's
sketches betrays any criticism or sympathy of the events of those days.
The comparison with Goethe during the French campaign cannot here be
altogether rejected.
If a biographical effort really endeavors to penetrate the understanding
of the psychic life of its hero it must not, as happens in most
biographies through discretion or prudery, pass over in silence the
sexual activity or the sex peculiarity of the one examined. What we know
about it in Leonardo is very little but full of significance. In a
period where there was a constant struggle between riotous
licentiousness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo presented an example of
cool sexual rejection which one would not expect in an artist and a
portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi[12] cites the following sentence
from Leonardo showing his frigidity: "The act of procreation and
everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human
beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom and if
there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions." His posthumous
works which not only treat of the greatest scientific problems but also
comprise the most guileless objects which to us do not seem worthy of so
great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, witticisms,
prophecies),[13] are chaste to a degree--one might say abstinent--that
in a work of _belle lettres_ would excite wonder even to-day. They evade
everything sexual so thoroughly, as if Eros alone who preserves
everything living was no worthy material for the scientific impulse of
the investigator.[14] It is known how frequently great artists found
pleasure in giving vent to their phantasies in erotic and even grossly
obscene representations; in contradistinction to this Leonardo left only
some anatomical drawings of the woman's internal genitals, the position
of the child in the womb, etc.
It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in love, nor is it
known that he ever entertained an intimate spiritual relation with a
woman as in the case of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. While he
still lived as an apprentice in the house of his master Verrocchio, he
with other young men were accused of forbidden homosexual relations
which ended in his acquittal. It seems that he came into this suspicion
because he employed as a model a boy of evil repute.[15] When he was a
master he surrounded himself with handsome boys and youths whom he took
as pupils. The last of these pupils Francesco Melzi, accompanied him to
France, remained with him until his death, and was named by him as his
heir. Without sharing the certainty of his modern biographers, who
naturally reject the possibility of a sexual relation between himself
and his pupils as a baseless insult to this great man, it may be thought
by far more probable that the affectionate relationships of Leonardo to
the young men did not result in sexual activity. Nor should one
attribute to him a high measure of sexual activity.
The peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life viewed in connection
with Leonardo's double nature as an artist and investigator can be
grasped only in one way. Of the biographers to whom psychological
viewpoints are often very foreign, only one, Edm. Solmi, has to my
knowledge approached the solution of the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri
Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected Leonardo as the hero of a great
historical novel has based his delineation on such an understanding of
this unusual man, and if not in dry words he gave unmistakable
utterance in plastic expression in the manner of a poet.[16] Solmi
judges Leonardo as follows: "But the unrequited desire to understand
everything surrounding him, and with cold reflection to discover the
deepest secret of everything that is perfect, has condemned Leonardo's
works to remain forever unfinished."[17] In an essay of the Conferenze
Fiorentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his
confession of faith and furnish the key to his character.
"_Nessuna cosa si puo amare ne odiare, se_
_prima no si ha cognition di quella._"[18]
That is: One has no right to love or to hate anything if one has not
acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by
Leonardo in a passage of the Treaties on the Art of Painting where he
seems to defend himself against the accusation of irreligiousness:
"But such censurers might better remain silent. For that action is the
manner of showing the workmaster so many wonderful things, and this is
the way to love so great a discoverer. For, verily great love springs
from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it
you will be able to love it only little or not at all."[19]
The value of these utterances of Leonardo cannot be found in that they
impart to us an important psychological fact, for what they maintain is
obviously false, and Leonardo must have known this as well as we do. It
is not true that people refrain from loving or hating until they have
studied and became familiar with the nature of the object to whom they
wish to give these affects, on the contrary they love impulsively and
are guided by emotional motives which have nothing to do with cognition
and whose affects are weakened, if anything, by thought and reflection.
Leonardo only could have implied that the love practiced by people is
not of the proper and unobjectionable kind, one should so love as to
hold back the affect and to subject it to mental elaboration, and only
after it has stood the test of the intellect should free play be given
to it. And we thereby understand that he wishes to tell us that this was
the case with himself and that it would be worth the effort of everybody
else to treat love and hatred as he himself does.
And it seems that in his case it was really so. His affects were
controlled and subjected to the investigation impulse, he neither loved
nor hated, but questioned himself whence does that arise, which he was
to love or hate, and what does it signify, and thus he was at first
forced to appear indifferent to good and evil, to beauty and ugliness.
During this work of investigation love and hatred threw off their
designs and uniformly changed into intellectual interest. As a matter of
fact Leonardo was not dispassionate, he did not lack the divine spark
which is the mediate or immediate motive power--_il primo motore_--of
all human activity. He only transmuted his passion into
inquisitiveness. He then applied himself to study with that
persistence, steadiness, and profundity which comes from passion, and on
the height of the psychic work, after the cognition was won, he allowed
the long checked affect to break loose and to flow off freely like a
branch of a stream, after it has accomplished its work. At the height of
his cognition when he could examine a big part of the whole he was
seized with a feeling of pathos, and in ecstatic words he praised the
grandeur of that part of creation which he studied, or--in religious
cloak--the greatness of the creator. Solmi has correctly divined this
process of transformation in Leonardo. According to the quotation of
such a passage, in which Leonardo celebrated the higher impulse of
nature ("O mirabile necessita ... ") he said: "Tale trasfigurazione
della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, e uno
dei tratti caratteristici de manoscritti vinciani, e si trova cento e
cento volte espressa...."[20]
Leonardo was called the Italian Faust on account of his insatiable and
indefatigable desire for investigation. But even if we disregard the
fact that it is the possible retransformation of the desire for
investigation into the joys of life which is presupposed in the Faust
tragedy, one might venture to remark that Leonardo's system recalls
Spinoza's mode of thinking.
The transformation of psychic motive power into the different forms of
activity is perhaps as little convertible without loss, as in the case
of physical powers. Leonardo's example teaches how many other things one
must follow up in these processes. Not to love before one gains full
knowledge of the thing loved presupposes a delay which is harmful. When
one finally reaches cognition he neither loves nor hates properly; one
remains beyond love and hatred. One has investigated instead of having
loved. It is perhaps for this reason that Leonardo's life was so much
poorer in love than those of other great men and great artists. The
storming passions of the soul-stirring and consuming kind, in which
others experience the best part of their lives, seem to have missed
him.
There are still other consequences when one follows Leonardo's dictum.
Instead of acting and producing one just investigates. He who begins to
divine the grandeur of the universe and its needs readily forgets his
own insignificant self. When one is struck with admiration and becomes
truly humble he easily forgets that he himself is a part of that living
force, and that according to the measure of his own personality he has
the right to make an effort to change that destined course of the world,
the world in which the insignificant is no less wonderful and important
than the great.
Solmi thinks that Leonardo's investigations started with his art,[21] he
tried to investigate the attributes and laws of light, of color, of
shades and of perspective so as to be sure of becoming a master in the
imitation of nature and to be able to show the way to others. It is
probable that already at that time he overestimated the value of this
knowledge for the artist. Following the guide-rope of the painter's
need, he was then driven further and further to investigate the objects
of the art of painting, such as animals and plants, and the proportions
of the human body, and to follow the path from their exterior to their
interior structure and biological functions, which really also express
themselves in their appearance and should be depicted in art. And
finally he was pulled along by this overwhelming desire until the
connection was torn from the demands of his art, so that he discovered
the general laws of mechanics and divined the history of the
stratification and fossilization of the Arno-valley, until he could
enter in his book with capital letters the cognition: _Il sole non si
move_ (The sun does not move). His investigations were thus extended
over almost all realms of natural science, in every one of which he was
a discoverer or at least a prophet or forerunner.[22] However, his
curiosity continued to be directed to the outer world, something kept
him away from the investigation of the psychic life of men; there was
little room for psychology in the "Academia Vinciana," for which he drew
very artistic and very complicated emblems.
When he later made the effort to return from his investigations to the
art from which he started he felt that he was disturbed by the new paths
of his interest and by the changed nature of his psychic work. In the
picture he was interested above all in a problem, and behind this one he
saw emerging numerous other problems just as he was accustomed in the
endless and indeterminable investigations of natural history. He was no
longer able to limit his demands, to isolate the work of art, and to
tear it out from that great connection of which he knew it formed part.
After the most exhausting efforts to bring to expression all that was in
him, all that was connected with it in his thoughts, he was forced to
leave it unfinished, or to declare it incomplete.
The artist had once taken into his service the investigator to assist
him, now the servant was stronger and suppressed his master.
When we find in the portrait of a person one single impulse very
forcibly developed, as curiosity in the case of Leonardo, we look for
the explanation in a special constitution, concerning its probable
organic determination hardly anything is known. Our psychoanalytic
studies of nervous people lead us to look for two other expectations
which we would like to find verified in every case. We consider it
probable that this very forcible impulse was already active in the
earliest childhood of the person, and that its supreme sway was fixed by
infantile impressions; and we further assume that originally it drew
upon sexual motive powers for its reenforcement so that it later can
take the place of a part of the sexual life. Such person would then,
e.g., investigate with that passionate devotion which another would give
to his love, and he could investigate instead of loving. We would
venture the conclusion of a sexual reenforcement not only in the impulse
to investigate, but also in most other cases of special intensity of an
impulse.
Observation of daily life shows us that most persons have the capacity
to direct a very tangible part of their sexual motive powers to their
professional or business activities. The sexual impulse is particularly
suited to yield such contributions because it is endowed with the
capacity of sublimation, i.e., it has the power to exchange its nearest
aim for others of higher value which are not sexual. We consider this
process as proved, if the history of childhood or the psychic
developmental history of a person shows that in childhood this powerful
impulse was in the service of the sexual interest. We consider it a
further corroboration if this is substantiated by a striking stunting in
the sexual life of mature years, as if a part of the sexual activity had
now been replaced by the activity of the predominant impulse.
The application of these assumptions to the case of the predominant
investigation-impulse seems to be subject to special difficulties, as
one is unwilling to admit that this serious impulse exists in children
or that children show any noteworthy sexual interest. However, these
difficulties are easily obviated. The untiring pleasure in questioning
as seen in little children demonstrates their curiosity, which is
puzzling to the grown-up, as long as he does not understand that all
these questions are only circumlocutions, and that they cannot come to
an end because they replace only one question which the child does not
put. When the child becomes older and gains more understanding this
manifestation of curiosity suddenly disappears. But psychoanalytic
investigation gives us a full explanation in that it teaches us that
many, perhaps most children, at least the most gifted ones, go through a
period beginning with the third year, which may be designated as the
period of _infantile sexual investigation_. As far as we know, the
curiosity is not awakened spontaneously in children of this age, but is
aroused through the impression of an important experience, through the
birth of a little brother or sister, or through fear of the same
endangered by some outward experience, wherein the child sees a danger
to his egotistic interests. The investigation directs itself to the
question whence children come, as if the child were looking for means
to guard against such undesired event. We were astonished to find that
the child refuses to give credence to the information imparted to it,
e.g., it energetically rejects the mythological and so ingenious
stork-fable, we were astonished to find that its psychic independence
dates from this act of disbelief, that it often feels itself at serious
variance with the grown-ups, and never forgives them for having been
deceived of the truth on this occasion. It investigates in its own way,
it divines that the child is in the mother's womb, and guided by the
feelings of its own sexuality, it formulates for itself theories about
the origin of children from food, about being born through the bowels,
about the role of the father which is difficult to fathom, and even at
that time it has a vague conception of the sexual act which appears to
the child as something hostile, as something violent. But as its own
sexual constitution is not yet equal to the task of producing children,
his investigation whence come children must also run aground and must be
left in the lurch as unfinished. The impression of this failure at the
first attempt of intellectual independence seems to be of a persevering
and profoundly depressing nature.[23]
If the period of infantile sexual investigation comes to an end through
an impetus of energetic sexual repression, the early association with
sexual interest may result in three different possibilities for the
future fate of the investigation impulse. The investigation either
shares the fate of the sexuality, the curiosity henceforth remains
inhibited and the free activity of intelligence may become narrowed for
life; this is especially made possible by the powerful religious
inhibition of thought, which is brought about shortly hereafter through
education. This is the type of neurotic inhibition. We know well that
the so acquired mental weakness furnishes effective support for the
outbreak of a neurotic disease. In a second type the intellectual
development is sufficiently strong to withstand the sexual repression
pulling at it. Sometimes after the disappearance of the infantile sexual
investigation, it offers its support to the old association in order to
elude the sexual repression, and the suppressed sexual investigation
comes back from the unconscious as compulsive reasoning, it is naturally
distorted and not free, but forceful enough to sexualize even thought
itself and to accentuate the intellectual operations with the pleasure
and fear of the actual sexual processes. Here the investigation becomes
sexual activity and often exclusively so, the feeling of settling the
problem and of explaining things in the mind is put in place of sexual
gratification. But the indeterminate character of the infantile
investigation repeats itself also in the fact that this reasoning never
ends, and that the desired intellectual feeling of the solution
constantly recedes into the distance. By virtue of a special disposition
the third, which is the most rare and most perfect type, escapes the
inhibition of thought and the compulsive reasoning. Also here sexual
repression takes place, it is unable, however, to direct a partial
impulse of the sexual pleasure into the unconscious, but the libido
withdraws from the fate of the repression by being sublimated from the
beginning into curiosity, and by reenforcing the powerful investigation
impulse. Here, too, the investigation becomes more or less compulsive
and a substitute of the sexual activity, but owing to the absolute
difference of the psychic process behind it (sublimation in place of the
emergence from the unconscious) the character of the neurosis does not
manifest itself, the subjection to the original complexes of the
infantile sexual investigation disappears, and the impulse can freely
put itself in the service of the intellectual interest. It takes account
of the sexual repression which made it so strong in contributing to it
sublimated libido, by avoiding all occupation with sexual themes.
In mentioning the concurrence in Leonardo of the powerful investigation
impulse with the stunting of his sexual life which was limited to the
so-called ideal homosexuality, we feel inclined to consider him as a
model example of our third type. The most essential point of his
character and the secret of it seems to lie in the fact, that after
utilizing the infantile activity of curiosity in the service of sexual
interest he was able to sublimate the greater part of his libido into
the impulse of investigation. But to be sure the proof of this
conception is not easy to produce. To do this we would have to have an
insight into the psychic development of his first childhood years, and
it seems foolish to hope for such material when the reports concerning
his life are so meager and so uncertain; and moreover, when we deal with
information which even persons of our own generation withdraw from the
attention of the observer.
We know very little concerning Leonardo's youth. He was born in 1452 in
the little city of Vinci between Florence and Empoli; he was an
illegitimate child which was surely not considered a great popular stain
in that time. His father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and descendant
of notaries and farmers, who took their name from the place Vinci; his
mother, a certain Caterina, probably a peasant girl, who later married
another native of Vinci. Nothing else about his mother appears in the
life history of Leonardo, only the writer Merejkowski believed to have
found some traces of her. The only definite information about Leonardo's
childhood is furnished by a legal document from the year 1457, a
register of assessment in which Vinci Leonardo is mentioned among the
members of the family as a five-year-old illegitimate child of Ser
Piero.[24] As the marriage of Ser Piero with Donna Albiera remained
childless the little Leonardo could be brought up in his father's house.
He did not leave this house until he entered as apprentice--it is not
known what year--in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1472
Leonardo's name could already be found in the register of the members of
the "Compagnia dei Pittori." That is all.
II
As far as I know Leonardo only once interspersed in his scientific
descriptions a communication from his childhood. In a passage where he
speaks about the flight of the vulture, he suddenly interrupts himself
in order to follow up a memory from very early years which came to his
mind.
"_It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself
so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early
memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he
opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail
against my lips._"[25]
We have here an infantile memory and to be sure of the strangest sort.
It is strange on account of its content and account of the time of life
in which it was fixed. That a person could retain a memory of the
nursing period is perhaps not impossible, but it can in no way be taken
as certain. But what this memory of Leonardo states, namely, that a
vulture opened the child's mouth with its tail, sounds so improbable, so
fabulous, that another conception which puts an end to the two
difficulties with one stroke appeals much more to our judgment. The
scene of the vulture is not a memory of Leonardo, but a phantasy which
he formed later, and transferred into his childhood. The childhood
memories of persons often have no different origin, as a matter of fact,
they are not fixated from an experience like the conscious memories from
the time of maturity and then repeated, but they are not produced until
a later period when childhood is already past, they are then changed and
disguised and put in the service of later tendencies, so that in general
they cannot be strictly differentiated from phantasies. Their nature
will perhaps be best understood by recalling the manner in which history
writing originated among ancient nations. As long as the nation was
small and weak it gave no thought to the writing of its history, it
tilled the soil of its land, defended its existence against its
neighbors by seeking to wrest land from them and endeavored to become
rich. It was a heroic but unhistoric time. Then came another age, a
period of self-realization in which one felt rich and powerful, and it
was then that one experienced the need to discover whence one originated
and how one developed. The history-writing which then continues to
register the present events throws also its backward glance to the past,
it gathers traditions and legends, it interprets what survived from
olden times into customs and uses, and thus creates a history of past
ages. It is quite natural that this history of the past ages is more the
expressions of opinions and desires of the present than a faithful
picture of the past, for many a thing escaped the people's memory, other
things became distorted, some trace of the past was misunderstood and
interpreted in the sense of the present; and besides one does not write
history through motives of objective curiosity, but because one desires
to impress his contemporaries, to stimulate and extol them, or to hold
the mirror before them. The conscious memory of a person concerning the
experiences of his maturity may now be fully compared to that of history
writing, and his infantile memories, as far as their origin and
reliability are concerned will actually correspond to the history of the
primitive period of a people which was compiled later with purposive
intent.
Now one may think that if Leonardo's story of the vulture which visited
him in his cradle is only a phantasy of later birth, it is hardly worth
while giving more time to it. One could easily explain it by his openly
avowed inclination to occupy himself with the problem of the flight of
the bird which would lend to this phantasy an air of predetermined fate.
But with this depreciation one commits as great an injustice as if one
would simply ignore the material of legends, traditions, and
interpretations in the primitive history of a people. Notwithstanding
all distortions and misunderstandings to the contrary they still
represent the reality of the past; they represent what the people formed
out of the experiences of its past age under the domination of once
powerful and to-day still effective motives, and if these distortions
could be unraveled through the knowledge of all effective forces, one
would surely discover the historic truth under this legendary material.
The same holds true for the infantile reminiscences or for the
phantasies of individuals. What a person thinks he recalls from his
childhood, is not of an indifferent nature. As a rule the memory
remnants, which he himself does not understand, conceal invaluable
evidences of the most important features of his psychic development. As
the psychoanalytic technique affords us excellent means for bringing to
light this concealed material, we shall venture the attempt to fill the
gaps in the history of Leonardo's life through the analysis of his
infantile phantasy. And if we should not attain a satisfactory degree of
certainty, we will have to console ourselves with the fact that so many
other investigations about this great and mysterious man have met no
better fate.
When we examine Leonardo's vulture-phantasy with the eyes of a
psychoanalyst then it does not seem strange very long; we recall that we
have often found similar structures in dreams, so that we may venture
to translate this phantasy from its strange language into words that are
universally understood. The translation then follows an erotic
direction. Tail, "coda," is one of the most familiar symbols, as well as
a substitutive designation of the male member which is no less true in
Italian than in other languages. The situation contained in the
phantasy, that a vulture opened the mouth of the child and forcefully
belabored it with its tail, corresponds to the idea of fellatio, a
sexual act in which the member is placed into the mouth of the other
person. Strangely enough this phantasy is altogether of a passive
character; it resembles certain dreams and phantasies of women and of
passive homosexuals who play the feminine part in sexual relations.
Let the reader be patient for a while and not flare up with indignation
and refuse to follow psychoanalysis because in its very first
applications it leads to an unpardonable slander of the memory of a
great and pure man. For it is quite certain that this indignation will
never solve for us the meaning of Leonardo's childhood phantasy; on the
other hand, Leonardo has unequivocally acknowledged this phantasy, and
we shall therefore not relinquish the expectation--or if you prefer the
preconception--that like every psychic production such as dreams,
visions and deliria this phantasy, too, must have some meaning. Let us
therefore lend our unprejudiced ears for a while to psychoanalytic work
which after all has not yet uttered the last word.
The desire to take the male member into the mouth and suck it, which is
considered as one of the most disgusting of sexual perversions, is
nevertheless a frequent occurrence among the women of our time--and as
shown in old sculptures was the same in earlier times--and in the state
of being in love seems to lose entirely its disgusting character. The
physician encounters phantasies based on this desire, even in women who
did not come to the knowledge of the possibility of such sexual
gratification by reading V. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis or
through other information. It seems that it is quite easy for the women
themselves to produce such wish-phantasies.[26] Investigation then
teaches us that this situation, so forcibly condemned by custom, may be
traced to the most harmless origin. It is nothing but the elaboration of
another situation in which we all once felt comfort, namely, when we
were in the suckling-age ("when I was still in the cradle") and took the
nipple of our mother's or wet-nurse's breast into our mouth to suck it.
The organic impression of this first pleasure in our lives surely
remains indelibly impregnated; when the child later learns to know the
udder of the cow, which in function is a breast-nipple, but in shape and
in position on the abdomen resembles the penis, it obtains the primary
basis for the later formation of that disgusting sexual phantasy.
We now understand why Leonardo displaced the memory of the supposed
experience with the vulture to his nursing period. This phantasy
conceals nothing more or less than a reminiscence of nursing--or being
nursed--at the mother's breast, a scene both human and beautiful, which
he as well as other artists undertook to depict with the brush in the
form of the mother of God and her child. At all events, we also wish to
maintain, something we do not as yet understand, that this reminiscence,
equally significant for both sexes, was elaborated in the man Leonardo
into a passive homosexual phantasy. For the present we shall not take up
the question as to what connection there is between homosexuality and
suckling at the mother's breast, we merely wish to recall that tradition
actually designates Leonardo as a person of homosexual feelings. In
considering this, it makes no difference whether that accusation against
the youth Leonardo was justified or not. It is not the real activity but
the nature of the feeling which causes us to decide whether to attribute
to some one the characteristic of homosexuality.
Another incomprehensible feature of Leonardo's infantile phantasy next
claims our interest. We interpret the phantasy of being wet-nursed by
the mother and find that the mother is replaced by a vulture. Where does
this vulture originate and how does he come into this place?
A thought now obtrudes itself which seems so remote that one is tempted
to ignore it. In the sacred hieroglyphics of the old Egyptians the
mother is represented by the picture of the vulture.[27] These Egyptians
also worshiped a motherly deity, whose head was vulture like, or who had
many heads of which at least one or two was that of a vulture.[28] The
name of this goddess was pronounced _Mut_; we may question whether the
sound similarity to our word mother (Mutter) is only accidental? So the
vulture really has some connection with the mother, but of what help is
that to us? Have we a right to attribute this knowledge to Leonardo when
Francois Champollion first succeeded in reading hieroglyphics between
1790-1832?[29]
It would also be interesting to discover in what way the old Egyptians
came to choose the vulture as a symbol of motherhood. As a matter of
fact the religion and culture of Egyptians were subjects of scientific
interest even to the Greeks and Romans, and long before we ourselves
were able to read the Egyptian monuments we had at our disposal some
communications about them from preserved works of classical antiquity.
Some of these writings belonged to familiar authors like Strabo,
Plutarch, Aminianus Marcellus, and some bear unfamiliar names and are
uncertain as to origin and time, like the hieroglyphica of Horapollo
Nilus, and like the traditional book of oriental priestly wisdom bearing
the godly name Hermes Trismegistos. From these sources we learn that the
vulture was a symbol of motherhood because it was thought that this
species of birds had only female vultures and no males.[30] The natural
history of the ancients shows a counterpart to this limitation among the
scarebaeus beetles which were revered by the Egyptians as godly, no
females were supposed to exist.[31]
But how does impregnation take place in vultures if only females exist?
This is fully answered in a passage of Horapollo.[32] At a certain time
these birds stop in the midst of their flight, open their vagina and are
impregnated by the wind.
Unexpectedly we have now reached a point where we can take something as
quite probable which only shortly before we had to reject as absurd. It
is quite possible that Leonardo was well acquainted with the scientific
fable, according to which the Egyptians represented the idea of mother
with the picture of the vulture. He was an omnivorous reader whose
interest comprised all spheres of literature and knowledge. In the Codex
Atlanticus we find an index of all books which he possessed at a certain
time,[33] as well as numerous notices about other books which he
borrowed from friends, and according to the excerpts which Fr.
Richter[34] compiled from his drawings we can hardly overestimate the
extent of his reading. Among these books there was no lack of older as
well as contemporary works treating of natural history. All these books
were already in print at that time, and it so happens that Milan was the
principal place of the young art of book printing in Italy.
When we proceed further we come upon a communication which may raise to
a certainty the probability that Leonardo knew the vulture fable. The
erudite editor and commentator of Horapollo remarked in connection with
the text (p. 172) cited before: _Caeterum hanc fabulam de vulturibus
cupide amplexi sunt Patres Ecclesiastici, ut ita argumento ex rerum
natura petito refutarent eos, qui Virginis partum negabant; itaque apud
omnes fere hujus rei mentio occurit._