Freud - Complete Works (393 page)

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2283

   Leonardo spent four years
painting at this picture, perhaps from 1503 to 1507, during his
second period of residence in Florence, when he was over fifty.
According to Vasari he employed the most elaborate artifices to
keep the lady amused during the sittings and to retain the famous
smile on her features. In its present condition the picture has
preserved but little of all the delicate details which his brush
reproduced on the canvas at that time; while it was being painted
it was considered to be the highest that art could achieve, but it
is certain that Leonardo himself was not satisfied with it,
declaring it to be incomplete, and did not deliver it to the person
who had commissioned it, but took it to France with him, where his
patron, Francis I, acquired it from him for the Louvre.

   Let us leave unsolved the riddle
of the expression on Mona Lisa’s face, and note the
indisputable fact that her smile exercised no less powerful a
fascination on the artist than on all who have looked at it for the
last four hundred years. From that date the captivating smile
reappears in all his pictures and in those of his pupils. As
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is a portrait, we cannot assume that he
added on his own account such an expressive feature to her face - a
feature that she did not herself possess. The conclusion seems
hardly to be avoided that he found this smile in his model and fell
so strongly under its spell that from then on he bestowed it on the
free creations of his phantasy. This interpretation, which cannot
be called far-fetched, is put forward, for example, by
Konstantinowa (1907, 44):

   ‘During the long period in
which the artist was occupied with the portrait of Mona Lisa del
Giocondo, he had entered into the subtle details of the features on
this lady’s face with such sympathetic feeling that he
transferred its traits - in particular the mysterious smile and the
strange gaze - to all the faces that he painted or drew afterwards.
The Gioconda’s peculiar facial expression can even be
perceived in the picture of John the Baptist in the Louvre; but
above all it may be clearly recognized in the expression on
Mary’s face in the "Madonna and Child with St.
Anne".’

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2284

   Yet this situation may also have
come about in another way. The need for a deeper reason behind the
attraction of La Gioconda’s smile, which so moved the artist
that he was never again free from it, has been felt by more than
one of his biographers. Walter Pater, who sees in the picture of
Mona Lisa a ‘presence . . . expressive of what
in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’, and
who writes very sensitively of ‘the unfathomable smile,
always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over
all Leonardo’s work’, leads us to another clue when he
declares (loc. cit.):

   ‘Besides, the picture is a
portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the
fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we
might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld
at last . . .’

   Marie Herzfeld (1906, 88) has no
doubt something very similar in mind when she declares that in the
Mona Lisa Leonardo encountered his own self and for this reason was
able to put so much of his own nature into the picture ‘whose
features had lain all along in mysterious sympathy within
Leonardo’s mind’.

   Let us attempt to clarify what is
suggested here. It may very well have been that Leonardo was
fascinated by Mona Lisa’s smile for the reason that it awoke
something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind -
probably an old memory. This memory was of sufficient importance
for him never to get free of it when it had once been aroused; he
was continually forced to give it new expression. Pater’s
confident assertion that we can see, from childhood, a face like
Mona Lisa’s defining itself on the fabric of his dreams,
seems convincing and deserves to be taken literally.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2285

   Vasari mentions that ‘teste
di femmine, che ridono’¹ formed the subject of
Leonardo’s first artistic endeavours. The passage - which,
since it is not intended to prove anything, is quite beyond
suspicion - runs more fully according to Schorn’s translation
(1843,
3
, 6): ‘In his youth he made some heads of
laughing women out of clay, which were reproduced in plaster, and
some children’s heads which were as beautiful as if they had
been modelled by the hand of a
master . . .’

   Thus we learn that he began his
artistic career by portraying two kinds of objects; and these
cannot fail to remind us of the two kinds of sexual objects that we
have inferred from the analysis of his vulture-phantasy. If the
beautiful children’s heads were reproductions of his own
person as it was in his childhood, then the smiling women are
nothing other than repetitions of his mother Caterina, and we begin
to suspect the possibility that it was his mother who possessed the
mysterious smile - the smile that he had lost and that fascinated
him so much when he found it again in the Florentine
lady.²

   The painting of Leonardo’s
which stands nearest to the Mona Lisa in point of time is the
so-called ‘St. Anne with Two Others’, St. Anne with the
Madonna and child. In it the Leonardesque smile is most beautifully
and markedly portrayed on both the women’s faces. It is not
possible to discover how long before or after the painting of the
Mona Lisa Leonardo began to paint this picture. As both works
extended over years, it may, I think, be assumed that the artist
was engaged on them at the same time. It would best agree with our
expectation if it was the intensity of Leonardo’s
preoccupation with the features of Mona Lisa which stimulated him
to create the composition of St. Anne out of his phantasy. For if
the Gioconda’s smile called up in his mind the memory of his
mother, it is easy to understand how it drove him at once to create
a glorification of motherhood, and to give back to his mother the
smile he had found in the noble lady. We may therefore permit our
interest to pass from Mona Lisa’s portrait to this other
picture - one which is hardly less beautiful, and which to-day also
hangs in the Louvre.

  
¹
[’Heads of laughing women.’]
Quoted by Scognamiglio (1900, 32).

  
²
The same assumption is made by
Merezhkovsky. But the history of Leonardo’s childhood as he
imagines it departs at the essential points from the conclusions we
have drawn from the phantasy of the vulture. Yet if the smile had
been that of Leonardo himself tradition would hardly have failed to
inform us of the coincidence.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2286

   St. Anne with her daughter and
her grandchild is a subject that is rarely handled in Italian
painting. At all events Leonardo’s treatment of it differs
widely from all other known versions. Muther (1909,
1
, 309)
writes:

   ‘Some artists, like Hans
Fries, the elder Holbein and Girolamo dai Libri, made Anne sit
beside Mary and put the child between them. Others, like Jakob
Cornelisz in his Berlin picture, painted what was truly a "St.
Anne with Two Others"; in other words, they represented her as
holding in her arms the small figure of Mary upon which the still
smaller figure of the child Christ is sitting.’ In
Leonardo’s picture Mary is sitting on her mother’s lap,
leaning forward, and is stretching out both arms towards the boy,
who is playing with a young lamb and perhaps treating it a little
unkindly. The grandmother rests on her hip the arm that is not
concealed and gazes down on the pair with a blissful smile. The
grouping is certainly not entirely unconstrained. But although the
smile that plays on the lips of the two women is unmistakably the
same as that in the picture of Mona Lisa, it has lost its uncanny
and mysterious character; what it expresses is inward feeling and
quiet blissfulness.¹

   After we have studied this
picture for some time, it suddenly dawns on us that only Leonardo
could have painted it, just as only he could have created the
phantasy of the vulture. The picture contains the synthesis of the
history of his childhood: its details are to be explained by
reference to the most personal impressions in Leonardo’s
life. In his father’s house he found not only his kind
stepmother, Donna Albiera, but also his grandmother, his
father’s mother, Monna Lucia, who - so we will assume - was
no less tender to him than grandmothers usually are. These
circumstances might well suggest to him a picture representing
childhood watched over by mother and grandmother. Another striking
feature of the picture assumes even greater significance. St. Anne,
Mary’s mother and the boy’s grandmother, who must have
been a matron, is here portrayed as being perhaps a little more
mature and serious than the Virgin Mary, but as still being a young
woman of unfaded beauty. In point of fact Leonardo has given the
boy two mothers, one who stretches her arms out to him, and another
in the background; and both are endowed with the blissful smile of
the joy of motherhood. This peculiarity of the picture has not
failed to surprise those who have written about it; Muther, for
example, is of the opinion that Leonardo could not bring himself to
paint old age, lines and wrinkles, and for this reason made Anne
too into a woman of radiant beauty. But can we be satisfied with
this explanation? Others have had recourse to denying that there is
any similarity in age between the mother and daughter.² But
Muther’s attempt at an explanation is surely enough to prove
that the impression that St. Anne has been made more youthful
derives from the picture and is not an invention for an ulterior
purpose.

  
¹
Konstantinowa (1907): ‘Mary gazes
down full of inward feeling on her darling, with a smile that
recalls the mysterious expression of La Gioconda.’ In another
passage she says of Mary: ‘The Gioconda’s smile hovers
on her features.’

  
²
Von Seidlitz (1909,
2
, 274,
notes).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2287

   Leonardo’s childhood was
remarkable in precisely the same way as this picture. He had had
two mothers: first, his true mother Caterina, from whom he was torn
away when he was between three and five, and then a young and
tender stepmother, his father’s wife, Donna Albiera. By his
combining this fact about his childhood with the one mentioned
above (the presence of his mother and grandmother) and by his
condensing them into a composite unity, the design of ‘St.
Anne with Two Others’ took shape for him. The maternal figure
that is further away from the boy - the grandmother - corresponds
to the earlier and true mother, Caterina, in its appearance and in
its special relation to the boy. The artist seems to have used the
blissful smile of St. Anne to disavow and to cloak the envy which
the unfortunate woman felt when she was forced to give up her son
to her better-born rival, as she had once given up his father as
well.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] If an attempt
is made to separate the figures of Anne and Mary in this picture
and to trace the outline of each, it will not be found altogether
easy. One is inclined to say that they are fused with each other
like badly condensed dream-figures, so that in some places it is
hard to say where Anne ends and where Mary begins. But what appears
to a critic’s eye as a fault, as a defect in composition, is
vindicated in the eyes of analysis by reference to its secret
meaning. It seems that for the artist the two mothers of his
childhood were melted into a single form.

  
[
Added
1923:] It is especially tempting to compare the
‘St. Anne with Two Others’ of the Louvre with the
celebrated London cartoon, where the same material is used to form
a different composition. Here the forms of the two mothers are
fused even more closely and their separate outlines are even harder
to make out, so that critics, far removed from any attempt to offer
an interpretation, have been forced to say that it seems ‘as
if two heads were growing from a single body’.

Fig. 2.

  
Most authorities are in agreement in pronouncing the London cartoon
to be the earlier work and in assigning its origin to
Leonardo’s first period in Milan (before 1500). Adolf
Rosenberg (1898), on the other hand, sees the composition of the
cartoon as a later - and more successful - version of the same
theme, and follows Anton Springer in dating it even after the Mona
Lisa. It would fit in excellently with our arguments if the cartoon
were to be much the earlier work. It is also not hard to imagine
how the picture in the Louvre arose out of the cartoon, while the
reverse course of events would make to sense. If we take the
composition shown in the cartoon as our starting point, we can see
how Leonardo may have felt the need to undo the dream-like fusion
of the two women - a fusion corresponding to his childhood memory -
and to separate the two heads in space. This came about as follows:
From the group formed by the mothers he detached Mary’s head
and the upper part of her body and bent them downwards. To provide
a reason for this displacement the child Christ had to come down
from her lap on to the ground. There was then no room for the
little St. John, who was replaced by the lamb.