ecstatic smile as it had once encircled his mother's mouth in caressing,
he had long been under the ban of an inhibition, forbidding him ever
again to desire such tenderness from women's lips. But as he had become
a painter he endeavored to reproduce this smile with his brush and
furnish all his pictures with it, whether he executed them himself or
whether they were done by his pupils under his direction, as in Leda,
John, and Bacchus. The latter two are variations of the same type.
Muther says: "From the locust eater of the Bible Leonardo made a
Bacchus, an Apollo, who with a mysterious smile on his lips, and with
his soft thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated eyes." These
pictures breathe a mysticism into the secret of which one dares not
penetrate; at most one can make the effort to construct the connection
to Leonardo's earlier productions. The figures are again androgynous but
no longer in the sense of the vulture phantasy, they are pretty boys of
feminine tenderness with feminine forms; they do not cast down their
eyes but gaze mysteriously triumphant, as if they knew of a great happy
issue concerning which one must remain quiet; the familiar fascinating
smile leads us to infer that it is a love secret. It is possible that in
these forms Leonardo disavowed and artistically conquered the
unhappiness of his love life, in that he represented the wish
fulfillment of the boy infatuated with his mother in such blissful union
of the male and female nature.
[Illustration: JOHN THE BAPTIST]
V
Among the entries in Leonardo's diaries there is one which absorbs the
reader's attention through its important content and on account of a
small formal error. In July, 1504, he wrote:
"Adi 9 Luglio, 1504, mercoledi, a ore 7 mori Ser Piero da Vinci notalio
al palazzo del Potesta, mio padre, a ore 7. Era d'eta d'anni 80, lascio
10 figlioli maschi e 2 feminine."[64]
The notice as we see deals with the death of Leonardo's father. The
slight error in its form consists in the fact that in the computation of
the time "at 7 o'clock" is repeated two times, as if Leonardo had
forgotten at the end of the sentence that he had already written it at
the beginning. It is only a triviality to which any one but a
psychoanalyst would pay no attention. Perhaps he would not even notice
it, or if his attention would be called to it he would say "that can
happen to anybody during absent-mindedness or in an affective state and
has no further meaning."
The psychoanalyst thinks differently; to him nothing is too trifling as
a manifestation of hidden psychic processes; he has long learned that
such forgetting or repetition is full of meaning, and that one is
indebted to the "absent-mindedness" when it makes possible the betrayal
of otherwise concealed feelings.
We would say that, like the funeral account of Caterina and the expense
account of the pupils, this notice, too, corresponds to a case in which
Leonardo was unsuccessful in suppressing his affects, and the long
hidden feeling forcibly obtained a distorted expression. Also the form
is similar, it shows the same pedantic precision, the same pushing
forward of numbers.[65]
We call such a repetition a perseveration. It is an excellent means to
indicate the affective accentuation. One recalls for example Saint
Peter's angry speech against his unworthy representative on earth, as
given in Dante's Paradiso:[66]
"Quegli ch'usurpa in terra il luoga mio
Il luoga mio, il luogo mio, che vaca
Nella presenza del Figliuol di Dio,
Fatto ha del cimiterio mio cloaca."
Without Leonardo's affective inhibition the entry into the diary could
perhaps have read as follows: To-day at 7 o'clock died my father, Ser
Piero da Vinci, my poor father! But the displacement of the
perseveration to the most indifferent determination of the obituary to
dying-hour robs the notice of all pathos and lets us recognize that
there was something here to conceal and to suppress.
Ser Piero da Vinci, notary and descendant of notaries, was a man of
great energy who attained respect and affluence. He was married four
times, the two first wives died childless, and not till the third
marriage has he gotten the first legitimate son, in 1476, when Leonardo
was 24 years old, and had long ago changed his father's home for the
studio of his master Verrocchio. With the fourth and last wife whom he
married when he was already in the fifties he begot nine sons and two
daughters.[67]
To be sure the father also assumed importance in Leonardo's psychosexual
development, and what is more, it was not only in a negative sense,
through his absence during the boy's first childhood years, but also
directly through his presence in his later childhood. He who as a child
desires his mother, cannot help wishing to put himself in his father's
place, to identify himself with him in his phantasy and later make it
his life's task to triumph over him. As Leonardo was not yet five years
old when he was received into his paternal home, the young step-mother,
Albiera, certainly must have taken the place of his mother in his
feeling, and this brought him into that relation of rivalry to his
father which may be designated as normal. As is known, the preference
for homosexuality did not manifest itself till near the years of
puberty. When Leonardo accepted this preference the identification with
the father lost all significance for his sexual life, but continued in
other spheres of non-erotic activity. We hear that he was fond of luxury
and pretty raiments, and kept servants and horses, although according to
Vasari's words "he hardly possessed anything and worked little." We
shall not hold his artistic taste entirely responsible for all these
special likings; we recognize in them also the compulsion to copy his
father and to excel him. He played the part of the great gentleman to
the poor peasant girl, hence the son retained the incentive that he also
play the great gentleman, he had the strong feeling "to out-herod
Herod," and to show his father exactly how the real high rank looks.
Whoever works as an artist certainly feels as a father to his works. The
identification with his father had a fateful result in Leonardo's works
of art. He created them and then troubled himself no longer about them,
just as his father did not trouble himself about him. The later
worriments of his father could change nothing in this compulsion, as the
latter originated from the impressions of the first years of childhood,
and the repression having remained unconscious was incorrigible through
later experiences.
At the time of the Renaissance, and even much later, every artist was in
need of a gentleman of rank to act as his benefactor. This patron was
wont to give the artist commissions for work and entirely controlled his
destiny. Leonardo found his patron in Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il
Moro, a man of high aspirations, ostentations, diplomatically astute,
but of an unstable and unreliable character. In his court in Milan,
Leonardo spent the best period of his life, while in his service he
evinced his most uninhibited productive activity as is evidenced in The
Last Supper, and in the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. He left
Milan before the catastrophe struck Lodovico Moro, who died a prisoner
in a French prison. When the news of his benefactor's fate reached
Leonardo he made the following entry in his diary: "The duke has lost
state, wealth, and liberty, not one of his works will be finished by
himself."[68] It is remarkable and surely not without significance that
he here raises the same reproach to his benefactor that posterity was to
apply to him, as if he wanted to lay the responsibility to a person who
substituted his father-series, for the fact that he himself left his
works unfinished. As a matter of fact he was not wrong in what he said
about the Duke.
However, if the imitation of his father hurt him as an artist, his
resistance against the father was the infantile determinant of his
perhaps equally vast accomplishment as an artist. According to
Merejkowski's beautiful comparison he was like a man who awoke too early
in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep. He dared utter
this bold principle which contains the justification for all independent
investigation: _"Chi dispute allegando l'autorita non adopra l'ingegno
ma piuttosto la memoria"_ (Whoever refers to authorities in disputing
ideas, works with his memory rather than with his reason).[69] Thus he
became the first modern natural philosopher, and his courage was
rewarded by an abundance of cognitions and suggestions; since the Greek
period he was the first to investigate the secrets of nature, relying
entirely on his observation and his own judgment. But when he learned to
depreciate authority and to reject the imitation of the "ancients" and
constantly pointed to the study of nature as the source of all wisdom,
he only repeated in the highest sublimation attainable to man, which had
already obtruded itself on the little boy who surveyed the world with
wonder. To retranslate the scientific abstractions into concrete
individual experiences, we would say that the "ancients" and authority
only corresponded to the father, and nature again became the tender
mother who nourished him. While in most human beings to-day, as in
primitive times, the need for a support of some authority is so
imperative that their world becomes shaky when their authority is
menaced, Leonardo alone was able to exist without such support; but that
would not have been possible had he not been deprived of his father in
the first years of his life. The boldness and independence of his later
scientific investigation presupposes that his infantile sexual
investigation was not inhibited by his father, and this same spirit of
scientific independence was continued by his withdrawing from sex.
If any one like Leonardo escapes in his childhood his father's
intimidation and later throws off the shackles of authority in his
scientific investigation, it would be in gross contradiction to our
expectation if we found that this same man remained a believer and
unable to withdraw from dogmatic religion. Psychoanalysis has taught us
the intimate connection between the father complex and belief in God,
and daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious
belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down. In the
parental complex we thus recognize the roots of religious need; the
almighty, just God, and kindly nature appear to us as grand sublimations
of father and mother, or rather as revivals and restorations of the
infantile conceptions of both parents. Religiousness is biologically
traced to the long period of helplessness and need of help of the little
child. When the child grows up and realizes his loneliness and weakness
in the presence of the great forces of life, he perceives his condition
as in childhood and seeks to disavow his despair through a regressive
revival of the protecting forces of childhood.
It does not seem that Leonardo's life disproves this conception of
religious belief. Accusations charging him with irreligiousness, which
in those times was equivalent to renouncing Christianity, were brought
against him already in his lifetime, and were clearly described in the
first biography given by Vasari.[70] In the second edition of his Vite
(1568) Vasari left out this observation. In view of the extraordinary
sensitiveness of his age in matters of religion it is perfectly
comprehensible to us why Leonardo refrained from directly expressing his
position to Christianity in his notes. As investigator he did not permit
himself to be misled by the account of the creation of the holy
scriptures; for instance, he disputed the possibility of a universal
flood, and in geology he was as unscrupulous in calculating with hundred
thousands of years as modern investigators.
Among his "prophecies" one finds some things that would perforce offend
the sensitive feelings of a religious Christian, e.g. Praying to the
images of Saints, reads as follows:[71]
"People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see
nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore
those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those
who do not see."
Or: Concerning mourning on Good Friday (p. 297):
"In all parts of Europe great peoples will bewail the death of one man
who died in the Orient."
It was asserted of Leonardo's art that he took away the last remnant of
religious attachment from the holy figures and put them into human form
in order to depict in them great and beautiful human feelings. Muther
praises him for having overcome the feeling of decadence, and for having
returned to man the right of sensuality and pleasurable enjoyment. The
notices which show Leonardo absorbed in fathoming the great riddles of
nature do not lack any expressions of admiration for the creator, the
last cause of all these wonderful secrets, but nothing indicates that he
wished to hold any personal relation to this divine force. The sentences
which contain the deep wisdom of his last years breathe the resignation
of the man who subjects himself to the laws of nature and expects no
alleviation from the kindness or grace of God. There is hardly any doubt
that Leonardo had vanquished dogmatic as well as personal religion, and
through his work of investigation he had withdrawn far from the world
aspect of the religious Christian.
From our views mentioned before in the development of the infantile
psychic life, it becomes clear that also Leonardo's first investigations
in childhood occupied themselves with the problems of sexuality. But he
himself betrays it to us through a transparent veil, in that he
connects his impulse to investigate with the vulture phantasy, and in
emphasizing the problem of the flight of the bird as one whose
elaboration devolved upon him through special concatenations of fate. A
very obscure as well as a prophetically sounding passage in his notes
dealing with the flight of the bird demonstrates in the nicest way with
how much affective interest he clung to the wish that he himself should
be able to imitate, the art of flying: "The human bird shall take his
first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his
fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang." He
probably hoped that he himself would sometimes be able to fly, and we
know from the wish fulfilling dreams of people what bliss one expects
from the fulfillment of this hope.
But why do so many people dream that they are able to fly?
Psychoanalysis answers this question by stating that to fly or to be a
bird in the dream is only a concealment of another wish, to the
recognition of which one can reach by more than one linguistic or
objective bridge. When the inquisitive child is told that a big bird
like the stork brings the little children, when the ancients have formed
the phallus winged, when the popular designation of the sexual activity
of man is expressed in German by the word "to bird" (voegeln), when the
male member is directly called _l'uccello_ (bird) by the Italians, all
these facts are only small fragments from a large collection which
teaches us that the wish to be able to fly signifies in the dream
nothing more or less than the longing for the ability of sexual
accomplishment. This is an early infantile wish. When the grown-up
recalls his childhood it appears to him as a happy time in which one is
happy for the moment and looks to the future without any wishes, it is
for this reason that he envies children. But if children themselves
could inform us about it they would probably give different reports. It
seems that childhood is not that blissful Idyl into which we later
distort it, that on the contrary children are lashed through the years
of childhood by the wish to become big, and to imitate the grown ups.
This wish instigates all their playing. If in the course of their
sexual investigation children feel that the grown up knows something
wonderful in the mysterious and yet so important realm, what they are
prohibited from knowing or doing, they are seized with a violent wish to
know it, and dream of it in the form of flying, or prepare this disguise
of the wish for their later flying dreams. Thus aviation, which has
attained its aim in our times, has also its infantile erotic roots.
By admitting that he entertained a special personal relation to the
problem of flying since his childhood, Leonardo bears out what we must
assume from our investigation of children of our times, namely, that his
childhood investigation was directed to sexual matters. At least this
one problem escaped the repression which has later estranged him from
sexuality. From childhood until the age of perfect intellectual maturity
this subject, slightly varied, continued to hold his interest, and it is
quite possible that he was as little successful in his cherished art in
the primary sexual sense as in his desires for mechanical matters, that
both wishes were denied to him.
As a matter of fact the great Leonardo remained infantile in some ways
throughout his whole life; it is said that all great men retain
something of the infantile. As a grown up he still continued playing,
which sometimes made him appear strange and incomprehensible to his
contemporaries. When he constructed the most artistic mechanical toys
for court festivities and receptions we are dissatisfied thereby because
we dislike to see the master waste his power on such petty stuff. He
himself did not seem averse to giving his time to such things. Vasari
reports that he did similar things even when not urged to it by request:
"There (in Rome) he made a doughy mass out of wax, and when it softened
he formed thereof very delicate animals filled with air; when he blew
into them they flew in the air, and when the air was exhausted they fell
to the ground. For a peculiar lizard caught by the wine-grower of
Belvedere Leonardo made wings from skin pulled off from other lizards,
which he filled with mercury so that they moved and trembled when it
walked; he then made for it eyes, a beard and horns, tamed it and put it
in a little box and terrified all his friends with it."[72] Such
playing often served him as an expression of serious thoughts: "He had
often cleaned the intestines of a sheep so well that one could hold them
in the hollow of the hand; he brought them into a big room, and attached
them to a blacksmith's bellows which he kept in an adjacent room, he
then blew them up until they filled up the whole room so that everybody
had to crowd into a corner. In this manner he showed how they gradually
became transparent and filled up with air, and as they were at first
limited to very little space and gradually became more and more extended
in the big room, he compared them to a genius."[73] His fables and
riddles evince the same playful pleasure in harmless concealment and
artistic investment, the riddles were put into the form of prophecies;
almost all are rich in ideas and to a remarkable degree devoid of wit.
The plays and jumps which Leonardo allowed his phantasy have in some
cases quite misled his biographers who misunderstood this part of his
nature. In Leonardo's Milanese manuscripts one finds, for example,
outlines of letters to the "Diodario of Sorio (Syria), viceroy of the
holy Sultan of Babylon," in which Leonardo presents himself as an
engineer sent to these regions of the Orient in order to construct some
works. In these letters he defends himself against the reproach of
laziness, he furnishes geographical descriptions of cities and
mountains, and finally discusses a big elementary event which occurred
while he was there.[74]
In 1881, J. P. Richter had endeavored to prove from these documents that
Leonardo made these traveler's observations when he really was in the
service of the Sultan of Egypt, and that while in the Orient he embraced
the Mohammedan religion. This sojourn in the Orient should have taken
place in the time of 1483, that is, before he removed to the court of
the Duke of Milan. However, it was not difficult for other authors to
recognize the illustrations of this supposed journey to the Orient as
what they really were, namely, phantastic productions of the youthful
artist which he created for his own amusement, and in which he probably
brought to expression his wishes to see the world and experience
adventures.
A phantastic formation is probably also the "Academia Vinciana," the
acceptance of which is due to the existence of five or six most clever
and intricate emblems with the inscription of the Academy. Vasari
mentions these drawings but not the Academy.[75] Muentz who placed such
ornament on the cover of his big work on Leonardo belongs to the few who
believe in the reality of an "Academia Vinciana."
It is probable that this impulse to play disappeared in Leonardo's
maturer years, that it became discharged in the investigating activity
which signified the highest development of his personality. But the fact
that it continued so long may teach us how slowly one tears himself away
from his infantilism after having enjoyed in his childhood supreme
erotic happiness which is later unattainable.
VI
It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find
every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach
that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an
understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is
therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as
well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly
unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a
disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at
making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should
really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The
real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when
one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a
peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study
because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a
special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a
work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their
infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile
conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the
individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his
life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in
him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a
cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel
distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they
thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their
infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the
most attractive secrets of human nature.[76]
Leonardo himself, judging from his love for the truth and his
inquisitiveness, would have interposed no objections to the effort of
discovering the determinations of his psychic and intellectual
development from the trivial peculiarities and riddles of his nature. We
respect him by learning from him. It does no injury to his greatness to
study the sacrifices which his development from the child must have
entailed, and to the compile factors which have stamped on his person
the tragic feature of failure.
Let us expressly emphasize that we have never considered Leonardo as a
neurotic or as a "nervous person" in the sense of this awkward term.
Whoever takes it amiss that we should even dare apply to him viewpoints
gained from pathology, still clings to prejudices which we have at
present justly given up. We no longer believe that health and disease,
normal and nervous, are sharply distinguished from each other, and that
neurotic traits must be judged as proof of general inferiority. We know
to-day that neurotic symptoms are substitutive formations for certain
repressive acts which have to be brought about in the course of our
development from the child to the cultural man, that we all produce
such substitutive formations, and that only the amount, intensity, and
distribution of these substitutive formations justify the practical
conception of illness and the conclusion of constitutional inferiority.
Following the slight signs in Leonardo's personality we would place him
near that neurotic type which we designate as the "compulsive type," and
we would compare his investigation with the "reasoning mania" of
neurotics, and his inhibitions with the so-called "abulias" of the
latter.
The object of our work was to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo's
sexual life and in his artistic activity. For this purpose we shall now
sum up what we could discover concerning the course of his psychic
development.