Freud - Complete Works (395 page)

  
³
[The last three words are in English in the
original.]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2292

   There is no doubt that the
creative artist feels towards his works like a father. The effect
which Leonardo’s identification with his father had on his
paintings was a fateful one. He created them and then cared no more
about them, just as his father had not cared about him. His
father’s later concern could change nothing in this
compulsion; for the compulsion derived from the impressions of the
first years of childhood, and what has been repressed and has
remained unconscious cannot be corrected by later experiences.

   In the days of the Renaissance
-(and even much later - every artist stood in need of a gentleman
of rank, a benefactor and patron, who gave him commissions and in
whose hands his fortune rested. Leonardo found his patron in
Lodovico Sforza, called Il Moro, a man of ambition and a lover of
splendour, astute in diplomacy, but of erratic and unreliable
character. At his court in Milan Leonardo passed the most brilliant
period of his life, and in his service his creative power attained
its most uninhibited expansion, to which the Last Supper and the
equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza bore witness. He left Milan
before catastrophe overtook Lodovico Sforza, who died a prisoner in
a French dungeon. When the news of his patron’s fate reached
Leonardo, he wrote in his diary: ‘The duke lost his dukedom
and his property and his liberty, and none of the works that he
undertook was completed.’¹ It is remarkable, and
certainly not without significance, that he here cast the same
reproach at his patron which posterity was to bring against
himself. It is as if he wanted to make someone from the class of
his fathers responsible for the fact that he himself left his works
unfinished. In point of fact he was not wrong in what he said about
the duke.

  
¹
‘II duca perse to stato e la roba e
libertà e nessuna sua opera si finì per lui.’
Quoted by Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 270).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2293

   But if his imitation of his
father did him damage as an artist, his rebellion against his
father was the infantile determinant of what was perhaps an equally
sublime achievement in the field of scientific research. In
Merezhkovsky’s admirable simile (1903, 348), he was like a
man who had awoken too early in the darkness, while everyone else
was still asleep. He dared to utter the bold assertion which
contains within itself the justification for all independent
research: ‘
He who appeals to authority when there is a
difference of opinion works with his memory rather than with his
reason
.’¹ Thus he became the first modern natural
scientist, and an abundance of discoveries and suggestive ideas
rewarded his courage for being the first man since the time of the
Greeks to probe the secrets of nature while relying solely on
observation and his own judgement. But in teaching that authority
should be looked down on and that imitation of the
‘ancients’ should be repudiated, and in constantly
urging that the study of nature was the source of all truth, he was
merely repeating - in the highest sublimation attainable by man -
the one-sided point of view which had already forced itself on the
little boy as he gazed in wonder on the world. If we translate
scientific abstraction back again into concrete individual
experience, we see that the ‘ancients’ and authority
simply correspond to his father, and nature once more becomes the
tender and kindly mother who had nourished him. In most other human
beings - no less to-day than in primaeval times - the need for
support from an authority of some sort is so compelling that their
world begins to totter if that authority is threatened. Only
Leonardo could dispense with that support; he would not have been
able to do so had he not learnt in the first years of his life to
do without his father. His later scientific research, with all its
boldness and independence, presupposed the existence of infantile
sexual researches uninhibited by his father, and was a prolongation
of them with the sexual element excluded.

  
¹
‘Chi disputa allegando
l’autorità non adopra l’ingegno ma piuttosto la
memoria.’ Quoted by Solmi (1910, 13).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2294

   When anyone has, like Leonardo,
escaped being intimidated by his father during his earliest
childhood, and has in his researches cast away the fetters of
authority, it would be in the sharpest contradiction to our
expectation if we found that he had remained a believer and had
been unable to escape from dogmatic religion. Psycho-analysis has
made us familiar with the intimate connection between the
father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal
God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and
it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their
religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks
down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are
in the parental complex; the almighty and just God, and kindly
Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or
rather, as revivals and restorations of the young child’s
ideas of them. Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced
to the small human child’s long-drawn-out helplessness and
need of help; and when at a later date he perceives how truly
forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of
life, he feels his condition as he did in childhood, and attempts
to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces
which protected his infancy. The protection against neurotic
illness, which religion vouchsafes to those who believe in it, is
easily explained: it removes their parental complex, on which the
sense of guilt in individuals as well as in the whole human race
depends, and disposes of it, while the unbeliever has to grapple
with the problem on his own.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2295

   It does not seem as if the
instance of Leonardo could show this view of religious belief to be
mistaken. Accusations charging him with unbelief or (what at that
time came to the same thing) with apostasy from Christianity were
brought against him while he was still alive, and are clearly
described in the first biography which Vasari wrote of him,
(Müntz, 1899, 292 ff.) In the second (1568) edition of his
Vite
Vasari omitted these observations. In view of the
extraordinary sensitiveness of his age where religious matters were
in question, we can understand perfectly why even in his notebooks
Leonardo should have refrained from directly stating his attitude
to Christianity. In his researches he did not allow himself to be
led astray in the slightest degree by the account of the Creation
in Holy Writ; he challenged, for example, the possibility of a
universal Deluge, and in geology he calculated in terms of hundreds
of thousands of years with no more hesitation than men in modern
times.

   Among his
‘prophecies’ there are some things that would have been
bound to offend the sensitive feelings of a Christian believer.
Take for example, ‘On the practice of praying to the images
of saints’:

   ‘Men will speak to men that
perceive nothing, that have their eyes open and see nothing; they
will talk to them and receive no answer; they will implore the
grace of those that have ears and hear not; they will kindle lights
for one that is blind.’ (After Herzfeld, 1906, 292.)

   Or ‘On the mourning on Good
Friday’:

   ‘In every part of Europe
great people will weep for the death of a single man who died in
the East.’ (Ibid., 297.)

   The view has been expressed about
Leonardo’s art that he took from the sacred figures the last
remnant of their connection with the Church and made them human, so
as to represent by their means great and beautiful human emotions.
Muther praises him for overcoming the prevailing mood of decadence
and for restoring to man his right to sensuality and the joy of
living. In the notes that show Leonardo engrossed in fathoming the
great riddles of nature there is no lack of passages where he
expresses his admiration for the Creator, the ultimate cause of all
these noble secrets; but there is nothing which indicates that he
wished to maintain any personal relation with this divine power.
The reflections in which he has recorded the deep wisdom of his
last years of life breathe the resignation of the human being who
subjects himself to ‘’
Ανάγχη
',
to the laws of nature, and who expects no alleviation from the
goodness or grace of God. There is scarcely any doubt that Leonardo
had prevailed over both dogmatic and personal religion, and had by
his work of research removed himself far from the position from
which the Christian believer surveys the world.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2296

   The findings, mentioned above,
which we have reached concerning the development of the mental life
of children suggest the view that in Leonardo’s case too the
first researches of childhood were concerned with the problems of
sexuality. Indeed he himself gives this away in a transparent
disguise by connecting his urge for research with the vulture
phantasy, and by singling out the problem of the flight of birds as
one to which, as the result of a special chain of circumstances, he
was destined to turn his attention. A highly obscure passage in his
notes which is concerned with the flight of birds, and which sounds
like a prophecy, gives a very good demonstration of the degree of
affective interest with which he clung to his wish to succeed in
imitating the art of flying himself: ‘The great bird will
take its first flight from the back of its Great Swan; it will fill
the universe with stupefaction, and all writings with renown, and
be the eternal glory of the nest where it was born.’¹ He
probably hoped that he himself would be able to fly one day, and we
know from wish-fulfilling dreams what bliss is expected from the
fulfilment of that hope.

   But why do so many people dream
of being able to fly? The answer that psycho-analysis gives is that
to fly or to be a bird is only a disguise for another wish, and
that more than one bridge, involving words or things, leads us to
recognize what it is. When we consider that inquisitive children
are told that babies are brought by a large bird, such as the
stork; when we find that the ancients represented the phallus as
having wings; that the commonest expression in German for male
sexual activity is ‘
vögeln
’ [‘to
bird’: ‘
Vogel
’ is the German for
‘bird’]; that the male organ is actually called
‘
l’uccello
’ [‘the bird’] in
Italian - all of these are only small fragments from a whole mass
of connected ideas, from which we learn that in dreams the wish to
be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing
to be capable of sexual performance.² This is an early
infantile wish. When an adult recalls his childhood it seems to him
to have been a happy time, in which one enjoyed the moment and
looked to the future without any wishes; it is for this reason that
he envies children. But if children themselves were able to give us
information earlier they would probably tell a different story. It
seems that childhood is not the blissful idyll into which we
distort it in retrospect, and that, on the contrary, children are
goaded on through the years of childhood by the one wish to get big
and do what grown-ups do. This wish is the motive of all their
games. Whenever children feel in the course of their sexual
researches that in the province which is so mysterious but
nevertheless so important there is something wonderful of which
adults are capable but which
they
are forbidden to know of
and do, they are filled with a violent wish to be able to do it,
and they dream of it in the form of flying, or they prepare this
disguise of their wish to be used in their later flying dreams.
Thus aviation, too, which in our day is at last achieving its aim,
has its infantile erotic roots.

  
¹
After Herzfeld (1906, 32). ‘The Great
Swan’ seems to mean Monte Cecero, a hill near
Florence.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1919:] This
statement is based on the researches of Paul Federn and of Mourly
Vold (1912), a Norwegian man of science who had no contact with
psycho-analysis.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2297

   In admitting to us that ever
since his childhood he felt bound up in a special and personal way
with the problem of flight, Leonardo gives us confirmation that his
childhood researches were directed to sexual matters; and this is
what we were bound to expect as a result of our investigations on
children in our own time. Here was one problem at least which had
escaped the repression that later estranged him from sexuality.
With slight changes in meaning, the same subject continued to
interest him from his years of childhood until the time of his most
complete intellectual maturity; and it may very well be that the
skill that he desired was no more attainable by him in its primary
sexual sense than in its mechanical one, and that he remained
frustrated in both wishes.

   Indeed, the great Leonardo
remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one
way; it is said that all great men are bound to retain some
infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was
another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible
to his contemporaries. It is only we who are unsatisfied that he
should have constructed the most elaborate mechanical toys for
court festivities and ceremonial receptions, for we are reluctant
to see the artist turning his power to such trifles. He himself
seems to have shown no unwillingness to spend his time thus, for
Vasari tells us that he made similar things when he had not been
commissioned to do so: ‘There (in Rome) he got a soft lump of
wax, and made very delicate animals out of it, filled with air;
when he blew into them they flew around, and when the air ran out
they fell to the ground. For a peculiar lizard which was found by
the wine-grower of Belvedere he made wings from skin torn from
other lizards, and filled them with quicksilver, so that they moved
and quivered when it walked. Next he made eyes, a beard and horns
for it, tamed it and put it in a box and terrified all his friends
with it.’¹ Such ingenuities often served to express
thoughts of a serious kind. ‘He often had a sheep’s
intestines cleaned so carefully that they could have been held in
the hollow of the hand. He carried them into a large room, took a
pair of blacksmith’s bellows into an adjoining room, fastened
the intestines to them and blew them up, until they took up the
whole room and forced people to take refuge in a corner. In this
way he showed how they gradually became transparent and filled with
air; and from the fact that at first they were limited to a small
space and gradually spread through the whole breadth of the room,
he compared them to genius.’² The same playful delight
in harmlessly concealing things and giving them ingenious disguises
is illustrated by his fables and riddles. The latter are cast into
the form of ‘prophecies’: almost all are rich in ideas
and to a striking degree devoid of any element of wit.