two pack-sacks to be made. Ask Boltraffio to show thee his turning-lathe
and let him polish a stone on it.--Leave the book to master Andrea il
Todesco."[42] Or he wrote a resolution of quite different significance:
"Thou must show in thy treatise that the earth is a star, like the moon
or resembling it, and thus prove the nobility of our world."[43]
In this diary, which like the diaries of other mortals often skim over
the most important events of the day with only few words or ignore them
altogether, one finds a few entries which on account of their
peculiarity are cited by all of Leonardo's biographers. They show
notations referring to the master's petty expenses, which are recorded
with painful exactitude as if coming from a pedantic and strictly
parsimonious family father, while there is nothing to show that he spent
greater sums, or that the artist was well versed in household
management. One of these notes refers to a new cloak which he bought for
his pupil Andrea Salaino:[44]
Silver brocade Lira 15 Soldi 4
Crimson velvet for trimming " 9 " 0
Braid " 0 " 9
Buttons " 0 " 12
Another very detailed notice gives all the expenses which he incurred
through the bad qualities and the thieving tendencies of another pupil
or model: "On 21st day of April, 1490, I started this book and started
again the horse.[45] Jacomo came to me on Magdalene day, 1490, at the
age of ten years (marginal note: thievish, mendacious, willful,
gluttonous). On the second day I ordered for him two shirts, a pair of
pants, and a jacket, and as I put the money away to pay for the things
named he stole the money from my purse, and it was never possible to
make him confess, although I was absolutely sure of it (marginal note: 4
Lira ...)." So the report continues concerning the misdeeds of the
little boy and concludes with the expense account: "In the first year, a
cloak, Lira 2: 6 shirts, Lira 4: 3 jackets, Lira 6: 4 pair of socks,
Lira 7, etc."[46]
Leonardo's biographers, to whom nothing was further than to solve the
riddle in the psychic life of their hero from these slight weaknesses
and peculiarities, were wont to remark in connection with these peculiar
accounts that they emphasized the kindness and consideration of the
master for his pupils. They forget thereby that it is not Leonardo's
behavior that needs an explanation, but the fact that he left us these
testimonies of it. As it is impossible to ascribe to him the motive of
smuggling into our hands proofs of his kindness, we must assume that
another affective motive caused him to write this down. It is not easy
to conjecture what this motive was, and we could not give any if not
for another account found among Leonardo's papers which throws a
brilliant light on these peculiarly petty notices about his pupils'
clothes, and others of a kind:[47]
Burial expenses following the death of Caterina 27 florins
2 pounds wax 18 "
Cataphalc 12 "
For the transportation and erection of the cross 4 "
Pall bearers 8 "
To 4 priests and 4 clerics 20 "
Ringing of bells 2 "
To grave diggers 16 "
For the approval--to the officials 1 "
------------
To sum up 108 florins
Previous expenses:
To the doctor 4 florins
For sugar and candles 12 "
16 florins
------------
Sum total 124 florins
The writer Merejkowski is the only one who can tell us who this Caterina
was. From two different short notices he concludes that she was the
mother of Leonardo, the poor peasant woman from Vinci, who came to Milan
in 1493 to visit her son then 41 years old. While on this visit she fell
ill and was taken to the hospital by Leonardo, and following her death
she was buried by her son with such sumptuous funeral.[48]
This deduction of the psychological writer of romances is not capable of
proof, but it can lay claim to so many inner probabilities, it agrees so
well with everything we know besides about Leonardo's emotional activity
that I cannot refrain from accepting it as correct. Leonardo succeeded
in forcing his feelings under the yoke of investigation and in
inhibiting their free utterance, but even in him there were episodes in
which the suppression obtained expression, and one of these was the
death of his mother whom he once loved so ardently. Through this account
of the burial expenses he represents to us the mourning of his mother in
an almost unrecognizable distortion. We wonder how such a distortion
could have come about, and we certainly cannot grasp it when viewed
under normal mental processes. But similar mechanisms are familiar to us
under the abnormal conditions of neuroses, and especially in the
so-called _compulsion neurosis_. Here one can observe how the
expressions of more intensive feelings have been displaced to trivial
and even foolish performances. The opposing forces succeeded in debasing
the expression of these repressed feelings to such an extent that one is
forced to estimate the intensity of these feelings as extremely
unimportant, but the imperative compulsion with which these
insignificant acts express themselves betrays the real force of the
feelings which are rooted in the unconscious, which consciousness would
wish to disavow. Only by bearing in mind the mechanisms of compulsion
neurosis can one explain Leonardo's account of the funeral expenses of
his mother. In his unconscious he was still tied to her as in childhood,
by erotically tinged feelings; the opposition of the repression of this
childhood love which appeared later stood in the way of erecting to her
in his diary a different and more dignified monument, but what resulted
as a compromise of this neurotic conflict had to be put in operation and
hence the account was entered in the diary which thus came to the
knowledge of posterity as something incomprehensible.
It is not venturing far to transfer the interpretation obtained from the
funeral expenses to the accounts dealing with his pupils. Accordingly we
would say that here also we deal with a case in which Leonardo's meager
remnants of libidinous feelings compulsively obtained a distorted
expression. The mother and the pupils, the very images of his own boyish
beauty, would be his sexual objects--as far as his sexual repression
dominating his nature would allow such manifestations--and the
compulsion to note with painful circumstantiality his expenses on their
behalf, would designate the strange betrayal of his rudimentary
conflicts. From this we would conclude that Leonardo's love-life really
belonged to that type of homosexuality, the psychic development of which
we were able to disclose, and the appearance of the homosexual situation
in his vulture-phantasy would become comprehensible to us, for it states
nothing more or less than what we have asserted before concerning that
type. It requires the following interpretation: Through the erotic
relations to my mother I became a homosexual.[49]
IV
The vulture phantasy of Leonardo still absorbs our interest. In words
which only too plainly recall a sexual act ("and has many times struck
against my lips with his tail"), Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of
the erotic relations between the mother and the child. A second memory
content of the phantasy can readily be conjectured from the association
of the activity of the mother (of the vulture) with the accentuation of
the mouth zone. We can translate it as follows: My mother has pressed on
my mouth innumerable passionate kisses. The phantasy is composed of the
memories of being nursed and of being kissed by the mother.
[Illustration: MONA LISA]
A kindly nature has bestowed upon the artist the capacity to express in
artistic productions his most secret psychic feelings hidden even to
himself, which powerfully affect outsiders who are strangers to the
artist without their being able to state whence this emotivity comes.
Should there be no evidence in Leonardo's work of that which his memory
retained as the strongest impression of his childhood? One would have to
expect it. However, when one considers what profound transformations an
impression of an artist has to experience before it can add its
contribution to the work of art, one is obliged to moderate considerably
his expectation of demonstrating something definite. This is especially
true in the case of Leonardo.
He who thinks of Leonardo's paintings will be reminded by the remarkably
fascinating and puzzling smile which he enchanted on the lips of all his
feminine figures. It is a fixed smile on elongated, sinuous lips which
is considered characteristic of him and is preferentially designated as
"Leonardesque." In the singular and beautiful visage of the Florentine
Monna Lisa del Giocondo it has produced the greatest effect on the
spectators and even perplexed them. This smile was in need of an
interpretation, and received many of the most varied kind but none of
them was considered satisfactory. As Gruyer puts it: "It is almost four
centuries since Monna Lisa causes all those to lose their heads who have
looked upon her for some time."[50]
Muther states:[51] "What fascinates the spectator is the demoniacal
charm of this smile. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about
this woman, who now seems to smile upon us seductively and now to stare
coldly and lifelessly into space, but nobody has solved the riddle of
her smile, nobody has interpreted her thoughts. Everything, even the
scenery is mysterious and dream-like, trembling as if in the sultriness
of sensuality."
The idea that two diverse elements were united in the smile of Monna
Lisa has been felt by many critics. They therefore recognize in the play
of features of the beautiful Florentine lady the most perfect
representation of the contrasts dominating the love-life of the woman
which is foreign to man, as that of reserve and seduction, and of most
devoted tenderness and inconsiderateness in urgent and consuming
sensuality. Muentz[52] expresses himself in this manner: "One knows what
indecipherable and fascinating enigma Monna Lisa Gioconda has been
putting for nearly four centuries to the admirers who crowd around her.
No artist (I borrow the expression of the delicate writer who hides
himself under the pseudonym of Pierre de Corlay) has ever translated in
this manner the very essence of femininity: the tenderness and coquetry,
the modesty and quiet voluptuousness, the whole mystery of the heart
which holds itself aloof, of a brain which reflects, and of a
personality who watches itself and yields nothing from herself except
radiance...." The Italian Angelo Conti[53] saw the picture in the Louvre
illumined by a ray of the sun and expressed himself as follows: "The
woman smiled with a royal calmness, her instincts of conquest, of
ferocity, the entire heredity of the species, the will of seduction and
ensnaring, the charm of the deceiver, the kindness which conceals a
cruel purpose, all that appears and disappears alternately behind the
laughing veil and melts into the poem of her smile.... Good and evil,
cruelty and compassion, graceful and cat-like, she laughed...."
Leonardo painted this picture four years, perhaps from 1503 until 1507,
during his second sojourn in Florence when he was about the age of fifty
years. According to Vasari he applied the choicest artifices in order to
divert the lady during the sittings and to hold that smile firmly on her
features. Of all the gracefulness that his brush reproduced on the
canvas at that time the picture preserves but very little in its present
state. During its production it was considered the highest that art
could accomplish; it is certain, however, that it did not satisfy
Leonardo himself, that he pronounced it as unfinished and did not
deliver it to the one who ordered it, but took it with him to France
where his benefactor Francis I, acquired it for the Louvre.
Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Monna Lisa unsolved, and let us
note the unequivocal fact that her smile fascinated the artist no less
than all the spectators for these 400 years. This captivating smile had
thereafter returned in all of his pictures and in those of his pupils.
As Leonardo's Monna Lisa was a portrait we cannot assume that he has
added to her face a trait of his own so difficult to express which she
herself did not possess. It seems, we cannot help but believe, that he
found this smile in his model and became so charmed by it that from now
on he endowed it on all the free creations of his phantasy. This obvious
conception is, e.g., expressed by A. Konstantinowa in the following
manner:[54]
"During the long period in which the master occupied himself with the
portrait of Monna Lisa del Gioconda, he entered into the physiognomic
delicacies of this feminine face with such sympathy of feeling that he
transferred these creatures, especially the mysterious smile and the
peculiar glance, to all faces which he later painted or drew. The mimic
peculiarity of Gioconda can even be perceived in the picture of John the
Baptist in the Louvre. But above all they are distinctly recognized in
the features of Mary in the picture of St. Anne of the Louvre."
But the case could have been different. The need for a deeper reason for
the fascination which the smile of Gioconda exerted on the artist from
which he could not rid himself has been felt by more than one of his
biographers. W. Pater, who sees in the picture of Monna Lisa the
embodiment of the entire erotic experience of modern man, and discourses
so excellently on "that unfathomable smile always with a touch of
something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work," leads
us to another track when he says:[55]
"Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image
defining itself on the fabric of his dream; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady,
embodied and beheld at last."
Herzfeld surely must have had something similar in mind when stating
that in Monna Lisa Leonardo encountered himself and therefore found it
possible to put so much of his own nature into the picture, "whose
features from time immemorial have been imbedded with mysterious
sympathy in Leonardo's soul."[56]
Let us endeavor to clear up these intimations. It was quite possible
that Leonardo was fascinated by the smile of Monna Lisa, because it had
awakened something in him which had slumbered in his soul for a long
time, in all probability an old memory. This memory was of sufficient
importance to stick to him once it had been aroused; he was forced
continually to provide it with new expression. The assurance of Pater
that we can see an image like that of Monna Lisa defining itself from
Leonardo's childhood on the fabric of his dreams, seems worthy of belief
and deserves to be taken literally.
Vasari mentions as Leonardo's first artistic endeavors, "heads of women
who laugh."[57] The passage, which is beyond suspicion, as it is not
meant to prove anything, reads more precisely as follows:[58] "He formed
in his youth some laughing feminine heads out of lime, which have been
reproduced in plaster, and some heads of children, which were as
beautiful as if modeled by the hands of a master...."
Thus we discover that his practice of art began with the representation
of two kinds of objects, which would perforce remind us of the two kinds
of sexual objects which we have inferred from the analysis of his
vulture phantasy. If the beautiful children's heads were reproductions
of his own childish person, then the laughing women were nothing else
but reproductions of Caterina, his mother, and we are beginning to have
an inkling of the possibility that his mother possessed that mysterious
smile which he lost, and which fascinated him so much when he found it
again in the Florentine lady.[59]
[Illustration: SAINT ANNE]
The painting of Leonardo which in point of time stands nearest to the
Monna Lisa is the so-called Saint Anne of the Louvre, representing
Saint Anne, Mary and the Christ child. It shows the Leonardesque smile
most beautifully portrayed in the two feminine heads. It is impossible
to find out how much earlier or later than the portrait of Monna Lisa
Leonardo began to paint this picture. As both works extended over years,
we may well assume that they occupied the master simultaneously. But it
would best harmonize with our expectation if precisely the absorption in
the features of Monna Lisa would have instigated Leonardo to form the
composition of Saint Anne from his phantasy. For if the smile of
Gioconda had conjured up in him the memory of his mother, we would
naturally understand that he was first urged to produce a glorification
of motherhood, and to give back to her the smile he found in that
prominent lady. We may thus allow our interest to glide over from the
portrait of Monna Lisa to this other hardly less beautiful picture, now
also in the Louvre.
Saint Anne with the daughter and grandchild is a subject seldom treated
in the Italian art of painting; at all events Leonardo's representation
differs widely from all that is otherwise known. Muther states:[60]
"Some masters like Hans Fries, the older Holbein, and Girolamo dei
Libri, made Anne sit near Mary and placed the child between the two.
Others like Jakob Cornelicz in his Berlin pictures, represented Saint
Anne as holding in her arm the small figure of Mary upon which sits the
still smaller figure of the Christ child." In Leonardo's picture Mary
sits on her mother's lap, bent forward and is stretching out both arms
after the boy who plays with a little lamb, and must have slightly
maltreated it. The grandmother has one of her unconcealed arms propped
on her hip and looks down on both with a blissful smile. The grouping is
certainly not quite unconstrained. But the smile which is playing on the
lips of both women, although unmistakably the same as in the picture of
Monna Lisa, has lost its sinister and mysterious character; it expresses
a calm blissfulness.[61]
On becoming somewhat engrossed in this picture it suddenly dawns upon
the spectator that only Leonardo could have painted this picture, as
only he could have formed the vulture phantasy. This picture contains
the synthesis of the history of Leonardo's childhood, the details of
which are explainable by the most intimate impressions of his life. In
his father's home he found not only the kind step-mother Donna Albiera,
but also the grandmother, his father's mother, Monna Lucia, who we will
assume was not less tender to him than grandmothers are wont to be. This
circumstance must have furnished him with the facts for the
representation of a childhood guarded by a mother and grandmother.
Another striking feature of the picture assumes still greater
significance. Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and the grandmother of the
boy who must have been a matron, is formed here perhaps somewhat more
mature and more serious than Saint Mary, but still as a young woman of
unfaded beauty. As a matter of fact Leonardo gave the boy two mothers,
the one who stretched out her arms after him and another who is seen in
the background, both are represented with the blissful smile of maternal
happiness. This peculiarity of the picture has not failed to excite the
wonder of the authors. Muther, for instance, believes that Leonardo
could not bring himself to paint old age, folds and wrinkles, and
therefore formed also Anne as a woman of radiant beauty. Whether one can
be satisfied with this explanation is a question. Other writers have
taken occasion to deny generally the sameness of age of mother and
daughter.[62] However, Muther's tentative explanation is sufficient
proof for the fact that the impression of Saint Anne's youthful
appearance was furnished by the picture and is not an imagination
produced by a tendency.
Leonardo's childhood was precisely as remarkable as this picture. He has
had two mothers, the first his true mother, Caterina, from whom he was
torn away between the age of three and five years, and a young tender
step-mother, Donna Albiera, his father's wife. By connecting this fact
of his childhood with the one mentioned above and condensing them into a
uniform fusion, the composition of Saint Anne, Mary and the Child,
formed itself in him. The maternal form further away from the boy
designated as grandmother, corresponds in appearance and in spatial
relation to the boy, with the real first mother, Caterina. With the
blissful smile of Saint Anne the artist actually disavowed and concealed
the envy which the unfortunate mother felt when she was forced to give
up her son to her more aristocratic rival, as once before her lover.
Our feeling that the smile of Monna Lisa del Gioconda awakened in the
man the memory of the mother of his first years of childhood would thus
be confirmed from another work of Leonardo. Following the production of
Monna Lisa, Italian artists depicted in Madonnas and prominent ladies
the humble dipping of the head and the peculiar blissful smile of the
poor peasant girl Caterina, who brought to the world the noble son who
was destined to paint, investigate, and suffer.
When Leonardo succeeded in reproducing in the face of Monna Lisa the
double sense comprised in this smile, namely, the promise of unlimited
tenderness, and sinister threat (in the words of Pater), he remained
true even in this to the content of his earliest reminiscence. For the
love of the mother became his destiny, it determined his fate and the
privations which were in store for him. The impetuosity of the caressing
to which the vulture phantasy points was only too natural. The poor
forsaken mother had to give vent through mother's love to all her
memories of love enjoyed as well as to all her yearnings for more
affection; she was forced to it, not only in order to compensate herself
for not having a husband, but also the child for not having a father who
wanted to love it. In the manner of all ungratified mothers she thus
took her little son in place of her husband, and robbed him of a part of
his virility by the too early maturing of his eroticism. The love of the
mother for the suckling whom she nourishes and cares for is something
far deeper reaching than her later affection for the growing child. It
is of the nature of a fully gratified love affair, which fulfills not
only all the psychic wishes but also all physical needs, and when it
represents one of the forms of happiness attainable by man it is due, in
no little measure, to the possibility of gratifying without reproach
also wish feelings which were long repressed and designated as
perverse.[63] Even in the happiest recent marriage the father feels that
his child, especially the little boy has become his rival, and this
gives origin to an antagonism against the favorite one which is deeply
rooted in the unconscious.