A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud (1910)
Who was Sigmund Freud?
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian psychologist. He developed a model of depth psychology, known as psychoanalysis. Its goal was to heal people from mental suffering by exploring their unconscious and attempting to resolve hidden conflicts. Freud's methods—he popularized hypnosis and advocated for the use of cocaine as a medicine for local anesthesia, performance enhancement, and depression ("On Coca," 1884)—as well as his views on the psyche are now considered outdated and have been replaced by the scientific methods of biological psychology.
Sigmund Freud’s life achievement included intellectual support for the women’s movement, for which he advocated throughout his life. He particularly helped it to free itself from the restrictive norms of the era. His work provided women with access to a deeper understanding of the dominant male world, which until then had largely not regarded them as equals. Among his female students were his daughter Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte, a relative of Napoleon. Other students of Freud included Alfred Adler and Carl Jung.
Although the son of a practicing Jewish father, he was always highly critical of religion and is even said to have described himself as its greatest enemy. Sigmund Freud lived in Vienna until Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, after which he emigrated to London, where he passed away on September 23, 1939.
Sigmund Freud had a lasting influence on the arts, with the surrealist movement drawing heavily on his ideas. Its most prominent representative, Salvador Dalí, was a close acquaintance of Freud. Many of Dalí’s paintings are dedicated to Freud’s theories.
What is the purpose of Freud's text on Leonardo da Vinci?
The purpose of the text is to demonstrate the significance of considering the inner life when writing biographies. Freud illustrates this using the example of Leonardo da Vinci, even though there are only a handful of sources regarding Leonardo's childhood, which is particularly crucial for Freud's argument. Nevertheless, Freud concludes that Leonardo da Vinci must have been a passive homosexual due to his childhood experiences. In the conclusion of his work, he justifies himself:
"If such an endeavor, as perhaps in the case of Leonardo, does not yield definitive results, the fault does not lie in the flawed or insufficient methodology of psychoanalysis, but in the uncertainty and incompleteness of the material that tradition provides for this person."
Thus, Freud's text should not be understood as a scientifically substantiated statement about Leonardo da Vinci's sexuality, but rather serves merely as an example of the methodology Freud proposed for a biography. That his text is often cited as evidence of Leonardo's homosexuality is likely due to the fact that it is rarely read but frequently referenced.
Freud's Fateful Translation Error
Of great significance to Freud's argument is the vulture, which he interprets as a mythical symbol of motherly love. He references a childhood memory of Leonardo’s, but he mistranslates it. The Italian word "nibbio" in the memory does not mean vulture, as Freud mistakenly assumes, but rather refers to a kite, a type of bird of prey.
Additionally, Freud identifies the vulture as a hidden image in one of Leonardo's paintings. It is one of Freud’s achievements that hidden images are now accepted in a scientific context and even regarded as windows into the souls of artists. Encouraged by this idea, one of Freud’s admirers, the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, made extensive use of it within the framework of his self-devised method of "Critical Paranoia."

Freud uses details of the painting for his argumentation


It seems that I was destined from the beginning to concern myself so thoroughly with the kite, for it comes to mind as a very early memory that, when I was still in the cradle, a kite descended to me, opened my mouth with its tail, and repeatedly struck my lips with its tail.
A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci
Complete Edition of 1910
Note: Freud's text has the peculiarity of incorporating foreign-language quotes or original words without translation. Translations have been added at the corresponding points.
Chapter I
If psychoanalytic research, which usually contents itself with studying ordinary human material, approaches one of the great figures of humanity, it does not do so for the motives so often attributed to it by laypeople. It does not seek to "tarnish the radiant or bring the sublime into the dust"; it finds no satisfaction in reducing the distance between that perfection and the inadequacy of its usual subjects. Rather, it cannot help but find everything about such exemplary figures worthy of understanding, believing that no one is so great that it would be shameful for them to be subject to the laws that govern both normal and pathological behavior with equal rigor.
As one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was admired by his contemporaries, yet even they found him enigmatic, as we do now. A versatile genius, "whose contours one can only guess at—never fully comprehend," he exerted the most decisive influence on his time as a painter. It is only in our time that we have come to appreciate the greatness of the scientist (and engineer) who was united with the artist within him. Although he left behind masterpieces of painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, the researcher in him never fully released the artist, often severely impairing him and perhaps ultimately suppressing him. Vasari attributes to him, in his final moments, the self-reproach that he had offended both God and humanity by not fulfilling his duty in his art ("Egli per reverenza, rizzatosi a sedere sul letto, contando il mal suo e gli accidenti di quello, mostrava tuttavia, quanto aveva offeso Dio e gli uomini del mondo, non avendo operato nell' arte come si conveniva. [He (Leonardo) rose reverently to sit up in bed, describing his illness and its circumstances, showing how much he had offended God and the men of the world by not performing in art as was his duty.] Vasari, Vite etc. LXXXIII (1550)).
Even if Vasari’s account lacks both external and internal plausibility, belonging instead to the legend that began to form around the mysterious master even during his lifetime, it nevertheless retains undeniable value as testimony to the judgment of those people and times.
What was it that rendered Leonardo’s personality incomprehensible to his contemporaries? Certainly not the versatility of his talents and knowledge, which allowed him to introduce himself at the court of Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, Duke of Milan, as a lute player with an instrument of his own design, or to write that remarkable letter to the same person, boasting of his achievements as an architect and military engineer. The Renaissance was accustomed to such a combination of diverse skills in a single person; indeed, Leonardo himself was one of its most dazzling examples. Nor did he belong to that type of genius, outwardly ill-favored by nature, who disregard the external forms of life and retreat into misanthropic gloom.
On the contrary, he was tall and well-proportioned, of perfect facial beauty, and of extraordinary physical strength. Charming in his manners, a master of eloquence, cheerful and amiable toward all, he loved beauty in the things around him, enjoyed wearing splendid garments, and valued all refinements of living.
In a significant passage in the treatise on painting (1909), he compared painting with its sister arts and described the hardships of the sculptor’s work: "The sculptor has his face smeared and powdered with marble dust so that he looks like a baker, and he is covered with tiny marble splinters, so it seems as though snow had fallen on his back. His dwelling is filled with chips and dust. The painter, on the other hand, sits comfortably before his work, well-dressed, and moves the light brush with graceful colors. He is adorned with garments as he pleases. His abode is filled with cheerful paintings and shines with cleanliness. He often enjoys the company of music or the reading of beautiful works, and this is done without the din of hammers or other noise, with great pleasure."
It is certainly possible that the image of a radiantly cheerful and pleasure-loving Leonardo is only accurate for the earlier, longer period of the master’s life. From the time when the downfall of Ludovico il Moro forced him to leave Milan, his sphere of influence, and his secure position, leading to a restless life with few external successes until his final asylum in France, the brilliance of his mood may have faded, and some of the more puzzling traits of his character may have become more pronounced.
The increasing shift of his interests from art to science as he aged must also have contributed to widening the gap between him and his contemporaries. All the experiments, which they regarded as wasting time he should have spent diligently painting and enriching himself, like his former fellow student Perugino, appeared to them as eccentric whims or led to suspicions that he practiced "black magic."
We understand him better, knowing from his notes the arts he practiced. In an age that began to replace the authority of the Church with that of antiquity and knew no unfettered research, he, a precursor, and a not unworthy contemporary of Bacon and Copernicus, was inevitably isolated. When he dissected horses and human cadavers, built flying machines, studied the nutrition of plants and their reactions to poisons, he indeed distanced himself from the commentators on Aristotle and approached the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research found at least a refuge during those unfavorable times. This affected his painting, making him reluctant to pick up the brush, painting less and less often, leaving most of his projects unfinished, and showing little concern for the fate of his works.
That was also what his contemporaries reproached him for, their relationship to art remaining a mystery to them. Several later admirers of Leonardo tried to erase the stigma of inconsistency from his character. They argue that what is criticized in Leonardo is characteristic of great artists in general. Even the energetic and diligent Michelangelo left many of his works unfinished, and it was no more his fault than Leonardo's in similar cases. Moreover, many paintings were not so much unfinished as declared so by him. What seems to the layman to be a masterpiece often remains an unsatisfactory embodiment of his intentions to the creator of the artwork, who always envisions a perfection he despairs of achieving.
Yet, as valid as some of these excuses may be, they do not cover the entire reality that confronts us in Leonardo. The painful struggle with his work, the eventual flight from it, and indifference to its subsequent fate may recur in many other artists; certainly, Leonardo exhibited this behavior to the highest degree. Edmund Solmi quotes (1910, 12) the remark of one of his students: "Pareva, che ad ogni ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipingere, e però non diede mal fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell' arte, tal che egli scorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad altri parevano miracoli. [It seemed that he trembled at every moment when he painted, leaving unfinished everything he began, because he valued the greatness of art so highly that he saw flaws in what others considered miracles.]"
»Protogen che il penel di sue pitture on levava,
agguaglio il Vinci Divo,
Di cui opra non è finita pure.
[Protogen, who never set aside the brush of his paintings,
reached the divinity of Vinci,
whose work remained unfinished.]«
The slowness with which Leonardo worked was proverbial. At the Last Supper in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he painted for three years after the most thorough preliminary studies. A contemporary, the novelist Matteo Bandello, who at the time was a young monk at the monastery, recounts that Leonardo often climbed the scaffold early in the morning and worked with his brush until dusk, without thinking of eating or drinking. Then days would pass without him touching it, at times standing for hours in front of the painting, content to examine it internally. Other times, he came directly from the courtyard of the Milanese castle, where he was modeling the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, to the monastery to add a few brushstrokes to a figure before immediately leaving again. According to Vasari, he worked on the portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of the Florentine Francesco del Giocondo, for four years without being able to bring it to final completion, which might also explain why the painting was not delivered to its commissioner but remained with Leonardo, who took it to France. Purchased by King Francis I, it is now one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.
If one compares these accounts of Leonardo’s working methods with the testimony of the extraordinarily numerous sketches and studies he left behind, which vary every motif in his paintings to the utmost extent, one must firmly reject the notion that traits of haste or inconsistency had the slightest influence on Leonardo’s relationship with his art. On the contrary, one notices an extraordinary depth, a wealth of possibilities, between which decisions were made only hesitantly, demands that were scarcely satisfiable, and an inhibition in execution that cannot simply be explained by the inevitable falling short of the artist’s ideal intent. The slowness that had always characterized Leonardo’s work proves to be a symptom of this inhibition, a precursor of his later withdrawal from painting. (»But it is certain that at a certain point in his life, he almost ceased to be an artist.« – W. Pater, *The Renaissance*, translated into German, second edition, 1906.) It was also what determined the not entirely blameless fate of *The Last Supper*. Leonardo could not come to terms with fresco painting, which requires rapid work while the ground is still wet; hence, he chose oil paints, whose drying process allowed him to extend the completion of the painting according to his mood and leisure. However, these paints separated from the surface to which they were applied, isolating them from the wall; the flaws of the wall and the events in the space contributed to what seems to be the inevitable deterioration of the painting.
The painting of the Battle of Anghiari, which he later began in competition with Michelangelo on a wall of the Sala del Consiglio in Florence and abandoned unfinished, appears to have been lost due to the failure of a similar technical experiment. Here, it seems as though a foreign interest—that of the experimenter—initially strengthened the artistic intention, only to later harm the artwork. The character of the man Leonardo displayed many other unusual traits and apparent contradictions. A certain inactivity and indifference seemed unmistakable in him. At a time when every individual sought the broadest space for their activity, which could not be achieved without the development of energetic aggression against others, he stood out for his peacefulness, avoiding all antagonisms and disputes. He was mild and kind to all, allegedly abstained from eating meat because he did not consider it justified to take the lives of animals, and took special pleasure in buying birds at the market to set them free. (A letter from a contemporary in India to a Medici refers to this peculiarity of Leonardo, according to J. P. Richter.) He condemned war and bloodshed and regarded humans not as the kings of the animal world but rather as the worst of wild beasts. Yet this feminine sensitivity did not prevent him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution to study and sketch their fear-distorted faces in his notebook, nor did it stop him from designing the most cruel weapons of war or serving as chief military engineer for Cesare Borgia. He often appeared indifferent to good and evil or demanded to be measured by a special standard. In a key position, he participated in Cesare’s campaign, which brought this most ruthless and treacherous of opponents into possession of the Romagna. Not a single line in Leonardo’s writings reveals criticism or involvement in the events of those days. The comparison with Goethe during the campaign in France cannot be entirely dismissed here.
If a biographical attempt truly aims to penetrate the inner life of its subject, it must not, as is often the case in biographies out of discretion or prudery, pass over the sexual activity or sexual characteristics of the individual in silence. What is known about Leonardo in this regard is little but significant. In an era that saw unrestrained sensuality battling somber asceticism, Leonardo was an example of cool sexual renunciation, something unexpected in an artist and depicter of female beauty.
Solmi (1908) quotes the following sentence from him, which characterizes his frigidity: »The act of procreation and everything connected to it is so repulsive that humanity would soon die out if it were not for pretty faces and sensual inclinations being customary.«
His surviving writings, which not only address the highest scientific problems but also include harmless trifles that seem hardly worthy of such a great mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, jokes, prophecies), are marked by a chastity—one might even say abstinence—that would seem astonishing in a work of fine literature even today. They avoid all things sexual so decisively that it seems as though Eros, the force that sustains all life, was not considered a worthy subject for the curiosity of the researcher. (Perhaps the jokes he collected—*belle facezie*, which remain untranslated—constitute an exception, though an inconsequential one.) It is well known how often great artists delight in indulging their imaginations in erotic or even coarse and obscene representations; in contrast, we have from Leonardo only a few anatomical drawings of the female internal genitalia, the position of the fetus in the womb, and similar subjects.

[The sheet referenced by Dr. R. Reitler is reproduced here without cropping the edges]
A drawing by Leonardo, depicting the sexual act in an anatomical sagittal section and certainly not to be called obscene, reveals some peculiar errors, which Dr. R. Reitler identified and discussed in light of the characteristics of Leonardo described here:
»And this extraordinary drive for research failed entirely in the depiction of the act of procreation—of course, only due to his even greater sexual repression.
The male body is drawn in full figure, while the female body is only partially depicted. If one shows the reproduced drawing to an impartial observer in such a way that all parts below the head are covered, it can be expected with certainty that the head will be perceived as female. The wavy locks on the forehead, as well as those cascading along the back down to approximately the 4th or 5th dorsal vertebra, distinctly characterize the head as more feminine than virile.
The female breast shows two deficiencies, firstly in artistic terms, as its outline presents the appearance of an unattractive, sagging breast, and secondly in anatomical terms, as the researcher Leonardo was apparently prevented by his sexual repression from carefully observing the nipple of a nursing woman even once. Had he done so, he would have noticed that milk flows out of various separate ducts. However, Leonardo depicted only a single channel that extends deep into the abdominal cavity and likely, in Leonardo's view, draws milk from the *Cysterna chyli* and perhaps connects with the sexual organs in some way. [*Cysterna chyli* is a sac-like enlargement of the lymphatic vessels at the caudal end of the thoracic duct. It is part of the lymphatic system and collects lymph from the abdominal cavity and lower extremities.] It must be considered that studying the internal organs of the human body was extremely difficult at the time, as the dissection of corpses was regarded as desecration and strictly punished. Whether Leonardo, who had very limited access to dissection material, knew anything at all about the existence of a lymph reservoir in the abdominal cavity is therefore highly questionable, although his drawing undeniably depicts a cavity that could be interpreted as such. That he drew the milk duct extending further downward to reach the internal sexual organs suggests that he sought to represent the temporal coincidence of the onset of milk secretion with the end of pregnancy through apparent anatomical connections.
While we are willing to excuse the artist's inadequate anatomical knowledge in light of the circumstances of his time, it is nevertheless striking that Leonardo treated the female genitalia so negligently. The vagina and a hint of the *portio uteri* can be recognized, but the uterus itself is drawn in completely confused lines. The male genitalia, on the other hand, Leonardo depicted much more accurately. For example, he did not settle for simply drawing the testicle but also correctly included the epididymis [spermatic ducts] in the sketch.
The position in which Leonardo depicted coitus is extraordinarily peculiar. There are images and drawings by eminent artists that depict *coitus a tergo* [Latin for "from behind"], *a latere* [Latin for "from the side"], and so forth, but to draw sexual intercourse standing—this must surely suggest a particularly strong sexual repression as the cause of this solitary, almost grotesque depiction. When one wishes to enjoy something, one usually tries to make oneself as comfortable as possible. This applies, of course, to both primal instincts: hunger and love. Most ancient civilizations took a reclining position while eating, and during coitus, people today normally recline just as comfortably as their ancestors did. Reclining expresses the desire to remain in the desired situation for a longer period.
Even the facial features of the feminine male head show an outright unwilling defense. The eyebrows are furrowed, the gaze is directed sideways with an expression of shyness, the lips are pressed together, and their corners are turned downward. This face truly shows neither the pleasure of giving love nor the bliss of granting it; it expresses only reluctance and disgust. However, Leonardo made his grossest error in drawing the two lower extremities. The man’s foot should have been the right one because Leonardo depicted the act of procreation in the form of an anatomical sagittal section; thus, the man’s left foot would logically be positioned above the edge of the image, and conversely, the woman’s foot would belong to the left side for the same reason. In reality, however, Leonardo reversed male and female. The man’s figure has a left foot, and the woman’s figure has a right foot. To discern this reversal most easily, one need only consider that the big toes belong to the inner side of the feet. From this anatomical drawing alone, one could deduce the nearly overwhelming sexual repression that confused the great artist and researcher.«

[The lines of the drawing are so faint in the lower part that it is difficult to follow Dr. R. Reitler's explanation regarding the position of the feet.]
This account by Reitler has, however, been criticized for asserting that such serious conclusions should not be drawn from a fleeting sketch, and it is not even certain that the parts of the drawing truly belong together. It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in love; nor is there any known instance of an intimate emotional relationship with a woman, such as Michelangelo's with Vittoria Colonna.
While he was still an apprentice in the house of his master Verrocchio, he, along with other young men, faced a charge of forbidden homosexual relations, which ended in his acquittal. It seems that he came under suspicion because he used a boy of questionable reputation as a model. (This incident is referenced in a cryptic and variably interpreted passage in the *Codex Atlanticus*: "Quando io feci Domeneddio putto voi mi metteste in prigione, ora s'io lo fo grande, voimi farete peggio" ["When I made God the Father’s child, you threw me in prison. Now, if I make him grown, you will do worse to me"].)
As a master, he surrounded himself with beautiful boys and young men, whom he accepted as students. The last of these students, Francesco Melzi, accompanied him to France, stayed with him until his death, and was named his heir. Without sharing the certainty of his modern biographers, who naturally reject as groundless slander the possibility of sexual relations between him and his students, it seems far more likely that Leonardo’s tender relationships with the young men who shared his life in the manner of students of that time did not culminate in sexual activity. Nor should he be assumed to have engaged in much sexual activity at all.
The nature of this emotional and sexual life can only be understood in connection with Leonardo’s dual character as an artist and researcher. Among biographers, who often lack psychological insights, only one to my knowledge—Edmund Solmi—has approached the resolution of this enigma. A poet, however, who made Leonardo the hero of a great historical novel, Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, based his portrayal on such an understanding of this extraordinary man, and his interpretation, though not expressed in plain words, is unmistakably conveyed in the poet’s vivid depiction (*Leonardo da Vinci*, German translation, 1903, the centerpiece of a great trilogy of novels titled *Christ and Antichrist*. The other two volumes are *Julian the Apostate* and *Peter the Great and Alexei*). Solmi judged Leonardo: »But the insatiable desire to know everything around him and to uncover the deepest mysteries of all perfection with cold detachment condemned Leonardo’s works to remain perpetually unfinished.«
In an essay from the *Conference Fiorentine*, a statement by Leonardo is quoted that reveals his credo and the key to his nature: "Nessuna cosa si può amare nè odiare, se prima non si ha cognition di quella." In other words: One has no right to love or hate anything without first attaining a profound understanding of its nature. And Leonardo repeats the same sentiment in a passage from his treatise on painting, where he seems to defend himself against the accusation of irreligion: "Such critics should remain silent. For that (practice) is the way to know the master of so many admirable things, and this the path to love such a great creator. For truly, great love arises from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it little, you will love it little or not at all..."
The value of these statements by Leonardo cannot be found in their communication of significant psychological facts, as what they assert is evidently false, and Leonardo must have known this as well as we do. It is not true that people wait to love or hate until they have studied and understood the object of these emotions; rather, they love impulsively, based on emotional motives unrelated to understanding, whose influence reflection and contemplation can at best diminish. Thus, Leonardo could only have meant that what people commonly practice is not proper, flawless love; one should love in such a way that one restrains the emotion, subjects it to thought, and allows it to act freely only after it has passed the test of reason. And we understand that he is telling us this is how it was for him; it would be desirable for everyone else to treat love and hate as he did.
And it truly seems to have been so for him. His emotions were restrained, subordinated to his drive for research; he neither loved nor hated but asked himself where the source of what he might love or hate lay and what it meant, and so he initially appeared indifferent to good and evil, to beauty and ugliness. During this process of inquiry, love and hate shed their emotional signs and transformed uniformly into intellectual interest. In reality, Leonardo was not devoid of passion; he did not lack the divine spark that, directly or indirectly, is the driving force (*il primo motore*) of all human actions. He had merely transformed his passion into a thirst for knowledge; he pursued research with the perseverance, steadiness, and depth derived from passion. At the height of intellectual work, after achieving understanding, he would unleash the long-restrained emotion, letting it flow freely like a diverted stream released after powering its work. At the pinnacle of insight, when he could grasp a significant portion of the whole, he would be seized by pathos and, in ecstatic words, praise the grandeur of the creation he had studied—or, in religious terms, the greatness of its Creator. Solmi accurately captured this process of transformation in Leonardo. After quoting a passage in which Leonardo celebrated the sublime necessity of nature ("O mirabile necessità..." ["O admirable necessity"]), Solmi remarks: "Tale trasfigurazione della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, è uno dei tratti caratteristici de' manoscritti vinciani, e si trova cento e cento volte espressa ..." ["This transfiguration of natural science into what I would almost call a religious emotion is one of the characteristic traits of Leonardo’s manuscripts and is expressed a hundred and one times ..."].
Leonardo has been called the Italian Faust because of his insatiable and tireless drive for knowledge. But leaving aside all concerns about the possible transformation of the drive for knowledge back into the joys of life—which we must assume as a prerequisite of the Faustian tragedy—one might venture to suggest that Leonardo’s development borders on a Spinozist way of thinking.
The transformations of psychic drive energy into various forms of activity may be just as irreversibly convertible as those of physical forces. Leonardo’s example teaches us many things about these processes. From the delay of loving only after one has achieved understanding, a substitution arises. One no longer truly loves or hates once one has attained understanding; one remains beyond love and hate. One researches instead of loving. And perhaps for this reason, Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than that of other great figures and artists. The tempestuous passions of uplifting and consuming nature, in which others experienced their best moments, seem not to have touched him.
And there are other consequences. One has also researched instead of acting or creating. Those who have begun to sense the grandeur of the world's interconnectedness and its necessities easily lose their own small self. Immersed in admiration, truly humbled, they too easily forget that they are themselves a part of those active forces and may attempt, to the extent of their personal power, to alter a small piece of the necessary flow of the world—a world in which the small is no less wonderful and significant than the great.
Leonardo may have, as Solmi suggests, begun to research in service of his art: »Leonardo aveva posto, come regola al pittore, lo studio della natura..., poi la passione dello studio era divenuta dominante, egli aveva voluto acquistare non più la scienza per l'arte, ma la scienza per la scienza.« ["Leonardo had established the study of nature as a rule for the painter..., then the passion for study became dominant; he no longer wanted to acquire science for the sake of art but science for its own sake"]. He studied the properties and laws of light, color, shadow, and perspective to master the imitation of nature and guide others along the same path. Even then, he probably overestimated the value of this knowledge for the artist. Driven still by the painterly need, he sought to understand the objects of painting—animals and plants, the proportions of the human body—moving from their external appearance to knowledge of their inner structure and life functions, which are expressed in their appearance and demand representation by art. Finally, the overwhelming drive carried him away until the connection to the demands of his art was severed, leading him to discover the general laws of mechanics, deduce the history of sedimentation and fossils in the Arno Valley, and eventually record in his book, in large letters, the realization: *Il sole non si move* ["The sun does not move"]. He extended his investigations into nearly all areas of natural science, becoming on each one either a discoverer or at least a predictor and pioneer. (See the enumeration of his scientific achievements in the excellent biographical introduction by Marie Herzfeld (1906), in the individual essays of the *Conferenze Fiorentine* (1910), and elsewhere.)
Yet his thirst for knowledge remained directed toward the external world; something kept him distant from exploring the inner lives of people. In the *Academia Vinciana*, for which he designed intricate emblems, there was little room for psychology. When he attempted to return from research to artistic practice, where he had begun, he experienced in himself the disruption caused by the new orientation of his interests and the altered nature of his psychic work. In an artwork, what interested him most was a single problem, and behind this one, he saw countless others emerge, as he was accustomed to in his endless and unfinishable natural studies. He could no longer bring himself to limit his ambition, to isolate the artwork, to tear it out of the great interconnectedness in which he knew it belonged. After exhaustive efforts to express everything in it that his thoughts associated with it, he had to leave it unfinished or declare it incomplete. The artist had once employed the researcher as a helper; now the servant had become the stronger and suppressed his master.
When we find a single drive overly dominant in a person's character, as in Leonardo's case with curiosity, we often attribute this to a specific disposition, whose likely organic basis remains largely unknown.
However, our psychoanalytic studies of neurotics incline us toward two further hypotheses, which we are eager to see confirmed in individual cases. We consider it likely that such an overpowering drive already manifested in the person’s earliest childhood and that its dominance was shaped by childhood impressions. Furthermore, we assume that it originally drew on sexual energies for reinforcement, allowing it later to represent a part of the sexual life. Such a person, for example, would research with the same passionate devotion with which another invests in love, and they might research instead of loving. Not only in the case of the drive for research but also in most other instances of extraordinary intensity of a drive, we would venture to infer sexual reinforcement of that drive.
Observations of daily life show us that most people succeed in channeling considerable portions of their sexual energy into their professional activities. The sexual drive is particularly suited to contributing in this way because it has the capacity for sublimation—that is, it can replace its immediate goal with other, possibly higher-valued and non-sexual goals. We consider this process proven if a person’s childhood history—that is, their psychological development—shows that the overpowering drive in childhood served sexual interests. Further confirmation arises when, in the mature years, their sexual life exhibits a noticeable diminishment, as though a portion of sexual activity had been replaced by the activity of the dominant drive.
The application of these expectations to the case of an overpowering drive for knowledge seems particularly challenging, as one might not attribute such a serious drive—or significant sexual interests—to children. However, these challenges are easily resolved. The insatiable curiosity of young children is evidenced by their tireless questioning, which baffles adults until they understand that all these questions are merely circumlocutions and that they cannot end, as the child is trying to replace a single unspoken question. Once the child grows older and more perceptive, this expression of curiosity often abruptly ceases. Full clarification comes through psychoanalytic investigation, which reveals that many, perhaps most—certainly the most gifted—children undergo a period starting around the age of three that can be described as one of "infantile sexual research." As far as we know, the curiosity of children at this age does not arise spontaneously but is awakened by the impression of an important event, such as the birth of a sibling, either already occurring or feared after external experiences. The child perceives this as a threat to its egotistical interests. The research is directed at the question of where babies come from, as though the child were seeking means and methods to prevent such an undesirable event.
We are astonished to learn that the child rejects the explanations it is given—for example, the mythologically rich stork story—with great determination, dating its intellectual independence from this act of disbelief. Often, it feels its first opposition to adults and never truly forgives them for deceiving it about the truth. The child seeks its own answers, deduces the presence of the baby in the mother's womb, and, guided by its own sexual inclinations, develops ideas about the child’s origin from eating, its birth through the bowels, the difficult-to-grasp role of the father, and even an early intuition of the sexual act, which appears to the child as hostile and violent. However, just as its own sexual constitution is not yet suited to procreation, its research on where babies come from is destined to fail and remain incomplete. The impact of this failure in the first test of intellectual independence seems to be profound and deeply discouraging.
To support these seemingly implausible claims, one may refer to the *Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy* (1909 b) and similar observations. In an essay on *Infantile Sexual Theories* (1908 c), I wrote: "This brooding and doubting becomes a model for all later intellectual work on problems, and the first failure continues to exert a paralyzing influence forever."
If the period of infantile sexual research is concluded by a surge of vigorous sexual repression, three different possibilities emerge for the fate of the drive for knowledge, stemming from its early association with sexual interests.
Either the drive for research shares the fate of sexuality: curiosity remains inhibited from that point onward, and the free exercise of intelligence is possibly restricted for life, especially as a powerful religious intellectual inhibition is shortly thereafter reinforced through education. This is the type of neurotic inhibition. We can readily understand how such acquired intellectual weakness facilitates the emergence of a neurotic disorder.
In a second type, intellectual development is robust enough to resist the strain of sexual repression. Some time after the cessation of infantile sexual research, when intelligence has strengthened, it recalls the old association and offers its assistance in bypassing sexual repression. Suppressed sexual research returns from the unconscious as an obsessive compulsion, albeit distorted and constrained but powerful enough to sexualize thought itself, imbuing intellectual operations with the pleasure and anxiety of actual sexual acts. Research here becomes a form of sexual activity, often exclusive; the sense of resolution in thought and clarification replaces sexual satisfaction. However, the endless nature of the child’s research repeats itself, as this brooding never reaches a conclusion, and the sought-after intellectual sense of resolution remains ever out of reach.
The third, rarest, and most complete type escapes both intellectual inhibition and neurotic compulsive thinking due to a special disposition. Here too, sexual repression occurs, but it fails to force a partial drive of sexual desire into the unconscious. Instead, libido avoids repression by sublimating itself from the outset into curiosity, reinforcing the drive for research. Research thus becomes a form of compulsion and a substitute for sexual activity, but because of the entirely different underlying psychological processes (sublimation instead of a breakthrough from the unconscious), the character of neurosis is absent, the fixation on the original complexes of infantile sexual research is lifted, and the drive can freely operate in the service of intellectual interests. The drive for research, bolstered by sublimated libido, still acknowledges sexual repression by avoiding engagement with sexual themes.
When we consider Leonardo's overpowering drive for research alongside the stunted nature of his sexual life—restricted to so-called ideal homosexuality—we may be inclined to classify him as a prime example of our third type. That he succeeded, after the infantile engagement of his curiosity in the service of sexual interests, in sublimating the greater part of his libido into a drive for research would be the core and mystery of his being. However, the proof of this hypothesis is not easily provided. To substantiate it, we would need insights into the psychological development of his earliest childhood years, and it seems foolish to hope for such material when the accounts of his life are so sparse and unreliable, and when they pertain to conditions that even in our own generation escape the observer’s attention. We know very little about Leonardo's youth.
He was born in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, between Florence and Empoli. He was an illegitimate child, which at that time was certainly not regarded as a severe social stigma. His father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary descended from a family of notaries and farmers who derived their name from the town of Vinci. His mother, Caterina, was likely a peasant girl who later married another resident of Vinci. This mother does not appear further in Leonardo's life story, though the poet Merezhkovsky believes he has traced her presence. The only reliable information about Leonardo's childhood comes from an official document from 1457, a Florentine tax register, which lists Leonardo as a five-year-old illegitimate child of Ser Piero among the household members of the Vinci family. Ser Piero's marriage to a Donna Albiera was childless, so young Leonardo could be raised in his father's household. He left this paternal home only when, at an unknown age, he became an apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. By 1472, Leonardo’s name already appears in the register of members of the *Compagnia dei Pittori* ["Guild of Painters"]. That is all.
Chapter II
Only once, as far as I am aware, did Leonardo include a reference to his childhood in one of his scientific notes. At a point where he was discussing the flight of vultures, he suddenly interrupted himself to follow a memory emerging from his earliest years.
»It seems that it was already destined for me to concern myself so deeply with the vulture, for a very early memory comes to my mind. When I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, opened my mouth with its tail, and struck my lips many times with this tail.«
»Questo scriver si distintamente del nibio par che sia mio destino, perchè nella mia prima ricordatione della mia infantia e' mi parea che, essendo io in culla, che un nibio venissi a me e mi aprissi la bocca colla sua coda e molte volte mi percuotesse con tal coda dentro alle labbra.« (*Codex Atlanticus*, folio 65 verso)
Thus, a childhood memory—and a highly peculiar one at that. Peculiar due to its content and the time of life to which it is attributed. That a person could retain a memory from their infancy is perhaps not impossible, but it cannot be considered certain. What this memory of Leonardo claims—that a vulture opened the child's mouth with its tail—sounds so improbable, so fantastical, that another interpretation, resolving both difficulties at once, seems more appealing to our judgment. That scene with the vulture is likely not a memory of Leonardo's but rather a fantasy he later constructed and projected onto his childhood. Havelock Ellis, in a charming review of this work (1910), objected to the above interpretation, suggesting that Leonardo's memory could very well have had a real basis, as children's memories often reach much further back than generally believed. The large bird did not necessarily have to be a vulture. I am willing to concede this and, to mitigate the difficulty, propose that the mother might have observed the visit of a large bird to her child—which she could easily interpret as a significant omen—and later recounted it to the child. The child could then retain the memory of this tale and later confuse it, as often happens, with a memory of personal experience. However, this amendment does not diminish the validity of my argument. The late-formed fantasies of individuals about their childhoods often lean on small realities of this otherwise forgotten past. Therefore, a hidden motive must still exist to bring out the insignificant reality and shape it in the way Leonardo did with the bird, transformed into a vulture, and its peculiar behavior.
Childhood memories of individuals often have no other origin; they are not fixed and repeated by experiences, as conscious memories from adulthood are, but are instead recalled later, after childhood has passed, altered, falsified, and placed in the service of later tendencies. As such, they cannot be strictly distinguished from fantasies. Perhaps their nature can best be understood by comparing them to how historical writing developed among ancient peoples. As long as a people were small and weak, they did not think of writing their history; they tilled the land, defended their existence against neighbors, sought to seize land from them, and aimed for wealth. It was a heroic and unhistorical time.
Then came a different era, when they became reflective, felt rich and powerful, and now desired to learn where they came from and how they had become what they were. Historical writing, which had begun to record the events of the present in a continuous manner, turned its gaze backward into the past, collecting traditions and legends, interpreting remnants of old times in customs and practices, and thus creating a history of prehistory. It was inevitable that this prehistory would be more an expression of the opinions and wishes of the present than a representation of the past, as much had been erased from the memory of the people, other elements had been distorted, and many traces of the past were misunderstood in the light of the present. Moreover, history was not written from motives of objective curiosity but to influence contemporaries, to inspire, uplift, or hold a mirror to them. The conscious memory of a person’s experiences in maturity is comparable to such historical writing, and their childhood memories correspond, in their origin and reliability, to the late and tendentious histories of a people’s prehistory.
If Leonardo's tale of the vulture visiting him in his cradle is thus merely a late-born fantasy, one might think it hardly worth dwelling on further. Its explanation could suffice with the openly stated tendency to lend his engagement with the problem of bird flight the sanctity of predestination. Yet dismissing it lightly would commit a similar injustice as casually rejecting the material of legends, traditions, and interpretations in the prehistory of a people. Despite all distortions and misunderstandings, the reality of the past is represented in them; they are what the people shaped from the experiences of their earliest times under the influence of once powerful and still active motives. If one could reverse these distortions by understanding all the forces at play, the historical truth behind this legendary material could be uncovered. The same applies to the childhood memories or fantasies of individuals. It is not inconsequential what a person believes they remember from their childhood; in general, such remnants, not understood by the individual themselves, conceal invaluable evidence of the most significant traits of their psychological development. I have since attempted to make similar use of an unexplained childhood memory in the case of another great figure.
(In Goethe’s autobiography, *Poetry and Truth*, written around his sixtieth year, he recounts on the first pages how, at the instigation of neighbors, he threw small and large clay vessels out the window onto the street, where they shattered. This is the only scene he reports from his earliest years. The seemingly unrelated content, its similarity to childhood memories of other children who did not become particularly great, and the fact that Goethe does not mention his younger brother in this passage—born when Goethe was three and three-quarters years old and who died nearly seven years later—prompted me to analyze this childhood memory. (He does mention this sibling later when reflecting on the illnesses of childhood.) I hoped through analysis to replace it with something that better fits into the context of Goethe’s narrative and is more worthy, by its content, of preservation and its place in the life story. The brief analysis (*A Childhood Memory from Poetry and Truth*) allowed the act of throwing the dishes to be recognized as a magical act directed against an intrusive rival. Where the event is reported, it should signify the triumph that no second son could permanently disrupt Goethe’s intimate relationship with his mother. That the earliest childhood memory preserved in such disguises pertains to the mother—in Goethe’s case as in Leonardo’s—what would be surprising about that?)
Now that we possess excellent tools in psychoanalytic techniques to bring such hidden aspects to light, we are permitted to attempt filling the gap in Leonardo's life story by analyzing his childhood fantasy. Should we fail to achieve a satisfactory degree of certainty, we must console ourselves that many other inquiries into this great and enigmatic man have fared no better.
When we view Leonardo's vulture fantasy through the lens of psychoanalysis, it quickly ceases to seem strange; we recall having encountered similar instances in dreams, for example, allowing us to dare to translate this fantasy from its unique language into commonly understood terms. The translation points to an erotic meaning. "Tail" (*coda*) is one of the most well-known symbols and euphemisms for the male genitalia, in Italian as in other languages. The situation contained within the fantasy—of a vulture opening the child’s mouth with its tail and vigorously working it inside—corresponds to the concept of fellatio, a sexual act in which the penis is introduced into the mouth of the other person. Strangely enough, this fantasy is thoroughly passive in nature; it also resembles certain dreams and fantasies of women or passive homosexuals (who take on the female role in sexual intercourse).
Let the reader restrain themselves and refrain from rejecting psychoanalysis in indignant outrage because its initial applications lead to what might appear as an unforgivable insult to the memory of a great and pure man.
It is evident that this outrage could never explain the meaning of Leonardo's childhood fantasy; meanwhile, Leonardo unequivocally acknowledged this fantasy, and we maintain the expectation—or, if you prefer, the prejudice—that such a fantasy, like any psychological creation, whether a dream, vision, or delusion, must have some meaning. Let us, therefore, give the analytical work, which has not yet spoken its final word, a fair hearing for a while.
The inclination to take the male member into the mouth to suck on it, which in bourgeois society is considered one of the most reprehensible sexual perversions, is nonetheless very common among women of our time—and, as ancient artworks prove, also in earlier times—and seems to completely shed its offensive nature under the influence of love. Physicians encounter fantasies rooted in this inclination even among women who have not been introduced to the idea of such sexual satisfaction through literature like Krafft-Ebing's *Psychopathia Sexualis* or other sources. It appears that women can easily generate such wish fantasies on their own. (See also *Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria* (1905 e).) Further investigation reveals that this socially condemned situation is merely a reworking of another situation in which we all once felt comfortable: during infancy (*essendo io in culla* ["while I was in the cradle"]), when we took the nipple of our mother or nurse into our mouth to suckle. The organic impression of this first life pleasure is likely indelibly imprinted; when the child later encounters the udder of a cow—which functionally resembles a nipple but in shape and position on the abdomen resembles a penis—it has the precursor for forming the later, socially offensive sexual fantasy.
We now understand why Leonardo attributed the memory of the supposed experience with the vulture to his infancy. Behind this fantasy lies nothing other than a reminiscence of suckling—or being suckled—at the mother’s breast, a scene of human beauty that he, like so many other artists, sought to depict with his brush in representations of the Virgin Mary and Child. However, we must also note what we do not yet understand: why this memory, equally significant for both genders, was reworked by the man Leonardo into a passive homosexual fantasy. We will set aside, for now, the question of what connection might exist between homosexuality and suckling at the mother’s breast and simply recall that tradition indeed identifies Leonardo as someone with homosexual inclinations. It matters little to us whether the accusation against the young Leonardo was justified or not; for us, it is not the actual activity but the emotional orientation that determines whether someone exhibits the characteristic of inversion.
Another puzzling aspect of Leonardo's childhood fantasy demands our attention. We interpret the fantasy as concerning being suckled by the mother and find the mother replaced by a vulture. Where does this vulture come from, and how does it take this place? An idea presents itself, so remote that one might be tempted to discard it. In the sacred pictorial script of the ancient Egyptians, the mother was indeed represented by the image of a vulture (*Horapollo, Hieroglyphica* 1, 11. Μητέρα δεράφοντες... γυ̃πα ζωγραφου̃σιν). These Egyptians also worshiped a maternal deity, who was depicted with a vulture's head or multiple heads, at least one of which was that of a vulture. This goddess was called *Mut*; is the similarity in sound with our word "mother" merely coincidental? Thus, the vulture is indeed related to the mother, but how does this help us? Can we reasonably attribute such knowledge to Leonardo, given that the deciphering of hieroglyphs was only achieved by François Champollion (1790–1832)?
One might be curious about how the ancient Egyptians came to choose the vulture as a symbol of motherhood. Egyptian religion and culture had already been subjects of scholarly curiosity for the Greeks and Romans, and long before we could read the monuments of Egypt ourselves, certain details about them were available through preserved writings of classical antiquity. These writings come partly from known authors, such as Strabo, Plutarch, and Ammianus Marcellinus, and partly from unknown sources with uncertain origins and dates, such as the *Hieroglyphica* of Horapollo Nilus and the book of Oriental priestly wisdom attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. From these sources, we learn that the vulture was considered a symbol of motherhood because it was believed that there were only female vultures and no males of this bird species. *γυ̃πα δὲ άρρενα ού φασι γινέσθαι ποτε, αλλὰ θηλείας απάσας* [There are said to be no male vultures; all are female.] Ancient natural history also recognized a counterpart to this claim; in the scarab beetles, revered as divine by the Egyptians, they believed only males existed. Plutarch writes: *Veluti scarabaeos mares tantum esse putarunt Aegyptii sic inter vultures mares non inveniri statuerunt* [Just as the Egyptians thought there were only male scarabs, they also believed there were no male vultures]. How, then, did vultures reproduce if they were all female? A passage from Horapollo provides a clear explanation: at a certain time, these birds stop in flight, open their wombs, and receive impregnation from the wind.
Unexpectedly, we have now arrived at the conclusion that something we recently dismissed as absurd is quite likely. Leonardo could very well have known the scientific myth that credited the vulture with being used by the Egyptians to symbolize motherhood. He was a voracious reader whose interests spanned all areas of literature and knowledge. In the *Codex Atlanticus*, we have a catalog of all the books he owned at a certain time, as well as numerous notes about other books he borrowed from friends. Based on the excerpts compiled by Fr. Richter from his writings, the breadth of his reading is nearly impossible to overestimate. Among these works were older as well as contemporary texts of scientific content. All of these books were already in print at the time, and Milan, in particular, was Italy's main hub for the burgeoning art of printing.
As we proceed further, we encounter evidence that raises the likelihood of Leonardo knowing the vulture myth to near certainty. The learned editor and commentator of Horapollo writes regarding the previously cited text (172): »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 occurrit.« [?] Thus, the fable about the single-sex nature and conception of vultures was by no means an insignificant anecdote, unlike the analogous tale of the scarabs. The Church Fathers seized upon it as a naturalistic argument against those who denied the Virgin birth. Since, according to the best ancient accounts, vultures relied on the wind for conception, why could the same not occur in a human woman? This utility caused the Church Fathers to frequently recount the vulture myth, and it can hardly be doubted that such influential patronage would have brought it to Leonardo's attention.
We can now imagine the genesis of Leonardo's vulture fantasy in the following way: Upon reading, perhaps in a Church Father or a scientific text, that all vultures were female and could reproduce without the aid of males, a memory arose within him, transforming into the fantasy that he, too, was a vulture child—one who had a mother but no father. Along with this, as old impressions manifest themselves, came a lingering echo of the pleasure he experienced at his mother's breast. The authors' association with the sacred image of the Virgin and Child, cherished by every artist, must have added to the value and significance of this fantasy for him. Thus, he came to identify himself with the Christ Child, the comforter and redeemer not only of one woman.
When we analyze a childhood fantasy, we aim to separate its real memory content from the later motives that modify and distort it. In Leonardo's case, we believe we now know the real content of the fantasy: the substitution of the mother with the vulture indicates that the child missed the father and found himself alone with the mother. The fact of Leonardo's illegitimate birth aligns with his vulture fantasy; only because of this could he compare himself to a vulture child. However, we have learned from the next verifiable fact of his youth that at the age of five, he was taken into his father's household. When this occurred—whether a few months after his birth or a few weeks before the recording of that tax register—remains entirely unknown. Here, the interpretation of the vulture fantasy intervenes, suggesting that Leonardo spent the critical early years of his life not with his father and stepmother but with his poor, abandoned biological mother, giving him time to feel his father's absence. This may seem a meager and still risky result of psychoanalytic effort, yet it gains significance with further consideration.
Additional reflection on the factual circumstances of Leonardo's childhood lends support to this interpretation. Reports indicate that his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, married the noblewoman Donna Albiera in the same year as Leonardo's birth. The childlessness of this marriage secured the boy's documented admission into his father’s—or rather his grandfather’s—household at the age of five. It was not customary to entrust an illegitimate child to the care of a young wife hoping for her own offspring from the outset. Years of disappointment must have passed before they decided to adopt the charmingly developed illegitimate child as compensation for the hoped-for but unrealized legitimate offspring. It aligns well with the interpretation of the vulture fantasy if at least three, perhaps five, years of Leonardo's life had passed before he exchanged his lonely mother for a parental pair. By then, however, it was too late. Impressions and reaction patterns to the outside world formed during the first three or four years of life cannot be undermined by later experiences.
If it is true that the incomprehensible childhood memories and fantasies built upon them always highlight the most important aspects of a person’s psychological development, then the fact, confirmed by the vulture fantasy, that Leonardo spent his earliest years alone with his mother must have had a decisive influence on the shaping of his inner life. Among the effects of this situation, it is unsurprising that a child confronted with one more problem in their young life than other children would begin to ponder these mysteries with particular passion, becoming an early researcher preoccupied with the great questions of where babies come from and what role the father plays in their creation. The awareness of this connection between his research and his childhood history likely later prompted Leonardo to declare that it had been destined for him from the cradle to immerse himself in the problem of bird flight, as he had been visited by a vulture in infancy. Deriving his curiosity about bird flight from infantile sexual research will be a subsequent, easily accomplished task.
Chapter III
In Leonardo’s childhood fantasy, the element of the vulture represented the real memory content; the context in which Leonardo himself placed this fantasy shed a clear light on the significance of this content for his later life. As we proceed with the interpretative work, we encounter the puzzling problem of why this memory content was transformed into a homosexual situation. The mother, who nurses the child—or better: from whom the child suckles—has been transformed into a vulture, which places its tail into the child’s mouth. We assert that the “coda” of the vulture, in common substitutive linguistic usage, can mean nothing other than a male genital organ, a penis. However, we do not understand how the imaginative process arrived at equipping the maternal bird specifically with the hallmark of masculinity. Confronted by this absurdity, we begin to doubt whether it is even possible to reduce this fantasy construct to a rational meaning. Yet, we must not despair. How many seemingly absurd dreams have we already compelled to admit their meaning! Why should it be more difficult to do so with a childhood fantasy than with a dream?
Let us recall that it is rarely good when a peculiarity is found in isolation, and let us hasten to place another, even more striking one, alongside it. The vulture-headed goddess Mut of the Egyptians, a figure of entirely impersonal character as judged by Drexler in Roscher’s *Lexikon*, was often merged with other maternal deities of more vivid individuality, such as Isis and Hathor. However, she retained her separate existence and veneration alongside them. It was a particular characteristic of the Egyptian pantheon that individual gods did not vanish into syncretism. Alongside the composite gods, the simple, distinct forms of gods retained their independence. This vulture-headed maternal deity was frequently depicted in phallic form by the Egyptians; her body, marked as female by the presence of breasts, also bore a male organ in a state of erection.

With the goddess Mut, we encounter the same union of maternal and masculine characteristics as in Leonardo’s vulture fantasy! Should we explain this coincidence by assuming that Leonardo also knew, through his studies, about the androgynous nature of the maternal vulture? Such a possibility is highly doubtful; it seems that the sources available to him contained no reference to this peculiar attribute. It is more plausible to trace the correspondence to a common, yet unknown, motive influencing both contexts.
Mythology informs us that the androgynous depiction—the union of male and female sexual characteristics—was not limited to Mut but also applied to other deities, such as Isis and Hathor, although perhaps only in so far as they shared maternal qualities and were merged with Mut. Furthermore, it teaches us that other Egyptian deities, such as Neith of Sais—who later evolved into the Greek Athena—were originally conceived as androgynous, i.e., hermaphroditic. The same applies to many Greek gods, particularly those associated with Dionysus, as well as to Aphrodite, who was later confined to the role of a female love goddess. Mythology might attempt to explain that the phallus attached to the female body symbolizes the primal creative force of nature, and that all these hermaphroditic representations of gods express the idea that only the union of male and female can adequately portray divine perfection. Yet none of these observations clarify the psychological puzzle of why human imagination does not object to equipping a figure meant to embody the essence of motherhood with the antithetical symbol of male potency.
The explanation comes from infantile sexual theories. There was indeed a time when the male genital was considered compatible with the depiction of the mother. When a male child first directs its curiosity towards the mysteries of sexual life, it is dominated by interest in its own genitalia. It regards this part of its body as too valuable and important to believe it could be absent in others who seem so similar. Unable to conceive that there exists another equally valid type of genital formation, the child assumes that all humans, including women, possess genitals like its own. This bias becomes so firmly entrenched in the young investigator’s mind that even initial observations of the genitalia of little girls fail to dislodge it. While the child observes that something is different, it cannot admit that it does not find the same organ in girls. The notion of absence is uncanny and intolerable, prompting the child to adopt a mediating conclusion: the organ exists in girls too but is still very small and will grow later (cf. observations in the *Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research*, *International Journal for Medical Psychoanalysis*, and *Imago*). If later observations fail to confirm this expectation, another explanation emerges: the organ was there but has been removed, leaving a wound in its place. This theoretical progression already incorporates painful personal experiences: the child has by now heard threats that its beloved organ will be taken away if it shows too much interest in it. Under the influence of such castration threats, the child reinterprets its perception of female genitalia, fearing for its own masculinity while despising the "unfortunate creatures" who, in its view, have already suffered this cruel punishment.
It seems unavoidable to consider this a root cause of the irrational and elemental nature of anti-Semitism among Western peoples. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration. If we dare to extend our hypotheses into the prehistoric origins of humankind, we may speculate that circumcision originally served as a mitigating substitute for castration. Before a child falls under the sway of the castration complex, during a period when it still regards women as fully equal, an intense scopophilia—manifesting as an erotic impulse—emerges, focused on seeing the genitalia of others, likely to compare them with its own. The erotic attraction emanating from the mother culminates in a longing for her genitalia, which is imagined as being like its own. With the late-acquired realization that women lack a penis, this longing often turns into its opposite, giving way to disgust that, during puberty, may cause psychological impotence, misogyny, or persistent homosexuality. However, the fixation on the once-intensely desired object—the mother’s imagined penis—leaves indelible traces in the child’s psyche, especially for those who explored this stage of infantile sexual investigation with particular intensity. The fetishistic worship of female feet and shoes seems to use the foot as a substitute symbol for the absent genitalia once revered and later missed; similarly, "braid-cutters" unknowingly enact the role of agents performing the act of castration on female genitalia.
We cannot gain a proper understanding of infantile sexuality or its manifestations unless we abandon our culturally ingrained disdain for genitalia and sexual functions. To comprehend the psyche of a child, one must adopt a perspective rooted in ancient analogies. For many generations, genitalia have been objects of shame (*pudenda*), and with the advancement of sexual repression, even of disgust.
Taking a broad view of contemporary sexual life, especially among the cultural elite, one might say that most people reluctantly submit to the demands of reproduction and feel degraded and humiliated by them. Alternative attitudes toward sexuality persist only among the unrefined lower classes or remain hidden among the higher and more refined under the weight of cultural inferiority and a guilty conscience.
This was different in the prehistoric eras of humanity. From the painstaking collections of cultural researchers, we can infer that genitalia were originally a source of pride and hope, objects of divine reverence, and the inspiration for many newly discovered human activities. Countless divine figures emerged through the sublimation of their essence. Even when the connection between official religions and sexuality was no longer openly acknowledged, mystery cults sought to keep it alive among a select group of initiates. Over time, however, so much divinity and sanctity were extracted from sexuality that the remaining essence fell into contempt. Yet, given the indelibility of all psychic traces, it is no surprise that even the most primitive forms of genital worship can be traced to modern times and that contemporary language, customs, and superstitions still contain remnants of every phase of this evolutionary journey.
Significant biological analogies prepare us for the understanding that the psychic development of the individual recapitulates the course of human evolution in abbreviated form. Hence, it is unsurprising that psychoanalytic research into the child’s psyche reveals the infantile valuation of genitalia. The child’s assumption of the mother’s penis is the shared source from which the androgynous depictions of maternal deities, such as the Egyptian Mut, and the "coda" of the vulture in Leonardo’s childhood fantasy derive. We call these divine representations hermaphroditic, though this is misleading in the medical sense of the term. None of them combine the actual genitalia of both sexes as some physical deformities do, horrifying the human eye. Instead, they merely add the male organ to breasts, the hallmark of maternity, as it appeared in the child’s first conception of the mother’s body. Mythology has preserved this venerable, originally imagined body formation of the mother for the faithful. The emphasis on the vulture’s tail in Leonardo’s fantasy can now be interpreted thus: *Back then, when my tender curiosity was directed at my mother, I still attributed to her a genital organ like my own.* This serves as further evidence of Leonardo’s early sexual exploration, which, in our view, decisively shaped his entire later life.
A brief reflection now reminds us that we should not be content with the explanation of the vulture’s tail in Leonardo’s childhood fantasy. There seems to be more in it that we have yet to understand. Its most striking feature, after all, was that it transformed the act of nursing at the mother’s breast into being nursed—thus into passivity and, consequently, into a situation of unmistakably homosexual character. Bearing in mind the historical likelihood that Leonardo behaved in life like a man with homosexual inclinations, we are compelled to ask whether this fantasy does not point to a causal relationship between Leonardo’s childhood relationship with his mother and his later manifest, though idealized, homosexuality. We would not dare to infer such a connection from Leonardo’s distorted reminiscence if we had not learned from psychoanalytic studies of homosexual patients that such a relationship exists and is, in fact, both intimate and inevitable.
The homosexual men who have, in our time, mounted an energetic campaign against the legal restrictions on their sexual activity like to present themselves, through their theoretical advocates, as a distinct sexual variation from the outset—a "third sex," a sexual intermediate. They claim to be men who, from birth, have been compelled by organic conditions to find pleasure in men and denied it in women. While one might wholeheartedly endorse their demands on humanitarian grounds, one must remain cautious about their theories, which fail to consider the psychological genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the tools to fill this gap and put these claims to the test. Although it has only been applied to a small number of individuals, all investigations so far have produced the same surprising results. (These are primarily studies by I. Sadger, which I can confirm in essence based on my own experience. Furthermore, I am aware that W. Stekel in Vienna and S. Ferenczi in Budapest have reached similar conclusions.)
In all our homosexual men, there was, during early childhood—a period later forgotten by the individual—a very intense erotic attachment to a female figure, usually the mother. This attachment was either induced or facilitated by the mother’s excessive affection and further supported by the father’s diminished role in the child’s life. Sadger highlights that the mothers of his homosexual patients were often masculine women with strong character traits who could push the father out of his rightful position. I have occasionally observed the same, but have been more strongly impressed by cases where the father was absent from the outset or departed early, leaving the boy exposed to female influence. It almost appears as if the presence of a strong father ensures the son makes the correct choice of object in favor of the opposite sex.
(Psychoanalytic research has brought forth two indisputable facts regarding the understanding of homosexuality, without claiming to exhaust the causes of this sexual deviation. The first is the aforementioned fixation of affectional needs on the mother. The second is expressed in the assertion that everyone, even the most "normal" person, is capable of homosexual object-choice, has made it at some point in life, and either retains it unconsciously or safeguards against it through vigorous countermeasures. These two findings undermine the claim of homosexuals to be recognized as a "third sex" and render irrelevant the distinction between congenital and acquired homosexuality, which is often considered significant. The presence of somatic traits of the opposite sex (the degree of physical hermaphroditism) is highly conducive to the manifestation of homosexual object-choice but is not decisive. It is regrettable that advocates of homosexuality in the sciences have failed to learn anything from the established findings of psychoanalysis.)
Following this preliminary stage, a transformation occurs, the mechanism of which is known to us, though its driving forces remain unclear. The love for the mother cannot continue its conscious development and falls victim to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother by placing himself in her role, identifying with her, and modeling himself as the template for selecting new love objects. He thus becomes homosexual; essentially, he regresses into autoeroticism since the boys the adolescent now loves are merely substitutes and renewals of his own childhood self, loved as he was loved by his mother as a child. We describe his choice of love objects as narcissistic because the Greek myth refers to a young man named Narcissus, who was captivated by his own reflection and was transformed into the beautiful flower bearing his name.
Deeper psychological considerations justify the claim that those who become homosexual through such means remain unconsciously fixated on the memory of their mother. By repressing his love for his mother, he preserves it in his unconscious and remains faithful to her from that point forward. When he appears to pursue boys as a lover, he is, in reality, fleeing from other women who might cause him to be unfaithful. Direct observation has also shown that the seemingly exclusively responsive to male allure is, in truth, affected by the attraction of women as much as a "normal" man. However, he hastens to transfer the arousal he feels from women onto a male object, thereby repeatedly reenacting the mechanism through which he acquired his homosexuality.
We are far from exaggerating the significance of these insights into the psychological genesis of homosexuality. It is unmistakable that they starkly contradict the official theories of homosexual advocates, but we know they are not comprehensive enough to provide a definitive explanation of the problem. What is termed homosexuality for practical reasons may arise from a variety of psychosexual inhibitory processes, and the process we have identified is likely only one among many, corresponding to one type of "homosexuality." We must also admit that in our homosexual type, the number of cases in which the required conditions can be demonstrated far exceeds those where the derived effect actually occurs, suggesting that we cannot rule out the involvement of unknown constitutional factors traditionally invoked to explain homosexuality.
We would not have felt compelled to address the psychological genesis of the form of homosexuality we studied had there not been strong suspicion that Leonardo, from whose vulture fantasy we began, belonged to this particular type of homosexual.
Though little is known about the sexual behavior of the great artist and scientist, it seems reasonable to trust the likelihood that the accounts of his contemporaries are not grossly misleading. In light of these traditions, he appears as a man whose sexual needs and activity were extraordinarily diminished, as if a higher aspiration had elevated him above the common animalistic necessities of humanity. Whether he ever sought direct sexual gratification or managed entirely without it may remain undecided. However, we are justified in searching for those emotional currents in him that compel others to sexual action, for we cannot believe in a human psyche where sexual desire, in the broadest sense, libido, played no role, even if it was far removed from its original goal or held back from fulfillment.
Other than traces of unchanged sexual inclination, we cannot expect to find more in Leonardo. However, these traces point in a particular direction and allow us to classify him among homosexuals. It has long been emphasized that he only accepted notably handsome boys and youths as his students. He was kind and indulgent toward them, caring for them and nursing them when they were ill, much like a mother might tend to her children—just as his own mother might have cared for him. Because he selected them for their beauty and not their talent, none of them—Cesare da Sesto, G. Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Francesco Melzi, and others—became significant painters. Most of them failed to achieve independence from their master, disappearing from art history after his death without leaving a distinct legacy. Those who rightfully call themselves his students through their works, such as Luini and Bazzi (known as Sodoma), were likely not personally acquainted with him.
We know we must address the objection that Leonardo’s behavior toward his students had nothing to do with sexual motives and does not allow conclusions about his sexual orientation. With great caution, however, we argue that our interpretation clarifies some peculiar aspects of the master's behavior that would otherwise remain puzzling.
Leonardo kept a diary in his unique, right-to-left handwriting, making notes meant only for himself. Interestingly, in this diary, he addressed himself in the second person: "Learn from Master Luca the multiplication of roots." – "Have Master d’Abacco show you the squaring of the circle." – Or, when traveling: "I am going to Milan concerning my garden affairs... Have two saddlebags made. Have Boltraffio show you the lathe and work a stone on it. – Give the book to Master Andrea il Todesco." (Leonardo behaves here like someone accustomed to confessing daily to another person and who now replaces this person with the diary. For speculation about who this person might have been, see Mereschkowski (1903, p. 367)). Or, a resolution of a completely different nature: "You must show in your treatise that the Earth is a star, like the Moon or something similar, and thus prove the nobility of our world."
In this diary, which—like other mortals’ diaries—often skims over the day’s most significant events or omits them entirely, some entries stand out for their peculiarity and have been cited by all of Leonardo’s biographers. These are notes about small expenditures made by the master, recorded with a meticulousness that might seem befitting of a strict and frugal family patriarch. Yet, records of larger sums spent are absent, and nothing else suggests that the artist had a knack for economy. One such entry details a new coat he purchased for his student Andrea Salaino:
Silver brocade | 15 lire | 4 soldi |
Red velvet trimming | 9 lire | – soldi |
Cords | – lire | 9 soldi |
Buttons | – lire | 12 soldi |
Another detailed entry accounts for all the expenses incurred by another student (or model) due to his bad qualities and propensity for theft: "On the 21st day of April 1490, I began this book and resumed work on the horse (for the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza). Jacomo came to me on Magdalene’s Day 1490, at the age of 10. (Margin note: thieving, lying, stubborn, gluttonous.) On the second day, I had two shirts, a pair of trousers, and a doublet made for him, and when I set aside money to pay for these items, he stole it from my purse, and it was never possible to get him to confess, though I had undeniable proof (Margin note: 4 lire...)." The account of the boy’s misdeeds continues and concludes with a cost breakdown: "In the first year: one coat, 2 lire; six shirts, 4 lire; three doublets, 6 lire; four pairs of stockings, 7 lire, etc."
Leonardo’s biographers, disinclined to delve into the mysteries of their subject’s inner life through his minor quirks and peculiarities, typically add a note emphasizing the master’s kindness and indulgence toward his students when mentioning these strange accounts. They forget, however, that it is not Leonardo’s behavior that requires explanation, but rather the fact that he left us these records of it. Since he could not have intended to provide us with evidence of his good nature, we must assume another emotional motive prompted these entries. It is difficult to guess what this might have been, and we would have no idea if another ledger among Leonardo’s papers did not shed light on these oddly detailed notes about student attire and similar matters:
Expenses after the death for the burial of Caterina | 27 florins |
2 pounds of wax | 18 |
For carrying and erecting the cross | 12 |
Catafalque | 4 |
Pallbearers | 8 |
To 4 priests and 4 clerics | 20 |
Bell tolling | 2 |
To the gravediggers | 16 |
For permission—to the officials | 1 |
Sum | 108 florins |
Earlier expenses | |
To the doctor | 4 florins |
For sugar and candles | 12 |
16 florins | |
Grand total | 124 florins |
(As a disheartening indication of the uncertainty surrounding the already sparse accounts of Leonardo's intimate life, I note that the same expense record is presented with significant variations by Solmi (1908, p. 104). Most concerning is the substitution of florins with soldi in his version. It can be assumed that in this record, "florins" does not refer to the old "gold gulden" but rather to the later accounting unit equivalent to 1⅔ lire or 33⅓ soldi. – Solmi identifies Caterina as a servant who managed Leonardo’s household for some time. The source from which both interpretations of this record derive was not accessible to me.)
The poet Dmitry Merezhkovsky is the only one who tells us who this Caterina was. Based on two other brief notes, he concludes that Leonardo’s mother, the poor peasant woman from Vinci, came to Milan in 1493 to visit her then 41-year-old son, fell ill there, was placed in a hospital by Leonardo, and, upon her death, was buried with great honor and expense by him ("Caterina arrived on July 16, 1493." – "Giovannina – a fairy-tale face – inquire about Caterina at the hospital").
While this interpretation by the insightful novelist cannot be proven, it has enough internal plausibility and aligns so well with what we otherwise know of Leonardo’s emotional tendencies that I cannot refrain from accepting it as true. He had succeeded in subordinating his feelings to the yoke of research and suppressing their free expression; yet, even for him, there were occasions when the suppressed demanded an outlet, and the death of the once dearly loved mother was one such occasion. This expense account for her burial is the expression—distorted to the point of unrecognizability—of his mourning for his mother. We are puzzled by how such distortion could arise and cannot fully comprehend it through the lens of normal psychological processes. However, under the abnormal conditions of neuroses, and particularly of so-called obsessive-compulsive neurosis, we are familiar with similar phenomena. There, we see expressions of intense but repressed feelings shifted onto trivial, even absurd, actions. The opposing forces have managed to degrade the expression of these repressed feelings so profoundly that their intensity seems trivial. Yet, the compelling nature of the action betrays the true, unconscious power of the emotions that consciousness seeks to deny. Only such a parallel to what occurs in obsessive-compulsive neurosis can explain Leonardo’s funeral expense record following his mother’s death. In his unconscious, he was still bound to her by an erotically tinged attachment, just as in childhood; the conflict caused by the subsequent repression of this childhood love did not permit a more dignified memorial for her in his diary. Instead, the compromise resulting from this neurotic conflict had to be carried out, leading to the recording of this account, which came down to posterity as an incomprehensible oddity.
It does not seem a stretch to extend the insight gained from the funeral expense record to the accounts of student expenses. These, too, could be cases in which the sparse remnants of Leonardo’s libidinal impulses forcefully found a distorted expression. The mother and the students—mirrors of his own youthful beauty—would have been his sexual objects, as far as the sexual repression dominating his nature allowed such a designation. The compulsion to meticulously record expenses made for them would then represent the peculiar revelation of these rudimentary conflicts. Thus, it would appear that Leonardo’s love life indeed conformed to the type of homosexuality whose psychological development we have uncovered, making the emergence of the homosexual situation in his vulture fantasy comprehensible. It signified nothing other than what we have previously claimed about this type: it required the translation, "Through this erotic relationship with my mother, I became a homosexual." (The modes of expression in which Leonardo’s repressed libido manifested—meticulousness and financial interest—belong to character traits derived from anal eroticism.)
Chapter IV
Leonardo's vulture fantasy still holds us. In words that are all too clearly reminiscent of the description of a sexual act (“and thrust his tail against my lips many times”), Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of the erotic relationship between mother and child. It is not difficult to guess a second memory content of the fantasy from this connection between the activity of the mother (the vulture) and the emphasis on the mouth area. We can translate: My mother has pressed countless passionate kisses on my mouth. The fantasy is composed of the memory of being suckled and being kissed by the mother.
Nature has gifted the artist with the ability to express his most hidden, even unconscious, emotions through creations that deeply move others, though these others may be unable to articulate the source of their feelings. Could it be that Leonardo’s life’s work contains no testimony of what his memory preserved as the most powerful impression of his childhood? One would expect it to. Yet, when one considers the profound transformations a life impression undergoes before it can contribute to an artwork, particularly in Leonardo’s case, one must temper the demand for certainty to a very modest degree. Anyone who reflects on Leonardo’s paintings will be reminded of a peculiar, enchanting, and enigmatic smile that he conjured onto the lips of his female figures. A fixed smile on elongated, curved lips; it became his hallmark and is often referred to as "Leonardesque."
(The art connoisseur may here think of the distinctive, rigid smile seen in the plastic works of archaic Greek art, such as the Aeginetans, or perhaps find something similar in the figures of Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio, and therefore approach the following interpretations with some reservations.)

In the strangely beautiful face of the Florentine Mona Lisa del Giocondo, viewers have been most deeply moved and confounded. This smile demanded interpretation and inspired a variety of explanations, none of which proved satisfying. "Voilà quatre siècles bientôt que Monna Lisa fait perdre la tête à tous ceux qui parlent d'elle, après l'avoir longtemps regardée" ["For nearly four centuries now, Monna Lisa has been driving all who speak of her to madness, after they have gazed upon her for a long time"], wrote Gruyer, as cited by von Seidlitz (1909, vol. 2, 280).
Muther (1909, vol. 1, 314): "What particularly captivates the viewer is the demonic allure of this smile. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about this woman who sometimes seems to smile at us seductively, sometimes to stare coldly and soullessly into the void, and no one has deciphered her smile, no one has interpreted her thoughts. Everything, including the landscape, is mysteriously dreamlike, trembling as if in sultry sensuality."
The intuition that Mona Lisa's smile combines two distinct elements has stirred in several commentators. They see in the expression of the beautiful Florentine woman the perfect depiction of the contrasts that dominate a woman's love life—reserve and seduction, tender devotion, and the ruthlessly demanding sensuality that consumes the man as if he were something alien. Müntz (1899, 417) states:
"On sait quelle énigme indéchiffrable et passionnante Monna Lisa Gioconda ne cesse depuis bientôt quatre siècles, de proposer aux admirateurs pressés devant elle. Jamais artiste (j'emprunte la plume du délicat écrivain qui se cache sous le pseudonyme de Pierre de Corlay) ›a-t-il traduit ainsi l'essence même de la fémininité: tendresse et coquetterie, pudeur et sourde volupté, tout le mystère d'un cœur qui se réserve, d'un cerveau qui réfléchit, d'une personnalité qui se garde et ne livre d'elle-même que son rayonnement ...‹" ["It is well known that Monna Lisa Gioconda has been presenting her admirers, who gather before her, with a fascinating and indecipherable enigma for nearly four centuries. Never before has an artist (I borrow the words of the delicate writer who hides under the pseudonym Pierre de Corlay) translated so well the very essence of femininity: tenderness and coquetry, modesty and subdued sensuality, the whole mystery of a heart that holds back, a mind that reflects, a personality that preserves itself and reveals of itself only its radiance ..."]
The Italian Angelo Conti (1910, 93) views the painting in the Louvre as animated by a ray of sunlight: "La donna sorrideva in una calma regale: i suoi istinti di conquista, di ferocia, tutta l'eredità della specie, la volontà della seduzione e dell'agguato, la grazia del inganno, la bontà che cela un proposito crudele, tutto ciò appariva alternativamente e scompariva dietro il velo ridente e si fondeva nel poema del suo sorriso ... Buona e malvagia, crudele e compassionevole, graziosa e felina, ella rideva ..." ["The woman smiled in regal calm: her instincts for conquest, for ferocity, the entire inheritance of the species, the will to seduction and ambush, the grace of deception, the kindness that conceals a cruel intent—all this appeared alternately and disappeared behind the laughing veil, blending into the poem of her smile. Good and evil, cruel and compassionate, graceful and feline, she laughed."]
Leonardo worked on this painting for four years, likely between 1503 and 1507, during his second stay in Florence, when he was over 50 years old. According to Vasari, he employed the most refined techniques to amuse the lady during the sittings and capture that smile on her features. Of all the subtleties that his brush rendered on the canvas at the time, little remains in the painting's current state. While it was considered the pinnacle of artistic achievement when it was being created, it evidently did not satisfy Leonardo himself; he declared it unfinished, did not deliver it to the client, and took it with him to France, where his patron Francis I acquired it for the Louvre.
Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Mona Lisa unsolved and note the indisputable fact that her smile captivated the artist no less than it has captivated viewers for 400 years. This enchanting smile has since reappeared in all of his paintings and those of his pupils. As Leonardo's Mona Lisa is a portrait, we cannot assume that he lent her face such a profoundly expressive trait if she did not possess it herself. It seems almost unavoidable to believe that he found this smile in his model and became so enchanted by it that he thereafter endowed the creations of his imagination with it. This straightforward interpretation is expressed, for example, by A. Konstantinowa (1907, 44):
"During the long time the master spent on the portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo, he became so deeply engrossed in the physiognomic subtleties of this woman's face that he transferred these features—especially the enigmatic smile and the peculiar gaze—to all the faces he subsequently painted or drew; the mimetic peculiarity of the Gioconda can even be perceived in the painting of John the Baptist in the Louvre; above all, however, they are distinctly recognizable in Mary's facial features in the 'Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.'"
Yet, it may have happened differently. The need for a deeper explanation of the allure with which the Gioconda's smile captivated the artist, never to release him, has stirred more than one of his biographers. W. Pater, who sees in the Mona Lisa "the embodiment of all the love experiences of humanity," and subtly discusses "that unfathomable smile, which in Leonardo always seems to be tinged with something ominous," leads us in another direction when he states:
"By the way, the painting is a portrait. We can trace how it mingles with the fabric of his dreams from childhood on, so much so that one might think, were it not for explicit evidence to the contrary, that it is his finally found and embodied ideal of womanhood ..." (Pater 1906, 157, translated from English.)
M. Herzfeld likely means something similar when she says that in Mona Lisa, Leonardo encountered himself, and thus it became possible for him to embed so much of his own essence into the painting, "whose features have always lain in enigmatic sympathy within Leonardo's soul."
Let us attempt to develop these hints into clarity. It may well be that Leonardo was captivated by Mona Lisa's smile because it awakened something within him that had long slumbered in his soul—an old memory, most likely. This memory was significant enough to never let him go once it was awakened; he had to continually give it new expression. Pater's assurance that we can trace a face like Mona Lisa's mingling with the fabric of his dreams from childhood seems credible and deserves to be taken literally.
Vasari mentions as his first artistic attempts "teste di femmine, che ridono" ["female heads that smile"]. The passage, which is entirely unprejudiced since it seeks to prove nothing, reads more fully in German translation (by L. Schorn, 1843, vol. 3, 6): "In his youth, he modeled some laughing female heads out of clay, which were reproduced in plaster, and some children's heads so beautiful as if they were created by a master's hand."
Thus, we learn that his artistic practice began with the depiction of two kinds of subjects that remind us of the two kinds of sexual objects we deduced from the analysis of his vulture fantasy. If the beautiful children's heads were reproductions of his own childish person, then the smiling women are nothing other than repetitions of Caterina, his mother, and we begin to sense the possibility that his mother possessed the mysterious smile that he had lost and that so captivated him when he found it again in the Florentine lady.
(Mereschkowski assumes the same, although he imagines a childhood history for Leonardo that differs in essential points from our findings derived from the vulture fantasy. But if Leonardo himself had shown this smile, tradition would hardly have failed to report this coincidence to us.)

The painting by Leonardo that is closest in time to the Mona Lisa is the so-called "Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child." It beautifully showcases the characteristic leonardesque smile on the faces of both women. It is not possible to determine how much earlier or later Leonardo began working on this painting compared to the portrait of Mona Lisa. As both works took years to complete, it is likely that they occupied the artist simultaneously. Our expectations would best align if the deep engagement with the features of Mona Lisa had inspired Leonardo to compose the Holy Anne from his imagination. For if the smile of Gioconda evoked a memory of his mother, it is understandable that it first drove him to create a glorification of motherhood, restoring the smile he found in the noble lady to the mother. Let us therefore shift our attention from the portrait of Mona Lisa to this other, scarcely less beautiful painting, which is also housed in the Louvre.
The depiction of Saint Anne with her daughter and grandchild is a rare subject in Italian painting, and Leonardo's interpretation deviates significantly from all others known. Muther says (1909, Vol. 1, 309): "Some masters, like Hans Fries, the elder Holbein, and Girolamo dai Libri, depicted Anne seated beside Mary, with the child placed between them. Others, such as Jakob Cornelisz in his Berlin painting, showed the 'Saint Anne Trinity' quite literally, portraying Anne holding a small figure of Mary, upon whom the even smaller figure of the Christ Child sits." In Leonardo's painting, Mary sits on her mother's lap, leaning forward and reaching with both arms toward the child playing with a lamb, which he appears to mistreat slightly. The grandmother places one uncovered arm on her hip, gazing down at the two with a blissful smile. The grouping is certainly not entirely natural. However, the smile on the lips of both women, unmistakably the same as in the Mona Lisa, has lost its uncanny and enigmatic character; it expresses intimacy and quiet bliss.
(Konstantinowa (1907): "Mary looks down on her beloved with great intimacy, with a smile reminiscent of the enigmatic expression of Gioconda," and elsewhere about Mary: "The smile of the Gioconda hovers over her features.")
With a certain immersion in this painting, a sudden understanding dawns upon the viewer: Only Leonardo could paint this image, just as only he could conceive the Geier fantasy. This painting embodies the synthesis of his childhood story; its details are explicable through the most personal life experiences of Leonardo. In his father's house, he not only found the kind stepmother Donna Albiera but also his grandmother, Monna Lucia, his father's mother, whom we assume was no less affectionate toward him than grandmothers typically are. This circumstance may have inspired him to depict a childhood watched over by both mother and grandmother. Another striking feature of the painting gains even greater significance. Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and grandmother of the child, who should appear as a matron, is portrayed perhaps slightly more mature and serious than Mary but still as a young woman of unblemished beauty. Leonardo effectively gave the child two mothers: one reaching out to him and another in the background, both endowed with the blissful smile of maternal joy. This peculiarity of the painting has not failed to puzzle commentators. Muther, for instance, suggests that Leonardo could not bring himself to paint age, wrinkles, and creases and therefore made Anne a woman of radiant beauty. Is this explanation satisfactory? Others have outright denied the "equality in age of mother and daughter" (S. v. Seidlitz (1909, Vol. 2, 274, Notes)). But Muther's attempt sufficiently proves that the impression of Saint Anne's rejuvenation arises from the painting itself and is not artificially imposed by an external bias.
Leonardo's childhood was as peculiar as this painting. He had two mothers: the first, his real mother, Caterina, from whom he was separated between the ages of three and five, and a young and affectionate stepmother, his father's wife, Donna Albiera. By combining this fact of his childhood with the previously mentioned presence of both mother and grandmother, Leonardo condensed them into a composite unity, shaping the composition of "Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child." The maternal figure farther from the child, called the grandmother, corresponds in appearance and spatial relationship to the child with his real early mother, Caterina. With Saint Anne's blissful smile, the artist likely concealed and transcended the envy felt by the unfortunate woman as she surrendered not only the man but also the son to her nobler rival.
(If one tries to distinguish the figures of Anne and Mary in this painting, it is not easily done. One might say that they are so merged as to resemble poorly condensed dream figures, making it difficult at some points to determine where Anne ends and Mary begins. What appears to critical observation as a failure or flaw in composition is justified by analysis as a reflection of its hidden meaning. The two mothers of his childhood could blend into a single figure for the artist.)

Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1499–1502

It is particularly delightful to compare the *Holy Anna Selbdritt* in the Louvre with the famous London cartoon, which depicts another composition of the same subject. Here, the two maternal figures are even more intimately fused together, their boundaries even less distinct, so much so that commentators, who avoided any interpretative effort, had to say that it seemed “as if both heads emerged from a single torso.”
Most authors agree in considering the London cartoon to be an earlier work and attribute its creation to Leonardo's first Milanese period (before 1500). Adolf Rosenberg (*Monograph* 1898), on the other hand, sees in the composition of the cartoon a later—and happier—reworking of the same theme, suggesting it was created after the *Mona Lisa*, following Anton Springer's interpretation. For our discussion, it fits well that the cartoon should be the much older creation. It is also not difficult to imagine how the Louvre painting might have evolved from the cartoon, whereas the opposite transformation is harder to understand. Starting with the composition of the cartoon, Leonardo might have felt the need to resolve the dreamlike fusion of the two women, which reflected his childhood memory, by spatially separating the two heads. This was achieved by detaching Mary’s head and upper body from the maternal figure and bending them downward. To justify this shift, the Christ Child had to be moved from the lap to the ground, leaving no room for the little John, who was replaced by the lamb. –


In the Louvre painting, Oskar Pfister made a remarkable discovery that one cannot fail to find intriguing, even if one may not be inclined to fully endorse it. He found the contour of a vulture in the peculiarly designed and not easily understandable drapery of Mary, interpreting it as an unconscious puzzle image.
“On the painting, which represents the artist's mother, one can distinctly see the vulture, the symbol of motherhood.
One can observe the highly characteristic vulture's head, neck, and the sharply curved body emerging from the blue cloth visible near the hip of the foremost figure, extending towards the lap and the right knee. Almost no observer, to whom I presented this minor discovery, could resist the evidence of this puzzle image.”
At this point, the reader will surely not shy away from examining the accompanying illustration of this text to search for the outlines of the vulture that Pfister observed. The blue cloth, whose edges outline the puzzle image, appears as a light gray field against the darker background of the rest of the drapery in the reproduction.
Pfister continues (l. c., 147): “The important question now is: How far does the puzzle image extend? If we follow the cloth, which stands out so sharply from its surroundings, from the middle of the wing further on, we notice that it descends towards the figure's foot on one side and rises towards her shoulder and the child on the other. The former part might represent the wing and natural tail of the vulture, while the latter could form a pointed abdomen and, particularly if we consider the radiating lines resembling feather contours, an outspread bird tail, whose right end leads exactly, as in Leonardo's fateful childhood dream, to the child's mouth, thus to Leonardo’s mouth.”
The author then attempts to elaborate further on the interpretation and addresses the difficulties arising from it.
Thus, through another work by Leonardo, we have arrived at a confirmation of the suspicion that the smile of Mona Lisa del Giocondo awakened in the man a memory of his mother from his earliest childhood. Madonnas and noble ladies thereafter began to exhibit, in the works of Italian painters, the humble tilt of the head and the strangely blissful smile of the poor peasant girl Catarina, who had given the world a son destined for painting, research, and endurance.
If Leonardo succeeded in rendering in the visage of Mona Lisa the dual meaning of that smile — the promise of boundless tenderness and the ominous threat (as Pater described it) — then in this, too, he remained true to the content of his earliest memory. For the tenderness of the mother became his undoing, determining his destiny and the deprivations that awaited him. The fervor of the caresses, hinted at by his vulture fantasy, was only too natural; the poor abandoned mother had to pour all her memories of received tenderness and her longing for new ones into her motherly love. She was compelled to compensate not only for lacking a man but also for the fact that the child lacked a father to lavish affection. Thus, as all unfulfilled mothers do, she adopted her little son in the place of her husband and robbed him of a part of his masculinity through the premature awakening of his eroticism. A mother's love for her infant, whom she nourishes and cares for, is something far deeper than her later affection for the growing child. It is of the nature of a fully satisfying love relationship, fulfilling not only all emotional desires but also all physical needs. If it represents one of the forms of happiness attainable by humans, this is not least because it allows even long-repressed and so-called perverse desires to be satisfied without reproach (cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905 d)). Even in the happiest young marriage, the father feels that the child, especially the little son, has become his rival, and a deeply rooted unconscious opposition to the favored one takes root from this point onward.
When Leonardo, at the height of his life, encountered that blissfully rapturous smile again — as it had once graced his mother’s lips during her caresses — he was already under the sway of an inhibition that forbade him ever again to desire such affection from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and thus he endeavored to recreate that smile with his brush, giving it to all his paintings, whether he executed them himself or had them carried out under his guidance by his pupils — to the Leda, the John, and the Bacchus. The latter two are variations of the same type. Muther writes: “From the locust eater of the Bible, Leonardo turned John into a Bacchus, an Apollino, who, with a mysterious smile on his lips, his soft thighs crossed over one another, looks at us with a sensuous and beguiling gaze.” These paintings breathe a mysticism into whose secret one does not dare to penetrate; at best, one can attempt to connect them to Leonardo’s earlier creations. The figures are once again androgynous, but not in the sense of the vulture fantasy; they are beautiful youths with feminine delicacy and womanly forms. They do not cast their eyes downward but look on with a mysteriously triumphant gaze, as if they knew of a great happiness, a secret that must not be spoken. The familiar beguiling smile hints that it is a secret of love. It is possible that Leonardo, in these figures, artistically overcame and denied the tragedy of his love life, depicting the wish fulfillment of the boy bewitched by his mother in such a blissful union of male and female essence.


Chapter V
Among the entries in Leonardo's diaries, there is one that, due to its significant content and a tiny formal error, captures the reader's attention:
He writes in July 1504:
»Adì 9 di Luglio 1504 mercoledi a ore 7 morì Ser Piero da Vinci, notalio al palazzo del Potestà, mio padre, a ore 7. Era d'età d'anni 80, lasciò 10 figlioli maschi e 2 femmine.« ["On July 9, 1504, Wednesday, at 7 o'clock, Ser Piero da Vinci, notary at the palace of the Podestà, my father, passed away at 7 o'clock. He was 80 years old. He left behind 10 sons and two daughters."]
The note concerns the death of Leonardo’s father. The small formal error lies in the repetition of the time specification "a ore 7" ["at 7 o'clock"], as though Leonardo, at the end of the sentence, forgot that he had already written it at the beginning. It is a minor detail, something that anyone other than a psychoanalyst might dismiss. Perhaps they wouldn’t even notice it, and if pointed out, they might say: This could happen to anyone in distraction or emotion and has no further significance.
The psychoanalyst thinks differently; for them, nothing is too small to be considered an expression of hidden mental processes. They have long learned that such forgetting or repetition is meaningful and that we owe it to "distraction" when it reveals otherwise concealed emotions.
We would say that this note, like the funeral account for Caterina and the expense records for the students, corresponds to a case where Leonardo failed to suppress his emotions, and the long-repressed found a distorted expression. The form is also similar: the same pedantic precision, the same emphasis on numbers (I will ignore a larger error in this note, where Leonardo gives his 77-year-old father the age of 80.)
We call such a repetition a perseveration [pathological fixation on a single idea or verbal expression]. It is an excellent means of indicating emotional emphasis. For example, consider Saint Peter's angry speech against his unworthy earthly representative in Dante's Paradiso (Canto XXVII, V. 22–25):
»Quegli ch'usurpa in terra il luogo mio,
Il luogo mio, il luogo mio, che vaca
Nella presenza del Figliuol di Dio,
Fatto ha del cimiterio mio cloaca.«
["He who usurps on earth my place,
My place, my place, which is vacant
In the presence of the Son of God,
has made my cemetery into a sewer."]
Without Leonardo’s emotional suppression, the diary entry might have read: Today at 7 o’clock, my father, Ser Piero da Vinci, my poor father, died! But the shift of the perseveration to the least significant part of the death notice—the time of death—deprives the note of any pathos and leaves us just able to recognize that something was being concealed and suppressed.
Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and descendant of notaries, was a man of great vitality who achieved status and wealth. He was married four times; his first two wives died childless, and it wasn’t until his third wife in 1476 that he fathered his first legitimate son—by then, Leonardo was already 24 years old and had long since exchanged the family home for the studio of his master, Verrocchio. With his fourth and final wife, whom he married in his fifties, he fathered another nine sons and two daughters (It seems that Leonardo also erred in the number of his siblings in this diary entry, which contrasts with its apparent precision.)
Certainly, this father was significant for Leonardo’s psychosexual development, not only negatively, through his absence during the boy’s early childhood, but also directly, through his presence in Leonardo’s later childhood. A child who desires the mother cannot avoid wanting to take the father’s place, identifying with him in their imagination, and later making his defeat a life goal. When Leonardo, not yet five years old, was taken into his grandfather’s house, the young stepmother Albiera surely took the place of his mother in his feelings, and he entered that rivalry with the father that is considered normal. The decision toward homosexuality is known to occur near puberty. By the time Leonardo reached this stage, identification with the father had lost all significance for his sexual life but continued in other non-erotic pursuits. We hear that he loved finery and beautiful clothing, kept servants and horses, even though Vasari states he "owned almost nothing and worked little." We will not solely attribute these preferences to his aesthetic sense but also recognize in them the compulsion to imitate and surpass his father. The father had been the nobleman against the poor peasant girl; thus, the son retained the sting to also play the nobleman—the drive "to out-Herod Herod," to show the father what true nobility looked like.
An artist feels toward their works as a father feels toward his children. For Leonardo, identifying with his father had a detrimental effect on his work as a painter. He created his works and then neglected them, just as his father had neglected him. The later care shown by his father could not alter this compulsion, as it stemmed from the impressions of his earliest childhood years. The repressed unconscious remains impervious to correction by later experiences.
During the Renaissance, as well as long afterward, every artist needed a high-ranking patron or protector—a Padrone—to commission works and hold their fate in their hands. Leonardo found his Padrone in Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed il Moro, a man ambitious, lavish, diplomatically cunning, yet unreliable and erratic. Leonardo spent the most brilliant period of his life at Ludovico’s court in Milan, where he unleashed his creative powers without restraint, as evidenced by works such as The Last Supper and the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. He left Milan before the catastrophe that befell Ludovico, who ended his days as a prisoner in a French dungeon. When Leonardo learned of his patron’s fate, he wrote in his diary: “The Duke lost his state, his possessions, his freedom, and none of the works he undertook were completed for him” (Il duca perse lo stato e la roba e libertà e nessuna sua Opera si finì per lui). It is remarkable, and surely not insignificant, that he leveled against his Padrone the very accusation that posterity would make against him, as if shifting responsibility onto a father-figure for leaving his own works unfinished. In truth, he was not wrong about the Duke either.
While imitation of his father hindered him as an artist, rebellion against his father formed the infantile foundation of his perhaps equally magnificent achievements as a scientist. He resembled, as Mereschkowski aptly put it, a man who awoke too early in the darkness while others still slept (1903, 348). He dared to voice a bold statement that justifies all free inquiry: “He who disputes by appealing to authority works with his memory rather than his reason” (Chi disputa allegando l'autorità non adopra l'ingegno ma piuttosto la memoria). Thus, Leonardo became the first modern natural scientist, and his courage—relying solely on observation and personal judgment—rewarded him with an abundance of discoveries and insights, unmatched since the time of the Greeks.
By rejecting authority and dismissing imitation of the “ancients,” he repeatedly pointed to nature as the source of all truth. This stance sublimated, to the highest degree attainable by humankind, the alignment he had already adopted as a child gazing in wonder at the world. Translated back from scientific abstraction into concrete individual experience, the “ancients” and authority merely represented the father, while nature once again became the tender, nurturing mother who had sustained him. While most other children—even today, as in ancient times—cling so desperately to some form of authority that their world collapses if it is threatened, Leonardo alone could dispense with this support. He could only do so because he had learned in his earliest years to live without his father. His later scientific independence and boldness were predicated on the unimpeded infantile sexual curiosity freed from paternal inhibition, and they extended this curiosity while turning away from the sexual.
If someone like Leonardo, in his earliest childhood, escaped paternal intimidation and later cast off the shackles of authority in his inquiries, it would starkly contradict our expectations to find that he remained a believer, unable to disentangle himself from dogmatic religion. Psychoanalysis has taught us the intimate link between the father complex and belief in God, showing us that the personal God is psychologically nothing more than an exalted father. Daily, we witness how young people lose their religious faith once their father’s authority collapses. The parental complex thus becomes the root of the religious need: the omnipotent, just God and the benevolent nature are grand sublimations or renewals of early childhood notions of both parents. Religiosity is biologically rooted in the prolonged helplessness and dependence of the young child, who, upon later recognizing their actual abandonment and vulnerability to the forces of life, regresses to renew the comforting protection of those early parental powers. The protection religion offers against neuroses is easily explained by its assumption of the parental complex, relieving individuals of the guilt borne by both the individual and humanity, while the unbeliever must confront this task alone.
Leonardo’s example does not seem to challenge this understanding of religious faith. Accusations of unbelief—or, in that era, apostasy from Christianity—arose during his lifetime and found explicit expression in Vasari’s first biography of him. In the second edition of his Vite (1568), Vasari omitted these remarks. It is entirely comprehensible that Leonardo, given the extraordinary sensitivity of his time regarding religious matters, refrained from direct statements about his stance on Christianity in his writings. As a scientist, he was entirely unfazed by the creation accounts in the Holy Scriptures; for example, he dismissed the possibility of a universal flood and, like modern geologists, calculated in terms of millennia.
Among Leonardo’s “prophecies,” there are many that would offend the sensitivities of a devout Christian, such as:
Worshipping the images of saints.
“Men will speak with men who do not hear, with eyes open but unable to see; they will speak to these men and receive no answer; they will seek grace from one who has ears but does not hear; they will light candles for one who is blind.”
Or: On lamentations during Good Friday.
“Throughout all parts of Europe, vast crowds will weep for the death of a single man who died in the East.”
Regarding Leonardo’s art, it has been said that he removed the last vestiges of ecclesiastical constraint from sacred figures, drawing them into the human realm to express profound and beautiful human emotions. Muther praises him for overcoming the decadent mood of his time and restoring humanity’s right to sensuality and the enjoyment of life. In his writings, which delve into the great mysteries of nature, there is no lack of admiration for the Creator—the ultimate source of these wondrous mysteries—but nothing suggests he sought a personal relationship with this divine power. The statements reflecting the deep wisdom of his later years express the resignation of a man submitting to ’Ανάγκη (necessity), the laws of nature, and expecting no alleviation from God’s goodness or grace. There is little doubt that Leonardo overcame both dogmatic and personal religion, distancing himself from the worldview of a devout Christian through his scientific work.
From our earlier insights into the development of childhood psyche, we are led to assume that Leonardo’s earliest investigations as a child revolved around questions of sexuality. He reveals this to us in transparent disguise by linking his investigative drive to the vulture fantasy and highlighting the problem of bird flight as something fatefully assigned to him for study. A rather obscure, prophecy-like passage in his notes on bird flight attests to the emotional fervor with which he clung to the desire to replicate the art of flying: “The great bird will take its first flight from the back of its great swan, filling the universe with astonishment, bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.” (“The great swan” is said to refer to Monte Cecero, a hill near Florence.) He likely hoped to one day fly himself, and we know from the wish-fulfilling dreams of humans the bliss they associate with the fulfillment of this hope.
Why, however, do so many people dream of being able to fly? Psychoanalysis provides the answer: flying, or being a bird, is merely a disguised expression of another desire, one identifiable through linguistic and conceptual connections. When curious youth are told that a large bird like the stork brings babies, when older generations depicted the phallus as winged, when the most common German euphemism for male sexual activity is “vögeln” (literally, “to bird”), and when Italians directly call the male organ l’uccello (the bird), these are but fragments of a larger context teaching us that the dream of flying signifies the desire to be capable of sexual achievement. This is an early childhood wish. When adults reflect on their childhood, it appears to them as a happy time, free of cares, where one enjoyed the moment without yearning for the future. But children themselves, if able to express their thoughts early on, would likely report otherwise. It seems that childhood is not the idyllic paradise we reconstruct but a period driven by the singular wish to grow up and emulate adults, propelling children through the years. This wish fuels all their games. As they gradually understand through sexual exploration that adults possess some mysterious and important ability denied to them, a fervent desire awakens in them to do the same. They dream of it in the form of flying, or they prepare this representation for their future flight dreams. Thus, even aviation, which has finally achieved its goals in our times, has its roots in infantile eroticism.
By admitting his lifelong personal connection to the problem of flight, Leonardo confirms that his childhood curiosity was directed toward sexual matters, as we have inferred through our studies of modern children. At least this one problem escaped the repression that later estranged him from sexuality. From his early years into full intellectual maturity, the subject remained consistently interesting, albeit with slight variations in focus. It is quite possible that both his desired mastery of this art in the sexual sense and the mechanical sense eluded him, leaving both wishes unfulfilled.
The great Leonardo remained childlike in certain respects throughout his life; it is said that all great men must retain some childlike traits. Even as an adult, he continued to play, sometimes rendering himself uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. When he created the most intricate mechanical toys for courtly festivities and formal receptions, it is we who might begrudge such use of his talents, not the artist himself, who seemed to delight in these endeavors. Vasari reports that he engaged in similar activities even without commission: “In Rome, he created a wax paste and, when it was fluid, formed delicate animals filled with air; when he blew into them, they flew, and when the air escaped, they fell to the ground. A peculiar lizard found by the Belvedere vintner, he adorned with wings made from the skin of other lizards, filled it with mercury so that it moved and quivered when it walked, then added eyes, a beard, and horns, tamed it, placed it in a box, and frightened all his friends with it.” Often, these toys expressed profound ideas: “He frequently cleaned a sheep’s gut until it could fit in the palm of one’s hand; he brought it into a large room, attached a pair of bellows, and inflated the gut until it filled the entire space, forcing people into a corner. This showed how it gradually became transparent and filled with air, expanding from a small volume to a wide area, comparing it to the genius.” His fondness for harmless concealment and elaborate disguises also manifested in his fables and riddles—presented as “prophecies”—which, though thoughtful, were notably devoid of humor.
The games and leaps of imagination that Leonardo allowed himself have, in some cases, led his biographers—who misunderstood this aspect of his character—into serious error. For example, in Leonardo’s Milanese manuscripts, there are drafts of letters to the “Diodario of Sorio (Syria), Governor of the Holy Sultan of Babylonia,” in which Leonardo introduces himself as an engineer sent to these regions of the Orient to carry out certain works. In these letters, he defends himself against accusations of idleness, provides geographical descriptions of cities and mountains, and finally recounts a great elemental event that allegedly occurred during his presence there. (For more on these letters and the conjectures associated with them, see Müntz (1899, 82 ff.); the full text of these and related notes can be found in M. Herzfeld (1906, 223 ff.).)
In 1883, J. P. Richter attempted to prove from these documents that Leonardo had indeed conducted these travel observations in the service of the Sultan of Egypt and had even converted to the Mohammedan religion while in the Orient. This stay was supposed to have taken place before 1483, prior to his move to the court of the Duke of Milan. However, other authors’ critiques have easily recognized the evidence for Leonardo’s alleged journey to the Orient as what it truly is: fantastical creations by the youthful artist, crafted for his own amusement, in which he perhaps expressed his desires to see the world and experience adventures.
The “Academia Vinciana” is also likely a figment of imagination, based on the existence of five or six highly elaborate emblems bearing the inscription of the academy. Vasari mentions these drawings but not the academy itself (“Additionally, he spent some time drawing intricate patterns of string, in which one could follow the thread from one end to the other until it formed a completely circular figure; a very difficult and beautiful drawing of this type was engraved on copper, bearing the words ‘Leonardus Vinci Academia’ at its center.”). Müntz, who placed such an emblem on the cover of his major work on Leonardo, is among the few who believe in the reality of an “Academia Vinciana.”
It is likely that this playful streak in Leonardo diminished in his later years, ultimately channeling into the scientific pursuits that represented the final and highest development of his personality. Yet its prolonged presence teaches us how slowly one detaches from childhood, especially those who, during their early years, experienced the highest form of erotic bliss that was never again equaled later in life.
Chapter VI
It would be futile to deny that readers today find all pathography distasteful [the study and depiction of physical and psychological anomalies and illnesses of prominent individuals, as well as the examination of their impact on intellectual achievements]. The rejection comes cloaked in the accusation that a pathographic treatment of a great individual never leads to an understanding of their significance and accomplishments; thus, it is deemed pointless meddling to study in them qualities that could equally be found in any ordinary person. However, this critique is so evidently unjust that it can only be understood as a pretext and a cover. Pathography does not aim to explain the achievements of a great person; it cannot be faulted for failing to deliver something it never promised.
The real motives behind this resistance lie elsewhere. They become apparent when one considers that biographers are peculiarly fixated on their subjects. They often choose their subjects due to a personal emotional attachment, an affection for the individual even before their studies begin. They then engage in an idealization process, striving to insert the great person into the pantheon of their childhood ideals, perhaps to revive the childhood image of a father in them. To fulfill this desire, they erase the individual traits from their subject’s physiognomy, smooth over the traces of their struggles with inner and outer conflicts, and tolerate no remnants of human weakness or imperfection. In doing so, they ultimately present us with a cold, distant idealized figure instead of a person with whom we might feel a distant kinship. It is regrettable that they do this, for they sacrifice truth for illusion and forsake, in favor of their infantile fantasies, the opportunity to delve into the most fascinating mysteries of human nature. (This critique applies broadly and is not directed specifically at Leonardo's biographers.)
Leonardo himself, with his love of truth and insatiable curiosity, would not have opposed the attempt to discern the conditions of his intellectual and emotional development from the small peculiarities and enigmas of his character. We honor him by learning through him. His greatness is not diminished when we study the sacrifices his development demanded of the child he once was or gather the elements that imbued his person with the tragic sense of unfulfilled potential.
Let us emphasize explicitly that we have never classified Leonardo among neurotics or the "mentally ill," as the clumsy term suggests. Those who complain that we even dare to apply pathological perspectives to him are clinging to prejudices that we have rightly abandoned today. We no longer believe that health and illness, the normal and the nervous, can be sharply separated or that neurotic traits must be taken as evidence of general inferiority. Today, we understand that neurotic symptoms are substitutes for certain repressions that we all must undergo in our development from childhood to cultural maturity, that we all produce such substitutes, and that only the quantity, intensity, and distribution of these substitutes justify the practical concept of illness and conclusions about constitutional inferiority. From the small signs in Leonardo's personality, we might place him close to the neurotic type we term the "obsessive-compulsive type," comparing his research to the "rumination" of neurotics and his inhibitions to their so-called abulias.
The goal of our work was to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo's sexual life and artistic activity. To this end, we may summarize what we have inferred about the course of his psychological development.
We are denied insight into his hereditary conditions; however, we see that the accidental circumstances of his childhood exerted a profoundly disruptive influence. His illegitimate birth likely deprived him of paternal influence until around his fifth year, leaving him in the tender, seductive care of a mother for whom he was her sole comfort. Kissed by her into premature sexual maturity, he probably entered a phase of infantile sexual activity, from which only one expression is definitively attested: the intensity of his infantile sexual curiosity. The drive for seeing and knowing was most strongly stimulated by his early childhood impressions; the oral erogenous zone received an emphasis it never relinquished. From his later opposite behaviors, such as his extreme compassion for animals, we can infer that this childhood period did not lack strong sadistic tendencies.
A strong wave of repression put an end to this childhood excess and established the dispositions that would emerge during puberty. The aversion to any crude sensual activity became the most noticeable outcome of this transformation; Leonardo would live abstinently and give the impression of an asexual person. When the tides of pubertal excitement swept over him, they did not sicken him by forcing him into costly and harmful substitutes. Instead, the greater part of his sexual need sublimated into a general thirst for knowledge, bypassing repression. A much smaller part of his libido remained directed toward sexual goals, representing the stunted sexual life of the adult. Due to the repression of his love for his mother, this portion was pushed into a homosexual orientation and expressed itself as idealized love for young men. In the unconscious, the fixation on his mother and the blissful memories of interactions with her remained preserved but temporarily inactive. Thus, repression, fixation, and sublimation divided the contributions that the sexual drive made to Leonardo's psyche.
Emerging from the obscurity of boyhood, Leonardo appeared before us as an artist, painter, and sculptor, thanks to a specific talent that may owe its enhancement to the early stimulation of the visual drive during his childhood years. We would gladly specify how artistic activity ties back to fundamental psychic drives, but it is precisely here that our means fail. We content ourselves with highlighting the almost indisputable fact that the artist’s creation also provides an outlet for sexual desire. For Leonardo, we point to Vasari’s account that depictions of smiling women and beautiful boys—representations of his sexual objects—were among his earliest artistic experiments. In his blossoming youth, Leonardo seemed initially unhindered in his work. As he modeled his external life on his father’s example, he experienced a period of masculine creativity and artistic productivity in Milan, where fortune provided him with a paternal substitute in Duke Lodovico Moro. However, he soon exemplified the experience that the near-complete suppression of real sexual life does not create the best conditions for sublimated sexual aspirations. The exemplary nature of sexual life made itself felt; his activity and ability to make quick decisions began to wane. The inclination to ponder and delay became noticeably disruptive during his work on "The Last Supper," influencing the technique and ultimately determining the fate of this magnificent work. Gradually, a process occurred in him that can only be likened to neurotic regressions. The pubertal development of his being as an artist was overtaken by the infantile disposition toward research, prepared during his first repression. He became a researcher, initially in service of his art, later independently of it. With the loss of his patron and the increasing gloom in his life, this regressive substitution took hold more firmly. A correspondent to Marquise Isabella d’Este, who still wished to own a painting by his hand, reported that Leonardo had become "impacientissimo al pennello" ["impatient with the brush"]. His childhood past had claimed dominion over him. His research, which now replaced artistic creation, seemed to exhibit some traits characteristic of unconscious drives: insatiability, uncompromising rigidity, and an inability to adapt to practical realities.
At the height of his life, in his early fifties—a time when in women the sexual characteristics are already regressing, and in men the libido often makes a vigorous push—Leonardo underwent another transformation. Deeper layers of his psychic content were reactivated, but this further regression benefited his art, which had been stagnating. He encountered a woman who rekindled the memory of the joyous and sensually rapturous smile of his mother. Under the influence of this awakening, he regained the drive that had guided him at the start of his artistic endeavors, when he created smiling women. He painted the Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and a series of enigmatic paintings distinguished by their mysterious smiles. Using his oldest erotic impulses, he achieved a triumph, once more overcoming the inhibition in his art. This final development fades for us into the obscurity of approaching old age. His intellect, however, had already reached the highest achievements, ascending to a worldview far ahead of his time.
In the preceding sections, I have outlined what justifies such a portrayal of Leonardo's developmental path, the structuring of his life, and the elucidation of his oscillation between art and science. Should these arguments provoke even among friends and connoisseurs of psychoanalysis the judgment that I have merely written a psychoanalytic novel, I will respond that I do not overestimate the certainty of these findings. Like others, I have succumbed to the fascination of this great and enigmatic man, in whose being one senses powerful instinctual passions, which manifest in such strangely subdued ways.
Whatever the truth about Leonardo's life may be, we cannot abandon our attempt to psychoanalytically explore it until we have addressed another task. We must define the boundaries of psychoanalysis's capabilities in biography so that every unexplained aspect is not deemed a failure. Psychoanalytic investigation relies on the data of a life’s history: the contingencies of events and environmental influences on the one hand, and the reported reactions of the individual on the other. Using its knowledge of psychic mechanisms, it attempts to dynamically understand the essence of the individual, uncover their original psychic drives, and trace their later transformations and developments. If such an endeavor, as in Leonardo's case, yields no secure results, the fault does not lie in the flawed or inadequate methods of psychoanalysis but in the uncertainty and incompleteness of the material tradition provides about this person. Thus, the failure is the responsibility of the author, who compelled psychoanalysis to issue an opinion based on such inadequate material.
However, even with ample historical material and the most precise application of psychic mechanisms, psychoanalytic investigation would not yield necessary insight at two critical junctures. For one, we have posited that the accident of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth and his mother’s overzealous affection had the most decisive influence on his character formation and subsequent destiny, leading to the sexual repression after this phase of childhood and driving him to sublimate his libido into a thirst for knowledge, solidifying his lifelong sexual inactivity. Yet, this repression after the early erotic gratifications of childhood was not inevitable; it might not have occurred in another individual or might have been far less extensive. Here we must acknowledge a degree of freedom that psychoanalysis cannot resolve. Likewise, we cannot insist that the outcome of this repressive phase was the only possible one. Another person might not have succeeded in diverting the main portion of their libido from repression into sublimation as Leonardo did. Under similar conditions, they might have suffered a permanent impairment of cognitive work or an insurmountable disposition toward obsessive neurosis. These two peculiarities of Leonardo remain inexplicable through psychoanalytic effort: his unique tendency toward drive repression and his extraordinary capacity to sublimate primitive drives.
Drives and their transformations are the ultimate limits of psychoanalytic understanding. Beyond that, biological research takes precedence. Repressive tendencies and sublimative abilities must be traced to the organic foundations of character upon which the psyche is built. Since artistic talent and performance are closely linked with sublimation, we must admit that the essence of artistic achievement is psychoanalytically inaccessible. Modern biological research tends to explain the principal traits of a person’s organic constitution by the blending of male and female elements in a material sense; Leonardo’s physical beauty and left-handedness provide some points of connection here.
Yet, we shall not stray from the realm of purely psychological research. Our goal remains to demonstrate the connection between external experiences and personal reactions through the pathway of instinctual activity. Even if psychoanalysis does not explain Leonardo’s artistry, it helps us understand its expressions and limitations. It seems that only a man with Leonardo’s childhood experiences could have painted the Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, assigned such tragic fates to his works, and achieved such unparalleled heights as a natural scientist. It is as though the key to all his achievements and misfortunes lies hidden in the childhood fantasy of the vulture.
Should one take offense at the results of an investigation that attributes such a decisive influence on a person’s destiny to the contingencies of parental configurations—for example, making Leonardo's fate dependent on his illegitimate birth and the infertility of his first stepmother, Donna Albiera? I believe there is no justification for such indignation. To regard chance as unworthy of shaping our destiny is merely a relapse into the pious worldview that Leonardo himself helped dismantle when he wrote that the sun does not move. Naturally, we are affronted by the thought that a just God and a benevolent providence did not better shield us from such influences during our most vulnerable years. Yet, we conveniently forget that everything in our lives is chance, from our conception through the meeting of sperm and egg—a chance which, nonetheless, has its share in the lawfulness and necessity of nature, merely lacking relation to our desires and illusions. While the division of our life’s determination between the “necessities” of our constitution and the “contingencies” of our childhood may remain unsettled in detail, there is no longer any doubt about the significance of our earliest years. We still show too little respect for nature, which, in Leonardo’s dark words reminiscent of Hamlet’s speech, "is full of infinite causes that have never entered experience" (*La natura è piena d'infinite ragioni che non furono mai in isperienza*, M. Herzfeld, 1906, 11 ["Nature is full of countless reasons that have never been experienced"]). Each of us corresponds to one of the countless experiments through which these *ragioni* of nature press into experience.
It will seem to humans as if something is falling from the sky again, and it will seem to them as if they are rising into flight within it, and fleeing from it out of fear of the flames descending from it. They will hear animals speaking in every kind of human language, they will instantly transport their bodies to different parts of the world without moving, and they will see a great light in the darkness. O wonder of humankind! What madness has so guided you? You will speak with animals of every kind, and they with you, in the language of humans. You will see yourself plunging from great heights without being harmed, raging rivers will accompany you and draw you into their swift currents, you will have carnal relations with your mother and your sisters [illegible] you will [illegible] the feathers of the animals.
Nobody is perfect - this also applies to nicofranz.art!
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