Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood

Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910 as the seventh number of the series Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, is the first book-length psychoanalytic biography. It sets out to explain two features of Leonardo's life that his biographers recorded: the slowness and inhibition with which he painted, leaving many works unfinished as the investigator in him gradually overtook the artist, and a sexual life that seemed cool and abstinent, with an idealised attachment to handsome pupils. Freud builds his reading on a single note in Leonardo's notebooks, the recollection that as he lay in his cradle a bird (a 'vulture', Geier, in the German translation Freud used) came down and struck his lips with its tail. He treats it as a fantasy formed later in life and projected back into infancy, and reads it as a disguised memory of sucking at the mother's breast and of her kisses, recast as a passive homosexual scene. From the Egyptian hieroglyph in which the vulture stands for 'mother', and from the ancient fable that all vultures are female and conceive from the wind, he infers that the illegitimate Leonardo spent his first years alone with his mother Caterina, a 'vulture child' with a mother and no father, before he was taken into the house of his father, Ser Piero, and his childless wife. On this ground Freud builds a developmental account. The mother's tenderness made the boy sexually precocious and intensely curious; a wave of repression ended that phase, and most of his libido was sublimated into an insatiable urge to research, while a smaller part, fixated on the repressed love for the mother, became an ideal homosexual love in which he chose boys in his own image and loved them as his mother had loved him. The study goes on to the smile of the Mona Lisa and the strangely young Saint Anne of the Louvre painting, read as the revival of the mother's smile and a picture of the two mothers of his childhood; to a slip in Leonardo's note on his father's death; to his independence from authority, the ancients and religion, as the achievement of a son who grew up without a father's intimidation; and to the late regression in which the revived memory of the mother briefly freed his painting. Freud closes by marking the limits of the method: psychoanalysis cannot explain artistic talent or the capacity for sublimation, and must leave room for chance and organic constitution.