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[Illustration: LEONARDO DA VINCI]




Leonardo da Vinci

A PSYCHOSEXUAL STUDY OF AN
INFANTILE REMINISCENCE

BY
PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D.
(UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA)

TRANSLATED BY

A. A. BRILL, PH.B., M.D.

Lecturer in Psychoanalysis and Abnormal
Psychology, New York University

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY




ILLUSTRATIONS


Leonardo Da Vinci       _Frontispiece_

                              FACING
                               PAGE

Mona Lisa       78

Saint Anne       86

John the Baptist       94




LEONARDO DA VINCI




I


When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with
frail human material, approaches the great personages of humanity, it is
not impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by
laymen. It does not strive "to blacken the radiant and to drag the
sublime into the mire"; it finds no satisfaction in diminishing the
distance between the perfection of the great and the inadequacy of the
ordinary objects. But it cannot help finding that everything is worthy
of understanding that can be perceived through those prototypes, and it
also believes that none is so big as to be ashamed of being subject to
the laws which control the normal and morbid actions with the same
strictness.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was admired even by his contemporaries as
one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, still even then he
appeared as mysterious to them as he now appears to us. An all-sided
genius, "whose form can only be divined but never deeply fathomed,"[1]
he exerted the most decisive influence on his time as an artist; and it
remained to us to recognize his greatness as a naturalist which was
united in him with the artist. Although he left masterpieces of the art
of painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and
unused, the investigator in him has never quite left the artist, often
it has severely injured the artist and in the end it has perhaps
suppressed the artist altogether. According to Vasari, Leonardo
reproached himself during the last hour of his life for having insulted
God and men because he has not done his duty to his art.[2] And even if
Vasari's story lacks all probability and belongs to those legends which
began to be woven about the mystic master while he was still living, it
nevertheless retains indisputable value as a testimonial of the judgment
of those people and of those times.

What was it that removed the personality of Leonardo from the
understanding of his contemporaries? Certainly not the many sidedness of
his capacities and knowledge, which allowed him to install himself as a
player of the lyre on an instrument invented by himself, in the court of
Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, the Duke of Milan, or which allowed
him to write to the same person that remarkable letter in which he
boasts of his abilities as a civil and military engineer. For the
combination of manifold talents in the same person was not unusual in
the times of the Renaissance; to be sure Leonardo himself furnished one
of the most splendid examples of such persons. Nor did he belong to that
type of genial persons who are outwardly poorly endowed by nature, and
who on their side place no value on the outer forms of life, and in the
painful gloominess of their feelings fly from human relations. On the
contrary he was tall and symmetrically built, of consummate beauty of
countenance and of unusual physical strength, he was charming in his
manner, a master of speech, and jovial and affectionate to everybody. He
loved beauty in the objects of his surroundings, he was fond of wearing
magnificent garments and appreciated every refinement of conduct. In his
treatise[3] on the art of painting he compares in a significant passage
the art of painting with its sister arts and thus discusses the
difficulties of the sculptor: "Now his face is entirely smeared and
powdered with marble dust, so that he looks like a baker, he is covered
with small marble splinters, so that it seems as if it snowed on his
back, and his house is full of stone splinters, and dust. The case of
the painter is quite different from that; for the painter is well
dressed and sits with great comfort before his work, he gently and very
lightly brushes in the beautiful colors. He wears as decorative clothes
as he likes, and his house is filled with beautiful paintings and is
spotlessly clean. He often enjoys company, music, or some one may read
for him various nice works, and all this can be listened to with great
pleasure, undisturbed by any pounding from the hammer and other noises."

It is quite possible that the conception of a beaming jovial and happy
Leonardo was true only for the first and longer period of the master's
life. From now on, when the downfall of the rule of Lodovico Moro forced
him to leave Milan, his sphere of action and his assured position, to
lead an unsteady and unsuccessful life until his last asylum in France,
it is possible that the luster of his disposition became pale and some
odd features of his character became more prominent. The turning of his
interest from his art to science which increased with age must have also
been responsible for widening the gap between himself and his
contemporaries. All his efforts with which, according to their opinion,
he wasted his time instead of diligently filling orders and becoming
rich as perhaps his former classmate Perugino, seemed to his
contemporaries as capricious playing, or even caused them to suspect him
of being in the service of the "black art." We who know him from his
sketches understand him better. In a time in which the authority of the
church began to be substituted by that of antiquity and in which only
theoretical investigation existed, he the forerunner, or better the
worthy competitor of Bacon and Copernicus, was necessarily isolated.
When he dissected cadavers of horses and human beings, and built flying
apparatus, or when he studied the nourishment of plants and their
behavior towards poisons, he naturally deviated much from the
commentators of Aristotle and came nearer the despised alchemists, in
whose laboratories the experimental investigations found some refuge
during these unfavorable times.

The effect that this had on his paintings was that he disliked to handle
the brush, he painted less and what was more often the case, the things
he began were mostly left unfinished; he cared less and less for the
future fate of his works. It was this mode of working that was held up
to him as a reproach from his contemporaries to whom his behavior to his
art remained a riddle.

Many of Leonardo's later admirers have attempted to wipe off the stain
of unsteadiness from his character. They maintained that what is blamed
in Leonardo is a general characteristic of great artists. They said that
even the energetic Michelangelo who was absorbed in his work left many
incompleted works, which was as little due to his fault as to Leonardo's
in the same case. Besides some pictures were not as unfinished as he
claimed, and what the layman would call a masterpiece may still appear
to the creator of the work of art as an unsatisfied embodiment of his
intentions; he has a faint notion of a perfection which he despairs of
reproducing in likeness. Least of all should the artist be held
responsible for the fate which befalls his works.

As plausible as some of these excuses may sound they nevertheless do not
explain the whole state of affairs which we find in Leonardo. The
painful struggle with the work, the final flight from it and the
indifference to its future fate may be seen in many other artists, but
this behavior is shown in Leonardo to highest degree. Edm. Solmi[4]
cites (p. 12) the expression of one of his pupils: "Pareva, che ad ogni
ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipingere, e pero no diede mai fine ad
alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell'arte, tal che
egli scorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad altri parevano miracoli."
His last pictures, Leda, the Madonna di Saint Onofrio, Bacchus and St.
John the Baptist, remained unfinished "come quasi intervenne di tutte le
cose sue." Lomazzo,[5] who finished a copy of The Holy Supper, refers in
a sonnet to the familiar inability of Leonardo to finish his works:

    "Protogen che il penel di sue pitture
     Non levava, agguaglio il Vinci Divo,
     Di cui opra non e finita pure."

The slowness with which Leonardo worked was proverbial. After the most
thorough preliminary studies he painted The Holy Supper for three years
in the cloister of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. One of his
contemporaries, Matteo Bandelli, the writer of novels, who was then a
young monk in the cloister, relates that Leonardo often ascended the
scaffold very early in the morning and did not leave the brush out of
his hand until twilight, never thinking of eating or drinking. Then days
passed without putting his hand on it, sometimes he remained for hours
before the painting and derived satisfaction from studying it by
himself. At other times he came directly to the cloister from the palace
of the Milanese Castle where he formed the model of the equestrian
statue for Francesco Sforza, in order to add a few strokes with the
brush to one of the figures and then stopped immediately.[6] According
to Vasari he worked for years on the portrait of Monna Lisa, the wife of
the Florentine de Gioconda, without being able to bring it to
completion. This circumstance may also account for the fact that it was
never delivered to the one who ordered it but remained with Leonardo who
took it with him to France.[7] Having been procured by King Francis I,
it now forms one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.

When one compares these reports about Leonardo's way of working with the
evidence of the extraordinary amount of sketches and studies left by
him, one is bound altogether to reject the idea that traits of
flightiness and unsteadiness exerted the slightest influence on
Leonardo's relation to his art. On the contrary one notices a very
extraordinary absorption in work, a richness in possibilities in which a
decision could be reached only hestitatingly, claims which could hardly
be satisfied, and an inhibition in the execution which could not even be
explained by the inevitable backwardness of the artist behind his ideal
purpose. The slowness which was striking in Leonardo's works from the
very beginning proved to be a symptom of his inhibition, a forerunner of
his turning away from painting which manifested itself later.[8] It was
this slowness which decided the not undeserving fate of The Holy
Supper. Leonardo could not take kindly to the art of fresco painting
which demands quick work while the background is still moist, it was for
this reason that he chose oil colors, the drying of which permitted him
to complete the picture according to his mood and leisure. But these
colors separated themselves from the background upon which they were
painted and which isolated them from the brick wall; the blemishes of
this wall and the vicissitudes to which the room was subjected seemingly
contributed to the inevitable deterioration of the picture.[9]

The picture of the cavalry battle of Anghiari, which in competition with
Michelangelo he began to paint later on a wall of the Sala de Consiglio
in Florence and which he also left in an unfinished state, seemed to
have perished through the failure of a similar technical process. It
seems here as if a peculiar interest, that of the experimenter, at first
reenforced the artistic, only later to damage the art production.

The character of the man Leonardo evinces still some other unusual
traits and apparent contradictions. Thus a certain inactivity and
indifference seemed very evident in him. At a time when every individual
sought to gain the widest latitude for his activity, which could not
take place without the development of energetic aggression towards
others, he surprised every one through his quiet peacefulness, his
shunning of all competition and controversies. He was mild and kind to
all, he was said to have rejected a meat diet because he did not
consider it just to rob animals of their lives, and one of his special
pleasures was to buy caged birds in the market and set them free.[10] He
condemned war and bloodshed and designated man not so much as the king
of the animal world, but rather as the worst of the wild beasts.[11] But
this effeminate delicacy of feeling did not prevent him from
accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution in order to
study and sketch in his notebook their features, distorted by fear, nor
did it prevent him from inventing the most cruel offensive weapons, and
from entering the service of Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer.
Often he seemed to be indifferent to good and evil, or he had to be
measured with a special standard. He held a high position in Cesare's
campaign which gained for this most inconsiderate and most faithless of
foes the possession of the Romagna. Not a single line of Leonardo's
sketches betrays any criticism or sympathy of the events of those days.
The comparison with Goethe during the French campaign cannot here be
altogether rejected.

If a biographical effort really endeavors to penetrate the understanding
of the psychic life of its hero it must not, as happens in most
biographies through discretion or prudery, pass over in silence the
sexual activity or the sex peculiarity of the one examined. What we know
about it in Leonardo is very little but full of significance. In a
period where there was a constant struggle between riotous
licentiousness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo presented an example of
cool sexual rejection which one would not expect in an artist and a
portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi[12] cites the following sentence
from Leonardo showing his frigidity: "The act of procreation and
everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human
beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom and if
there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions." His posthumous
works which not only treat of the greatest scientific problems but also
comprise the most guileless objects which to us do not seem worthy of so
great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, witticisms,
prophecies),[13] are chaste to a degree--one might say abstinent--that
in a work of _belle lettres_ would excite wonder even to-day. They evade
everything sexual so thoroughly, as if Eros alone who preserves
everything living was no worthy material for the scientific impulse of
the investigator.[14] It is known how frequently great artists found
pleasure in giving vent to their phantasies in erotic and even grossly
obscene representations; in contradistinction to this Leonardo left only
some anatomical drawings of the woman's internal genitals, the position
of the child in the womb, etc.

It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in love, nor is it
known that he ever entertained an intimate spiritual relation with a
woman as in the case of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. While he
still lived as an apprentice in the house of his master Verrocchio, he
with other young men were accused of forbidden homosexual relations
which ended in his acquittal. It seems that he came into this suspicion
because he employed as a model a boy of evil repute.[15] When he was a
master he surrounded himself with handsome boys and youths whom he took
as pupils. The last of these pupils Francesco Melzi, accompanied him to
France, remained with him until his death, and was named by him as his
heir. Without sharing the certainty of his modern biographers, who
naturally reject the possibility of a sexual relation between himself
and his pupils as a baseless insult to this great man, it may be thought
by far more probable that the affectionate relationships of Leonardo to
the young men did not result in sexual activity. Nor should one
attribute to him a high measure of sexual activity.

The peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life viewed in connection
with Leonardo's double nature as an artist and investigator can be
grasped only in one way. Of the biographers to whom psychological
viewpoints are often very foreign, only one, Edm. Solmi, has to my
knowledge approached the solution of the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri
Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected Leonardo as the hero of a great
historical novel has based his delineation on such an understanding of
this unusual man, and if not in dry words he gave unmistakable
utterance in plastic expression in the manner of a poet.[16] Solmi
judges Leonardo as follows: "But the unrequited desire to understand
everything surrounding him, and with cold reflection to discover the
deepest secret of everything that is perfect, has condemned Leonardo's
works to remain forever unfinished."[17] In an essay of the Conferenze
Fiorentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his
confession of faith and furnish the key to his character.

    "_Nessuna cosa si puo amare ne odiare, se_
     _prima no si ha cognition di quella._"[18]

That is: One has no right to love or to hate anything if one has not
acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by
Leonardo in a passage of the Treaties on the Art of Painting where he
seems to defend himself against the accusation of irreligiousness:

"But such censurers might better remain silent. For that action is the
manner of showing the workmaster so many wonderful things, and this is
the way to love so great a discoverer. For, verily great love springs
from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it
you will be able to