Freud - Complete Works (396 page)

  
¹
Vasari, from Schorn’s translation
(1843, 39).

  
²
Ibid., 39.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2298

   The games and pranks which
Leonardo allowed his imagination have in some cases led his
biographers, who misunderstood this side of his character,
grievously astray. In Leonardo’s Milanese manuscripts there
are, for example, some drafts of letters to the ‘Diodario of
Sorio (Syria), Viceroy of the Holy Sultan of Babylonia’, in
which Leonardo presents himself as an engineer sent to those
regions of the East to construct certain works; defends himself
against the charge of laziness; supplies geographical descriptions
of towns and mountains, and concludes with an account of a great
natural phenomenon that occurred while he was there.¹

   In 1883 an attempt was made by J.
P. Richter to prove from these documents that it was really a fact
that Leonardo had made these observations while travelling in the
service of the Sultan of Egypt, and had even adopted the Mohammedan
religion when in the East. On this view his visit there took place
in the period before 1483 - that is, before he took up residence at
the court of the Duke of Milan. But the acumen of other authors has
had no difficulty in recognizing the evidences of Leonardo’s
supposed Eastern journey for what they are - imaginary productions
of the youthful artist, which he created for his own amusement and
in which he may have found expression for a wish to see the world
and meet with adventures.

   Another probable example of a
creation of his imagination is to be found in the ‘Academia
Vinciana’ which has been postulated from the existence of
five or six emblems, intertwined patterns of extreme intricacy,
which contain the Academy’s name. Vasari mentions these
designs but not the Academy.² Müntz, who put one of these
ornaments on the cover of his large work on Leonardo, is among the
few who believe in the reality of an ‘Academia
Vinciana’.

   It is probable that
Leonardo’s play-instinct vanished in his maturer years, and
that it too found its way into the activity of research which
represented the latest and highest expansion of his personality.
But its long duration can teach us how slowly anyone tears himself
from his childhood if in his childhood days he has enjoyed the
highest erotic bliss, which is never again attained.

  
¹
For these letters and the various questions
connected with them see Müntz (1899, 82 ff.); the actual texts
and other related notes will be found in Herzfeld (1906, 223
ff.).

  
²
‘Besides, he lost some time by even
making a drawing of knots of cords, in which it was possible to
trace the thread from one end to the other until it formed a
completely circular figure. A very complex and beautiful design of
this sort is engraved on copper; in the middle can be read the
words "Leonardus Vinci Academia".’ Schorn (1843,
8).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2299

VI

It would be futile to blind ourselves to the
fact that readers to-day find all pathography unpalatable. They
clothe their aversion in the complaint that a pathographical review
of a great man never results in an understanding of his importance
and his achievements, and that it is therefore a piece of useless
impertinence to make a study of things in him that could just as
easily be found in the first person one came across. But this
criticism is so manifestly unjust that it is only understandable
when taken as a pretext and a disguise.(Pathography does not in the
least aim at making the great man’s achievements
intelligible; and surely no one should be blamed for not carrying
out something he has never promised to do. The real motives for the
opposition are different. We can discover them if we bear in mind
that biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special
way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of
their studies because - for reasons of their personal emotional
life - they have felt a special affection for him from the very
first. They then devote their energies to a task of idealization,
aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile
models - at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his
father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual
features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the
traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external
resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness
or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a cold,
strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might
feel ourselves distantly related. That they should do this is
regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and
for the sake of their infantile phantasies abandon the opportunity
of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human
nature.¹

   Leonardo himself, with his love
of truth and his thirst for knowledge, would not have discouraged
an attempt to take the trivial peculiarities and riddles in his
nature as a starting-point, for discovering what determined his
mental and intellectual development. We do homage to him by
learning from him. It does not detract from his greatness if we
make a study of the sacrifices which his development from childhood
must have entailed, and if we bring together the factors which have
stamped him with the tragic mark of failure.

  
¹
This criticism applies quite generally and
is not to be taken as being aimed at Leonardo’s biographers
in particular.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2300

   We must expressly insist that we
have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a ‘nerve
case’, as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our
so much as daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained
in the field of pathology is still clinging to prejudices which we
have to-day rightly abandoned. We no longer think that health and
illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be sharply
distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must
necessarily be taken as proofs of a general inferiority. To-day we
know that neurotic symptoms are structures which are substitutes
for certain achievements of repression that we have to carry out in
the course of our development from a child to a civilized human
being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive
structures, and that it is only their number, intensity and
distribution which justify us in using the practical concept of
illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional
inferiority. From the slight indications we have about
Leonardo’s personality we should be inclined to place him
close to the type of neurotic that we describe as
‘obsessional’; and we may compare his researches to the
‘obsessive brooding’ of neurotics, and his inhibitions
to what are known as their ‘abulias’.

   The aim of our work has been to
explain the inhibitions in Leonardo’s sexual life and in his
artistic activity. With this in view we may be allowed to summarize
what we have been able to discover about the course of his
psychical development.

   We have no information about the
circumstances of his heredity; on the other hand we have seen that
the accidental conditions of his childhood had a profound and
disturbing effect on him. His illegitimate birth deprived him of
his father’s influence until perhaps his fifth year, and left
him open to the tender seductions of a mother whose only solace he
was. After being kissed by her into precocious sexual maturity, he
must no doubt have embarked on a phase of infantile sexual activity
of which only one single manifestation is definitely attested - the
intensity of his infantile sexual researches. The instinct to look
and the instinct to know were those most strongly excited by the
impressions of his early childhood; the erotogenic zone of the
mouth was given an emphasis which it never afterwards surrendered.
From his later behaviour in the contrary direction, such as his
exaggerated sympathy for animals, we can conclude that there was no
lack of strong sadistic traits in this period of his childhood.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2301

   A powerful wave of repression
brought this childhood excess to an end, and established the
dispositions which were to become manifest in the years of puberty.
The most obvious result of the transformation was the avoidance of
every crudely sensual activity; Leonardo was enabled to live in
abstinence and to give the impression of being an asexual human
being. When the excitations of puberty came in their flood upon the
boy they did not, however, make him ill by forcing him to develop
substitutive structures of a costly and harmful kind. Owing to his
very early inclination towards sexual curiosity the greater portion
of the needs of his sexual instinct could be sublimated into a
general urge to know, and thus evaded repression. A much smaller
portion of his libido continued to be devoted to sexual aims and
represented a stunted adult sexual life. Because his love for his
mother had been repressed, this portion was driven to take up a
homosexual attitude and manifested itself in ideal love for boys.
The fixation on his mother and on the blissful memories of his
relations with her continued to be preserved in the unconscious,
but for the time being it remained in an inactive state. In this
way repression, fixation and sublimation all played their part in
disposing of the contributions which the sexual instinct made to
Leonardo’s mental life.

   Leonardo emerges from the
obscurity of his boyhood as an artist, a painter and a sculptor,
owing to a specific talent which may have been reinforced by the
precocious awakening in the first years of childhood of his
scopophilic instinct. We should be most glad to give an account of
the way in which artistic activity derives from the primal
instincts of the mind if it were not just here that our capacities
fail us. We must be content to emphasize the fact - which it is
hardly any longer possible to doubt - that what an artist creates
provides at the same time an outlet for his sexual desire; and in
Leonardo’s case we can point to the information which comes
from Vasari, that heads of laughing women and beautiful boys - in
other words, representations of his sexual objects - were notable
among his first artistic endeavours. In the bloom of his youth
Leonardo appears at first to have worked without inhibition. Just
as he modelled himself on his father in the outward conduct of his
life, so too he passed through a period of masculine creative power
and artistic productiveness in Milan, where a kindly fate enabled
him to find a father substitute in the duke Lodovico Moro. But soon
we and confirmation of our experience that the almost total
repression of a real sexual life does not provide the most
favourable conditions for the exercise of sublimated sexual trends.
The pattern imposed by sexual life made itself felt. His activity
and his ability to form quick decisions began to fail; his tendency
towards deliberation and delay was already noticeable as a
disturbing element in the ‘Last Supper’, and by
influencing his technique it had a decisive effect on the fate of
that great painting. Slowly there occurred in him a process which
can only be compared to the regressions in neurotics. The
development that turned him into an artist at puberty was overtaken
by the process which led him to be an investigator, and which had
its determinants in early infancy. The second sublimation of his
erotic instinct gave place to the original sublimation for which
the way had been prepared on the occasion of the first repression.
He became an investigator, at first still in the service of his
art, but later independently of it and away from it. With the loss
of his patron, the substitute for his father, and with the
increasingly sombre colours which his life took on, this regressive
shift assumed larger and larger proportions. He became
‘
impacientissimo al pennello
’,¹ as we are
told by a correspondent of the Countess Isabella d’Este, who
was extremely eager to possess a painting from his hand. His
infantile past had gained control over him. But the research which
now took the place of artistic creation seems to have contained
some of the features which distinguish the activity of unconscious
instincts - insatiability, unyielding rigidity and the lack of an
ability to adapt to real circumstances.

  
¹
[‘Very impatient of painting.’]
Von Seidlitz (1909,
2
, 271).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2302

   At the summit of his life, when
he was in his early fifties - a time when in women the sexual
characters have already under gone involution and when in men the
libido not infrequently makes a further energetic advance - a new
transformation came over him. Still deeper layers of the contents
of his mind became active once more: but this further regression
was to the benefit of his art, which was in the process of becoming
stunted. He met the woman who awakened his memory of his
mother’s happy smile of sensual rapture; and, influenced by
this revived memory, he recovered the stimulus that guided him at
the beginning of his artistic endeavours, at the time when he
modelled the smiling women. He painted the Mona Lisa, the
‘St. Anne with Two Others’ and the series of mysterious
pictures which are characterized by the enigmatic smile. With the
help of the oldest of all his erotic impulses he enjoyed the
triumph of once more conquering the inhibition in his art. This
final development is obscured from our eyes in the shadows of
approaching age. Before this his intellect had soared upwards to
the highest realizations of a conception of the world that left his
epoch far behind it.