I picked up my copy of “Leonardo” on one of my first days in India, at Midland Bookshop, in between my guesthouse and office. Midland is small but densely stuffed with books. I eventually became a regular. On that first trip I grabbed the very small Freud book I’d never heard of and paid about two dollars. I walked back to the guesthouse through dust and smog. I’ve only now, living in New York almost two years later, read it.
Chapter 1 (p 7) – justification for Freud’s project. Leonardo* was always an enigmatic genius, and psychoanalysis is one way to learn something about him (not to say reduce his accomplishments or disparage his character). A lot of information about Leonardo’s life is offered in this chapter, recapping from other biographers: how he spent his money, how he had trouble finishing paintings and eventually focused on science. Some excellent trivia, like that he was a vegetarian on ethical grounds, but supported some unjust wars, prompting a comparison “with Goethe during the French campaign” (15). Then Freud zeroes in: libido being a core human force, it must feature in biography. Leonardo is a particularly interesting case, associated even in life with “the cool repudiation of sexuality” (15). Long discussion of how Leonardo’s anatomical drawings show his cluelessness about female sexual organs, and note of his trial for homosexual conduct in Verrochio’s studio.
Freud names Leonardo’s abnormality: he mostly chose what he cared about after careful research, but he cared involuntarily and deeply about research. The pleasure he took in gaining knowledge let him postpone any other loves indefinitely; “passions in which other men have enjoyed their richest experience, appear not to have touched him” (22). Perhaps he originally subordinated his scientific research to his art, but in the end he found the questions and problems relating to a painting far more compelling than actually painting. This explains his shortage of finished works.
Having established what was strange about Leonardo – his overwhelming craving to investigate – Freud posits that hypertrophied instincts are usually rooted in childhood and “originally sexual instinctual forces, so that later it could take the place of a part of the subjects’ sexual life” (25).
Infantile sexual researches are typical, but not spontaneous, childish “investigations” about where babies come from. Necessarily not equipped to fully understand sex, a child’s “first attempt at intellectual independence” has a depressing, lasting effect (27). One reaction is repression and incuriosity. Another is to “sexualize thinking” (27). The third is the “rarest and most perfect”, temporarily repressing the libido, which resurfaces later, detached from the drive to learn (28). This allows curiosity to operate without dredging up sexual themes. Freud says this characterizes Leonardo: he sublimated his libido into research. I am not sure how Leonardo better fits 3 than 2.
He closes the chapter with a recap of Leonardo’s early life. He was born in 1452, illegitimate but not terribly stigmatized; his father was Ser Piero da Vinci, his mother a peasant. His father never had a legitimate son, and so brought Leonardo in to be raised as a family member before he turned 5, which we know from a land register for taxes. By the time he was 20 he was already widely considered a painter. Sometime before that he entered into his apprenticeship to Verrocchio, but no one knows when exactly.
Chapter 2 (p 30) – Leonardo only wrote about his childhood once, describing the time a vulture came to his cradle and stuck its tail in his mouth. Freud says it’s more likely Leonardo has misattributed a fantasy, or an anecdote his mother told him. Freud explains how this confusion could have happened by comparing the pressures that operate on memory and historians (the need to tell a consistent story, or get a particular reaction from peers). Mature memory, he says, is like early attempts at objective historical work, essentially documenting current events; while childhood memories are closer to myths eventually recorded for national glory, “compiled later and for tendentious reasons” (32).
Moving from the source to the content of the memory/fantasy, Freud compares the image of a vulture beating its tail in the child’s mouth to fellatio, and in a cultural-historical quirk, describes fellatio as “in respectable society…a loathsome sexual perversion…nevertheless found with great frequency among women…and in the state of being in love it appears completely to lose its repulsive character” (35). He notes that in as much as it is sucking on another person’s body, fellatio resembles nursing, and that cows’ udders allow nursing but also resemble penises, which may provide the initial spark to connect food-pleasure/suckling and sex-pleasure/sucking (really). Freud notes that suckling is the same happy experience for babies of either gender, but fellatio is fraught for men.
To explain the vulture’s role – something like a mother, since it provides the thing to be suck(l)ed – Freud notes that ancient Egyptians had very similar words for “vulture” and “mother” because they believed only female vultures existed, and that myth persisted so long it may well have been absorbed by Leonardo early in his scientific reading (he made some notes on texts suggesting as much; it was considered a heresy because it implied non-holy virgin births, and through refutations apparently became widespread), so that vultures and femininity became associated in Leonardo’s mind. My edition of the book explains that Freud was working with a slight mistranslation of Leonardo’s writing and the bird Leonardo referenced was not actually a vulture, so Freud’s chain of reasoning from Egypt to Vinci doesn’t apply.
But Freud continues with the vulture and its significations. Because it stood in for a solitary mother, he argues the anecdote suggests that Leonardo understood that he had been left alone with his mother; the years before adoption into his father’s family must have been isolating and imprinted on him “ways of reacting to the outside world” (41). Freud says that Leonardo’s recording of this anecdote gives us a sense of “the most important elements in his mental development” – since those are the source of mythical memories (42). Because he only had a mother, Leonardo must have been more confused by the origin of children than most, prompting him to early sexual researches, which he eventually and vaguely still connected to the image of a vulture, and so concluded that he had always been destined to study birds’ power of flight, as he indeed claimed later in life (42).
Chapter 3 (p 43) – Freud revisits the jump from suckling to fellatio, noting that it is not obvious how Leonardo would have made the gender swap in his fantasy from nipple to phallus. But he is confident psychoanalysis has the answer. The Egyptian mother-vulture goddess had a phallus; often such “hermaphrodite divinities are expressions of the idea that only a combination of male and female elements can give a worthy representation of divine perfection” (45). But more likely, the explanation is simply that the male child finds his penis so sensitive, stimulating and important that he simply can’t imagine his mother doesn’t have one, and so doesn’t consider the penis gendered.
Then there is a bizarre, dense bit of psychoanalysis: “If it seems from later observations [women do not have penises], he has another remedy at his disposal: little girls too had a penis, but it was cut off and in its place was left a wound. This theoretical advance already makes use of personal experiences of a distressing kind: the boy in the meantime has heard the threat that the organ which is so dear to him will be taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too plainly. Under the influence of this threat of castration…he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen” (46). Disappointment (unconscious) that the mother does not have a penis can turn into “impotence, misogyny, and permanent homosexuality” (47). Foot fetishes try to substitute them as a symbol for the penis.
Freud is aware of how he sounds and asserts that the reader’s skepticism comes from a cultural devaluation of sexuality. In primitive times, people accepted the immense feeling that genitals provide: archaeologists show how prominently they featured in early civilization and religion. Freud says that this historical trajectory from pride to shame echoes contemporary personal development: children start out captivated by their genitals but learn to treat them with reserve.
Freud is circumspect in his wording, but it is clear that he believes homosexuality is caused by mothers who are single, energetic or affectionate. The homosexual, he says, ends up identifying with the mother; the men he loves are stand-ins for himself being loved by his mother. This connects homosexuality to narcissism. Freud does not consider this an adequate explanation of homosexuality; it likely has other causes, which we will probably never be able to find (too many variables; too few homosexuals to study). But he is sure this is one, and accounts for Leonardo’s case. Later, he claims “we know a decision in favor of homosexuality only takes place round about the years of puberty” (77).
Freud strongly believes Leonardo was homosexual. Pretty much all we know about Leonardo’s “sexual behavior” is that it was “exceptionally reduced” (53). But he only hired handsome young men as students, and nursed them himself when they were ill. None of his attractive students became significant painters, suggesting he really did not hire based on talent. There’s no evidence that he preyed on his students, but we know from his financial records that he attended to their needs and wants closely. More than the actual spending, the fact that he kept such detailed records of it suggests that his gifts to them were emotionally important to him (56).
For Freud, the financial records allow another insight. One expense was for a large funeral for a Caterina, likely his mother. The costs and the record of them suggest the strength of his feelings for her; it’s example of “obsessional neurosis”, where trivial acts become loaded with intense feelings they are charged with both hiding and expressing (58).
We get a couple of insights into Freud’s personality and his times from this chapter. He gets a good zinger in about how sexuality is considered so shameful that if an alien were to perfectly survey cultural elites, they would conclude that the human race is only reluctantly propagated (47). Homosexuals were already lobbying for equality on the basis of being born different, and Freud says “one would be glad on grounds of humanity to endorse their claims” (but ultimately rejects their biological self-explanation in favor of saying homosexuality emerges from a dynamic with their mother, without rejecting their claims to legalization) (50). He notes that everyone has felt homosexual desire at some point.
Chapter 4 (p 61) – The vulture fantasy signals Leonardo’s desire for his mother, other evidence for which will be traced in this chapter.
We can find analyze Leonardo’s psychology using his art. “Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates” (61).
The most obvious feature of Leonardo’s art is the “fascinating and puzzling” smile (62). It is often read as containing warmth and coldness. One writer asserted it was femininity itself. Occasionally considered “sinister”.
History of the Mona Lisa. Four years painting it, in Florence, over fifty years old. Vasari suggests the smile was genuinely the model’s, and the painting was acclaimed from the beginning. Leonardo “fell under the spell” of the smile in life as his audience did in art; he reproduced it frequently in later paintings – of John the Baptist, Leda, Bacchus, Mary, and St Anne (64). The latter appear together in a painting created concurrently with the Mona Lisa. Both women smile like Mona Lisa, but the meaning of it is clearer and peaceful. Freud says that only Leonard could have painted this composition, on the thin grounds that he grew up raised by his step mother and grandmother and so would have associated that pairing with childhood. Because he made Anne look strikingly young, it seems the young Jesus has two mothers, just as Leonardo did – birth and step. He combined his own series of mothers into two figures who are meaningfully “not altogether easy” to separate; the way they merge evokes dream-logic, or childhood impressions. Anne – farther from the child – corresponds to his birth mother Caterina, and he made her smile instead of reflecting how hard losing him and his father must have been (69).
But why was he so affected by the smile when he saw it in the model? Positive remarks about Pater’s (who did so much to make the Mona Lisa iconic) perceptiveness. It must have “awoke something in [Leonardo]…probably an old memory” – probably something from his childhood (66). Vasari noted that Leonardo’s first artworks were beautiful laughing women and children’s heads in clay, the same as the sexual objects in the vulture fantasy. This suggests a fixation on his mother coming through in his early art; his other fixation in art, the smile, may have so affected him because it was his mother’s, lost when she died and then rediscovered.
Freud finally reaches the plane of generalization he was trying to get to with a case study. He leads in: Leonardo was so struck by the sign of his mother’s smile because “the poor forsaken mother had to give vent to all her memories of the caresses she had enjoyed as well as her longing for new ones…also to compensate her child for having no father to fondle him” before switching abruptly to: “a mother’s love for the infant she suckles and cares for is something far more profound than her later affection for the growing child. It is in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation, which not only fulfils every mental wish but also every physical need; and if it represents one of the forms of attainable human happiness, that is [by] satisfying, without reproach” (73). This is one of the more convincing framings Freud uses for the idea of unconscious compulsion: having been happy and satisfied felt so good that a great engine of human behavior is the urge to recapture it.
Chapter 5 (p 75) – When noting his father’s death, Leonardo apparently accidentally recorded the time twice; it’s minor, but “nothing is too small to be a manifestation of hidden mental processes” in psychoanalysis (76). The note is very similar to the already-discussed ones about Caterina’s death and expenses for his students: “the same pedantic exactness, and the same prominence given to numbers”, suggesting we are working with similar emotional forces (76). The repetition, similar to how Dante showed a reserved man becoming angry by repeating an innocuous phrase, suggests there is something Leonardo wanted to write but felt he couldn’t. Instead of lamenting his father, he repeats emotionless details – but the resulting oddity, repetition, is what makes it obvious, in retrospect, that there was something he was concealing.
There’s an interesting assertion on psychoanalytic method: if Leonardo made the repetition simply because he was distracted or inattentive, the question becomes why he was distracted or inattentive with respect to that particular subject. That’s a neat way of reworking the problem.
Discussion of Leonardo’s father. A notary, respected, energetic, wealthy; married four times. Died while Leonardo was working for Verrochio. Leonardo, drawn to his mother, would have identified with his father as a child; post-pubescence, as his desire became homosexual, this identification would become asexual. It explains Leonardo’s taste for horses, servants and fine clothes – he was copying and outdoing his gentleman father, and even to demonstrate that he could play his father’s social role better than the man did originally (78). Again, Freud is saying something resonant here: part of childhood is, I think, the feeling that of course I could do this, adulthood, better than the adults I see, and then adulthood is, often, humbling.
Leonardo’s relationship with his father finds echoes in other parts of his work. His paintings might be considered his children; and like his father did to him, he often left them, unfinished, and seemed at least a little uneasy about it. But more substantially, his Leonardo was a scientist in the modern sense and a skeptic of received authority. His rejection of the ancients and the church as an adult corresponds to how, as a child, he had to learn not to need the authority or inhibitions a father imposes. Others drew reassurance from the social authorities of the time; “only Leonardo could dispense with that support” (80). Not having developed in early childhood around an Oedipal fear of his father, he also felt no need for a God, as made evident in accusations of apostasy and unbelief made against him in life, the debunkings of Biblical stories he made with his scientific work, and the sarcasm he directed at Christianity in his journals. There are times his scientific notes pay tribute to a Creator, but it is clearly not a personal, Christian god.
His unbelief may have paid off in his art and helped make it unusual and good, the epochal break that it so clearly was. One critic claimed that Leonardo was the first to really humanize Biblical figures, restoring “sensuality and the joy of living” (82).
Freud takes all of these correspondences to prove that infantile sexual researches were crucial to shaping Leonardo. He notes that Leonardo, like many, wished to fly as a child. Flight is a common, powerful dream for children because it is on a deep level connected to sex: there is the stork bringing babies, ancient phalluses with wings, and etymological quirks linking flight to genitals and sex in different Italian and German (83). All these, Freud says, are “fragments from a whole mass of connected ideas…the wish to be able to fly is…a longing to be capable of sexual performance”, children’s great frustration and inadequacy which adults tend to forget (83). Flight continued to interest Leonardo throughout his life; “one problem at least which had escaped the repression that later estranged him from sexuality”, but he likely never achieved proficiency in either (84).
Late into adulthood, Leonardo preserved some childish quirks. He played with animals and built them costumes; he came up with prank-like scientific gimmicks and demonstrations to the amusement and disgust of his friends; he wrote wildly imaginative fables and fictional bits of autobiography. He eventually fully matured, but his clinging to childhood suggests how “slowly anyone tears himself from his childhood if [he then] enjoyed the highest erotic bliss, which is never again attained” (87).
Chapter 6 (p 88) – Justification and summary of the book. Freud comes out swinging at psychoanalysis’ critics. Acknowledges that he’s written a “pathography” more than a biography, and that this is likely be unpopular; it feels like it ignores what we love about Leonardo (88). It doesn’t explain Leonardo’s greatness, but it wasn’t supposed to. People – especially biographers – who think Freud has picked the wrong questions are just trying to make their subjects into their ideal fathers. Psychoanalytic biography is in line with Leonardo’s own unrelenting pursuit of truth.
Freud is not calling Leonardo neurotic; in fact, “we no longer think that health and illness…are to be sharply distinguished”; some symptoms are just “achievements of repression”, and illness is an imprecise term, only practical in severe cases, but it is true that Leonardo was similar to modern obsessives (90).
“The aim of our work has been to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo’s sexual life and in his artistic activity” (90).
In his early years, lack of father meant lots of affection from his mother, and so intense infantile sexual researches. He repressed these urges effectively until puberty, and then was able to channel them into the desire for knowledge. What little of his libido remained sexual was homosexual because of his affection for and identification with his mother.
Freud would love to explain how individuals’ art is shaped by their psychological dynamics generally, but cannot, except to say that art is an outlet for sexual desire. Leonardo started out creating women and boys; under the “father-substitute” Lodovico Moro, he was productive. But it is not healthy to be so repressed. Like how neurotics regress, Leonardo’s love of investigation came to dominate him and his art. The “insatiability, unyielding rigidity and the lack of an ability to adapt” that characterize his learning are the same for deep unconscious instincts. His art was rejuvenated by the sight of his mother’s smile on a model, which evoked his rapturous early years in him.
Freud is not too sure about any of this, but thinks he’s offered at least enough evidence to show why it’s occurred to him to see this as a biographical thumbnail. It is peculiar that Leonardo expressed even great passions in so “subdued a manner” (93).
Psychoanalysis in biography is always a limited tool because the materials are limited; basically a matter of testing theories against whatever archival evidence happened to survive. Any failures are not an indictment of psychoanalysis as a way to understand people, just an indicator that for particular historical cases there’s not enough to go on. Psychoanalytic biography is also limited in that it can’t fully assert necessity – events in the person’s life could easily have gone differently, provoking different mental reactions, and even some of the mental processes that clearly happened weren’t exactly necessary. In Leonardo’s case, psychoanalysis can characterize, but not explain, his remarkable repression and redirection of his libido. “Instincts and their transformations are at the limit of what is discernible by psychoanalysis” (95). Still skeptical of biological determinism. Goal is to show how instinctual activities link external events and internal reactions.
“It seems at any rate as if only a man who had had Leonardo’s childhood experiences could have painted the Mona Lisa” (96). This is actually pretty convincing in the book! It’s amazing how much power Freud’s analysis loses in being summarized. There is much more resonance, pathos, artistic understanding and human sympathy in his phrasings, which all lend credibility to what are, in dry text, less compelling claims for the idea of inextricability between Leonardo’s libido and art.
Does it feel odd, arbitrary and a bit unjust that something as random as Leonardo’s stepmother’s barrenness had such an impact on his life and our artistic heritage as a civilization? Maybe, but everything in life depends on chance, whether social or biological or physical; we are all equally products of infinite, minuscule causes we will never be aware of.
Over the year I lived in India I became a regular at Midland. The staff hunted down and recommended books for me freely. I miss it there, but I’m sinking into life in New York.
Mather on Books 