N5 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/leonardodavincip00freu_0 LEONARDO DA VINCI [trout] Leonardo da Vinci A PSYCHOSEXUAL STUDY OF AN INFANTILE REMINISCENCE BY PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D. (UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA) TRANSLATED BY A. A. BRILL. Ph.B., M.D. Lecturer in Psychoanalysis and Abnormal Psychology, New York University NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY ILLUSTRATIONS Leonardo Da Vinci Frontispiece FACING FACE Mona Lisa . 78 Saint Anne 86 Jolm the Baptist 94 LEONARDO DA VINCI i When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with frail human mate- rial, approaches the great personages of hu- manity, it is not impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by laymen. It does not strive “to blacken the radiant and to drag the sublime into the mire” ; it finds no satisfac- tion in diminishing the distance between the perfection of the great and the inadequacy of the ordinary objects. But it cannot help find- ing that everything is worthy of understanding that can be perceived through those prototypes, and it also believes that none is so big as to be ashamed of being subject to the laws which con- trol the normal and morbid actions with the same strictness. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was ad- 1 2 LEONARDO DA VINCI mired even by his contemporaries as one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, still even then he appeared as mysterious to them as he now appears to us. An all-sided genius, “whose form can only be divined but never deeply fathomed,” 1 he exerted the most deci- sive influence on his time as an artist ; and it re- mained to us to recognize his greatness as a naturalist which was united in him with the artist- Although he left masterpieces of the art of painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, the investi- gator in him has never quite left the artist, often it has severely injured the artist and in the end it has perhaps suppressed the artist altogether. According to Vasari, Leonardo reproached himself during the last hour of his life for having insulted God and men because he has not done his duty to his art . 2 And even if Vasari's story lacks all probability and be- longs to those legends which began to be woven about the mystic master while he was still liv- 1 In the words of J. Burckhard, cited by Alexandra Kon- stantmowa. Die Entwicklung des Madonnentypus by Leonardo da Vinci, Strassburg, igo 7 - 2 Vite, cte, LXXXI 1 L 1550-1584. LEONARDO DA VINCI 3 mg, it nevertheless retains indisputable value as a testimonial of the judgment of those peo- ple and of those times. What was it that removed the personality of Leonardo from the understanding of his con- temporaries? Certainly not the many sided ness of his capacities and knowledge, which al- lowed him to install himself as a player of the lyre on an instrument invented by himself, in the court of Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed 11 Moro, the Duke of Milan, or which allowed him to write to the same person that remark- able letter in which he boasts of Ms abilities as a civil and military engineer. For the combi- nation of manifold talents in the same person was not unusual in the times of the Renais- sance; to be sure Leonardo himself furnished one of the most splendid examples of such per- sons. Nor did he belong to that type of genial persons who are outwardly poorly endowed by nature, and who on their side place no value on the outer forms of life, and in the painful gloominess of their feelings fly from human relations. On the contrary he was tall and symmetrically built, of consummate beauty of 4 LEONARDO DA VINCI countenance and of unusual physical strengtn, he was charming in his manner, a master of speech and jovial and affectionate to every- body. He loved beauty in the objects of his surroundings, he was fond of wearing magnifi- cent garments and appreciated every refine- ment of conduct. In his treatise 3 on the art of painting he compares in a significant pas- sage the art of painting with its sister arts and thus discusses the difficulties of the sculptor: “Now his faoe is entirely smeared and pow- dered with marble dust, so that he looks like a baker, he is covered with small marble splin- ters, so that it seems as if it snowed on his back, and his house is full of stone splinters, and dust. The case of the painter is quite dif- ferent from that; for the painter is well dressed and sits with great comfort before his work, he gently and very lightly brushes in the beautiful colors. He wears as decorative clothes as he likes, and his house is filled with beautiful paintings and is spotlessly clean. He often enjoys company, music, or some one may 3 Traktat von der Malerei, new edition and introduction by Marie Herzfeld, E. Diederichs, Jena, 1909. LEONARDO DA VINCI 5 read for him various nice works, and all this can be listened to with great pleasure, undis- turbed by any pounding from the hammer and other noises/’ It is quite possible that the conception of a beaming jovial and happy Leonardo was true only for the first and longer period of the mas- ter’s life. From now on, when the downfall of the rule of Lodovico Moro forced him to leave Milan, his sphere of action and his as- sured position, to lead an unsteady and unsuc- cessful life until his last asylum in France, it is possible that the luster of his disposition be- came pale and some odd features of his char- acter became more prominent. The turning of his interest from his art to science which in- creased with age must have also been respon- sible for widening the gap between himself and his contemporaries. All his efforts with which, according to their opinion, he wasted his time instead of diligently filling orders and be- coming rich as perhaps his former classmate Perugino, seemed to his contemporaries as ca- pricious playing, or even caused them to sus- pect him of being in the service of the “black 6 LEONARDO DA VINCI art,” We who know him from his sketches understand him better. In a time in which the authority of the church began to be substituted by that of antiquity and in which only theo- retical investigation existed, he the forerunner, or better the worthy competitor of Bacon and Copernicus, was necessarily isolated. When he dissected cadavers of horses and human be- ings, and built flying apparatus, or when he studied the nourishment of plants and their be- havior towards poisons, he naturally deviated much from the commentators of Aristotle and came nearer the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories the experimental investigations found some refuge during these unfavorable times. The effect that this had on his paintings was that he disliked to handle the brush, he painted less and what was more often the case, the things he began were mostly left unfinished ; he cared less and less for the future fate of his works. It was this mode of working that was held up to him &s a reproach from his contem- poraries to whom his behavior to his art re- mained a riddle. LEONARDO DA VINCI 7 Many of Leonardo's later admirers have at- tempted to wipe off the stain of unsteadiness from his character. They maintained that what is blamed in Leonardo is a general char- acteristic of great artists. They said that even the energetic Michelangelo who was absorbed in his work left many incompleted works, which was as little due to his fault as to Leo- nardo's m the same case. Besides some pic- tures were not as tinfinished as he claimed, and what the layman would call a masterpiece may still appear to the creator of the work of art as an unsatisfied embodiment of his intentions; he has a faint notion of a perfection which he de- spairs of reproducing in likeness. Least of all should the artist be held responsible for the fate which befalls his works. As plausible as some of these excuses may sound they nevertheless do not explain the whole state of affairs which we find in Leo- nardo. The painful struggle with the work, the final flight from it and the indifference to its future fate may be seen in many other artists, but this behavior is shown in Leonardo to high- 8 LEONARDO DA VINCI est degree. Edm. Solmi 4 cites (p. 12) the ex- pression of one of his pupils : “Pareva, che ad ogni ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipin- gere, e pero no diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell’arte, tal che egli scorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad altri parevano miracoli.” His last pic- tures, Leda, the Madonna di Saint Onofrio, Bacchus and St. John the Baptist, remained unfinished “come quasi intervenne di tutte le cose sue.” Lomazzo , 5 who finished a copy of The Holy Supper, refers in a sonnet to the fa- miliar inability of Leonardo to finish his works : “Protogen che ii penel di sue pitture Non levava, agguaglio il Vinci Divo, Di cui opra non e finita pure.” The slowness with which Leonardo worked was proverbial. After the most thorough pre- liminary studies he painted The Holy Supper for three years in the cloister of Santa Maria 4 Solmi. La resurrezionc delC opera di Leonardo in the col- lected work; Leonardo da Vinci. Conferenze Florentine, Milan, 1910. 5 Scognamiglio Ricerche e Doeumenti sulla eiovinezza di Leonardo da Vinci. Napoli, 1900. LEONARDO DA VINCI 9 delle Grazie in Milan. One of his contem- poraries, Matteo Bandelli, the writer of novels, who was then a young monk in the cloister, re- lates that Leonardo often ascended the scaffold very early in the morning and did not leave the brush out of his hand until twilight, never thinking of eating or drinking. Then days passed without putting his hand on it, some- times he remained for hours before the paint- ing and derived satisfaction from studying it by himself. At other times he came directly to the cloister from the palace of the Milanese Castle where he formed the mode) of the eques- trian statue for Francesco Sforza, in order to add a few strokes with the brush to one of the figures and then stopped immediately . 6 Ac- cording to Vasari he worked for years on the portrait of Monna Lisa, the wife of the Floren- tine de Gioconda, without being able to bring it to completion. This circumstance may also account for the fact that it was never delivered to the one who ordered it but remained with Leonardo who took it with him to 6 W. v. Seidlitz. Leonardo da Vinci, der Wendepunkt d?r Renaissance* 1909, Bd. I, p. 203. io LEONARDO DA VINCI France . 7 Having been procured by King Francis I, it now forms one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre. When one compares these reports about Leonardo's way of working with the evidence of the extraordinary amount of sketches and studies left by him, one is bound altogether to reject the idea that traits of flightiness and unsteadiness exerted the slightest influence on Leonardo^ relation to his art. On the con- trary one notices a very extraordinary absorp- tion in work, a richness in possibilities in which a decision could be reached only hestitatingly, claims which could hardly be satisfied, and an inhibition in the execution which could not even be explained by the inevitable back- wardness of the artist behind his ideal pur- pose. The slowness which was striking in Leonardo's works from the very beginning proved to be a symptom of his inhibition, a forerunner of his turning away from painting which manifested itself later,® It was this * W. v. Seidlrtz, 1 . c. Bd. IL p. 48. 8 W Pater. The Renaissance, p. 107 The Macmillan Co., 1910- "Rut it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.” LEONARDO DA VINCI slowness which decided the not undeserving fate of The Holy Supper. Leonardo could not take kindly to the art of fresco painting which demands quick work while the background is still moist, it was for this reason that he chose oil colors, the drying of which permitted him to complete the picture according to his mood and leisure. But these colors separated themselves from the background upon which they were painted and which isolated them from the brick wall; the blemishes of this wall and the vicissitudes to which the room was sub- jected seemingly contributed to the inevitable deterioration of the picture. 9 The picture of the cavalry battle of An- ghiari, which in competition with Michelangelo he began to paint later on a wall of the Sala de Consiglio in Florence and which he also left in an unfinished state, seemed to have perished through the failure of a similar technical proc- ess. It seems here as if a peculiar interest, that of the experimenter, at first reenforced the artistic, only later to damage the art production. ® Cf. v Seidlitz Bd. I die Geschichte der Restaurations — und Rettungsversuche. 12 LEONARDO DA VINCI The character of the man Leonardo evinces still some other unusual traits and apparent contradictions. Thus a certain inactivity and indifference seemed very evident in him* At a time when every individual sought to gain the widest latitude for his activity, which could not take place without the development of energetic aggression towards others, he surprised every one through his quiet peacefulness, his shun- ning of all competition and controversies. He was mild and kind to all, he was said to have rejected a meat diet because he did not con- sider it just to rob animals of their lives, and one of his special pleasures was to buy caged birds in the market and set them free . 10 He condemned war and bloodshed and designated man not so much as the king of the animal world, but rather as the worst of the wild beasts . 11 But this effeminate delicacy of feel- ing did not prevent him from accompanying 10 Miintz. Leonard de Vinci, Paris, 1899. p. 18. (A letter of a contemporary from India to a Medici alludes to this pe- culiarity of Leonardo Given by Richter : The literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci.) 11 F. Botazzi. Leonardo biologo e anatomico. Conferenze Florentine, p. 186, 1910. LEONARDO DA VINCI 13 condemned criminals on their way to execution in order to study and sketch in-his notebook their features, distorted by fear, nor did it pre- vent him from inventing the most cruel offen- sive weapons, and from entering the service of Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer. Often he seemed to be indifferent to good and evil, or he had to be. measured with a special standard. He held a high position in Cesare's campaign which gained for this most inconsid- erate and most faithless of foes the possession of the Remagna. Not a single line of Leonar- do's sketches betrays any criticism or sympathy of the events of those days. The comparison with Goethe during the French campaign can- not here be altogether rejected, If a biographical effort really endeavors to penetrate the understanding of the psychic life of its hero it must not, as happens in most biog^ raphies through discretion or prudery, pass over in silence the sexual activity or the sex peculiarity of the one examined. What we know about it in Leonardo is very little but fuil of significance. In a period where there was. a constant struggle between riotous licentious- M LEONARDO DA VINCI ness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo pre- sented an example of cool sexual rejection which one would not expect in an artist and a portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi 12 cites the following sentence from Leonardo showing his frigidity: ‘The act of procreation and everything that has any relation to it is so dis- gusting that human beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom and if there were no pretty faces and sensuous disposi- tions.” His posthumous works which not only treat of the greatest scientific problems but also comprise the most guileless objects which to us do not seem worthy of so great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, wit- ticisms, prophecies ), 13 are chaste to a degree- one might say abstinent— that in a work of belle lettres would excite wonder even to-day. They evade everything sexual so thoroughly, as if Eros alone who preserves everything liv- ing was no worthy material for the scientific 12 £. Solmi: Leonardo da Vinci German Translation by Emmi Hirschberg. Berlin, 190S 18 Marie Herzfeld : Leonardo da Vinci der Denker, Forscher und Poet. Second edition. Jena, 1906. LEONARDO DA VINCI *5 impulse of the investigator . 14 It is known how frequently great artists found pleasure in giv- ing vent to their phantasies in erotic and even grossly obscene representations; in contradis- tinction to this Leonardo left only some ana™ tomical drawings of the woman's internal gen- itals, the position of the child in the womb, etc* It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever em- braced a woman in love, nor is it known that he ever entertained an intimate spiritual rela- tion with a woman as in the case of Michel- angelo and Yittoria Colonna* While he still lived as an apprentice in the house of his mas- ter Verrocchio, he with other young men were accused of forbidden homosexual relations which ended in his acquittal. It seems that he came into this suspicion because he employed as a model a boy of evil repute . 15 When he was a master he surrounded himself with hand- 14 His collected witticisms— belle facezie,— which are not translated, may be an exception. Cf. Herzfeld, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 15X. 15 According to Scognamiglio (I. c. p. 49) reference is made to this episode in an obscure and even variously interpreted passage of the Codex Atlanticus : “Quando io feci Domened- dio putto voi mi mettcste in prigione, ora s"io lo fo grande, voi mi farete peggio.” i6 LEONARDO DA VINCI some boys and youths whom he took as pupils. The last of these pupils Francesco Melzi, ac- companied him to France, remained with him until his death, and was named by him as his heir. Without sharing the certainty of his modern biographers, who naturally reject the possibility of a sexual relation between himself and his pupils as a baseless insult to this great man, it may be thought by far more probable that the affectionate relationships of Leonardo to the young men did not result in sexual ac- tivity. Nor should one attribute to him a high measure of sexual activity. The peculiarity of this emotional and sex- ual life viewed in connection with Leonar- do's double nature as an artist and investiga- tor can be grasped only in one way. Of the biographers to whom psychological viewpoints are often very foreign, only one, Edm. Soltni, has to my knowledge approached the solu- tion cf the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected Leo- nardo as the hero of a great historical novel has based his delineation on such an under* standing of this unusual man, and if not in dry LEONARDO DA VINCI 17 words he gave unmistakable utterance in plas- tic expression in the manner of a poet/ 6 Solmi judges Leonardo as follows: “But the unre- quited desire to understand everything' sur- rounding him ? and with cold reflection to dis coyer the deepest secret of everything that is perfect, has condemned Leonardo's works to remain forever unfinished/’ 17 In an essay of the Conferenze Florentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his confession of faith and. furnish the key to his character, “Nessuna cosa si pub am are ne odiare , se prima no si ha cognition di quella” 18 That is: One has no right to love or to hate anything if one has not acquired a thor- ough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by Leonardo in a passage of the T reaties on the Art of Painting where he seems 16 Merejkowski: The Romance o Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Herbert Trench, G. P. Putnam Sons, New York. It fcrm« the second of the historical Trilogy entitled Christ and Anti-Christ, of which the first volume is Julian Apostata, and the third volume is Peter the Craat and Alexei. 17 Solmi 1. c. p. 46. 18 Filippo Bot&zzi, 1. c. p. 193. i8 LEONARDO DA VINCI to defend himself against the accusation of ir- religiousness : “But such censurers might better remain si- lent. For that action is the manner of show- ing the workmaster so many wonderful things, and this is the way to love so great a discoverer. For, verily great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it you will be able to love it only little or not at all.” 19 The value of these utterances of Leonardo cannot be found in that they impart to us an important psychological fact, for what they maintain is obviously false, and Leonardo must have known this as well as we do. It is not true that people refrain from loving or hat- ing until they have studied and became famil- iar with the nature of the object to whom they wish to give these affects, on the contrary they love impulsively and are guided by emotional motives which have nothing to do with cogni- tion and whose affects are weakened, if any- thing, by thought and reflection. Leonardo ld Marie Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci, Traktal von der Malerei, Jena, 1909 (Chap. I, 64). LEONARDO DA VINCI 19 only could have implied that the love practiced by people is not of the proper and unobjection- able kind, one should so love as to hold back the affect and to subject it to mental elabora- tion, and only after it has stood the test of the intellect should free play be given to it. And we thereby understand that he wishes to tell us that this was the case with himself and that it would be worth the effort of everybody else to treat love and hatred as he himself does. And it seems that in his case it was really so. His affects were controlled and subjected to the investigation impulse, he neither loved nor hated, but questioned himself whence does that arise, which he was to love or hate, and what does it signify, and thus he was at first forced to appear indifferent to good and evil, to beauty and ugliness. During this work of investigation love and hatred threw' off their designs and uniformly changed into intellectual interest. As a matter of fact Leonardo was not dispassionate, he did not lack the divine spark which is the mediate or immediate motive power — il primo motore — of all human activ- ity. He only transmuted his passion into in- 20 LEONARDO DA VINCI quisitiveness, He then applied himself to study with that persistence, steadiness, and profundity which comes from passion, and on the height of the psychic work, after the cog- nition was won, he allowed the long checked affect to break loose and to flow off freely like a branch of a stream, after it has accomplished its work. At the height of his cognition when he could examine a big part of the whole he was seized with a feeling of pathos, and in ecstatic words he praised the grandeur of that part of creation which he studied, or — in reli- gious cloak— the greatness of the creator. Solmi has correctly divmed this process of transformation in Leonardo According to the quotation of such a passage, in which Leo- nardo celebrated the higher impulse of nature ("O mirabile necessita , . /’) he said: “Tale trasfigurazlone della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, relig'iosa, e uno del tratti caratteristici de manescritti vinciani, e si trova cento e cento volte espressa. . . ” 20 20 “Such transfiguration of science and of nature into emo- tions, or one might say, religion, ts one of the characteristic traits of da Vinci's manuscripts, which one finds expressed hundreds of times.” Solmi: La resurrezione, etc., p. II. LEONARDO DA VINCI 21 Leonardo was called the Italian Faust on ac- count of his insatiable and indefatigable desire for investigation. But even if we disregard the fact that it is the possible ^transformation of the desire for investigation into the joys of life which is presupposed in the Faust trag- edy, one might venture to remark that Leon- ardo’s system recalls Spinoza’s mode of think- ing. The transformation of psychic motive power into the different forms of activity is perhaps as little convertible without loss, as in the case of physical powers. Leonardo's example teaches how many other things one must follow up in these processes. Not to love before one gains full knowledge of the thing loved pre- supposes a delay which is harmful. When one finally reaches cognition he neither loves nor hates properly; one remains beyond love and hatred. One has investigated instead of hav- ing loved . It is perhaps for this reason that Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than those of other great men and great artists. The storming passions of the soul- stirring and consuming kind, in which others experience the 22 LEONARDO DA VINCI best part of their lives, seem to have missed him. There are still other consequences when one follows Leonardo’s dictum. Instead of acting and producing one just investigates. He who begins to divine the grandeur of the universe and its needs readily forgets his own insig- nificant self. When one is struck with admi- ration and becomes truly humble he easily for- gets that be himself is a part of that living force, and that according to the measure of his own personality he has the right to make an effort to change that destined course of the world, the world in which the insignificant is no less wonderful and important than the great. Solmi thinks that Leonardo’s investigations started with his art , 21 he tried to investigate the attributes and laws of light, of color, of shades and of perspective so as to be sure of becoming a master in the imitation of nature and to be able to show the way to others. It 21 La resurrezione, etc., pv 8 : '‘Leonardo placed the study of nature as a precept to painting . . . later the passion for study became dominating, he no longer wished to acquire science for art, but science for science’ sake.” LEONARDO DA VINCI 23 is probable that already at that time he over- estimated the value of this knowledge for the artist. Following the guide-rope of the paint- er's need, he was then driven further and fur- ther to investigate the objects of the art of painting, such as animals and plants, and the proportions of the human body, and to follow the path from their exterior to their interior structure and biological functions, which really also express themselves in their appearance and should be depicted in art. And finally he was pulled along by this overwhelming desire until the connection was torn from the de- mands of his art, so that he discovered the gen- eral laws of mechanics and divined the history of the stratification and fossilization of the Arno-valley, until he could enter in his book with capital letters the cognition : II sole non si move (The sun does not move). His inves- tigations were thus extended over almost all realms of natural science, in every one of which he was a discoverer or at least a prophet or forerunner . 22 However, his curiosity contin- ued to be directed to the outer world, some- 22 For an enumeration of his scientific attainments see Marie 24 LEONARDO DA VINCI thing kept him away from the investigation of the psychic life of men; there was little room for psychology ill the Academia Viticiana,” for which he drew very artistic and very com- plicated emblems. When he later made the effort to return from his investigations to the art from which he started he felt that he was disturbed by the new paths of his interest and by the changed nature of his psychic work. In the picture he was interested above all in a problem, and be- hind this one he saw emerging numerous other problems just as he was accustomed in the end- less and indeterminable investigations of nat- ural history. He was no longer able to limit his demands, to isolate the work of art* and to tear it out from that great connection of which he knew it formed part. After the most exhausting efforts to bring to expression all that was in him, all that was connected with it in his thoughts, he was forced to leave it un- finished, or to declare it incomplete. The artist had once taken into his service Herzfeld's interesting introduction (Jena, 1906) to the essays of the Conferenze Florentine, 1910, and elsewhere. LEONARDO DA VINCI 25 the investigator to assist him, now the servant was stronger and suppressed his master. When we find in the portrait of a person one single impulse very forcibly developed, as curi- osity in the case of Leonardo, we look for the explanation in a special constitution, concern- ing its probable organic determination nardly anything is known. Our psychoanalytic stud- ies of nervous people lead us to look for two other expectations which we would like to find verified in every case. We consider it prob- able that this very forcible impulse was already active in the earliest childhood of the person, and that its supreme sway was fixed by infan- tile impressions; and we further assume that originally it drew upon sexual motive powers for its reenforcement so that it later can take the place of a part of the sexual life. Such person would then, e.g., investigate with that passionate devotion which another would give to his love, and he could investigate instead of loving. We would venture the conclusion of a sexual reenforcement not only in the impulse to investigate, but also in most other cases of special intensity of an impulse. 26 LEONARDO DA VINCI Observation of daily life shows ns that most persons have the capacity to direct a very tan- gible part of their sexual motive powers to their professional or business activities. The sexual impulse is particularly suited to yield such contributions because it is endowed with the capacity of sublimation, i.e., it has the pow r er to exchange its nearest aim for others of higher value which are not sexuaL We consider this process as proved, if the history of childhood or the psychic developmental his- tory of a person shows that in childhood this powerful impulse was in the service of the sex- ual interest. We consider it a further cor- roboration if this is substantiated by a strik- ing stunting in the sexual life of mature years, as if a part of the sexual activity had now been replaced by the activity of the predominant im- pulse. The application of these assumptions to the case of the predominant investigation-impulse seems to be subject to special difficulties, as one is unwilling to admit that this serious impulse exists in children or that children show any noteworthy sexual interest. However, these LEONARDO DA VINCI 27 difficulties are easily obviated. The untiring pleasure in questioning as seen in little children demonstrates their curiosity, which is puzzling to the grown-up, as long as he does not under- stand that all these questions are only circum- locutions, and that they cannot come to an end because they replace only one question which the child does not put. When the child be- comes older and gains more understanding this manifestation of curiosity suddenly disappears. But psychoanalytic investigation gives us a full explanation in that it teaches us that many, perhaps most children, at least the most gifted ones, go through a period beginning with the third year, which may be designated as the period of infantile sexual investigation . As far as we know, the curiosity is not awakened spontaneously in children of this age, but is aroused through the impression of an impor- tant experience, through the birth of a little brother or sister, or through fear of the same endangered by some outward experience, wherein the child sees a danger to his egotistic interests. The investigation directs itself to the question whence children come, as if the 28 LEONARDO DA VINCI child were looking for means to guard against such undesired event. We were astonished to find that the child refuses to give credence to the information imparted to it, e.g., it energetically rejects the mythological and so ingenious stork- fable, we were astonished to find that its psychic independence dates from this act of dis- belief, that it often feels itself at serious vari- ance with the grown-ups, and never forgives them for having been deceived of the truth on this occasion, It investigates in its own way. it divines that the child is in the mother's womb, and guided by the feelings of its own sexuality, it formulates for itself theories about the origin of children from food, about being born through the bowels, about the role of the father which is difficult to fathom, and even at that time it has a vague conception of the sexual act which appears to the child as some- thing hostile, as something violent. But as its own sexual constitution is not yet equal to the task of producing children, his investigation whence come children must also run aground and must be left in the lurch as unfinished. The impression of this failure at the first at- LEONARDO DA VINCI 29 tempt of intellectual independence seems to be of a persevering and profoundly depressing nature . 23 If the period of infantile sexual investigation comes to an end through an impetus of ener- getic sexual repression, the early association with sexual interest may result in three differ- ent possibilities for the future fate of the in- vestigation impulse. The investigation either shares the fate of the sexuality, the curiosity henceforth remains inhibited and the free ac- tivity of intelligence may become narrowed for life ; this is especially made possible by the pow- erful religious inhibition of thought, which is brought about shortly hereafter through educa- tion. This is the type of neurotic inhibition. We know well that the so acquired mental weakness furnishes effective support for the 23 For a corroboration of this improbable sounding assertion see the “Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-year-old Boy,” Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Fsychopatliologischc Forselmngen, Bd. I, 1909, and the similar observation in Bd. II, 1910. In an essay concerning “Infantile Theories of Sex” (Samtnlungen kleiner Schriften zur Neurosen! eh re, p. 167, Second Series, 1909), I wrote: “But this reasoning and doubt- ing serves as a model for all later intellectual work in prob- lems, and the first failure acts as a paralyze r for all times.” 30 LEONARDO DA VINCI outbreak of a neurotic disease. In a second type the intellectual development is sufficiently strong to withstand the sexual repression pull- ing at it. Sometimes after the disappearance of the infantile sexual investigation, it offers its support to the old association in order to elude the sexual repression, and the suppressed sexual investigation comes back from the un- conscious as compulsive reasoning, it is nat- urally distorted and not free, but forceful enough to sexualize even thought itself and to accentuate the intellectual operations with the pleasure and fear of the actual sexual proc- esses. Here the investigation becomes sexual activity and often exclusively so, the feeling of settling the problem and of explaining things in the mind is put in place of sexual gratifica- tion. Rut the indeterminate character of the infantile investigation repeats itself also in the fact that this reasoning never ends, and that the desired intellectual feeling of the solution constantly recedes into the distance. By vir- tue of a special disposition the third, which is the most rare and most perfect type, escapes the inhibition of thought and the compulsive LEONARDO DA VINCI 31 reasoning. Also here sexual repression takes place, it is unable, however, to direct a partial impulse of the sexual pleasure into the uncon- scious, but the libido withdraws from the fate of the repression by being sublimated from the beginning into curiosity, and by reenforcing the powerful investigation impulse. Here, too, the investigation becomes more or less compulsive and a substitute of the sexual ac- tivity, but owing to the absolute difference of the psychic process behind it (sublimation in place of the emergence from the unconscious) the character of the neurosis does not manifest itself, the subjection to the original complexes of the infantile sexual investigation disappears, and the impulse can freely put itself in the service of the intellectual interest. It takes account of the sexual repression which made it so strong in contributing to it sublimated libido, by avoiding all occupation with sexual themes. In mentioning the concurrence in Leonardo of the powerful investigation impulse with the stunting of his sexual life which was limited to the so-called ideal homosexuality, we feel in- 32 LEONARDO DA VINCI dined to consider him as a model example of our third type. The most essential point of his character and the secret of it seems to lie in the fact, that after utilizing the infantile ac- tivity of curiosity in the service of exual in- terest he was able to sublimate the greater part of his libido into the impulse of investigation. But to be sure the proof of this conception is not easy to produce. To do this we would have to have an insight into the psychic development of his first childhood years, and it seems fool- ish to hope for such material when the reports concerning his life are so meager and so un- certain ; and moreover, when we deal with in- formation which even persons of our own gen- eration withdraw from the attention of the observer. We know very little concerning Leonardo’s youth. He was born in 1452 in the little city of Vinci between Florence and Empoli ; he was an illegitimate child which was surely not con- sidered a great popular stain in that time. His father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and descendant of notaries and farmers, who took their name from the place Vinci; his mother, LEONARDO DA VINCI 33 a certain Caterina, probably a peasant girl, who later married another native of Vinci. Noth- ing else about his mother appears in the life his- tory of Leonardo, only the writer Merejkowski believed to have found some traces of her. The only definite information about Leonar- do's childhood is furnished by a legal document from the year 1457, a register of assessment in which Vinci Leonardo is mentioned among the members of the family as a five-year-old ille- gitimate child of Ser Piero. 24 As the mar- riage of Ser Piero with Donna Albiera re- mained childless the little Leonardo could be brought up in his father's house. He did not leave this house until he entered as apprentice —it is not known what vear — -in the studio of * Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1472 Leonardo's name could already be found in the register of the members of the u Compagnia dei Pittori." That is all. 24 Scognamiglio 1 . c., p. 15. II As far as I know Leonardo only once in- terspersed in his scientific descriptions a com- munication from his childhood. In a passage where he speaks about the flight of the vulture, he suddenly interrupts himself in order to fol- low up a memory from very early years which came to his mind. “It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture , for it comes to my mind as a very early memory , when I was still in the cradle , a vulture came down to me , he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a fezv times with his tail against my lips ” 1 We have here an infantile memory and to be sure of the strangest sort. It is strange on account of its content and account of the time of life in which it was fixed. That a person 1 Cited by Scognamiglio from the Codex Atlanticus, p. 65. 34 LEONARDO DA VINCI 35 could retain a memory of the nursing period is perhaps not impossible, but it can in no way be taken as certain. But what this memory of Leonardo states, namely, that a vulture opened the child’s mouth with its tail, sounds so im- probable, so fabulous, that another conception which puts an end to the two difficulties with one stroke appeals much more to our judgment The scene of the vulture is not a memory of Leonardo, but a phantasy which he formed later, and transferred into his childhood. The childhood memories of persons often have no different origin, as a matter of fact, they are not fixated from an experience like the con- scious memories from the time of maturity and then repeated, but they are not produced until a later period when childhood is already past, they are then changed and disguised and put in the service of later tendencies, so that in gen- eral they cannot be strictly differentiated from phantasies. Their nature will perhaps be best understood by recalling the manner in which history writing originated among ancient na- tions. As long as the nation was small and weak it gave no thought to the writing of its 36 LEONARDO DA VINCI history, it tilled the soil of its land, defended its existence against its neighbors by seeking to wrest land from them and endeavored to become rich. It was a heroic but unhistoric time. Then came another age, a period of self-realization in which one felt rich and pow- erful, and it was then that one experienced the need to discover whence one originated and how one developed. The history-writing which then continues to register the present events throws also its backward glance to the past, it gathers traditions and legends, it in- terprets what survived from olden times into customs and uses, and thus creates a history of past ages. It is quite natural that this his- tory of the past ages is more the expressions of opinions and desires of the present than a faithful picture of the past, for many a thing escaped the people's memory, other things be- came distorted, some trace of the past was mis- understood and interpreted in the sense of the present ; and besides one does not write history through motives of objective curiosity, but be- cause one desires to impress his contempor- aries, to stimulate and extol them, or to hold the LEONARDO DA VINCI 37 mirror before them. The conscious memory of a person concerning the experiences of his maturity may now be fully compared to that of history writing, and his infantile memories, as far as their origin and reliability are concerned will actually correspond to the history of the primitive period of a people which was com- piled later with purposive intent. Now one may think that if Leonardo’s story of the vulture which visited him in his cradle is only a phantasy of later birth, it is hardly worth while giving more time to it. One could easily explain it by his openly avowed inclination to occupy himself with the problem of the flight of the bird which would lend to this phantasy an air of predetermined fate. But with this depreciation one commits as great an injustice as if one would simply ignore the material of legends, traditions, and interpreta- tions in the primitive history of a people. Not- withstanding all distortions and misunder- standings to the contrary they still represent the reality of the past ; they represent what the people formed out of the experiences of its past age under the domination of once powerful and LEONARDO DA VINCI 38 to-day still effective motives, and if these dis- tortions could be unraveled through the knowl- edge of all effective forces, one would surely discover the historic truth under this legendary material. The same holds true for the infan- tile reminiscences or for the phantasies of indi- viduals. What a person thinks he recalls from his childhood, is not of an indifferent nature. As a rule the memory remnants, which he him- self does not understand, conceal invaluable evidences of the most important features of his psychic development. As the psychoanalytic technique affords us excellent means for bring- ing to light this concealed material, we shall venture the attempt to fill the gaps in the his- tory of Leonardo's life through the analysis of his infantile phantasy. And if we should not attain a satisfactory degree of certainty, we will have to console ourselves with the fact that so many other investigations about this great and mysterious man have met no better fate. When we examine Leonardo's vulture-phan- tasy with the eyes of a psychoanalyst then it does not seem strange very long; we recall that we have often found similar structures in LEONARDO DA VINCI 39 dreams, so that we may venture to translate this phantasy from its strange language into words that are universally understood. The translation then follows an erotic direction. Tail, “coda,” is one of the most familiar sym- bols, as well as a substitutive designation of the male member which is no less true in Italian than in other languages. The situation con- tained in the phantasy, that a vulture opened the mouth of the child and forcefully belabored it with its tail, corresponds to the idea of fella- tio, a sexual act in which the member is placed into the mouth of the other person. Strangely enough this phantasy is altogether of a passive character; it resembles certain dreams and phantasies of women and of passive homosex- uals who play the feminine part in sexual re- lations. Let the reader be patient for a while and not flare up with indignation and refuse to follow psychoanalysis because in its very first applica- tions it leads to an unpardonable slander of the memory of a great and pure man. For it is quite certain that this indignation will never solve for us the meaning of Leonardo’s child- 40 LEONARDO DA VINCI hood phantasy; on the other hand, Leonardo has unequivocally acknowledged this phantasy, and we shall therefore not relinquish the ex- pectation— or if you prefer the preconception— that like every psychic production such as dreams, visions and deliria this phantasy, too, must have some meaning. Let us therefore lend our unprejudiced ears for a while to psy- choanalytic work which after all has not yet uttered the last word. The desire to take the male member into the mouth and suck it, which is considered as one of the most disgusting of sexual perversions, is nevertheless a frequent occurrence among the women of our time — and as shown in old sculptures was the same in earlier times — and in the state of being in love seems to lose en- tirely its disgusting character. The physician encounters phantasies based on this desire, even in women who did not come to the knowl- edge of the possibility of such sexual gratifica- tion by reading v. Krafft-Ebing’s Psycho- pathia Sexualis or through other information. It seems that it is quite easy for the women themselves to produce such wish-phanta- LEONARDO DA VINCI 41 sies . 2 Investigation then teaches us that this situation, so forcibly condemned by custom, may be traced to the most harmless origin. It is nothing but the elaboration of another situa- tion in which we all once felt comfort, namely, when we were in the suckling-age (’'when I was still in the cradle”) and took the nipple of our mother’s or wet-nurse’s breast into our mouth to suck it. The organic impression of this first pleasure in our lives surely remains indelibly impregnated; when the child later learns to know the udder of the cow, which in function is a breast-nipple, but in shape and in position on the abdomen resembles the penis, it obtains the primary basis for the later formation of that disgusting sexual phantasy. We now understand why Leonardo displaced the memory of the supposed experience with the vulture to his nursing period. This phan- tasy conceals nothing more or less than a rem- iniscence of nursing — or being nursed — at the mother’s breast, a scene both human and beau- tiful, which he as well as other artists under- 2 Cf. here the “Bruchstiklc einer Hysteneanalyse/’ in Neu- rosenlehre, Second series, 1909. 42 LEONARDO DA VINCI took to depict with the brush in the form of the mother of God and her child. At all events, we also wish to maintain, something we do not as yet understand, that this reminiscence, equally significant for both sexes, was elabo- rated in the man Leonardo into a passive homo- sexual phantasy. For the present we shall not take up the question as to what connection there is between homosexuality and suckling at the mother’s breast, we merely wish to recall that tradition actually designates Leonardo as a person of homosexual feelings. In consider- ing this, it makes no difference whether that ac- cusation against the youth Leonardo was justi- fied or not. It is not the real activity but the nature of the feeling which causes us to decide whether to attribute to some one the character- istic of homosexuality. Another incomprehensible feature of Leo- nardo’s infantile phantasy next claims our in- terest. We interpret the phantasy of being wet-nursed by the mother and find that the mother is replaced by a vulture. Where does this vulture originate and how does he come into this place? LEONARDO DA VINCI 43 A thought now obtrudes itself which seems so remote that one is tempted to ignore it. In the sacred hieroglyphics of the old Egyptians the mother is represented by the picture of the vulture. 3 These Egyptians also worshiped a motherly deity, whose head was vulture like, or who had many heads of which at least one or two w r as that of a vulture. 4 The name of this goddess was pronounced Mut ; we may question whether the sound similarity to our word mother (Mutter) is only accidental? So the vulture really has some connection with the mother, but of w^hat help is that to us? Have we a right to attribute this knowledge to Leo- nardo wdien Francois Champollion first suc- ceeded in reading hieroglyphics between 1790- 1832? 5 It w r ould also be interesting to discover in what w r ay the old Egyptians came to choose the vulture as a symbol of motherhood. As a mat- ter of fact the religion and culture of Egyptians 3 Horapollo: Hieroglyphica I, n. M ifrcpa te ypd^oyrej; . . . yvira £aypa. 4 Roscher : Ausf . Lexicon der griechischen und romischen Mythologie. Artikel Mut, II Bd., 1894-1897. — Lanzone. Dizionario di Mitologia egizia. Torino, 1882. 5 H. Hartlebcn, Champollion. Sein Lebcn und sein Werk, 1906. 44 LEONARDO DA VINCI were subjects of scientific interest even to the Greeks and Romans, and long before we our- selves were able to read the Egyptian monu- ments we had at our disposal some communica- tions about them from preserved works of clas- sical antiquity. Some of these writings be- longed to familiar authors like Strabo, Plu- tarch, Aminianus Marcellas, and some bear un- familiar names and are uncertain as to origin and time, like the hieroglyphica of Horapoilo Nilus, and like the traditional book of oriental priestly wisdom bearing the godly name Hermes Trismegistos. From these sources we Searn that the vulture was a symbol of motherhood because it was thought that this species of birds had only female vultures and no males . 6 The natural history of the ancients shows a counterpart to this limitation among the scarebaeus beetles which were revered by the Egyptians as godly, no females were sup- posed to exist . 7 e “yvira 5e lipptva ov (p&ciyhccOai ir ore, otXd BvfXelas awatras” cited by v. Romer. Uber die androgynische Idee des Lebens, Jalirb. f. Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, V, 1903, P- 732. 7 Plutarch : Veluti scarabaeos mares tantum esse putarunt Aegypti* sic inter vultures mares non inveniri statuerunt. LEONARDO DA VINCI 45 But how does impregnation take place in vul- tures if only females exist? This is fully an- swered in a passage of Horapollo * At a cer- tain time these birds stop in the midst of their flight, open their vagina and are impregnated by the wind. Unexpectedly we have now reached a point where we can take something as quite probable which only shortly before we had to reject as absurd. It is quite possible that Leonardo was well acquainted with the scientific fable, ac- cording to which the Egyptians represented the idea of mother with the picture of the vulture. He was an omnivorous reader whose interest comprised all spheres of literature and knowl- edge. In the Codex Atlanticus we find an in- dex of all books which he possessed at a cer- tain time , 9 as well as numerous notices about other books which he borrowed from friends, and according to the excerpts which Fr„ Rich- ter 30 compiled from his drawings we can 8 Horapollinis Niloi Hieroglyphica edidit Conradus Leemans Amstelodami, 1835. The words referring to the sex of the vulture read as follows ( p. 14) : “Mrepa &rrei8^ hpptv iv rovTip yivet ru> v iiatov o\)\ v-no^px^i'* 9 E. Muntz, i. c., p. 282. 10 E. Muntz, 1 . e. LEONARDO DA VINCI 46 hardly overestimate the extent of his reading. Among these books there was no lack of older as well as contemporary works treating of nat ural history. All these books were already in print at that time, and it so happens that Milan was the principal place of the young art of book printing in Italy. When we proceed further we come upon a communication which may raise to a certainty the probability that Leonardo knew the vulture fable. The erudite editor and commentator of Horapollo remarked in connection with the text (p. i/2) cited before: Caeterum hanc fabulam dc vulturibns cupid e ample xi sunt Patres Ec- clesiastic}, ut ita argumento ex rerum natura petito refutarent eos , qui Virginis partum nega- bant ; itaque apud omnes fere hujus ret mentio occur it. Hence the fable of the monosexuality and the conception of the vulture by no means re- mained as an indifferent anecdote as in the case of the analogous fable of the scareteeus beetles; that church fathers mastered it in order to have it ready as an argument from natural history against those who doubted the sacred history. LEONARDO DA VINCI 47 If according the best information from antiq- uity the vultures were directed to let them- selves be impregnated by the wind, why should the same thing not have happened even once in a human female? On account of this use the church fathers were “almost all” in the habit of relating this vulture fable, and now it can hardly remain doubtful that it also became known to Leonardo through so powerful a source. The origin of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy can be conceived in the following manner: While reading in the writings of a church father or in a book on natural science that the vultures are all females and that they know to procreate without the cooperation of a male, a memory emerged in him which became trans- formed into that phantasy, but which meant to say that he also had been such a vulture child, which had a mother but no father. An echo of pleasure which he experienced at his moth- er’s breast was added to this in the manner as so old impressions alone can manifest them- selves. The allusion to the idea of the holy virgin with the child, formed by the authors, LEONARDO DA VINCI 48 which is so dear to every artist, must have con- tributed to it to make this phantasy seem to him valuable and important. For this helped him to identify himself with the Christ child, the comforter and savior of not alone this one woman. When we break up an infantile phantasy we strive to separate the real memory content from the later motives which modify and dis- tort the same. In the case of Leonardo we now think that we know the real content of the phantasy. The replacement of the mother by the vulture indicates that the child missed the father and felt himself alone with his mother. The fact of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth fits in with his vulture phantasy ; only on account of it was he able to compare himself with a vulture child. But we have discovered as the next definite fact from his youth that at the age of five years he had already been received in his father’s home; when this took place, whether a few months following his birth, or a few weeks before the taking of the assessment of taxes, is entirely unknown to us. The interpretation of the vulture phantasy then steps in and wants LEONARDO DA VINCI 49 to tell us that Leonardo did not spend the first decisive years of his life with his father and his step-mother but with his poor, forsaken, real mother, so that he had time to miss his father. This still seems to be a rather meager and rather daring result of the psychoanalytic ef- fort, but on further reflection it will gain in significance. Certainty will be promoted by mentioning the actual relations in Leonardo’s childhood. According to the reports, his fa- ther Ser Piero da Vinci married the prominent Donna Albiera during the year of Leonardo’s birth; it was to the childlessness of this mar- riage that the boy owed his legalized reception into his father’s or rather grandfather’s house during his fifth year. However, it is not cus- tomary to offer an illegitimate offspring to a young woman’s care at the beginning of mar- riage when she is still expecting to be blessed with children. Years of disappointment must have elapsed before it was decided to adopt the probably handsomely developed illegitimate child as a compensation for legitimate children who were vainly hoped for. It harmonizes best with the interpretation of the vulture- LEONARDO DA VINCI 50 phantasy, if at least three years or perhaps five years of Leonardo’s life had elapsed before he changed from his lonely mother to his father's home. But then it had already become too late. In the first three or four years of life im- pressions are fixed and modes of reactions are formed towards the outer world which can never be robbed of their importance by any later experiences. If it is true that the incomprehensible child- hood reminiscences and the person’s phantasies based on them always bring out the most sig- nificant of his psychic development, then the fact corroborated by the vulture phantasy, that Leonardo passed the first years of his life alone with his mother must have been a most de- cisive influence on the formation of his inner fife. Under the effect of this constellation it could not have been otherwise than that the child which in his young life encountered one problem more than other children, should have begun to ponder very passionately over this riddle and thus should have become an investi- gator early in life. For he was tortured by the great questions where do children come from LEONARDO DA VINCI 51 and what has the father to do with their origin. The vague knowledge of this connection be tween his investigation and his childhood his- tory has later drawn from him the exclama- tion that it was destined that he should deeply occupy himself with the problem of the bird's flight, for already in his cradle he had been visited by a vulture. To trace the curiosity which is directed to the flight of the bird to the infantile sexual investigation will be a later task which will not be difficult to accomplish. Ill The element of the vulture represents to us the real memory content in Leonardo's child- hood phantasy; the association into which Leo- nardo himself placed his phantasy threw a bright light on the importance of this content for his later life. In continuing the work of interpretation we now encounter the strange problem why this memory content was elabo- rated into a homosexual situation. The mother who nursed the child, or rather from whom the child suckled was transformed into a vulture which stuck its tail into the child’s mouth. We maintain that the “coda” (tail) of the vulture, following the common substitut- ing usages of language, cannot signify any- thing else but a male genital or penis. But we do not understand how the phantastic activity came to furnish precisely this maternal bird with the mark of masculinity, and in view of 52 LEONARDO DA VINCI 53 this absurdity we become confused at the possi- bility of reducing this phantastic structure to rational sense. However, we must not despair. How many seemingly absurd dreams have we not forced to give up their sense ! Why should it become more difficult to accomplish this in a childhood phantasy than in a dream! Let us remember the fact that it is not good to find one isolated peculiarity, and let us has- ten to add another to it which is still more striking. The vulture-headed goddess Mut of the Egyptians, a figure of altogether impersonal' character, as expressed by Drexel in Roscher's lexicon, was often fused with other maternal deities of living individuality like Isis and Hathor, but she retained besides her separate existence and reverence. It was especially characteristic of the Egyptian pantheon that the individual gods did not perish in this amal- gamation. Besides the composition of deities the simple divine image remained in her inde- pendence. In most representations the vul- ture-headed maternal deity was formed by the 54 LEONARDO DA VINCI Egyptians in a phallic manner , 1 her body which was distinguished as feminine by its breasts also bore the masculine member in a state of erection. The goddess Mut thus evinced the same union of maternal and paternal characteristics as in Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. Should we explain this concurrence by the assumption that Leonardo knew from studying his book the androgynous nature of the maternal vulture? Such possibility is more than questionable; it seems that the sources accessible to him con- tained nothing of remarkable determination. It is more likely that here as there the agree- ment is to be traced to a common, effective and unknown motive. Mythology can teach us that the androgy- nous formation, the union of masculine and feminine sex characteristics, did not belong to the goddess Mut alone but also to other deities such as Isis and Hathor, but in the latter per- haps only insofar as they possessed also a motherly nature and became fused with the goddess Mut . 2 It teaches us further that 1 See the illustrations in Lanzone 1 . c. T. CXXXVI-VIII 7 v. Romer 1. c. LEONARDO DA VINCI 55 other Egyptian deities such as Neith of Sais out of whom the Greek Athene was later formed, were originally conceived as androg- ynous or dihermaphroditic, and that the same held true for many of the Greek gods, espe- cially of the Dionysian circle, as well as for Aphrodite who was later restricted to a femi- nine love deity. Mythology may also offer the explanation that the phallus which was added to the feminine body was meant to de- note the creative primitive force of nature, and that all these hermaphroditic deistic forma- tions express the idea that only a union of the masculine and feminine elements can result in a worthy representation of divine perfection. But none of these observations explain the psychological riddle, namely, that the phan- tasy of men takes no offense at the fact that a figure which was to embody the essence of the mother should be provided with the mark of the masculine power which is the opposite of motherhood. The explanation comes from the infantile sexual theories. There really was a time in which the male genital was found to be com- 56 LEONARDO DA VINCI patible with the representation of the mother. When the male child first directs his curiosity to the riddle of the sexual life, he is dominated by the interest for his own genitals. He finds this part of the body too valuable and too im- portant to believe that it would be missing in other persons to whom he feels such a resem- blance. As he cannot divine that there is still another equally valuable type of genital forma- tion he must grasp the assumption that all per- sons, also women, possess such a member as he. This preconception is so firm in the youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even by the first observation of the genitals in little girls. His perception naturally tells him that there is something different here than in him, but he is unable to admit to himself as the con- tent of this perception that he cannot find this member in girls. That this member may be missing is to him a dismal and unbearable thought, and he therefore seeks to reconcile it by deciding that it also exists in girls but it is still very small and that it will grow later . 3 3 Cf. the observations in the Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopatbologische Forschungen, Vol. I, 1909. LEONARDO DA VINCI 57 If this expectation does not appear to be ful- filled on later observation he has at his disposal another way of escape. The member also ex- isted in the little girl but it was cut off and on its place there remained a wound. This prog- ress of the theory already makes use of his own painful experience; he was threatened in the meantime that this important organ will be taken away from him if it will form too much of an interest for his occupation. Under the influence of this threat of castration he now interprets his conception of the female genital, henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will look with contempt upon those unhappy creatures upon whom, in his opinion, this cruel punishment had already been visited. Before the child came under the domination of the castration complex, at the time when he still held the woman at her full value, he began to manifest an intensive desire to look as an erotic activity of his impulse. He wished to see the genitals of other persons, originally probably because he wished to compare them with his own. The erotic attraction which LEONARDO DA VINCI 58 emanated from the person of his mother soon reached its height in the longing to see her genital which he believed to be a penis. With the cognition acquired only later that the woman has no penis, this longing often be- comes transformed into its opposite and gives place to disgust, which in the years of puberty may become the cause of psychic impotence, of misogyny and of lasting homosexuality. But the fixation on the once so vividly desired ob- ject, the penis of the woman, leaves inerad- icable traces in the psychic life of the child, which has gone through that fragment of in- fantile sexual investigation with particular thoroughness. The fetich-like reverence for the feminine foot and shoe seems to take the foot only as a substitutive symbol for the once revered and since then missed member of the woman. The “braid-slashers" without know- ing it play the part of persons who perform the act of castration on the female genital. One will not gain any correct understanding of the activities of the infantile sexuality and probably will consider these communications unworthy of belief, as long as one does not re- LEONARDO DA VINCI 59 linquish the attitude of our cultural deprecia- tion of the genitals and of the sexual functions in general. To understand the infantile psy- chic life one has to look to analogies from primitive times. For a long series of genera- tions we have been in the habit of considering the genitals or pudenda as objects of shame, and in the case of more successful sexual re- pression as objects of disgust. The majority of those living to-day only reluctantly obey the laws of propagation, feeling thereby that their human dignity is being offended and degraded. What exists among us of the other conception of the sexual life is found only in the unculti- vated and in the lower social strata; among the higher and more refined types it is concealed as culturally inferior, and its activity is ventured only under the embittered admonition of a guilty conscience. It was quite different in the primitive times of the human race. From the laborious collections of students of civiliza- tion one gains the conviction that the genitals were originally the pride and hope of living be- ings, they enjoyed divine worship, and the divine nature of their functions was trans- 6o LEONARDO DA VINCI ported to all newly acquired activities of man- kind. Through sublimation of its essential elements there arose innumerable god-figures, and at the time when the relation of official re- ligions with sexual activity was already hidden from the general consciousness, secret cults labored to preserve it alive among a number of the initiated. In the course of cultural devel- opment it finally happened that so much godli- ness and holiness had been extracted from sex- uality that the exhausted remnant fell into con- tempt. But considering the indestructibility which is in the nature of all psychic impressions one need not wonder that even the most prim- itive forms of genital worship could be demon- strated until quite recent times, and that lan- guage, customs and superstitions of present day humanity contain the remnants of all phases of this course of development. 4 Important biological analogies have taught us that the psychic development of the individ- ual is a short repetition of the course of devel- opment of the race, and we shall therefore not find improbable what the psychoanalytic in- 4 Cf. Richard Payne Knight: The Cult of Priapus. LEONARDO DA VINCI 61 vestigation of the child’s psyche asserts con- cerning the infantile estimation of the genitals. The infantile assumption of the maternal penis is thus the common source of origin for the androgynous formation of the maternal dei- ties like the Egyptian goddess Mut and the vul- ture’s “coda” (tail) in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy. As a matter of fact, it is only through misunderstanding that these deistic representations are designated hermaphroditic in the medical sense of the word. In none of them is there a union of the true genitals of both sexes as they are united in some deformed beings to the disgust of every human eye ; but besides the breast as a mark of motherhood there is also the male member, just as it ex- isted in the first imagination of the child about his mother’s body. Mythology has retained for the faithful this revered and very early fancied bodily formation of the mother. The prominence given to the vulture-tail in Leo- nardo’s phantasy we can now translate as fol- lows : At that time when I directed my tender curiosity to my mother I still adjudged to her a genital like my own. A further testimonial 62 LEONARDO DA VINCI of Leonardo's precocious sexual investigation, which in our opinion became decisive for his entire life* A brief reflection now admonishes us that we should not be satisfied with the explanation of the vulture-tail in Leonardo's childhood phantasy. It seems as if it contained more than we as yet understand. For its more striking feature really consisted in the fact that the nursing at the mother's breast was trans- formed into being nursed, that is into a passive act which thus gives the situation an undoubted homosexual character. Mindful of the his- torical probability that Leonardo behaved in life as a homosexual in feeling, the question ob- trudes itself whether this phantasy does not point to a causal connection between Leonar- do’s childhood relations to his mother and the later manifest, if only ideal, homosexuality. We would not venture to draw such conclusion from Leonardo's disfigured reminiscence were it not for the fact that we know from our psychoanalytic investigation of homosexual patients that such a relation exists, indeed it really is an intimate and necessary relation. LEONARDO DA VINCI 63 Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against the legal limitations of their sexual activity are fond of representing themselves through theoretical spokesmen as evincing a sexual variation, which may be distinguished from the very be- ginning, as an intermediate stage of sex or as “a third sex.” In other words, they maintain that they are men who are forced by organic determinants originating in the germ to find that pleasure in the man which they cannot feel in the woman. As much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands out of humane con- siderations, one must nevertheless exercise re- serve regarding their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychic genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis of fers the means to fill this gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true that psychoanalysis fulfilled this task in only a small number of people, but all investigation thus far undertaken brought the same surpris- ing results. 5 In all our male homosexuals 5 Prominently among* those who undertook these investiga- tions are I. Sadger, whose results I can essentially corroborate 64 LEONARDO DA VINCI there was a very intensive erotic attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the mother, which was manifest in the very first period of childhood and later entirely forgotten by the individual. This attachment w r as produced or favored by too much love from the mother her- self, but was also furthered by the retirement or absence of the father during the childhood period. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the mothers of his homosexual patients were often man-women, or women w r ith energetic traits of character who were able to crowd out the father from the place allotted to him in the family. I have sometimes observed the same thing, but I was more impressed by those cases in which the father was absent from the be- ginning or disappeared early so that the boy was altogether under feminine influence. It almost seems that the presence of a strong father would assure for the son the proper de- cision in the selection of his object from the op- posite sex. from my own experience. I am also aware that Stekel of Vienna, Ferenczi of Budapest, and Brill of New York, came to the same conclusions. LEONARDO DA VINCI 65 Following this primary stage, a transfor- mation takes place whose mechanisms we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The love of the mother cannot con- tinue to develop consciously so that it merges into repression. The boy represses the love for the mother by putting himself in her place, by identifying himself with her, and by taking his own person as a model through the simi- larity of which he is guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosex- ual ; as a matter of fact he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys whom the grow- ing adult now loves are only substitutive per- sons or revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love ob- ject on the road to narcism, for the Greek legend called a boy Narcissus to whom nothing was more pleasing than his own mirrored image, and who became transformed into a beautiful flower of this name. Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person who becomes homo- sexual in this manner remains fixed in his un- 66 LEONARDO DA VINCI conscious on the memory picture or his mother. By repressing the love for his mother he con- serves the same in his unconscious and hence- forth remains faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away from women who could cause him to become faithless to his mother. Through direct observation of individual cases we could demonstrate that he who is seemingly receptive only of masculine stimuli is in reality influenced by the charms emanating from women just like a normal person, but each and every time he hastens to transfer the stimulus he received from the woman to a male object and in this manner he repeats again and again the mechan- ism through which he acquired his homosex- uality. Tt is far from us to exaggerate the impor- tance of these explanations concerning the psychic genesis of homosexuality. It is quite clear that they are in crass opposition to the official theories of the homosexual spokesmen, but we are aware that these explanations are not sufficiently comprehensive to render pos- sible a final explanation of the problem. What LEONARDO DA VINCI 67 one calls homosexual for practical purposes may have its origin in a variety of psychosex- ual inhibiting processes, and the process recog- nized by us is perhaps only one among many, and has reference only to one type of “homo- sexuality.” We must also admit, that the number of cases in our homosexual type which shows the conditions required by us, exceeds by far those cases in which the resulting effect really appears, so that even we cannot reject the supposed cooperation of unknown consti- tutional factors from which one was otherwise wont to deduce the whole of homosexuality. * As a matter of fact there wouid be no occasion for entering into the psychic genesis of the form of homosexuality studied by us if there were not a strong presumption that Leonardo, from whose vulture-phantasy we started, really belonged to this one type of homosexuality. As little as is known concerning the sexual behavior of the great artist and investigator, we must still trust to the probability that the testimonies of his contemporaries did not go far astray. In the light of this tradition he ap- pears to us as a man whose sexual need and 68 LEONARDO DA VINCI activity were extraordinarily low, as if a higher striVing had raised him above the common ani- mal need of mankind It may be open to doubt whether he ever sought direct sexual gratifica- tion, and in what manner, or whether he could dispense with it altogether. We are justified, however, to look also in him for those emo- tional streams which imperatively force others to the sexual act, for we cannot imagine a hu- man psychic life in whose development the sex- ual desire in the broadest sense, the libido, has not had its share, whether the latter has with- drawn itself far from the original aim or whether it was detained from being put into execution. Anything but traces of unchanged sexual de- sire we need not expect in Leonardo. These point however to one direction and allow us to count him among homosexuals. It has always been emphasized that he took as his pupils only strikingly handsome boys and youths. He was kind and considerate tov/ards them, he cared for them and nursed them himself when they were ill, just like a mother nurses her chil- dren, as his own mother might have cared for LEONARDO DA VINCI 69 him. As he selected them on account of their beauty rather than their talent, none of them — Cesare da Sesto, G. Boltraffio, Andrea Sa- laino, Francesco Melzi and the others— '-ever became a prominent artist. Most of them could not make themselves independent of their master and disappeared after his death without leaving a more definite physiognomy to the his- tory of art. The others who by their produc- tions earned the right to cal! themselves his pupils, as Luini and Bazzi, nicknamed Sodoma, he probably did not know personally. We realize that we will have to face the ob- jection that Leonardo's behavior towards his pupils surely had nothing to do with sexual motives, and permits no conclusion as to his sexual peculiarity. Against this we wish to assert with all caution that our conception ex- plains some strange features in the master's be- havior which otherwise would have remained enigmatical. Leonardo kept a diary ; he made entries in his small hand, written from right to left which were meant only for himself. It is to be noted that in this diary he addressed him- self with “thou”: “Learn from master Lucca 70 LEONARDO DA VINCI the multiplication of roots /' 6 "Let master d’Abacco show thee the square of the circle /' 7 Or on the occasion of a journey he entered in his diary: "I am going to Milan to look after the affairs of my garden . . . order two pack-sacks to be made. Ask Boltraffio to show thee his turn- ing-lathe and let him polish a stone on it. — Leave the book to master Andrea il Todesco /’ 8 Or he wrote a resolution of quite different sig- nificance: "Thou must show in thy treatise that the earth is a star, like the moon or resem- bling it, and thus prove the nobility of our world /' 9 In this diary, which like the diaries of other mortals often skim over the most important events of the day with only few words or ig- nore them altogether, one finds a few entries which on account of their peculiarity are cited 6 Edm. Solmi : Leonardo da Vinci, German translation, p. 152 . 7 Solmi, 1 . c. p. 203. 8 Leonardo thus behaves like one who was in the habit of making a daily confession to another person whom he now- replaced by his diary. For an assumption as to who this person may have been see Merejkowski, p. 309. 9 M. Herzfeld : Leonardo da Vinci, 1906, p 141. LEONARDO DA VINCI 71 by all of Leonardo’s biographers. They show notations referring to the master’s petty ex- penses, which are recorded with painful ex- actitude as if coming from a pedantic and strictly parsimonious family father, while there is nothing to show that he spent greater sums, or that the artist was well versed in household management. One of these notes refers to a new cloak which he bought for his pupil Andrea Salaino : 10 Silver brocade Lira 15 Soldi 4 Crimson velvet for trimming . . ” 9 ” o Braid ” o ” 9 Buttons ” o * 12 Another very detailed notice gives all the ex- penses which he incurred through the bad qual- ities and the thieving tendencies of another pupil or model: “On 21st day of April, 1490, I started this book and started again the horse. 11 Jacomo came to me on Magdalene day, 1490, at the age of ten years (marginal note: thievish, mendacious, willful, glutton- ous). On the second day I ordered for him 10 The wording is that of Merejkowski. ? c. p 2 37. 11 The equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza. 72 LEONARDO DA VINCI two shirts, a pair of pants, and a jacket, and as 1 put the money away to pay for the things named he stole the money from my purse, and it was never possible to make him confess, al- though I was absolutely sure of it . (marginal note: 4 Lira . . So the report continues concerning the misdeeds of the little boy and concludes with the expense account: “In the first year, a cloak, Lira 2: 6 shirts, Lira 4: 3 jackets, Lira 6: 4 pair of socks, Lira 7, etc/’ 12 Leonardo’s biographers, to whom nothing was further than to solve the riddle in the psychic life of their hero from these slight weaknesses and peculiarities, were wont to re- mark in connection with these peculiar accounts that they emphasized the kindness and consid- eration of the master for his pupils. They for- get thereby that it is not Leonardo’s behavior that needs an explanation, but the fact that he left us these testimonies of it. As it is impos- sible to ascribe to him the motive of smuggling into our hands proofs of his kindness, we must assume that another affective motive caused him to write this down. It is not easy to con- 12 The full wording is found in M. Herzfeid, 1. c. p. 45. LEONARDO DA VINCI 73 jecture what this motive was, and we could not give any if not for another account found among Leonardo’s papers which throws a bril- liant light on these peculiarly petty notices about his pupils’ clothes, and others of a kind: 13 Burial expenses following the death of Caterina . . . . 2 pounds wax * Cataphalc For the transportation and erection of the cross Pall bearers To 4 priests and 4 clerics Ringing of bells To grave diggers For the approval — to the officials 27 florins 18 ” 4 8 20 2 16 1 » To sum up 108 florins Previous expenses: To the doctor 4 florins For sugar and candles . . 12 ” 16 florins Sum total 124 florins 13 Merejkowski 1. c. — As a disappointing illustration of the vagueness of the information concerning Leonardo’s intimate 74 LEONARDO DA VINCI The writer Merejkowski is the only one who can tell us who this Caterina was. From two different short notices he concludes that she was the mother of Leonardo, the poor peasant woman from Vinci, who came to Milan in 14 93 to visit her son then 41 years old. While on this visit she fell ill and was taken to the hospital by Leonardo, and following her death she was buried by her son with such sumptuous funeral. 14 This deduction of the psychological writer of romances is not capable of proof, but it can lay claim to so many inner probabilities, it agrees so well with everything we know besides about Leonardo’s emotional activity that I cannot re- frain from accepting it as correct. Leonardo succeeded in forcing his feelings under the yoke life, meager as it is, I mention the fact that the same expense account is given by Solmi with considerable variation (German translation, p. 104). The most serious difference is the substi- tution of florins by soldi. One may assume that in this ac- count florins do not mean the old “gold florins,” but those used at a later period which amounted to 1% lira or 33^ soldi. — Solmi represents Caterina as a servant who had taken care of Leonardo’s household for a certain time. The source from which the two representations of this account were taken was not accessible to me. 14 “Caterina came in July, 1493. LEONARDO DA VINCI 75 of investigation and in inhibiting their free ut- terance, but even in him there were episodes in which the suppression obtained expression, and one of these was the death of his mother whom he once loved so ardently. Through this ac- count of the burial expenses he represents to us the mourning of his mother in an almost un- recognizable distortion. We wonder how such a distortion could have come about, and we cer- tainly cannot grasp it when viewed under nor- mal mental processes. But similar mecha- nisms are familiar to us under the abnormal conditions of neuroses, and especially in the so- called compulsion neurosis. Here one can ob- serve how the expressions of more intensive feelings have been displaced to trivial and even foolish performances. The opposing forces succeeded in debasing the expression of these repressed feelings to such an extent that one is forced to estimate the intensity of these feel- ings as extremely unimportant, but the impera- tive compulsion with which these insignificant acts express themselves betrays the real force of the feelings which are rooted in the uncon- scious, which consciousness would wish to dis- LEONARDO DA VINCI 76 avow. Only by bearing in mind the mecha- nisms of compulsion neurosis can one explain Leonardo’s account of the funeral expenses of his mother. In his unconscious he was still tied to her as in childhood, by erotically tinged feelings; the opposition of the repression of this childhood love which appeared later stood in the way of erecting to her in his diary a different and more dignified monument, but what resulted as a compromise of this neurotic conflict had to be put in operation and hence the account was entered in the diary which thus came to the knowledge of posterity as some- thing incomprehensible. It is not venturing far to transfer the in- terpretation obtained from the funeral ex- penses to the accounts dealing with his pupils. Accordingly we would say that here also we deal with a case in which Leonardo’s meager remnants of libidinous feelings compulsively obtained a distorted expression. The mother and the pupils, the very images of his own boy- ish beauty, would be his sexual objects — as far as his sexual repression dominating his nature would allow such manifestations — and the LEONARDO DA VINCI 77 compulsion to note with painful circumstantial- ity his expenses on their behalf, would desig- nate the strange betrayal of his rudimentary conflicts. From this we would conclude that Leonardo’s love-life really belonged to that type of homosexuality, the psychic development of which we were able to disclose, and the ap- pearance of the homosexual situation in his vulture-phantasy would become comprehen- sible to us, for it states nothing more or less than what we have asserted before concerning that type. It requires the following interpre- tation: Through the erotic relations to my mother 1 became a homosexual. 15 15 The manner of expression through which the repressed libidio could manifest itself in Leonardo, such as circum- stantiality and marked interest in money, belongs to those traits of character which emanate from anal eroticism. C'f. Character und Analerotik in the second series of my Samm- lung zur Neurosenlehre, 1909, also Brill’s Psychoanalysis, its Theories and Practical Applications, Chap. XIII, Anal Eroti- cism and Character, Saunders, Philadelphia. IV The vulture phantasy of Leonardo still ab- sorbs our interest. In words which only too plainly recall a sexual act (“and has many times struck against my lips with his tail”), Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of the erotic relations between the mother and the child. A second memory content of the phantasy can readily be conjectured from the association of the activity of the mother (of the vulture) with the accentuation of the mouth zone. We can translate it as follows: My mother has pressed on my mouth innumerable passionate kisses. The phantasy is composed of the memories of being nursed and of being kissed by the mother. A kindly nature has bestowed upon the artist the capacity to express in artistic productions his most secret psychic feelings hidden even to himself, which powerfully affect outsiders who 78 MONA LISA LEONARDO DA VINCI 79 are strangers to the artist without their being able to state whence this emotivity comes. Should there be no evidence in Leonardo's work of that which his memory retained as the strongest impression of his childhood? One would have to expect it. However, when one considers what profound transformations an impression of an artist has to experience before it can add its contribution to the work of art, one is obliged to moderate considerably his ex- pectation of demonstrating something definite. This is especially true in the case of Leonardo. He who thinks of Leonardo's paintings will be reminded by the remarkably fascinating and puzzling smile which he enchanted on the lips of all his feminine figures. It is a fixed smile on elongated, sinuous lips which is considered characteristic of him and is preferentially des- ignated as “Leonardesque.” In the singular and beautiful visage of the Florentine Monna Lisa del Giocondo it has produced the greatest effect on the spectators and even perplexed them. This smile was in need of an interpre- tation, and received many of the most varied kind but none of them was considered satis- 8o LEONARDO DA VINCI factory. As Gruyer puts it: “It is almost four centuries since Monna Lisa causes all those to lose their heads who have looked upon her for some time.” 1 Muther states : 2 “What fascinates the spectator is the demoniacal charm of this smile. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about this woman, who now seems to smile upon us seductively and now to stare coldly and lifelessly into space, but nobody has solved the riddle of her smile, nobody has interpreted her thoughts. Everything, even the scenery is mysterious and dream-like, trembling as if in the sultriness of sensuality.” The idea that two diverse elements were united in the smile of Monna Lisa has been felt by many critics. They therefore recognize in the play of features of the beautiful Floren- tine lady the most perfect representation of the contrasts dominating the love-life of the woman which is foreign to man, as that of re- serve and seduction, and of most devoted ten- derness and inconsiderateness in urgent and 1 Seidlitz : Leonardo da Vinci, II Bd., p. 280. 2 Geschichte der Malerei, Bd. I, p. 314* LEONARDO DA VINCI 81 consuming sensuality. Muntz 3 expresses him- self in this manner: “One knows what inde- cipherable and fascinating enigma Monna Lisa Gioconda has been putting for nearly four cen- turies to the admirers who crowd around her. No artist (I borrow the expression of the deli- cate writer who hides himself under the pseu- donym of Pierre de Corlay) has ever trans- lated in this manner the very essence of femininity: the tenderness and coquetry, the modesty and quiet voluptuousness, the whole mystery of the heart which holds itself aloof, of a brain which reflects, and of a personality who watches itself and yields nothing from her- self except radiance. . . ” The Italian An- gelo Conti 4 saw the picture in the Louvre il- lumined by a ray of the sun and expressed him- self as follows: “The woman smiled with a royal calmness, her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, the entire heredity of the species, the will of seduction and ensnaring, the charm of the deceiver, the kindness which conceals a 3 1 . c. p. 417. * A. Conti : Leonardo pittore, Conferenze Florentine, 1 . c. P. 93* 8a LEONARDO DA VINCI cruel purpose, all that appears and disappears alternately behind the laughing veil and melts into the poem of her smile. . . . Good and evil, cruelty and compassion, graceful and cat- like, she laughed,. . . Leonardo painted this picture four years, perhaps from 1503 until 1507, during his sec- ond sojourn in Florence when he was about the age of fifty years. According to Vasari he ap- plied the choicest artifices in order to divert the lady during the sittings and to hold that smile firmly on her features. Of all the graceful- ness that his brush reproduced on the canvas at that time the picture preserves but very lit- tle in its present state. During its production it was considered the highest that art could accomplish; it is certain, however, that it did not satisfy Leonardo himself, that he pro- nounced it as unfinished and did not deliver it to the one who ordered it, but took it with him to France where his benefactor Francis I, ac- quired it for the Louvre. Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Monna Lisa unsolved, and let us note the un- equivocal fact that her smile fascinated the art- LEONARDO DA VINCI 83 ist no less than all the spectators for these 400 years. This captivating smile had thereafter returned in all of his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo's Monna Lisa was a portrait we cannot assume that he has added to her face a trait of his own so difficult to ex- press which she herself did not possess. It seems, we cannot help but believe, that he found this smile in his model and became so charmed by it that from now on he endowed it on all the free creations of his phantasy. This ob- vious conception is, e.g. ? expressed by A. Kon- stantinowa in the following manner: 5 “During the long period in which the master occupied himself with the portrait of Monna Lisa del Gioconda, he entered into the physi- ognomic delicacies of this feminine face with such sympathy of feeling that he transferred these creatures, especially the mysterious smile and the peculiar glance, to all faces which he later painted or drew. The mimic peculiarity of Cioconda can even be perceived in the pic- ture of John the Baptist in the Louvre. But above all they are distinctly recognized in the 5 L c. p. 45. LEONARDO DA VINCI 84 features of Mary in the picture of St. Anne of the Louvre/' But the case could have been different. The need for a deeper reason for the fascination which the smile of Gioconda exerted on the artist from which he could not rid himself has been felt by more than one of his biographers. W. Pater, who sees in the picture of Monna Lisa the embodiment of the entire erotic ex- perience of modern man, and discourses so ex- cellently on “that unfathomable smile always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work,” leads us to another track when he says : 6 “Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dream; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last.” Herzfeld surely must have had something similar in mind when stating that in Monna Lisa Leonardo encountered himself and there- 6 W. Pater: The Renaissance, p. 124, The Macmillan Co., 19/0. LEONARDO DA VINCI 85 fore found it possible to put so much of his own nature into the picture, “whose features from time immemorial have been imbedded with mysterious sympathy in Leonardo’s soul.” 7 Let us endeavor to clear up these intimations. It was quite possible that Leonardo was fasci- nated by the smile of Monna Lisa, because it had awakened something in him which had slumbered in his soul for a long time, in all probability an old memory. This memory was of sufficient importance to stick to him once it had been aroused ; he was forced continually to provide it with new expression. The assur- ance of Pater that we can see an image like that of Monna Lisa defining itself from Leonardo’s childhood on the fabric of his dreams, seems worthy of belief and deserves to be taken liter- ally. Vasari mentions as Leonardo’s first artistic endeavors, “heads of women who laugh .” 8 The passage, which is beyond suspicion, as it is not meant to prove anything, reads more pre- cisely as follows: 9 “He formed in his youth 7 M. Herzfeld : Leonardo da Vinci, p. 88. 8 Scognamiglio, 1. c. p. 32. 9 L. Schom, Bd. Ill, 1843, p. 6. 86 LEONARDO DA VINCI some laughing feminine heads out of lime, which have been reproduced in plaster, and some heads of children, which were as beauti- ful as if modeled by the hands of a mas- ter. . , ” Thus we discover that his practice of art be- gan with the representation of two kinds of ob- jects, which would perforce remind us of the two kinds of sexual objects which we have in- ferred from the analysis of his vulture phan- tasy. If the beautiful children’s heads were reproductions of his own childish person, then the laughing women were nothing else but re- productions of Catarina, his mother, and we are beginning to have an inkling of the possi- bility that his mother possessed that mysteri- ous smile which he lost, and which fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady . 10 The painting of Leonardo which in point of time stands nearest to the Monna Lisa is 10 The same is assumed by Merejkowski, who imagined a childhood for Leonardo which deviates in the essential points from ours, drawn from the results of the vulture phantasy. But if Leonardo himself had displayed this smile, tradition hardly would have failed to report to us this coincidence. T* [face P- 86] SAINT ANNE LEONARDO DA VINCI 87 the so-called Saint Anne of the Louvre, repre- senting Saint Anne, Mary and the Christ child. It shows the Leonardesque smile most beauti- fully portrayed in the two feminine heads. It is impossible to find out how much earlier or later than the portrait of Monna Lisa Leo- nardo began to paint this picture. As both works extended over years, we may well as- sume that they occupied the master simultane- ously. But it would best harmonize with our expectation if precisely the absorption in the features of Monna Lisa would have instigated Leonardo to form the composition of Saint Anne from his phantasy. For if the smile of Gioconda had conjured up in him the memory of his mother, we would naturally understand that he was first urged to produce a glorifica- tion of motherhood, and to give back to her the smile he found in that prominent lady. We may thus allow our interest to glide over from the portrait of Monna Lisa to this other hardly less beautiful picture, now also in the Louvre. Saint Anne with the daughter and grand- child is a subject seldom treated in the Italian art of painting; at all events Leonardo's rep- 88 LEONARDO DA VINCI reservation differs widely from all that is oth- erwise known. Muther states : 11 “Some masters like Hans Fries, the older Holbein, and Girolamo dei Libri, made Anne sit near Mary and placed the child between the two. Others like Jakob Cornelicz in his Ber- lin pictures, represented Saint Anne as holding in her arm the small figure of Mary upon which sits the still smaller figure of the Christ child.” In Leonardo's picture Mary sits on her moth- er's lap, bent forward and is stretching out both arms after the boy who plays with a little lamb, and must have slightly maltreated it. The grandmother has one of her unconcealed arms propped on her hip and looks down on both with a blissful smile. The grouping is certainly not quite unconstrained. But the smile which is playing on the lips of both women, although unmistakably the same as in the picture of Monna Lisa, has lost its sinister and mysterious character; it expresses a calm blissfulness . 12 11 1. c. p. 309. 158 A. Konstantinowa, 1 . c., says : “ Mary looks tenderly down on her beloved child with a smile that recalls the mys- terious expression of la Gioconda.” Elsewhere speaking of LEONARDO DA VINCI 89 On becoming somewhat engrossed in this picture it suddenly dawns upon the spectator that only Leonardo could have painted this pic- ture, as only he could have formed the vulture phantasy. This picture contains the synthesis of the history of Leonardo’s childhood, the de- tails of which are explainable by the most inti- mate impressions of his life. In his father’s home he found not only the kind step-mother Donna Albiera, but also the grandmother, his father’s mother, Monna Lucia, who we will as- sume was not less tender to him than grand- mothers are wont to be. This circumstance must have furnished him with the facts for the representation of a childhood guarded by a mother and grandmother. Another striking feature of the picture assumes still greater sig- nificance. Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and the grandmother of the boy who must have been a matron, is formed here perhaps some- what more mature and more serious than Saint Mary, but still as a young woman of unfaded beauty. As a matter of fact Leonardo gave Mary she says: ‘‘The smile of Gioconda floats upon her features.” go LEONARDO DA VINCI the boy two mothers, the one who stretched out her arms after him and another who is seen in the background, both are represented with the blissful smile of maternal happiness* This peculiarity of the picture has not failed to ex- cite the wonder of the authors. Muther, for instance, believes that Leonardo could not bring himself to paint old age, folds and wrinkles, and therefore formed also Anne as a woman of radiant beauty. Whether one can be satisfied with this explanation is a question. Other writers have taken occasion to deny gen- erally the sameness of age of mother and daughter . 13 However, Muther’s tentative ex- planation is sufficient proof for the fact that the impression of Saint Anne’s youthful ap- pearance was furnished by the picture and is not an imagination produced by a tendency. Leonardo’s childhood was precisely as re- markable as this picture. He has had two mothers, the first his true mother, Caterina, from whom he was torn away between the age of three and five years, and a young tender step-mother, Donna Albiera, his father’s wife. 13 Cf. v. Seidlitz, !. c. Bd. II, p. 274 LEONARDO DA VINCI 9i By connecting 1 this fact of his childhood with the one mentioned above and condensing them into a uniform fusion, the composition of Saint Anne, Mary and the Child, formed itself in him. The maternal form further away from the boy designated as grandmother, corresponds in ap- pearance and in spatial relation to the boy, with the real first mother, Caterina. With the bliss- ful smile of Saint Anne the artist actually dis- avowed and concealed the envy which the un- fortunate mother felt when she was forced to give up her son to her more aristocratic rival, as once before her lover. Our feeling that the smile of Monna Lisa del Gioconda awakened in the man the memory of the mother of his first years of childhood would thus be confirmed from another work of Leonardo. Following the production of Monna Lisa, Italian artists depicted in Ma- donnas and prominent ladies the humble dip- ping of the head and the peculiar blissful smile of the poor peasant girl Caterina, who brought to the world the noble son who was destined to paint, investigate, and suffer. When Leonardo succeeded in reproducing in 92 LEONARDO DA VINCI the face of Monna Lisa the double sense com- prised in this smile, namely, the promise of unlimited tenderness, and sinister threat (in the words of Pater), he remained true even in this to the content of his earliest reminiscence. For the love of the mother became his destiny, it determined his fate and the privations which were in store for him. The impetuosity of the caressing to which the vulture phantasy points was only too natural. The poor forsaken mother had to give vent through mother's love to all her memories of love enjoyed as well as to all her yearnings for more affection ; she was forced to it, not only in order to compensate herself for not having a husband, but also the child for not having a father who wanted to love it. In the manner of all ungratified mothers she thus took her little son in place of her husband, and robbed him of a part of his virility by the too early maturing of his eroticism. The love of the mother for the suckling whom she nourishes and cares for is something far deeper reaching than her later affection for the growing child. It is of the nature of a fully gratified love affair, which LEONARDO DA VINCI 93 fulfills not only all the psychic wishes but also all physical needs, and when it represents one of the forms of happiness attainable by man it is due, in no little measure, to the possibility of gratifying without reproach also wish feelings which were long repressed and designated as perverse . 14 Even in the happiest recent mar- riage the father feels that his child, especially the little boy has become his rival, and this gives origin to an antagonism against the fa- vorite one which is deeply rooted in the uncon- scious. When in the prime of his life Leonardo re- encountered that blissful and ecstatic smile as it had once encircled his mother’s mouth in caressing, he had long been under the ban of an inhibition, forbidding him ever again to desire such tenderness from women’s lips. But as he had become a painter he endeavored to reproduce this smile with his brush and fur- nish all his pictures with it, whether he exe- cuted them himself or whether they were done by his pupils under his direction, as in Leda, 14 Cf. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, translated by A. A. Brill, 2nd edition, igi6, Monograph series. 94 LEONARDO DA VINCI John, and Bacchus. The latter two are va- riations of the same type, Muther says : “From the locust eater of the Bible Leonardo made a Bacchus, an Apollo, who with a mys- terious smile on his lips, and with his soft thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated eyes ” These pictures breathe a mysticism into the secret of which one dares not pene- trate; at most one can make the effort to con- struct the connection to Leonardo's earlier productions. The figures are again androgy- nous but no longer in- the sense of the vulture phantasy, they are pretty boys of feminine ten- derness with feminine forms; they do not cast down their eyes but gaze mysteriously tri- umphant, as if they knew of a great happy issue concerning which one must remain quiet ; the familiar fascinating smile leads us to infer that it is a love secret. It is possible that in these forms Leonardo disavowed and artisti- cally conquered the unhappiness of his love life, in that he represented the wish fulfillment of the boy infatuated with his mother in such blissful union of the male and female nature. P- 94] JOHN THE BAPTIST V Among the entries in Leonardo's diaries there is one which absorbs the reader’s atten- tion through its important content and on ac- count of a small formal error* In July, 1504, he wrote : “Adi 9 Luglio, 1504, mercoledi, a ore 7 mori Ser Piero da Vinci notalio al palazzo del Po- testa, mio padre, a ore 7. Era d’eta d’anni 80, lascio to figlioli maschi e 2 feminine.” 1 The notice as we see deals with the death of Leonardo’s father. The slight error in its form consists in the fact that in the computa- tion of the time “at 7 o'clock” is repeated two times, as if Leonardo had forgotten at the end of the sentence that he had already written it at the beginning. It is only a triviality to 1 “On the 9th of July, 1504, Wednesday at 7 o’clock died Ser Piero da Vmci, notary at the palace of the Podesta, my father, at 7 o’clock. He was 80 years o!d ; left. 10 sons and 2 daugh- ters.” (E. Muntz, 1 . c. p. 13.) 95 LEONARDO DA VINCI 96 which any one but a psychoanalyst would pay no attention. Perhaps he would not even no- tice it, or if his attention would be called to it he would say “that can happen to anybody dur- ing absent-mindedness or in an affective state and has no further meaning / 5 The psychoanalyst thinks differently; to him nothing is too trifling as a manifestation of hid- den psychic processes ; he has long learned that such forgetting or repetition Is full of mean- ing, and that one is indebted to the “absent- mindedness” when it makes possible the be- trayal of otherwise concealed feelings. We would say that, like the funeral account of Caterina and the expense account of the pupils, this notice, too, corresponds to a case in which Leonardo was unsuccessful in suppress- ing his affects, and the long hidden feeling forcibly obtained a distorted expression. Also the form is similar, it shows the same pedantic precision, the same pushing forward of num- bers . 2 We call such a repetition a perseveration. 2 I shall overlook a greater error committed by Leonardo in his notice in that he gives his 77-year -old father 80 years. LEONARDO DA VINCI 97 It is an excellent means to indicate the affective accentuation. One recalls for example Saint Peter's angry speech against his unworthy rep- resentative on earth, as given in Dante's Para- diso: 3 “Quegli ch’usurpa in terra il luoga mio II luoga mio, il luogo mio, che vaca Nella presenza del Figliuol di Dio, Fatto ha del cimiterio mio cloaca.” Without Leonardo's affective inhibition the entry into the diary could perhaps have read as follows: To-day at 7 o'clock died my father, Ser Piero da Vinci, my poor father ! But the displacement of the perseveration to the most indifferent determination of the obituary to dying-hour robs the notice of all pathos and lets us recognize that there was something here to conceal and to suppress. Ser Piero da Vinci, notary and descendant of notaries, was a man of great energy who at- tained respect and affluence. He was married four times, the two first wives died childless, 3 “He who usurps on earth my place, my place, my place, which is void in the presence of the Son of God, has made out of my cemetery a sewer.” Canto XXXVII. LEONARDO DA VINCI 98 and not till the third marriage has he gotten the first legitimate son, in 1476, when Leonardo was 24 years old, and had long ago changed his father’s home for the studio of his master Verrocchio. With the fourth and last wife whom he married when he was already in the fifties he begot nine sons and two daughters. 4 To be sure the father also assumed impor- tance in Leonardo’s psychosexual development, and what is more, it was not only in a negative sense, through his absence during the boy’s first childhood years, but also directly through his presence in his later childhood. He who as a child desires his mother, cannot help wishing to put himself in his father’s place, to identify himself with him in his phantasy and later make it his life’s task to triumph over him. As Leonardo was not yet five years old when he was received into his paternal home, the young step-mother, Albiera, certainly must have taken the place of his mother in his feel- ing, and this brought him into that relation of 4 It seems that in that passage of the diary Leonardo also erred in the number of his sisters and brothers, which stands in remarkable contrast to the apparent exactness of the same. LEONARDO DA VINCI 99 rivalry to his father which may be designated as normal. As is known, the preference for homosexuality did not manifest itself till near the years of puberty. When Leonardo ac- cepted this preference the identification with the father lost all significance for his sexual life, but continued in other spheres of non- erotic activity. We hear that he was fond of luxury and pretty raiments, and kept servants and horses, although according to Vasari’s words “he hardly possessed anything and worked little.” We shall not hold his artistic taste entirely responsible for all these special likings; we recognize in them also the compul- sion to copy his father and to excel him. He played the part of the great gentleman to the poor peasant girl, hence the son retained the incentive that he also play the great gentleman, he had the strong feeling “to out-herod Herod,” and to show his father exactly how the real high rank looks. Whoever works as an artist certainly feels as a father to his works. The identification with his father had a fateful result in Leo- nardo’s works of art. He created them and loo LEONARDO DA VINCI then troubled himself no longer about them, just as his father did not trouble himself about him. The later worriments of his father could change nothing in this compulsion, as the latter originated from the impressions of the first years of childhood, and the repression having remained unconscious was incorrigible through later experiences. At the time of the Renaissance, and even much later, every artist was in need of a gen- tleman of rank to act as his benefactor. This patron w