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When psychiatric research, usually using sick human material, begins with one of the giants of the human race, it is not guided at all by the motives that profane people so often attribute to it. It does not seek to “denigrate the radiant and trample the sublime into the mud”: it does not give pleasure to belittle the difference between the given perfection and the wretchedness of its usual objects of study. It only finds valuable for science everything that is understandable in these samples, and thinks that no one is so great that it would be humiliating for him to be subject to laws that equally dominate the normal and the morbid.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance. It aroused surprise among contemporaries, but it seemed mysterious to them, as it still does to us. A comprehensive genius, “whose outlines can only be anticipated, but never known,” he had an immeasurable influence as an artist on his time; but it only fell to us to comprehend the great naturalist who was united in him with the artist. Despite the fact that he left us great works of art, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, still in his development the researcher never gave complete freedom to the artist, often seriously harmed him and in the end, perhaps, completely suppressed him. Vasari puts into his mouth at the hour of death the self-accusation that he offended God and people by not fulfilling his duty to art. And even if this story of Vasari has neither external nor, even more so, internal plausibility, but refers only to the legend that began to take shape about the mysterious master already during his lifetime, it still undoubtedly has value as an indicator of the judgments of those people and those times.
What was it that prevented contemporaries from understanding Leonardo’s personality? Of course, it was not the versatility of his talents and information, which gave him the opportunity to be presented at the court of the Duke of Milan, Lodovic Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, as a lutenist playing an instrument he himself invented, or allowed him to write to this duke that wonderful letter, in which he was proud of his merits as a builder and military engineer. The Renaissance, of course, was accustomed to such a combination of diverse knowledge in one person; in any case, Leonardo was only one of the brilliant examples of this. He also did not belong to that type of brilliant people, seemingly deprived of nature, who, for their part, do not attach value to external forms of life and, in a painfully gloomy mood, avoid communication with people. On the contrary, he was tall, slender, beautiful in face and of extraordinary physical strength, charming in his dealings with people, a good speaker, cheerful and friendly. He loved beauty in the objects around him, wore shiny clothes with pleasure and appreciated refined pleasures. In one passage of his Treatise on Painting, indicating his penchant for fun and pleasure, he compares art with related arts and depicts the hard work of a sculptor: “He smeared his face and powdered it with marble dust so that he looks like a baker; he is covered all over with small fragments of marble, as if the snow was falling directly on his back and his home is filled with fragments and dust. The artist is completely different... the artist sits with all the comforts in front of his work - well dressed and moving a very light brush with lovely colors. He's dressed up the way he likes. And his home is filled with cheerful drawings and sparkles with cleanliness. Often a company of musicians or lecturers of various beautiful works gathers with him, and they listen to it with great pleasure without the knocking of a hammer or any other noise.”
Of course, it is very likely that the image of Leonardo's sparklingly cheerful, pleasure-loving image is true only for the first, longer period of the artist's life. From the time when the fall of the power of Lodovic Moreau forced him to leave Milan, his secure position and field of activity, in order to lead a wandering life, poor in external successes, until his very last refuge in France, from then on the shine of his mood could fade and the strange features of his appearance became clearer. character. The increasing deviation of his interests from art to science over the years must also have contributed to the widening of the gap between him and his contemporaries. All these experiments, over which he, in their opinion, “wasted time,” instead of diligently drawing orders and enriching himself, like, for example, his former classmate Perugino, seemed to them fancy toys and even brought upon him the suspicion that he was serving “ black magic." We, who know from his notes what exactly he studied, understand him better. At a time when the authority of the church began to be replaced by the authority of the ancient world and when impartial research was not yet known, he was a forerunner and even a worthy collaborator of Bacon and Copernicus - involuntarily alone. When he dismantled the corpses of horses and people, built flying machines, studied the nutrition of plants and their response to poisons, he, in any case, moved far from the commentators of Aristotle and approached the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research found, at least, shelter in those unfavorable times.
For his artistic activity, this had the consequence that he was reluctant to take up a brush, painted less and less, abandoned what he started and cared little about the further fate of his works. This is what his contemporaries reproached him for, for whom his attitude to art remained a mystery.
Many of Leonardo's later admirers tried to smooth over the reproach for the inconstancy of his character. They argued that what is condemned in Leonardo is a feature of great masters in general. And the hardworking, busy Michelangelo left many of his works unfinished, and for this he is as little to blame as Leonardo. Another picture was not so much unfinished as it was considered by him to be such. What already seems like a masterpiece to a layman is still an unsatisfactory embodiment of his plan for the creator of a work of art; Before him floats that perfection that he cannot convey in an image. In total, it is less possible to make the artist responsible for the final fate of his works.
However sound many of these justifications may be, they still do not explain everything about Leonardo. Painful impulses and breakdowns in the work, ending in flight from it and indifference to its further fate, could be repeated by other artists; but Leonardo, without a doubt, exhibited this characteristic to the highest degree. Solmi, quotes the words of one of his students: “Pavera, che ad ogni ora-tremasse, quando si poneva a dipendere, e pero non diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell"arte, talche egliscorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad "altri parevano mira-coli" (“It seemed that sometimes he was afraid to write, and then he did not finish what he started, understanding the greatness of art and the inevitability of mistakes in it, but to others it seemed like something extraordinary or a miracle.” - Translated by V.V. Koshkin). His last paintings: “Leda”, “Madonna of Sant’Onofrio”, “Bacchus” and “San Giovanni Battista the Younger” remained as if unfinished, “as happened with almost all his affairs and activities...” Lomazzo, who made a copy of “The Last Supper” ", refers in one sonnet to Leonardo's well-known inability to finish any work: "It seems that his brush no longer lifted to the picture, our divine da Vinci. And so many of his things are not finished." The slowness with which Leonardo worked, became a proverb. He worked on The Last Supper in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, after thorough preparation for this, for three whole years. One of his contemporary, short story writer Matteo Bandelli, who was at that time a young monk in the monastery, says that often Leonardo climbed the scaffolding early in the morning so as not to let go of his brushes until dusk, forgetting to eat and drink. Then days passed without him touching the work, at times he remained for hours in front of the painting, satisfied with the experience of it internally. Another time he came to the monastery straight from the courtyard of the Milan Castle, where he was making a model of a statue of a horseman for Francesco Sforza, to make a few strokes on one of the figures and then immediately leave. The portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife of the Florentine Francesco Giocondo, he wrote, according to Vasari, for four years, without being able to finish it, which is confirmed, perhaps, by the fact that the portrait was not given to the customer, but remained with Leonardo, who took take him with you to France. Acquired by King Francis I, it now constitutes one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.
If we compare these stories about the nature of Leonardo’s work with the evidence of the numerous sketches and sketches that survived after him, which varied in many ways each motif found in his painting, then we will have to far discard the opinion about the fleetingness and inconstancy of Leonardo’s attitude towards his art. On the contrary, one notices an extraordinary depth, a wealth of possibilities, between which a solution only slowly crystallizes, requests, which are more than enough, and a delay in execution, which, strictly speaking, cannot be explained even by the discrepancy between the artist’s strengths and his ideal plan. The slowness that has long been noticeable in Leonardo's work turns out to be a symptom of this delay, as a harbinger of the distance from artistic creativity that subsequently came. This delay also determined the not entirely undeserved fate of the Last Supper. Leonardo could not relate to al fresco painting, which required quick work while the soil was still wet; Therefore, he chose oil paints, the drying of which gave him the opportunity to delay the completion of the painting, taking into account the mood and taking his time. But these paints separated from the ground on which they were applied and which separated them from the wall; the shortcomings of this wall and the fate of the room joined here to solve the seemingly inevitable death of the painting.
Due to the failure of a similar technical experiment, it seems that the painting of the battle of horsemen at Anghiari, which he later began to paint in competition with Michelangelo on the wall of the Hall del Consiglio in Florence and also left unfinished, was lost. It seems as if the outside participation of the experimenter first supported art, only to then destroy the work of art.
Leonardo's character also exhibited other unusual traits and apparent contradictions. Some inactivity and indifference were obvious in him. At that age when each individual tries to seize for himself as large a field of activity as possible, which cannot do without the development of energetic aggressive activity towards others, he stood out for his calm friendliness, avoiding all hostility and quarrels. He was affectionate and merciful to everyone, rejected, as is known, meat food, because he considered it unfair to take the life of animals, and found special pleasure in giving freedom to the birds that he bought at the market. He condemned war and bloodshed and called man not so much the king of the animal kingdom as the most evil of wild animals. But this feminine tenderness of feelings did not prevent him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to the place of execution in order to study their faces distorted by fear and sketch them in his pocket book, did not prevent him from drawing the most terrible hand-to-hand battles and entering the service of Caesar Borgia as chief military engineer. He often seems as if indifferent to good and evil - or he must be measured by a special standard. He participated in a responsible position in one of Caesar's military campaigns, which made this callous and most treacherous of all opponents the owner of Romagna. Not a single feature of Leonardo's works reveals criticism or sympathy for the events of that time. A comparison arises with Goethe during the French campaign.
If a biographer really wants to gain insight into the mental life of his hero, he should not, as happens in most biographies, pass over his sexual uniqueness in silence out of modesty or bashfulness. From this side little is known about Leonardo, but this little is very significant. At a time when boundless sensuality struggled with gloomy asceticism, Leonardo was an example of strict sexual abstinence, which is difficult to expect from an artist and depictor of female beauty. Solmi quotes his following phrase characterizing his chastity: “The act of intercourse and everything that goes with it in connection, are so disgusting that people would soon die out if it were not for this custom, hallowed by antiquity, and if there were still no beautiful faces and sensual attraction left.” The works he left behind, which do not exclusively treat the highest scientific problems, but also contain harmless subjects that seem to us hardly even worthy of such a great spirit (allegorical natural history, fables about animals, jokes, predictions) are so chaste that it is surprising it would even be in a work of modern fine literature. They so resolutely avoid everything sexual, as if Eros alone, which protects all living things, is matter unworthy of the curiosity of the researcher. It is known how often great artists find pleasure in letting their imagination go wild in erotic and even obscene images; from Leonardo, on the contrary, we have only some anatomical drawings of the internal female genital organs, the position of the fetus in the womb, and the like.
It is doubtful that Leonardo ever held a woman in a loving embrace; Even about any kind of spiritual intimate relationship between him and a woman, like Michelangelo had with Victoria Colonna, nothing is known. While he was still a student in the house of his teacher Verrochio, he and other young men were denounced about forbidden homosexual cohabitation. The investigation ended in acquittal. It seems that he attracted suspicion by using a boy who had a bad reputation as a model. When he became a master, he surrounded himself with beautiful boys and young men whom he took on as apprentices. The last of these disciples, Francesco Melzi, followed him to France, remained with him until his death and was appointed by him as his heir. Without sharing the confidence of his modern biographers, who, of course, reject with indignation the possibility of sexual relations between him and his students as an unfounded dishonor of a great man, one would be more likely to assume that Leonardo’s tender relations with young people who Due to the situation at that time, the students lived the same life with him, and did not result in sexual intercourse. However, one cannot assume strong sexual activity in it.
The peculiarity of his heart and sexual life in connection with his dual nature of artist and researcher can only be understood in one way. Of the biographers who are often very far from the psychological point of view, in my opinion, only Solmi came close to solving this riddle; but the poet Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky, who chose Leonardo as the hero of a great historical novel, created this image precisely on this understanding of an extraordinary person, expressing this view very clearly, although not directly, but, like a poet, in a poetic image. Solmi expresses the following judgment about Leonardo: “The insatiable thirst to know everything around him and analyze with a cold mind the deepest secrets of everything perfect condemned Leonardo’s works to remain constantly unfinished.” One Conferenze Florentine article quotes Leonardo's opinion, which gives the key to understanding his creed and his nature: “Nessuna cosa si puo amare neodiare, se prima non si ha cognition di quella. “You have no right to love or hate something if you have not acquired thorough knowledge of the essence of it.” And Leonardo repeats the same thing in one place in his Treatise on Painting, where he apparently defends himself against the reproach of being anti-religious: “But such accusers could have remained silent. Because this is the way to know the Creator of so many beautiful things, and this is the way to love such a great Master. Because truly great love comes from great knowledge of your loved one, and if you know him little, you will only be able to love him little or not at all...”
The meaning of these words by Leonardo is not that they communicate a greater psychological truth; what he asserts is obviously false, and Leonardo should have realized this as well as we do. It is not true that people wait with their love or hatred until they have studied and comprehended the essence of what arouses these feelings; they love more impulsively, motivated by a feeling that has nothing to do with cognition and the effect of which is only weakened by discussion and reflection. Therefore, Leonardo could only want to express that the way people love is not true, undoubted love; that one must love in such a way as to first suppress passion, subject it to the work of thought and only then allow the feeling to develop when it passed the test of reason. And we understand: at the same time he wants to say that for him it happens this way; for all others it would be desirable that they relate to love and hate as he does.
And it seems that this was actually the case with him. His affects were curbed and subordinated to the desire to explore; he neither loved nor hated, but only asked himself where what he should love or hate came from, and what significance it had. Thus, he must have seemed indifferent to good and evil, to the beautiful and the disgusting. During this work of exploration, love and hatred ceased to be leaders and gradually turned into mental interest. In fact, Leonardo was not dispassionate; he was not deprived of this divine spark, which is the direct or indirect engine - il primo motore - of all human affairs. But he turned his passions into one passion for exploration; he devoted himself to research with that perseverance, constancy, and depth that can only come from passion, and, having achieved knowledge at the height of spiritual tension, he allows the long-restrained affect to burst out and then flow freely, like a stream along a drainage sleeve, after it has worked. At the height of knowledge, when he could glance at the relationship of things in the area under study, he was seized by pathos, and he ecstatically praised the greatness of this area of \u200b\u200bcreation that he was studying, or - clothed in religiosity - the greatness of its Creator. Solmi clearly captured this process of transformation from Leonardo. Quoting one such place where Leonardo glorifies the greatness of the immutability of the laws of nature (“O wonderful necessity ...”), he says: “Tale transfigurazione della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, e une dei tratti caratteristici de" manoscritti vinciani, e uno dei tratti caratteristici de "manoscritti vinciani, si trova cento volte espressa..." (“This transformation of the knowledge of nature into emotions I would call religion, and this is one of the most characteristic features of da Vinci’s manuscripts, features repeated a hundred times in them...".
Leonardo was called the Italian Faust for his insatiable and tireless passion for research. But, abandoning all considerations about the possibility of transforming the desire for research into love of life, which we must accept as a prerequisite for the tragedy of Faust, it should be noted that Leonardo’s development approaches Spinoza’s worldview.
The transformation of psychic energy into various types of activity can be just as impossible without loss as the transformation of physical forces. Leonardo's example teaches how many other things can be traced to this process. From postponing to love until you know, comes substitution. They love and hate no longer so much when they have reached knowledge; then they remain on the other side of love and hate. They explored - instead of loving. And that is why, perhaps, Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than the life of other great people and other artists, it seemed that he was not touched by stormy passions, sweet and all-consuming, which were the best experiences for others. And there were other consequences. He explored instead of acting and creating. Anyone who has begun to feel the greatness of the world pattern and its immutability easily loses consciousness of his own small self. Immersed in contemplation, truly reconciled, he easily forgets that he himself is a particle of these active forces of nature and that he must, having measured his own strength, try to influence to this immutability of the world, a world in which the small is no less wonderful and significant than the great. Leonardo probably began his research, as Solmi thinks, in the service of his art, he worked on the properties and laws of light, colors, shadows, perspective, in order to comprehend the art of imitating nature and showing the way to this to others. Probably, even then he exaggerated the value of this knowledge for the artist. Then he was drawn, still with the goal of serving art, to the study of objects of painting, animals and plants, the proportions of the human body; from their external appearance he took the path of studying their internal structure and their vital functions, which, after all, are also reflected in their appearance and therefore require to be depicted by art. And finally, the passion that became powerful drew him further, so that the connection with art was broken. He then discovered the general laws of mechanics, discovered the process of deposition and fossilization in Arnotal, and, finally, he could write in capital letters in his book the confession: “And sole non si move (The Sun does not move).” Thus, he extended his research to almost all areas of knowledge, being in each of them the creator of something new, or at least a forerunner and pioneer. However, his research was aimed only at the visible world, something alienated him from the study of the spiritual life of people; in the Academia Vinciana, for which he painted very cleverly disguised emblems, little space was devoted to psychology.
When he later tried to return from research to the art from which he had come, he felt that he was hampered by a new set of interests and the changed nature of his mental activity. In the picture he was most interested in one problem, and behind this one problem emerged countless other problems, as he was accustomed to seeing in the boundless and incapable of being completed studies of nature. He was no longer able to limit his requests, to isolate a work of art, to tear it out of the enormous world correlation in which he knew its place. After overwhelming efforts to express in it everything that was combined in his thoughts, he was forced to abandon it to the mercy of fate or declare it unfinished.
In a short book entitled Leonardo da Vinci and the Memory of His Childhood, Freud outlined the “psychobiography” of the great artist, scientist and inventor as the quintessential Renaissance man. Freud began a study of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) in the fall of 1909 and published it in May 1910. His monograph on Leonardo da Vinci was the first and last attempt at writing a large-scale biography. In it he tried to expand the scope of psychoanalysis - from understanding the symptoms of what he called “the mortal man” to the analysis of “one who stands among the greatest representatives of the human race,” according to “ laws that govern both normal and pathological activity with equal irrefutability”(Sigmund Freud. Leonardo...). Freud was in his mid-sixties and obviously wanted to show the applicability of his theories and methods to understanding both pathologies and outstanding qualities of the psyche.
Indeed, in his work on Leonardo, Freud sets out many of the fundamental elements of his meta-strategy of analysis and interpretation. He's writing:
“We must define in general the limits of what can be achieved with the help of psychoanalysis in the study of biography... The material that is at the disposal of psychoanalytic research consists of the facts of a person’s life history: on the one hand, random sequences of events and external influences, and on the other hand , known reactions of the subject. Using knowledge of mental mechanisms, psychoanalysis seeks to establish the dynamic basis of the natural force of his reactions and to identify the initial motivating forces in his psyche, as well as their subsequent development and transformation. If this is achieved, then the behavior of a person during his life can be explained in terms of the combined influence of constitution and fate, internal forces and external influences.” (ibid.).
In this work, Freud clearly sought to expand his range of strategies - from understanding and explaining the meaning of a symptom in relation to the unconscious to which the symptom belonged, to understanding and explaining “the behavior of a person during his life.” To achieve this goal, Freud sought to combine “data from personal life history” with “knowledge of psychic mechanisms.”
In the language of the SOAR model (see the chapter on Aristotle in Volume 1), Freud defined the “problem space” that he intended to explore as consisting of “the data of a person's personal history”, including:
1. “Random sequences of events and the influence of the environment” on a person, i.e., the influence of “external forces”, or “fate”.
2. “Known reactions of the subject,” which Freud perceived as the result of the action of “internal forces” arising from the “constitution” of the individual.
Types of influence on the “Behavior of a subject during his life”
The key achievements of the individual being studied are the sequence of “states” that formed within the “problem space” in the life of this person. The “psychic mechanisms” that Freud spoke of as “operators” that can be mobilized to influence a particular state and that determine the path of achievement or “transitional states” in the life of the individual. In other words, “states” are made up of special combinations or interactions of “external” influences and “internal” forces. The features of a “state” are determined by the influence of “mental mechanisms” that “act” to create or change a specific state.
Problem space of “Psychobiography”
Looking at the relationship between the subject's behavior and external surrounding circumstances and applying “knowledge of mental mechanisms,” Freud attempted to analyze the chain of transitional states that made up a person’s personal history in order to:
1) establish the “dynamic basis” of the nature of the subject;
2) identify the “initial driving forces” of the subject’s psyche;
3) trace their “subsequent transformations and development.”
According to Freud, the type and strength of a subject's reactions to particular circumstances provide clues to the “motivating forces” within his psyche. Freud's strategies of analysis seek to explain and interpret the relationships between a) a person's specific behavior in some context and b) the mental processes or “operators” that caused that behavior in response to that context. Such research involves the ability to find “patterns” of behavior and then associate them with specific mental processes or “mental mechanisms.”
A “pattern” of behavior is essentially something that repeats itself over time, or something that necessarily repeats itself at key moments or in a particular environment. Such patterns can be identified by the fact that a person does or doesn't, while comparing his behavior with the behavior of others. One of Freud's basic analytical strategies was based, for example, on the ability to notice what could or should have been but was not. Freud looked for behavior that was significant or appropriate, and in doing so he paid attention to what did not fit into the typical picture.
Freud began his analysis of Leonardo's personality with a comment on some of the general macropatterns of behavior that define the context of Leonardo da Vinci's life. Pointing to Leonardo's extraordinary versatility, which stemmed from his insatiable passion for knowledge, Freud concluded that he was not a typical man of his era, and argued that although Leonardo was admired during his lifetime as “one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance,” “already Then he seemed the mystery that he is to us now.” Of course, given the fame and respect that surrounded Leonardo during his lifetime, information about his life is very scarce. Biographers apparently knew little about Leonardo's childhood, close personal relationships, or hobbies. Freud was surprised:
“What prevented Leonardo’s personality from being understood by his contemporaries? The reason was, of course, not the variety of his talents and breadth of knowledge... Since in the Renaissance such a combination of broad and varied abilities in one person was not an unusual phenomenon, we must admit that Leonardo himself is one of the most striking confirmations of this.” (ibid.).
Freud further pointed out that Leonardo da Vinci's characteristic pattern was the ability to undertake many things at once, scientifically and artistically, but he carried only a few of them to completion, and many of his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused for several centuries . In fact, Leonardo was often so engrossed in his scientific research that it distracted him from the artistic work from which his fame was largely born. Leonardo himself was apparently aware of this pattern, mentioning distracting influences in his last words. Freud writes:
“In the last hour of his life, according to the words that Vasari [Leonardo’s contemporary and biographer - R.D.] attributes to him, he reproached himself for offending God and man by failing to fulfill his duty as an artist... “He even rose and sat down on his bed, filled with a feeling of reverence, which, in his sick condition, showed how much he had offended God and humanity by not working in art as he should have.”
Leonardo was taught and paid to create works of art, but his scientific research was self-motivated. Leonardo did them himself, for himself, without any external incentive, recognition or reward from the outside world. Because this fact is difficult to explain clearly through external reinforcement, Freud viewed the pattern of Leonardo's varied but incomplete investigations as the result of an internal force or mechanism similar to the “symptoms” of his patients.
Freud's core belief was that Da Vinci's research was the result of a “psychic mechanism” that Freud called “sublimation”; that is, the direction of his sexual aspirations towards artistic and scientific research. Freud argued: “what the artist creates simultaneously gives vent to his sexual desires.” This view of Freud raises one of the most important themes in his thinking:
“...Impulses that can only be described as sexual, both in the narrow and in the broad sense, play a particularly important role in the occurrence of nervous and mental disorders; Previously, this role was not given sufficient importance, nor was the fact that these impulses made an invaluable contribution to the greatest cultural, artistic and social achievements of the human mind ”.
From Freud's point of view, reversal of sexual impulses can lead either to the emergence of pathology or to the greatest cultural or artistic achievements, depending on the nature and degree of their redirection, or “sublimation.” If normal sexual relations are denied to any living being, it transforms these impulses into behavior that may seem pathological or perverted, as can be seen in isolated caged animals in a zoo. On the other hand, Freud was convinced that if sexual impulses are given the appropriate stimuli and channels for transformation, then they turn into the driving force of important social, scientific and artistic achievements.
“We believe that culture was created under the influence of vital necessity at the expense of the gratification of instincts, and it is for the most part constantly recreated due to the fact that the individual, entering human society, again sacrifices the gratification of his instincts to the benefit of society. Among these attractions, sexual ones play a significant role; at the same time, they are sublimated, that is, they deviate from their sexual goals and are directed towards goals that are socially higher, no longer sexual” .
Z. Freud. Introduction to psychoanalysis. Lectures. M., Science
According to Freud, Leonardo da Vinci's pattern of behavior can be explained in terms of the process of sublimation: Leonardo "diverted" all his sexual energy and "directed it towards other purposes." Freud noted that accounts of Leonardo da Vinci's life are devoid of any reference to his sex or love life, with the exception of an unconfirmed accusation of homosexuality in his youth. Freud believed that this happened because Leonardo had no real sex or love life and replaced his love and sexual explorations with scientific research.
“The transformation of psychic power into various activities cannot probably be achieved without the same losses that occur in the transformation of physical forces... He was engaged in research instead of love... The violent passions of nature that inspire and absorb, passions in which other people experienced the most deep pleasure, apparently, did not touch him at all... Research also took the place of action and creation.” .
Z. Freud. Leonardo...
Freud's beliefs about the centrality of sexuality and his theories about the role of sublimation are the most provocative and controversial. And yet, if we take a moment to look at what lies behind the content of Freud's beliefs, we see that in essence he is saying that “deep structures” (primitive instinctual impulses) can be transformed into an infinite number of different “surface structures” (social, artistic and scientific achievements). Freud implies that the manner and care with which a deep structure is expressed determines whether it will be “transformed” in a satisfactory manner or whether it will lead to the emergence of “disorders” and “pathologies.”
Directing “Instinctive Impulses” toward Social and Cultural Achievements
In Freud's view, “strategies of genius” must involve the use of channels and rules of transformation through which primitive impulses and instinctual forces can be successfully redirected and sublimated into other modes of expression. “Genius” comes from the amount of detail and degree of perfection through which sublimation is achieved. From this point of view, people like Leonardo, Shakespeare or Mozart were able to more completely and completely transform their primitive impulses and express them in pictures, words or music instead of using the usual channels of sexual or romantic behavior. Thus, Freud was convinced that Leonardo differed from his contemporaries in 1) the degree, 2) the manner and 3) the reasons for this change in the direction of “primitive impulses”.
Freud's conclusion about the relationship of Leonardo da Vinci's behavior to the “physical mechanism” of sublimation led him to the next step in his strategy. He built a theory, gave an explanation, and then began to look for further experimental “confirmation.” The general macro research strategy uses a process of “induction” to formulate explanations of external factors and behavioral clues (as already shown in the study of Aristotle and Sherlock Holmes patterns in the first volume). The second macro research strategy involves constructing hypotheses and predictions based on this theory, and then searching for details contained in the environment and behavior of those who support these predictions. In this sense, Freud, like Einstein, often tried to explore deep patterns and principles by constructing theories that were essentially the fruits of the “free creativity” of his imagination, and then looked for confirmation of these theories in his environment and behavior.
Macro Strategy 1:
Collecting evidence/clues -> Building a theory to explain existing evidence/clues
Macro Strategy 2:
Creating a theory -> Finding evidence to support a theory
Often these two strategies turn out to be connected in one cycle in such a way that, firstly, the researcher builds a theory from a set of clues, and then, secondly, looks for new evidence that either confirms or refutes this theory (“syllogisms” of Aristotle or Holmes' process of deduction). Freud wrote:
“When we see that in a person’s character one instinct is overdeveloped - as was the case with Leonardo’s insatiable thirst for knowledge - then we look for an explanation in a special predisposition, although practically nothing is known about the circumstances that determined it (probably of an organic nature). Our psychoanalytic studies of neurotic people, however, led us to the construction of two further assumptions, the confirmation of which it would be desirable to find confirmation in each individual case. We consider it possible that such an instinct as this excess strength was actively manifested already in the very early age of the subject and its superiority was consolidated by the impressions of childhood. We further assume that it was established through the initial sexual instinctual drives in such a way that it was later able to take a place in the sexual life of the subject. Accordingly, such a person will, for example, be as passionate about research as another is about his love, and the former will be able to engage in research instead of loving.”
Z. Freud. Leonardo...
Freud points out that macropatterns (“Leonardo's insatiable thirst for knowledge”) tell us where we are most likely to find micro clues (the subject's earliest childhood and sexual life) and what kind of clues to look for. He also describes another important part of his strategy - using assumptions and expectations taken from one (for example, a patient's symptoms) as analogies and guidelines for the analysis of an entirely different one (for example, Leonardo's studies). Freud typically used the patterns he discovered in his patients to draw conclusions about literature. And he used examples from the literature to draw conclusions about his patients. In a similar way, Freud used the patterns of his patients to explain Leonardo's artistic creativity. And he also turned to the patterns that he discovered in Leonardo to understand his patients. For example, shortly after the publication of the book about Leonardo, Freud wrote a letter to Jung, noting that he had a patient who apparently had the same constitution as Leonardo, but without his genius.
These expectations and analogies drawn from other areas define the boundaries of the “space” in which a person is willing to find other clues and other information. Taking "Leonardo's insatiable thirst for knowledge" as a kind of symptom similar to what he might find in his psychoanalytic patients, Freud introduces here the assumption that a stable pattern of behavior in the present:
1) had “preceding” or “accelerating” causes in the past: an instinct like this was actively manifested at a very early age in man and its dominance was determined by the impressions of childhood;
2) has a limiting cause that maintains it in the present - in the sense that this pattern serves a specific purpose in relation to the larger system of which it is part: it became established through the initial instinctive sexual drives, so that later it was able to take a place in the sexual life of the subject.
Freud's hypothesized influences on the development of Leonardo's pattern of behavior
Using these assumptions, Freud approached Leonardo as he would approach one of his psychoanalytic clients. First, he looked in Leonardo's notebooks for references to the events of his childhood. Then he checked to see if they had anything to do with underlying “instinctive drives” (in this case, sexual drives) that might give these memories special meaning. He remarked:
“It is not at all indifferent what a person remembers about his childhood; As a rule, residual memories, which he himself does not understand, hide priceless fragments of evidence about the most important features of his mental development.” .
Z. Freud. Leonardo...
Claiming that he knew of “only one place in Leonardo’s scientific notebooks where he left but one reference to his childhood,” Freud based the bulk of his study of Leonardo da Vinci on a single passage from his notebook on flights. In it, reporting his observations of a kite, Leonardo “suddenly interrupts himself to talk about a memory of very early childhood that surfaced in his brain.” Leonardo da Vinci writes:
“It seems that fate itself has connected me very deeply with kites; I remember one of the earliest events of my childhood, when I was lying in my cradle: a kite flew towards me, opened my mouth with its tail and lightly hit me with its tail several times on the lips.” .
Z. Freud. Leonardo...
Freud's attention to this message from Leonardo da Vinci and his attempts to attach special significance to this event tell us a lot about his strategies and methods of analysis. At first one might wonder why, in order to draw conclusions about a person's character, Freud turned his attention to something whose value is very dubious. Leonardo's “memory” seems more like a dream or fantasy than a memory itself. It is quite incredible for a bird to bend over a child, deliberately “open” its mouth with its tail, and then touch its lips with its tail.
In his analytic work, Freud acknowledged the dubious nature of such memory, but argued:
“Childhood memories, reconstructed or recovered in subsequent analysis, are in some cases undoubtedly false, while others are certainly true; and in most cases, truth and lies are intertwined with each other. Therefore, the symptoms are at one moment a reproduction of an experience that actually took place ... and at another moment a reproduction of the patient’s fantasies ... Fantasy and reality must be treated equally, without making a distinction between childhood memories of one kind or another.” .
Z. Freud. Introduction to psychoanalysis. Lectures. M., Science
This Freudian statement echoes the following NLP belief: “The map is not the territory.” In other words, as human beings, we can never know reality accurately. We only know our perception of reality. We experience and respond to the world around us primarily through our own unique internal “models of the world.” In this sense, it is our “neurolinguistic” maps of reality that influence our behavior in general and give it some meaning, and not reality itself. Thus, it is not “objective” reality that determines our response, but rather our “subjective” map of reality.
This is especially important to remember when the territory we want to explore becomes a person’s internal map. Fantasies, memories, and even current perceptions of external reality are functions of processes occurring in our nervous system. Thus, they all potentially influence our behavior in the same way. Therefore, as Freud pointed out, “ Fantasy and reality must be treated equally, without making any distinction between childhood memories of one or the other.”.
Freud believed that it did not matter whether Leonardo's memory was his own experience or a dream and fantasy. It is important that Leonardo retained this “memory” in his memory for some reason.
“It should not be indifferent or unimportant that some detail of a child’s life has escaped extinction from memory. Rather, we can assume the following: what remained in memory was the most significant element of that period of life, and it does not matter whether it was so important then or acquired significance later, thanks to subsequent events...
Usually they seem unnoticeable, even insignificant events, and at first it is not at all clear why these memories did not succumb to amnesia: and even the person himself, who stores them for many years in his own memory, sees more in them than in any new memory with which he can connect them. Before their importance can be understood, some work of interpretation must be done to show how the content of these memories is replaced by something else, and how this work makes clear their connection with some other, undeniably important sensations for which they were so-called “memory-screens.”
In any analytic work on the history of life it is always possible, following these rules, to explain the meaning of the earliest memories.” .
Z. Freud. Character and culture
Using this approach to searching for “precipitating causes” of behavior, Freud applies one of his basic pattern-seeking strategies to the memory process: he looks for something that does not fit into the overall picture. Speaking about childhood memories, he points out that most of them disappear from memory altogether - most people have only fragmentary and foggy memories of the events of early childhood. According to Freud's model, such “amnesia” is not a problem, but rather serves as a filter - “what remained in the memory was the most significant element of this entire period of life.”
At first glance, it might seem that if this were true, people would only remember apparently “significant” events. But it often happens that the memories that remain with people are not relevant to the case. They are “subtle” or even “insignificant,” so “it is unclear why these particular memories did not succumb to amnesia.” Of course, at first it seems surprising how valuable such a strange childhood “memory” of Leonardo was. It looks more like something that should be discarded than something that could be used as useful information about the development of Leonardo's genius.
Freud's answer to this question was that “some work of interpretation had to be done to show how the content of these memories was replaced by something else; and how this work clarifies their connection with certain other, undeniably important sensations.” This statement reveals to us one of Freud's most important macrostrategies - “ interpretation” the content of mental experience, with the goal of clarifying its “meaning”. Interpretation involves explaining actions, events, or statements by using inference or indicating internal relationships or motives related to broader patterns or general principles through relevant particulars. The purpose of interpretation is to clarify the meaning of something that was not clear at first. It often involves some work of “translating” the content of the experience. As with all effective translation, this work requires an understanding of the relationship of a single statement or event to a larger “problem space.”
In this sense, Freud's goals and methods resemble the strategies of analysis and deduction used by the great detective Sherlock Holmes. In the first volume of this work, in the chapter on Holmes, we established that the “problem space” is defined by the parts of the system relevant to the problem under study. What you consider a “problem” space will determine what kind of events or circumstances you look for and what meaning you attach to what you find. We also identified several factors that influence the accuracy, significance, and usefulness of conclusions drawn regarding a study of a particular phenomenon.
1. A specific interpretation of the meaning of an event or input information.
Interpretations involve connecting and fitting a particular event or information into other schemas. Thus, in order to interpret the meaning of something, you need to make assumptions about the problem space you are operating with. Many of Freud's interpretations are based on fundamental assumptions, such as the influence of early childhood events and the role of instinctual forces (such as the sexual drive) on individual behavior. The problem is that some assumptions may only be meaningful from a narrow social or historical perspective. This often results in the interpretation of keys and events being subject to considerable variation.
Further, the problem is this: since the consequence of interpreting a particular information or event is the conclusion that “their content is replaced by something else”, the interpretations themselves often turn out to be based on other interpretations. Each additional element in the chain of interpretation opens up a new possible source of error in the translation.
2. Completeness/thoroughness of coverage of the problem space.
Since assumptions must always be made when making meaning of anything, one might ask, “How can we minimize the problems caused by incorrect assumptions or misinterpretations?” The significance of the conclusions is related to how thoroughly the entire possible space of the problem is covered. Freud, of course, recognized that conscious mental processes “are only separate acts and parts of a single mental integrity.” It is always possible to take several different perspectives on any given behavior pattern. Perspective is one of the key elements of the problem space. The time frame is another key element. Perceiving events from different time frames often changes their meaning. As Freud pointed out, a particular behavior or event can acquire “important due to subsequent events”. A key element of Freud's analytical strategy is his ability to identify and include possible perspectives and time frames that may form part of the problem space.
“Interpretation” of a particular detail or symptom involves relating it to elements that make up the broader “problem space.”
3. The order in which the features/elements of a problem are addressed.
The order in which observations and conclusions are made can also influence the conclusions reached. This is especially true in cases where conclusions follow from one another. Some conclusions cannot be drawn until others are reached. The “states” that make up the path within the problem space are arranged in a logical sequence implicit in the concept of “strategy”. We have already identified the macro-level sequence in Freud's processes, which include: a) the formation of a theory from a body of evidence; b) creating projections based on this theory; c) searching for further evidence that either confirms or refutes the projections derived from the theory. Freud seemed to have a tendency to move from large to small, in the sense that he tended to look first at generalities as clues providing contextual information, and then move on to look for details or features of actions or events that could confirm or fit into this context.
4. Priority among problem elements/traits.
In addition to consistency, the priority, or emphasis, given to various keys and elements determines their influence in forming a conclusion or conclusion. As stated earlier, Freud emphasized verbal clues. He emphasized the importance of the meaning of various elements or features depending on his perception of their relationship to the object or phenomenon under study - “ it doesn’t matter whether it was so important then or became important later thanks to subsequent events.” For example, some clues are more indicative of a person's character, others provide more information about a person's recent behavior, and still others are more important in determining a person's physical or social environment. Freud, like Holmes, could appreciate the importance of the meaning of little things, arguing: “Is it not possible that, under certain conditions and at certain moments, very important things do not reveal themselves in completely insignificant manifestations?” Like Holmes, who pointed out that “weirdness is almost certainly the key” ( Arthur Conan Doyle. The Boscombe Valley Mystery), Freud primarily sought to pay attention to subjective memories and experiences that do not fit into the expected or usual picture. He argued that such anomalies “conceal invaluable evidence of the most important features in mental development.” Freud was drawn to Leonardo da Vinci's "childhood memory" because it was “one of the strangest... strange because of its content and the age to which it belonged”(Sigmund Freud. Leonardo da Vinci's memories of early childhood. In the book: Z. Freud. Artist and fantasy. M., Republic, 1995).
5. Additional information about the problem obtained from sources outside the problem space.
The assumptions used to give meaning to clues and features are often derived from information contained in knowledge transferred to the problem from schemas and sources not directly related to the problem space. This information is often “shows its connection with some other, undeniably important experience”. As we will see later, Freud used not only knowledge of “personal life history data” and “physical mechanisms” to make his conclusions and conclusions, but also knowledge of cultural patterns, literary works and historical data.
6. The degree of involvement of fantasy and imagination.
Another source of knowledge that arises outside the specific problem space is imagination. While the process of “induction” involves discovering patterns within clusters of empirical observations, “interpretation” involves indicating or suggesting the meaning of a phenomenon by relating its details to a larger pattern or more general principles. When the problem space is very broad and complex, there are often many “missing connections.” When faced with a large information gap, many people perceive it as an obstacle, give up, and dismiss the problem as “unsolvable.” This is when the “genius” uses his imagination to fill the void and move on. Like Albert Einstein, who argued that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” Freud also used a significant dose of imagination and “free creativity” in his work of interpretation.
Having collected these various factors related to Leonardo da Vinci's “remembering,” Freud concludes that the adult Leonardo does indeed “remember” something from his childhood, but it is not a memory of a specific event. Rather, it is a memory of an early metaphorical fantasy symbolizing something else, a fantasy “which he formed later and carried into his childhood.” Freud explains:
“If we look at Leonardo’s fantasy of the kite through the eyes of a psychoanalyst, it will not seem strange to us at all; we remember that we have repeatedly discovered something similar, for example in dreams, so we can venture to translate this fantasy from its peculiar language into a generally understandable one. In this case, the translation is erotic in nature. The tail, 'coda', is one of the most famous symbols replacing the image of the male penis in Italian and other languages; the fantastic situation - the kite opens the child's mouth and nimbly moves its tail in it - corresponds to the idea of a kiss of the genital organ, of sexual intercourse in which the penis is inserted into the mouth of the person who receives it. It is rather strange that this fantasy in itself is of a completely passive nature; it is also similar to some dreams and fantasies of women or passive homosexuals (playing the female role during sexual intercourse)…
…Research tells us that this much-traditional action can occur in the most innocuous ways. It is just a reworking of another situation in which we all once felt comfortable when, as infants, we took the nipple of our mother's breast or nurse in our mouths and sucked eg o... We interpret this fantasy as being suckled by the mother and believe that the mother has been replaced by a kite.”
Z. Freud. Leonardo da Vinci's memories of early childhood. In the book: Z. Freud. The artist and fantasy. M., Republic, 1995
Thus, according to Freud, the bird is a symbolic representation of Leonardo's mother; and the bird's tail represents the male phallus. At first glance, Freud's interpretation of Leonardo's strange "residual memory" may seem to do little to clarify its meaning and do little to establish his relationship to artistic and scientific genius. I would like to ask how Freud did it: “Where did the kite come from and how did it get to this place?”
It is interesting to note that the historical and cultural evidence that Freud uses to support the interpretation of the bird as a symbol of the mother is based on a misinterpretation of the word “kite,” which he insists on translating as “vulture.” So, although this mistake was unfortunate for Freud in terms of the accuracy of his conclusions about Leonardo da Vinci's memories, it may actually be quite useful for us. Since we no longer have to worry about, and therefore be distracted by, the veracity of the “content” of Freud's research, we can concentrate more fully on his “strategy.”
Freud's original interpretation of Leonardo's “memories”
Freud's first step in interpreting Leonardo's “memories” highlights one of the key elements of his analytic strategy: the perception of symptoms and unusual mental phenomena not directly, but as symbols. A symbol is essentially a “surface structure,” and to understand its meaning, one must look at its “deep structure.” The same deep structure can give rise to a number of different surface structures - as happens in the process of “sublimation”. For example, Freud pointed out that “in the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, the image of the mother was represented by the image of a vulture”. Thus, for a person familiar with this system of symbols, the deep structure “mother” turns (consciously or unconsciously) into a surface structure - “mother” or “vulture”.
At the same time, one surface structure may represent a point where several deep structures overlap. Thus, according to Freud, Leonardo’s fascination with “vultures” could have been the result of his research into the process of flight, And the result of the manifestation of unconscious feelings and desires experienced towards the mother. From this point of view, the fixation of the image of the vulture can be considered simultaneously as 1) a symbolic reflection of unfulfilled but forgotten childhood desires and as 2) part of the study of the flight process. In other words, we find the point where Leonardo's past and present overlap.
Freud's observation that a bird's tail indicates some erotic content suggests a third area of possible overlap—sexual desires. Freud implies that this fantasy is also associated with the “sublimation” of repressed homosexual feelings on the part of Leonardo da Vinci. Freud concludes that this memory/fantasy was partly a symbolic reflection of a mixture of the unconscious desire for “breastfeeding” and oral sex. He argued that the fantasy was born as a result of processes of suppression of childhood sexual curiosity, as well as in connection with the difficulties that Leonardo had with his real mother (he was an illegitimate child). Freud postulates, based on the stories of his patients, that the interruption of his relationship with his mother in infancy may have caused Leonardo to “fixate” on her image and led to the emergence of homosexual tendencies.
Freud also implies that, rather than becoming a source of disease, the overlapping of these several deep structures and the merging into one surface structure - the “vultures” - may also have served a positive purpose and provided additional unconscious motivation for the adult exploration of Leonardo da Vinci; it pushed him to do things that others would never have spent so much time and energy on, without any external “reward.”
Freud's interpretation of the sources of Leonardo's “memories”
Freud then explores the implications of his interpretation and “makes the case” in a manner more reminiscent of a detective or lawyer than a doctor or scientist. Drawing on sources as varied as Egyptian mythology, the symptoms and dreams of his patients, works of literature and Leonardo's personal diaries and paintings, Freud attempts to show that the latter's memories reveal the forces underlying the development of his unique personality and extraordinary abilities.
Freud begins his search for historical sources for his interpretation of the “kite” as an image of the mother with a detailed excursion into Egyptian mythology (in his opinion, Leonardo da Vinci could have been familiar with Egyptian mythology and symbolism). Freud notes the fact that the Egyptians worshiped a Mother Goddess who was depicted as a woman with the head of a vulture (or several heads, one of which was the head of a vulture); The ancient Egyptians were convinced that only female kites existed, there were no males.
Freud then points out the sexual connotations of the word “bird” in many languages, as well as stories in many European cultures about the stork delivering babies; about the widespread prevalence of “flying in a dream.” Freud concludes: “... all this is only small fragments of a whole mass of interconnected ideas, from which we learn that in a dream the desire to fly means nothing more than the desire to have the ability to engage in sexual behavior”(S. Freud, ibid.). Applying the implications of this conclusion to the “memory” of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud states: “Leonardo, by his admission that since childhood he felt a special personal relationship to the problem of flight, confirms that his childhood quests were aimed at the sexual...”(S. Freud, ibid.).
Freud's remarks that “all of these are just small fragments of a whole mass of interconnected ideas”, indicates another significant part of his macro strategy - the desire to put together “fragments” at the level of “surface structure” in order to reveal “a whole mass of interconnected ideas” at the level of “deep structure”. This strategy is a continuation of Freud's belief that “mental processes are for the most part unconscious, and those which appear to be conscious are simply isolated manifestations and parts of the psychic whole... Each individual process belongs primarily to the unconscious psychic system; from this system, under certain conditions, he can move further into the conscious system.” Freud believed that much of the information had been removed or its passage from the unconscious deep structure of the “psychic totality” to expression in conscious surface structures was blocked. His macro strategy is organized in such a way as to identify and put together “fragments” of surface structures in order to try to understand the “psychic whole”; just as an archaeologist might excavate and then put the pieces back together in an attempt to reconstruct the culture from which they remain.
Freud demonstrates this strategy even more clearly by examining Leonardo's diaries for additional clues that might support his hypothesis. He first points to the conspicuous absence of erotic or sexual drawings in Leonardo's numerous anatomical sketches as evidence of his repression of sexual feelings. He mentions inaccuracies in Leonardo's depiction of male and female genitalia and his drawings of sexual intercourse, which Leonardo called “disgusting.” Freud also pointed out Leonardo's eccentric habits of writing backwards (from right to left) and speaking about himself in the second person in his diaries. He notes Leonardo's strange habit of constantly recording details such as spending small amounts of money. Freud claims that such notes, “written down with precision, as if they were written by a pedantic and extremely calculating owner,” are found in patients suffering from “obsessive neurosis.” Freud argues that such compulsions are actually the “tip of the iceberg” of deeper obsessive feelings.
“The opposing forces succeeded in so reducing the manifestation of these repressed feelings that their intensity should be assessed as extremely insignificant; but in the imperious pressure with which this trifling action breaks through, one can discern the real, rooted in the unconscious, power of impulses that consciousness would like to renounce.”
Z. Freud. Leonardo da Vinci's memories of early childhood. In the book: Artist and fantasy. M., Republic
Freud points out that most of these notes relate to expenses made by Leonardo's students, for whom, according to Freud's interpretation, he had repressed sexual feelings. Freud notes that these students - Cesare da Sesto, Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino and Francesco Melzi - did not achieve fame as artists and with very great difficulty were able to become independent of their teacher. He concludes that “ Leonardo selected them for their beauty, not their talent. ”.
One note, however, is a dispassionate account of the funeral expenses of a certain Katherine; this is the name of Leonardo's real mother. Freud interpreted this reference as a remark referring to Leonardo's mother, and it is the only mention of the mother in all of Leonardo's diaries. According to Freud, this is another clue that shows Leonardo's deep and conflicted feelings for his mother. Freud believed that this was the basis for the formation of Leonardo’s character and led to the appearance of his mysterious “memory”.
Next, Freud collects information about Leonardo's childhood in order to confirm his hypothesis about the confusion of Leonardo's relationship with his mother and fixation on her image. He points to the fact that Leonardo was an illegitimate child (although, as Freud pointed out, this was not considered such a shame in society in those days). Leonardo's father, Sir Piero, married another woman, Donna Albiera, who remained childless. His mother, Katerina, probably a peasant girl, later married another man. Freud mentions that Leonardo lived in his father's house, not his mother's. According to Freud, Leonardo's mother did not figure at all in his life, except for a possible cryptic reference to the costs of her funeral. Freud sees the reason why Leonardo's character was formed in this way (on the basis of which Freud bases his conclusions) in the fact that at an early age Leonardo was separated from his mother.
Freud claims that in early childhood Leonardo lived with his mother, and his mother's affection for him was very strong. Freud interprets Leonardo's memory of the “kite” as indicating an unconscious erotic attachment that exists between mother and son. He suggests that due to the “sterility” of the first wife of Leonardo’s father, he was taken to live in his father’s house at a relatively young age as some “compensation”. From Freud's point of view, this led to a break in the typical circle of affection and feeding (between natural mother and child), and also to the emergence of ambiguity in the child Leonardo about the identity of his true “mother”.
Freud argued that these same unconscious conflicts about the mother, which underlie the memory of the kite, also appear in Leonardo's paintings. For example, according to Freud, this same theme is expressed in his painting “Madonna and Child with St. Anne”. Mary is depicted sitting on the lap of St. Anne (her mother) and reaching out her hands to the child Christ and holding him, while St. Anne leans back. Freud wrote:
“Leonardo's childhood is distinguished by the same thing as this painting. He had two mothers: one real one, Caterina, whom he lost between the ages of three and five, and a young, affectionate stepmother, his father’s wife, Donna Albiera.”
In Freud's view, it is these subtle but deep and unconsciously expressed emotional themes that give Leonardo's works their real power, not just their technical or aesthetic perfection. For example, regarding Leonardo da Vinci's most famous work, the Mona Lisa, Freud writes:
“This woman [Mona Lisa], who seems to be either smiling seductively or frozen, looking coldly and soullessly into space... [is] the most perfect image of the antagonism that rules a woman’s love life, of restraint and seduction...” (ibid.).
Freud points out that Leonardo was already approaching fifty when he began working on the portrait of Mona Lisa del Gioconda. Leonardo spent four years “painting the portrait” and yet never considered it a finished work. Instead of handing over the work to the customer, Leonardo kept the painting and took it with him to France, where he spent the last years of his life and where the painting was eventually purchased by his patron Francis I for the Louvre. Freud explained Leonardo's fixation on this painting and the intensity of his affect as a direct result of his mixed feelings towards his mother.
“...The smile of Mona Lisa del Gioconda awakened in a mature person the memory of her mother... ...Leonardo, in the image of Mona Lisa, managed to reproduce the double meaning of her smile, the promise of boundless tenderness and ominous threat...”
“In all our homosexuals, in the first period of childhood, which is later forgotten by the individual, there is a very strong erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule, to the mother, caused or supported by the excessive tenderness of the mother herself, and later reinforced by the removal of the father from the child’s life.”
Freud believed that all these dynamics were reflected in the symbolism of the “memory of the kite.” An interesting part of Freud's strategy was that at different stages of his analysis he "translated" various aspects of the visual symbolism of Leonardo's memory "from his specific language into the common language." If these statements are arranged sequentially, we get:
“When I was in the cradle [the kite] flew up to me and opened my mouth with its tail.” ( “It was a moment when my loving curiosity was directed towards my mother, and when I still thought that she had a sexual organ just like me.”
“He nudged my lips with his tail many times.” ( “My mother passionately kissed my mouth countless times.”
“It seems that I was always destined to have a deep interest in kites” ( “And as a result of this erotic relationship with my mother, I became homosexual.”
Leonardo's later relationship with his father was apparently good, and Freud argues that it became so only after a certain critical period and Sir Piero da Vinci played only a “minor role” in the early childhood of his illegitimate son. Freud points out small or seemingly trivial details in Leonardo's diaries in order to find confirmation of his conclusions, noting that “Among the entries in Leonardo’s diaries there is one which, because of its important content and one tiny formal error, holds the reader’s attention.” This entry reads:
“On Wednesday, July 9, 1504, at seven o’clock in the morning, my father, Sir Piero da Vinci, a notary in the Podestà Palace, died at seven o’clock. He was eighty years old. He left ten male children and two female children.”
“The record therefore reports the death of Leonardo’s father. A small misunderstanding in its form is the double repetition of the time of death (a ore 7), as if at the end of the phrase Leonardo forgot that he had already written it at the beginning. This is just a trifle from which no one except a psychoanalyst would learn anything. It may happen that no one would have noticed it at all, but having paid attention to it, he said: this can happen to anyone who is in a state of absent-mindedness or excitement, and has no other meaning.
The psychoanalyst thinks differently; for him even a little expresses hidden mental processes; he learned long ago what forgetting or repeating something significant is and that one must thank “absent-mindedness” if it reveals otherwise hidden impulses.”
Leonardo da Vinci. Childhood memory
When psychiatric research, usually using sick human material, begins with one of the giants of the human race, it is not guided at all by the motives that profane people so often attribute to it. It does not seek to “denigrate the radiant and trample the sublime into the mud”: it does not give pleasure to belittle the difference between the given perfection and the wretchedness of its usual objects of study. It only finds valuable for science everything that is understandable in these samples, and thinks that no one is so great that it would be humiliating for him to be subject to laws that equally dominate the normal and the morbid.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance. It aroused surprise among contemporaries, but it seemed mysterious to them, as it still does to us. A comprehensive genius, “whose outlines can only be anticipated, but never known,” he had an immeasurable influence as an artist on his time; but it only fell to us to comprehend the great naturalist who was united in him with the artist. Despite the fact that he left us great works of art, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, still in his development the researcher never gave complete freedom to the artist, often seriously harmed him and in the end, perhaps, completely suppressed him. Vasari puts into his mouth at the hour of death the self-accusation that he offended God and people by not fulfilling his duty to art. And even if this story of Vasari has neither external nor, even more so, internal plausibility, but refers only to the legend that began to take shape about the mysterious master already during his lifetime, it still undoubtedly has value as an indicator of the judgments of those people and those times.
What was it that prevented contemporaries from understanding Leonardo’s personality? Of course, it was not the versatility of his talents and information, which gave him the opportunity to be presented at the court of the Duke of Milan, Lodovic Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, as a lutenist playing an instrument he himself invented, or allowed him to write to this duke that wonderful letter, in which he was proud of his merits as a builder and military engineer. The Renaissance, of course, was accustomed to such a combination of diverse knowledge in one person; in any case, Leonardo was only one of the brilliant examples of this. He also did not belong to that type of brilliant people, seemingly deprived of nature, who, for their part, do not attach value to external forms of life and, in a painfully gloomy mood, avoid communication with people. On the contrary, he was tall, slender, beautiful in face and of extraordinary physical strength, charming in his dealings with people, a good speaker, cheerful and friendly. He loved beauty in the objects around him, wore shiny clothes with pleasure and appreciated refined pleasures. In one passage of his Treatise on Painting, indicating his penchant for fun and pleasure, he compares art with related arts and depicts the hard work of a sculptor: “He smeared his face and powdered it with marble dust so that he looks like a baker; he is covered all over with small fragments of marble, as if the snow was falling directly on his back and his home is filled with fragments and dust. The artist is completely different... the artist sits with all the comforts in front of his work - well dressed and moving a very light brush with lovely colors. He's dressed up the way he likes. And his home is filled with cheerful drawings and sparkles with cleanliness. Often a company of musicians or lecturers of various beautiful works gathers with him, and they listen to it with great pleasure without the knocking of a hammer or any other noise.”
Of course, it is very likely that the image of Leonardo's sparklingly cheerful, pleasure-loving image is true only for the first, longer period of the artist's life. From the time when the fall of the power of Lodovic Moreau forced him to leave Milan, his secure position and field of activity, in order to lead a wandering life, poor in external successes, until his very last refuge in France, from then on the shine of his mood could fade and the strange features of his appearance became clearer. character. The increasing deviation of his interests from art to science over the years must also have contributed to the widening of the gap between him and his contemporaries. All these experiments, over which he, in their opinion, “wasted time,” instead of diligently drawing orders and enriching himself, like, for example, his former classmate Perugino, seemed to them fancy toys and even brought upon him the suspicion that he was serving “ black magic." We, who know from his notes what exactly he studied, understand him better. At a time when the authority of the church began to be replaced by the authority of the ancient world and when impartial research was not yet known, he was a forerunner and even a worthy collaborator of Bacon and Copernicus - involuntarily alone. When he dismantled the corpses of horses and people, built flying machines, studied the nutrition of plants and their response to poisons, he, in any case, moved far from the commentators of Aristotle and approached the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research found, at least, shelter in those unfavorable times.
For his artistic activity, this had the consequence that he was reluctant to take up a brush, painted less and less, abandoned what he started and cared little about the further fate of his works. This is what his contemporaries reproached him for, for whom his attitude to art remained a mystery.
Many of Leonardo's later admirers tried to smooth over the reproach for the inconstancy of his character. They argued that what is condemned in Leonardo is a feature of great masters in general. And the hardworking, busy Michelangelo left many of his works unfinished, and for this he is as little to blame as Leonardo. Another picture was not so much unfinished as it was considered by him to be such. What already seems like a masterpiece to a layman is still an unsatisfactory embodiment of his plan for the creator of a work of art; Before him floats that perfection that he cannot convey in an image. In total, it is less possible to make the artist responsible for the final fate of his works.
However sound many of these justifications may be, they still do not explain everything about Leonardo. Painful impulses and breakdowns in the work, ending in flight from it and indifference to its further fate, could be repeated by other artists; but Leonardo, without a doubt, exhibited this characteristic to the highest degree. Solmi, quotes the words of one of his students: “Pavera, che ad ogni ora-tremasse, quando si poneva a dipendere, e pero non diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell"arte, talche egliscorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad "altri parevano mira-coli" (“It seemed that sometimes he was afraid to write, and then he did not finish what he started, understanding the greatness of art and the inevitability of mistakes in it, but to others it seemed like something extraordinary or a miracle.” - Translated by V.V. Koshkin). His last paintings: “Leda”, “Madonna of Sant’Onofrio”, “Bacchus” and “San Giovanni Battista the Younger” remained as if unfinished, “as happened with almost all his affairs and activities...” Lomazzo, who made a copy of “The Last Supper” ", refers in one sonnet to Leonardo's well-known inability to finish any work: "It seems that his brush no longer lifted to the picture, our divine da Vinci. And so many of his things are not finished." The slowness with which Leonardo worked, became a proverb. He worked on The Last Supper in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, after thorough preparation for this, for three whole years. One of his contemporary, short story writer Matteo Bandelli, who was at that time a young monk in the monastery, says that often Leonardo climbed the scaffolding early in the morning so as not to let go of his brushes until dusk, forgetting to eat and drink. Then days passed without him touching the work, at times he remained for hours in front of the painting, satisfied with the experience of it internally. Another time he came to the monastery straight from the courtyard of the Milan Castle, where he was making a model of a statue of a horseman for Francesco Sforza, to make a few strokes on one of the figures and then immediately leave. The portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife of the Florentine Francesco Giocondo, he wrote, according to Vasari, for four years, without being able to finish it, which is confirmed, perhaps, by the fact that the portrait was not given to the customer, but remained with Leonardo, who took take him with you to France. Acquired by King Francis I, it now constitutes one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.
One notices an extraordinary depth, a wealth of possibilities, between which a solution only slowly crystallizes, the demands of which are more than enough, and delays in implementation, which cannot even be explained by the discrepancy between the artist’s strengths and his ideal plan. The slowness that has long been noticeable in Leonardo's work turns out to be a symptom of this delay, as a harbinger of the distance from artistic creativity that subsequently came.
Solmi: “The insatiable thirst to know everything around us and analyze with a cold mind the deepest secrets of everything perfect condemned Leonardo’s works to constantly remain unfinished.”
Leonardo da Vinci: “You have no right to love or hate something unless you have acquired a thorough knowledge of its essence.”
The transformation of psychic energy into various types of activity may be as impossible without loss as the transformation of psychic forces.
Leonardo began his studies in the service of his art. The passion that became powerful drew him further, so that the connection with art was severed. He extended his research to almost all areas of knowledge, being a creator or pioneer in each of them.
His research, however, was aimed only at the visible world; something distanced him from the study of the spiritual life of people. Little space was given to psychology.
When in a person’s character we see a single, strongly expressed inclination, like L.’s curiosity, then to explain this we refer to a special inclination, about the organic nature of which little is known.
Freud considers it probable that this too strong tendency already arises in a person's early childhood and that its dominance is strengthened by the impressions of childhood life.
To strengthen itself, it first uses sexual attraction, so that later it is able to replace part of the sexual life.
And not only to the passion for research, but also in many other cases of particular intensity of some kind of attraction, F. concludes that it is reinforced by sexuality.
Many people manage to transfer a significant part of their sexual desire into their professional activities.
The sexual instinct is especially adapted to make such investments because it is endowed with the power of sublimation.
From about the third year of life, the most gifted children experience a period that can be called the period of infantile sexual exploration.
Beginning with the act of disbelief in fairy tales about the stork, the child notes his mental independence. The impression of failure at the first test of mental independence, apparently, can be long-lasting and deeply overwhelming. When the period of childhood sexual exploration is suddenly cut short by energetic repression, three different possibilities remain for the future fate of curiosity, due to its early connection with sexual interests:
The study shares the fate of sexuality (curiosity remains paralyzed from that time on, freedom of mental activity may be limited for life).
Intellectual development is strong enough to withstand the sexual repression that interferes with it
The third type, the rarest and most perfect, due to a special predisposition, avoids both mental retardation and a neurotic obsessive attraction to thinking.
He pays tribute to the repressed sexuality that made him so strong through the addition of sublimated libido only by avoiding dealing with sexual topics.
The scene with the kite is not a memory of Leonardo, but a fantasy that he later created and transferred to his childhood.
To explain it, one could be content with the openly expressed tendency to give the sanction of predetermination of fate to one's preoccupation with the problem of bird flight.
About Leonardo, Freud writes: “The boy, repressing his love for his mother, puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her and takes his own personality as a model, choosing objects of love similar to him. Thus he becomes homosexual. This is nothing more than as a return to autoeroticism, because boys are substitutes and renewers of his own childhood personality, and he loves them as his mother loved him as a child."
Freud, analyzing Leonardo's fantasy about the kite's tail, comes to the conclusion that the content of this fantasy is erotic. The tail is a symbol and way of depicting the male genital organ; the idea of imagining that a kite opened the child's mouth and worked hard with its tail corresponds to the idea of sexual intercourse in which a member is inserted into the mouth of another person. Fantasy is passive; it also resembles some dreams of women or passive homosexuals.
Fantasies in which a woman takes the male organ into her mouth and sucks it are nothing more than a reworking of another situation in which a child in infancy takes the mother's nipple into her mouth in order to suck it. The kite in Leonardo's fantasy symbolizes the mother. The appearance of the kite can be explained as follows. In the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, mother is written using the image of a kite. The revered deity of motherhood (Mut) was depicted with the head of a kite. Thus, the kite is related to the mother. The kite was considered a symbol of motherhood, because It was believed that only kites of the same sex exist; this bird does not have a male gender.
The creation of Leonardo's fantasy of the kite can be represented as follows. When he read that kites are all female and can reproduce without the help of males, then this memory surfaced and turned into a fantasy. Fantasy says that he, too, was once a kite calf, who had a mother but no father, and, as often happens in such long-standing memories, this was accompanied by an echo of the pleasure he received at his mother’s breast. The real content of the fantasy is this. The replacement of the mother by the kite indicates that the child felt the absence of the father and lived only with the mother. The fact of Leonardo's illegitimate birth corresponds to his fantasy of the kite; only because of this could he compare himself to a baby kite.
This fantasy may indicate a long-standing connection between Leonardo's childhood relationship with his mother and his later apparent, although ideal, homosexuality.
Leonardo's artistic exercises began with the depiction of two kinds of objects that resemble the two sexual objects found in the vulture fantasy - children's heads and women's heads. The children's heads were a repetition of his own childish personality, and the smiling women were a repetition of his mother. Leonardo, due to identification with his mother, reacted to his unconscious femininity in his work when he painted portraits of women in whom he had the opportunity to embody his own characteristics. Researchers of Leonardo's work find that portraits of women contain features of Leonardo himself, i.e. these are partly portraits of himself.
The father, of course, also played a role in Leonardo's psychosexual development.
Anyone who feels attracted to his mother as a child cannot help but want to be in his father’s place. He identifies himself with him in fantasy and later sets himself the goal of surpassing him.
For Leonardo's artistic creativity, his identification of himself with his father had a fatal consequence. He created his creations and no longer cared about them, just as his father did not care about him.
His father’s later impressions of him could not change anything in this obsessive desire, because it came from the impressions of his first childhood years, and was repressed and remained in the unconscious irreparably by later experiences.
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When psychiatric research, usually using sick human material, begins with one of the giants of the human race, it is not guided at all by the motives that profane people so often attribute to it. It does not seek to “denigrate the radiant and trample the sublime into the mud”: it does not give pleasure to belittle the difference between the given perfection and the wretchedness of its usual objects of study. It only finds valuable for science everything that is understandable in these samples, and thinks that no one is so great that it would be humiliating for him to be subject to laws that equally dominate the normal and the morbid.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance. It aroused surprise among contemporaries, but it seemed mysterious to them, as it still does to us. A comprehensive genius, “whose outlines can only be anticipated, but never known,” he had an immeasurable influence as an artist on his time; but it only fell to us to comprehend the great naturalist who was united in him with the artist. Despite the fact that he left us great works of art, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, still in his development the researcher never gave complete freedom to the artist, often seriously harmed him and in the end, perhaps, completely suppressed him. Vasari puts into his mouth at the hour of death the self-accusation that he offended God and people by not fulfilling his duty to art. And even if this story of Vasari has neither external nor, even more so, internal plausibility, but refers only to the legend that began to take shape about the mysterious master already during his lifetime, it still undoubtedly has value as an indicator of the judgments of those people and those times.
Was it the same thing that prevented contemporaries from understanding Leonardo’s personality? Of course, it was not the versatility of his talents and information, which gave him the opportunity to be represented at the court of the Duke of Milan, Lodovic Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, as a lutenist playing an instrument he himself invented, or allowed him to write to this duke that wonderful letter in which he was proud of his achievements as a builder and military engineer. The Renaissance, of course, was accustomed to such a combination of diverse knowledge in one person; in any case, Leonardo was only one of the brilliant examples of this. He also did not belong to that type of brilliant people, seemingly deprived of nature, who, for their part, do not attach value to external forms of life and, in a painfully gloomy mood, avoid communication with people. On the contrary, he was tall, slender, beautiful in face and of extraordinary physical strength, charming in his dealings with people, a good speaker, cheerful and friendly. He loved beauty in the objects around him, wore shiny clothes with pleasure and appreciated refined pleasures. In one passage of his Treatise on Painting, indicating his penchant for fun and pleasure, he compares art with related arts and depicts the hard work of a sculptor: “He smeared his face and powdered it with marble dust so that he looks like a baker; he is covered all over with small fragments of marble, as if the snow was falling directly on his back and his home is filled with fragments and dust. The artist is completely different... the artist sits with all the comforts in front of his work - well dressed and moving a very light brush with lovely colors. He's dressed up the way he likes. And his home is filled with cheerful drawings and sparkles with cleanliness. Often a company of musicians or lecturers of various beautiful works gathers with him, and they listen to it with great pleasure without the knocking of a hammer or any other noise.”
Of course, it is very likely that the image of Leonardo's sparklingly cheerful, pleasure-loving image is true only for the first, longer period of the artist's life. From the time when the fall of the power of Lodovic Moreau forced him to leave Milan, his secure position and field of activity, in order to lead a wandering life, poor in external successes, until his very last refuge in France, from then on the shine of his mood could fade and the strange features of his appearance became clearer. character. The increasing deviation of his interests from art to science over the years must also have contributed to the widening of the gap between him and his contemporaries. All these experiments, over which he, in their opinion, “wasted time,” instead of diligently drawing orders and enriching himself, like, for example, his former classmate Perugino, seemed to them fancy toys and even brought upon him the suspicion that he was serving “ black magic." We, who know from his notes what exactly he studied, understand him better. At a time when the authority of the church began to be replaced by the authority of the ancient world and when impartial research was not yet known, he was a forerunner and even a worthy collaborator of Bacon and Copernicus - involuntarily alone. When he dismantled the corpses of horses and people, built flying machines, studied the nutrition of plants and their response to poisons, he, in any case, moved far from the commentators of Aristotle and approached the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research found, at least, shelter in those unfavorable times.
For his artistic activity, this had the consequence that he was reluctant to take up a brush, painted less and less, abandoned what he started and cared little about the further fate of his works. This is what his contemporaries reproached him for, for whom his attitude to art remained a mystery.
Many of Leonardo's later admirers tried to smooth over the reproach for the inconstancy of his character. They argued that what is condemned in Leonardo is a feature of great masters in general. And the hardworking, busy Michelangelo left many of his works unfinished, and for this he is as little to blame as Leonardo. Another picture was not so much unfinished as it was considered by him to be such. What already seems like a masterpiece to a layman is still an unsatisfactory embodiment of his plan for the creator of a work of art; Before him floats that perfection that he cannot convey in an image. In total, it is less possible to make the artist responsible for the final fate of his works.
No matter how solid many of these justifications are, they still do not explain everything about Leonardo. Painful impulses and breakdowns in the work, ending in flight from it and indifference to its further fate, could be repeated by other artists; but Leonardo, without a doubt, exhibited this characteristic to the highest degree. Solmi quotes the words of one of his students: “Pavera, che ad ogni ora-tremasse, quando si poneva a dipendere, e pero non diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell'arte, talche egliscorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad'altri parevano mira-coli" (“It seemed that sometimes he was afraid to write, and then he did not finish what he started, understanding the greatness of art and the inevitability of mistakes in it, but to others it seemed like something extraordinary or a miracle.” - Per V.V. Koshkina). His last paintings: “Leda”, “Madonna Sant’Onofrio”, “Bacchus” and “San Giovanni Battista the Younger” remained as if unfinished, “as happened with almost all of his affairs and activities...”. Lomazzo, who made a copy of The Last Supper, refers in one sonnet to Leonardo’s well-known inability to finish any work: “It seems that his brush no longer lifted the picture, like our divine da Vinci. And many of his things are not finished.” The slowness with which Leonardo worked became a proverb. He worked on “The Last Supper” in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, after thorough preparation for this, for three whole years. One of his contemporary, short story writer Matteo Bandelli, who was at that time a young monk in the monastery, says that Leonardo often climbed the scaffolding early in the morning so as not to let go of his brushes until dusk, forgetting to eat and drink. Then days passed without him touching the work; at times he remained for hours in front of the painting, satisfied with experiencing it internally. Another time he came to the monastery directly from the courtyard of the Milan Castle, where he was making a model of a statue of a horseman for Francesco Sforza, to make a few strokes on one of the figures and then immediately leave. The portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife of the Florentine Francesco Giocondo, he wrote, according to Vasari, for four years, without being able to finish it, which is confirmed, perhaps, by the fact that the portrait was not given to the customer, but remained with Leonardo, who took take him with you to France. Acquired by King Francis I, it now constitutes one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.
If we compare these stories about the nature of Leonardo’s work with the evidence of the numerous sketches and sketches that survived after him, which varied in many ways each motif found in his painting, then we will have to throw away the opinion about the fleetingness and inconstancy of Leonardo’s attitude towards his art. On the contrary, one notices an extraordinary depth, a wealth of possibilities, between which a solution only slowly crystallizes, requests, which are more than enough, and a delay in execution, which, strictly speaking, cannot be explained even by the discrepancy between the artist’s strengths and his ideal plan. The slowness that has long been noticeable in Leonardo's work turns out to be a symptom of this delay and a harbinger of the distance from artistic creativity that subsequently came. This delay also determined the not entirely undeserved fate of the Last Supper. Leonardo could not relate to al fresco painting, which required quick work while the soil was still wet; Therefore, he chose oil paints, the drying of which gave him the opportunity to delay the completion of the painting, taking into account the mood and taking his time. But these paints separated from the ground on which they were applied and which separated them from the wall; the shortcomings of this wall and the fate of the room came together to solve the seemingly unavoidable death of the painting.
Due to the failure of a similar technical experiment, it seems that the painting of the battle of horsemen at Anghiari, which he later began to paint in a competition with Michelangelo on the wall of the Hall del Consiglio in Florence and also left unfinished, perished. It seems as if the outside participation of the experimenter first supported art, only to then destroy the work of art.
Leonardo's character also exhibited other unusual traits and apparent contradictions. Some inactivity and indifference were obvious in him. At that age when each individual tries to seize for himself as large a field of activity as possible, which cannot do without the development of energetic aggressive activity towards others, he stood out for his calm friendliness, avoiding all hostility and quarrels. He was affectionate and merciful to everyone, rejected, as is known, meat food, because he considered it unfair to take the life of animals, and found special pleasure in giving freedom to the birds that he bought at the market. He condemned war and bloodshed and called man not so much the king of the animal kingdom as the most evil of wild beasts. But this feminine tenderness of feelings did not prevent him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to the place of execution in order to study their faces distorted by fear and sketch them in his pocket book, did not prevent him from drawing the most terrible hand-to-hand battles and entering the service of Caesar Borgia as chief military engineer. He often seems as if indifferent to good and evil - or he must be measured by a special standard. He participated in a responsible position in one of Caesar's military campaigns, which made this callous and most treacherous of all opponents the owner of Romagna. Not a single feature of Leonardo's works reveals criticism or sympathy for the events of that time. A comparison arises with Goethe during the French campaign. If a biographer really wants to gain insight into the mental life of his hero, he should not, as happens in most biographies, pass over his sexual uniqueness in silence out of modesty or bashfulness. From this side little is known about Leonardo, but this little is very significant. At a time when boundless sensuality struggled with gloomy asceticism, Leonardo was an example of strict sexual abstinence, which is difficult to expect from an artist and depictor of female beauty. Solmi quotes the following phrase of his, characterizing his chastity: “The act of intercourse and everything that stands with it connections are so disgusting that people would soon die out if it were not for this custom, hallowed by antiquity, and if there were still no beautiful faces and sensual attraction left.”
the works he wrote, which not only treat the highest scientific problems, but also contain harmless subjects that seem to us hardly even worthy of such a great spirit (allegorical natural history, fables about animals, jokes, predictions), are so chaste that they It would be surprising even in a work of modern fine literature. They so resolutely avoid everything sexual, as if Eros alone, which protects all living things, is matter unworthy of the curiosity of the researcher. It is known how often great artists find pleasure in letting their imagination go wild in erotic and even obscene images; from Leonardo, on the contrary, we have only some anatomical drawings of the internal female genital organs, the position of the fetus in the womb, and the like.
It is doubtful that Leonardo ever held a woman in a loving embrace; Even about any kind of spiritual intimate relationship between him and a woman, like Michelangelo had with Victoria Colonna, nothing is known. While he was still a student in the house of his teacher Verrochio, he and other young men were denounced about forbidden homosexual cohabitation. The investigation ended in acquittal. It seems that he attracted suspicion by using a boy who had a bad reputation as a model. When he became a master, he surrounded himself with beautiful boys and young men whom he took on as apprentices. The last of these disciples, Francesco Melzi, followed him to France, remained with him until his death and was appointed by him as his heir. Without sharing the confidence of his modern biographers, who, of course, reject with indignation the possibility of sexual relations between him and his students as an unfounded dishonor of a great man, one would be more likely to assume that Leonardo’s tender relations with young people who Due to the situation at that time, the students lived the same life with him, and did not result in sexual intercourse. However, one cannot assume strong sexual activity in it.
The peculiarity of his heart and sexual life in connection with his dual nature of artist and researcher can only be understood in one way. Of the biographers who are often very far from the psychological point of view, in my opinion, only Solmi came close to solving this riddle; but the poet Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky, who chose Leonardo as the hero of a great historical novel, created this image precisely on this understanding of an extraordinary person, expressing this view very clearly, although not directly, but, like a poet, in a poetic image. Solmi expresses the following judgment about Leonardo: “The insatiable thirst to know everything around him and analyze with a cold mind the deepest secrets of everything perfect condemned Leonardo’s works to remain constantly unfinished.” One Conferenze Florentine article quotes Leonardo's opinion, which gives the key to understanding his creed and his nature: “Nessuna cosa si puo amare neodiare, se prima non si ha cognition di quella. “You have no right to love or hate something if you have not acquired thorough knowledge of the essence of it.” And Leonardo repeats the same thing in one place in his Treatise on Painting, where he apparently defends himself against the reproach of being anti-religious: “But such accusers could have remained silent. Because this is the way to know the Creator of so many beautiful things, and this is the way to love such a great Master. Because truly great love comes from great knowledge of your loved one, and if you know him little, you will only be able to love him little or not at all...”
The meaning of these words of Leonardo is not that they communicate a greater psychological truth; what he asserts is obviously false, and Leonardo should have realized this as well as we do. It is not true that people wait with their love or hatred until they have studied and comprehended the essence of what arouses these feelings; they love more impulsively, motivated by a feeling that has nothing to do with cognition and the effect of which is only weakened by discussion and reflection. Therefore, Leonardo could only wish to express that something, as people love, is not true, undoubted love; that one must love in such a way as to first suppress passion, subject it to the work of thought, only then allow the feeling to develop when it has stood the test of reason. And we understand: at the same time, he wants to say that for him it happens this way; for all others it would be desirable that they relate to love and hate as he does.
It seems that this was actually the case with him. His affects were curbed and subordinated to the desire to explore; he neither loved nor hated, but only asked himself where what he should love or hate came from, and what significance it had. Thus, he must have seemed indifferent to good and evil, to the beautiful and the disgusting. During this work of exploration, love and hatred ceased to be leaders and gradually turned into mental interest. In fact, Leonardo was not dispassionate; he was not deprived of this divine spark, which is the direct or indirect engine - il primo motore - of all human affairs. But he turned his passions into one passion for exploration; he devoted himself to research with that perseverance, constancy, and depth that can only come from passion, and, having achieved knowledge at the height of spiritual tension, he allows the long-restrained affect to burst out and then flow freely, like a stream along a drainage sleeve, after it has worked. At the height of knowledge, when he could glance at the relationship of things in the area under study, he was seized by pathos, and he ecstatically praised the greatness of this area of \u200b\u200bcreation that he was studying, or - clothed in religiosity - the greatness of its Creator. Solmi clearly captured this process of transformation from Leonardo. Quoting one such passage, where Leonardo sings of the greatness of the immutability of the laws of nature (“O wonderful necessity ...”), he says: “Tale transfigurazione della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, e une dei tratti caratteristici de'manoscritti vinciani, e uno dei tratti caratteristici de'manoscritti vinciani, si trova cento volte espressa..." - "I would call this transformation of the knowledge of nature into emotions religion, and this is one of the most characteristic features of da Vinci's manuscripts, features repeated a hundred times in them..." - .
Leonardo was called the Italian Faust for his insatiable and tireless passion for research. But, abandoning all considerations about the possibility of transforming the desire for research into love of life, which we must accept as a prerequisite for the tragedy of Faust, it should be noted that Leonardo’s development approaches Spinoza’s worldview.
the transformation of psychic energy into various types of activity may be just as impossible without loss as the transformation of physical forces. Leonardo's example teaches how many other things can be traced to this process. From postponing to love until you know, comes substitution. They love and hate no longer so much when they have reached knowledge; then they remain on the other side of love and hate. They explored - instead of loving. And that is why, perhaps, Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than the life of other great people and other artists, it seemed that he was not touched by stormy passions, sweet and all-consuming, which were the best experiences for others. And there were other consequences. He explored instead of acting and creating. Anyone who has begun to feel the greatness of the world pattern and its immutability easily loses consciousness of his own small self. Immersed in contemplation, truly reconciled, he easily forgets that he himself is a particle of these active forces of nature and that he must, having measured his own strength, try to influence to this immutability of the world, a world in which the small is no less wonderful and significant than the great. Leonardo probably began his research, as Solmi thinks, in the service of his art, he worked on the properties and laws of light, colors, shadows, perspective, in order to comprehend the art of imitating nature and showing the way to this to others. Probably, even then he exaggerated the value of this knowledge for the artist. Then he was drawn, still with the goal of serving art, to the study of objects of painting, animals and plants, the proportions of the human body; from their external appearance he took the path of studying their internal structure and their vital functions, which, after all, are also reflected in their appearance and therefore require to be depicted by art. And finally, the passion that became powerful drew him further, so that the connection with art was broken. He then discovered the general laws of mechanics, discovered the process of deposition and fossilization in Arnotal, and, finally, he could write in capital letters in his book the confession: “And sole non si move (The Sun does not move).” So he extended his research to almost all areas of knowledge, being in each of them the creator of something new, or at least a forerunner and pioneer. However, his research was aimed only at the visible world, something alienated him from the study of the spiritual life of people; in the Academia Vinciana, for which he painted very cleverly disguised emblems, little space was devoted to psychology.
When he later tried to return from research to the art from which he had come, he felt that he was hampered by a new set of interests and the changed nature of his mental activity. In the picture he was most interested in one problem, and behind this one problem emerged countless other problems, as he was accustomed to seeing in the boundless and incapable of being completed studies of nature. He was no longer able to limit his requests, to isolate a work of art, to tear it out of the enormous world correlation in which he knew its place. After overwhelming efforts to express in it everything that was combined in his thoughts, he was forced to abandon it to the mercy of fate or declare it unfinished.
The artist once took the researcher into his service as a worker, but the servant became stronger than him and suppressed his master.
When in a person’s character we see a single, strongly expressed inclination, as in Leonardo’s curiosity, then to explain this we refer to a special inclination, about the organic nature of which in most cases nothing more precisely is known. But thanks to our psychoanalytic studies on nervous patients, we are inclined to two further assumptions, the confirmation of which we are pleased to see in each individual case. We consider it probable that this too strong inclination arises already in a person’s early childhood and that its dominance is strengthened by the impressions of childhood life, and further we accept that to strengthen it, it first uses sexual instincts, so that subsequently it is able to replace part of the sexual life. Such a person will therefore, for example, explore with the same passion with which another gives himself to his love, and he could explore instead of loving. And not only in the passion for research, but also in many other cases of special intensity of some drive, we dare to conclude that it is reinforced by sexuality.
Observation of people's daily lives shows us that many manage to transfer a significant part of their sexual desire to their professional activities. The sexual instinct is especially adapted to make such investments because it is endowed with the power of sublimation, that is, it is able to replace its immediate goal with other, depending on the circumstances, higher and non-sexual goals. We consider such a transformation to be proven if in the history of childhood, that is, in the history of the development of the human soul, we find that some strongly expressed attraction served sexual interests. We further see confirmation of this if in adulthood there is a conspicuous lack of sexual activity, as if part of it was replaced here by the activity of this powerful instinct.
The application of this explanation in relation to the case of an overly strong desire for exploration seems especially difficult, because it is precisely children who are reluctant to communicate both this serious desire and sexual interests. Meanwhile, these difficulties can be easily eliminated. The curiosity of young children is evidenced by their tireless questioning, which seems mysterious to an adult until he realizes that all these questions are only circumstantial and that they are endless, because the child wants to replace with them only one single question, which, however, he does not pose. . As the child grows older and more prudent, often this display of curiosity suddenly ceases. But a complete explanation is given to us by psychoanalytic research, which shows that many, perhaps even the majority, and in any case the most gifted children, from about the third year of life, experience a period that can be called the period of infantile sexual exploration. Curiosity awakens in children of this age, as far as we know, not by itself, but is awakened by the impression of an important experience, such as the birth of a sister - unwanted, since the child sees in her a threat to his egoistic interests. The research is directed towards the question of where children come from, just as if the child was looking for ways and means to prevent such an undesirable phenomenon. Thus, we learned with amazement that the child refuses to believe the explanations given to him, for example, he energetically rejects the tale of the stork, full of mythological meaning, that starting from this act of disbelief he marks his mental independence; he often feels at odds with his elders and, in fact, never forgives them for the fact that in his search for the truth he was deceived. He explores in his own ways, guesses the location of the child in the mother's womb and, based on his own sexual sensations, builds his judgments about the origin of the child from food, about his birth through the intestines, about the incomprehensible role of the father, and even then he anticipates the existence of sexual intercourse, which he imagines to him as something malicious and violent. But since his own sexual constitution is not yet mature for the purpose of procreation, then his research into where the children come from, wandering in the dark, should be left incomplete. The impression of this failure at the first test of mental independence, apparently, can be long-lasting and deeply overwhelming.
When the period of childhood sexual exploration is suddenly cut short by energetic repression, three different possibilities remain for the future fate of curiosity, due to its early connection with sexual interests. Or research shares the fate of sexuality; curiosity remains paralyzed from that time, and freedom of mental activity may be limited for life, especially since a new mental retardation is soon added through religious education. It is clear that the acquired weakness of thought in this way gives a strong impetus to the formation of a neurotic disease.
about the second type, intellectual development is strong enough to resist the sexual repression that interferes with it. Some time after the cessation of infantile sexual exploration, when the intellect has become stronger, it, remembering the old connection, helps to bypass sexual repression, and then the suppressed sexual exploration returns from the unconscious in the form of a tendency to obsessive analysis, in any case, distorted and unfree, but quite strong, to make thinking itself sexual and to color mental operations with the pleasure and fear inherent in sexual processes.
The third type, the rarest and most perfect, due to a special predisposition, avoids both mental retardation and the neurotic obsessive attraction to thinking. Sexual repression occurs here too, but it fails to suppress part of the sexual pleasure into the unconscious; on the contrary, libido avoids repression, sublimating from the very beginning into curiosity and increasing the desire for exploration. And in this case, exploration also turns to a certain extent into passion and replaces sexual activity, but due to the complete difference in the underlying mental processes (sublimation instead of interruption from the unconscious), the character of neurosis is not obtained, the connection with the original childhood sexual exploration is lost, and passion can free to serve intellectual interests.
He pays tribute to the repressed sexuality that made him so strong through the addition of sublimated libido only by avoiding dealing with sexual topics.
If we pay attention to the combination of Leonardo's strong desire for exploration with the poverty of his sex life, which is limited, so to speak, to ideal homosexuality, we will be inclined to consider him as an example of our third type. That, after straining his childhood curiosity in the direction of sexual interests, he succeeded in sublimating a large share of his libido into a passion for exploration, this is the core and secret of his being. But of course it is not easy to provide evidence for this view. To do this, it is necessary to look into the development of his soul in the first years of childhood, but it seems crazy to count on this, since information about his life is too scarce and inaccurate and, in addition, we are talking here about information and relationships that even among people of our generation escape the attention of observers.
We know very little about Leonardo's youth. He was born in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, between Florence and Empoli; he was an illegitimate child, which at that time, of course, was not considered a great vice; his father was Signor Piero da Vinci, a notary and a descendant of the family of notaries and farmers who were called after Vinci's place of residence. His mother, Katarina, was probably a country girl who married another resident of Vinci. This mother no longer appears in Leonardo's biography, only the poet Merezhkovsky suggests traces of her influence. The only reliable information about Leonardo's childhood comes from an official document from 1457, the Florentine Tax Cadastre, where among the members of the Vinci family Leonardo is listed as the five-year-old illegitimate child of Signor Piero. Signor Piero's marriage to a certain Donna Albiera remained childless, so little Leonardo could be brought up in his father's house. He left this father's house only when (it is unknown at what age) he entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio as an apprentice. In 1472, the name Leonardo already appears in the list of members of the Compagnia dei Pittore. This is all.
The only time, as far as I know, Leonardo cited information from his childhood in one of his learned notes. In one place where the flight of a kite is spoken of, he suddenly breaks away to indulge in a resurfaced memory from his very early childhood years: “It seems that I was already destined in advance to study the kite so thoroughly, because what seems to come to me is a very early memory, that while I was still lying in the cradle, a kite flew to me, opened my mouth with its tail and pushed its tail against my lips many times.”
Thus, a childhood memory of a highly strange nature. Strange in its content and in the age to which it belongs. That a person retains a memory of the time when he was an infant is, perhaps, nothing incredible, although such a memory cannot in any case be considered reliable. However, the way Leonardo claims that the kite opened the child’s mouth with its tail sounds so incredible, so fabulous, that another assumption comes up, more accessible to understanding, which immediately resolves the difficulties. This scene with the kite is not a memory of Leonardo, but a fantasy that he later created and transferred to his childhood. People's childhood memories often have this origin; they are not at all fixed during experience and are not repeated later, like memories of adulthood, but only later, when childhood is over, they are resurrected, and they change, distort, adapt to later trends, so that it is difficult to strictly separate them from fantasies. Perhaps the best way to get an idea of their nature is to remember how history began to be compiled among ancient peoples. While the people were small and weak, they did not think about writing their history: they cultivated the land of the country, defended their existence from their neighbors, tried to take away their lands and get rich. It was a heroic and prehistoric time. Then another time began, when they began to live a conscious life, felt rich and strong, and now there was a need to find out where they came from and how they became what they are. History, which began to mark successively the events of the present time, cast a glance back into the past, collected traditions and sagas, explained the remnants of the old time according to morals and customs, and thus created the history of ancient times. This history of antiquity was, of necessity, rather an expression of the opinions and desires of the present than a depiction of the past, because much disappeared from the memory of the people, others were distorted, other traces of the past were misinterpreted in the spirit of the times, and besides all this, history was not written based on motives objective curiosity, but because they wanted to influence their contemporaries, to lift them up and inspire them, or to show them their reflection. A person’s conscious memories of what he experienced in adulthood can be fully compared with this process of creating history, and his childhood memories, in the way they were formed and in their groundlessness, can be compared with the late and tendentiously compiled primitive history of the people.
If, therefore, Leonardo’s story about the kite that visited him in the cradle is only a fantasy born later, then one should think that it is hardly worth dwelling on it any longer. To explain it, one could be content with the openly expressed tendency to give the sanction of predetermination of fate to one's preoccupation with the problem of bird flight. However, this neglect would be as unfair as if we frivolously discarded material about sagas, traditions and interpretations in the ancient history of a people. Despite all the distortions and misinterpretations, they still represent the real past; they are what the people created for themselves from the experiences of their long past, under the influence of once powerful and now still active motives, and if only it were possible to correct these distortions again with the knowledge of all the active forces, then behind this legendary material we could discover the historical the truth. The same applies to childhood memories or fantasies of individual individuals. It is not indifferent what a person considers to remain in his memory from his childhood. Usually, behind fragments of memories that are incomprehensible to him, priceless evidence of the most important features of his spiritual development is hidden. But since in psychoanalytic technique we have excellent means to illuminate the hidden, we can try to fill in the gap in the history of Leonardo’s childhood through analysis. If we do not achieve a sufficient degree of reliability in this case, then we can console ourselves with the fact that so many other studies about the great and mysterious man were not destined for a better fate.
But when we look through the eyes of a psychoanalyst at Leonardo’s fantasy about the kite, it will not seem strange to us for long. We remember that we have often seen similar things, for example in dreams, so we are confident that we will be able to translate this fantasy of this strange language into a generally understandable language. The translation then points to the erotic. The tail (“coda”) is one of the most famous symbols and ways of depicting the male genital organ, in Italian no less than in other languages; the idea of imagining that a kite opened the child's mouth and worked vigorously with its tail corresponds to the idea of fellatio, a sexual act in which a penis is inserted into the mouth of another person. It is quite strange that this fantasy is so entirely passive in nature; it also resembles some dreams of women or passive homosexuals (playing the female role in sexual relations).
However, the reader will wait and in fiery indignation will not refuse to follow psychoanalysis due to the fact that even at the first use it leads to an unforgivable disgrace to the memory of a great and pure man. It is obvious that this indignation will never be able to tell us what Leonardo’s childhood fantasy means; on the other hand, Leonardo unequivocally admitted this fantasy, and we will not give up the idea - the prejudice, if you like - that such a fantasy, like every creation of the psyche, such as a dream, a vision, a delirium, must have some kind of meaning. Therefore, it is better to pay a little attention to analytical work, which has not yet said its last word. The desire to take a male organ into the mouth and suck it, which is ranked among the most disgusting perversions in civil society, is still often found among women of our time and, as ancient paintings prove, also among women of old times, and, apparently, in a state of love its repulsiveness is dulled character. The doctor encounters fantasies based on this tendency also in women who have not become acquainted with the possibility of such sexual satisfaction by reading Krafft-Ebing's sexual psychopathology or through other sources. Apparently, it is possible for women to create such desire-fantasies involuntarily. Because, checking, we also see that these actions, so heavily persecuted by customs, admit of the most harmless explanation. They are nothing more than a reworking of another situation in which we all once felt great, when in infancy we took our mother’s or nurse’s nipple into our mouths to suck on it. The organic impression of this our first life pleasure, of course, remained firmly imprinted; when the child later becomes acquainted with the udder of a cow, which in its function is similar to the breast nipple, and in shape and position on the belly with the penis, it has already reached the first stage for the later formation of this disgusting sexual fantasy.
We now understand why Leonardo attributes the memory of an imaginary experience with a kite to infancy. Underneath this fantasy lies nothing more than a reminiscence of the mother’s breast sucking, a humanly beautiful scene of which he, like many other artists, undertook to paint with a brush on the Mother of God and her Child. In any case, let us remember, although we still do not understand, that this reminiscence, equally important for both sexes, was processed by the man Leonardo into a passive homosexual fantasy. We will leave aside for now the question of what connection there could be between homosexuality and sucking the mother's breast, and only remember that rumor actually considered Leonardo to be homosexual. At the same time, it makes no difference to us whether the accusation against the young Leonardo was confirmed or not: it is not a real action, but an image of feelings that decides for us the question of whether we can detect homosexuality in someone.
Another incomprehensible feature of Leonardo’s childhood fantasy primarily arouses our interest. We explain the fantasy by the mother's sucking and find the mother replaced by a kite. Where did this kite come from and how did it get here?
The bottom of the guess is coming, but it’s so remote that I want to give it up. In the sacred hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, mother is actually written through the image of a kite. These Egyptians also worshiped the deity of motherhood, who was depicted with the head of a kite or with many heads, of which at least one was the head of a kite. The name of this goddess was Mut; Is this coincidental consonance with the word “Mutter” (mother)? So, the kite is indeed related to the mother, but how can this help us? Can we assume that Leonardo had this information when only François Champollion (1790-1832) succeeded in reading hieroglyphs?
It is interesting to know how the ancient Egyptians came to choose the kite as a symbol of motherhood. The religion and culture of the Egyptians was already a subject of scientific interest for the Greeks and Romans, and long before we had the opportunity to read Egyptian writings, we had at our disposal isolated information about them in the surviving works of classical antiquity, works that partly belonged to famous authors such as Strabo, Plutarch, Ammianus Morcellinus, partly bear unknown names and are doubtful in their origin and time of appearance, like the hieroglyphs of Horapollo Gilus and the book of eastern priestly wisdom that has come down to us under the divine name Hermes Trismegitus. From these sources we learned that the kite was considered a symbol of motherhood, because they thought that only female kites existed and that this breed of bird did not have a male gender.
How did the fertilization of kites take place if they were all only females? A good explanation of this is given by one passage in Horapollo. At a certain time these birds stop in their flight, open their vaginas and conceive from the wind.
We have now unexpectedly come to the need to recognize as very probable what just recently should have been rejected as absurd. Leonardo may have been very well aware of the scientific tale to which the kite owes the fact that the Egyptians wrote the concept of “mother” with its image. He was a man who read a lot and was interested in all areas of literature and knowledge. We have in the Codex Atlanticus an index of all the books he had at a certain time [M u n t z E. Leonardo da Vinci. P. 282 (Münz E. Leonardo da Vinci)] and numerous other notes about other books that he borrowed from friends; According to the list of books that Richter compiled from his notes, we can hardly overestimate the extent of what he read. He had no shortage of both old and modern works of natural history. All these books were already printed at that time, and Milan was the center of young book printing in Italy.
If we go further, we will come across information that turns the possibility that Leonardo read the tale of the kite into a certainty. The learned publisher and commentator Gorapollo makes a note to the text already quoted: “However, the church fathers considered in the order of things that fable about the kites, about their virgin birth, which therefore occurs in a special way.”
Thus, the fable about same-sex and the conception of kites by no means remained an indifferent anecdote, like a similar one about scarabs; Church ministers relied on it to have a natural-historical argument against those who doubted sacred history. If, according to the best sources of antiquity, kites were destined to be impregnated by the wind, why could not something similar one day happen to a woman? As a result, the church fathers “almost all” tried to tell the fable of the kite, and one can hardly doubt that thanks to such powerful patronage it became known to Leonardo.
We can imagine the creation of Leonardo’s fantasy about the kite in the following way: when he once read in the Fathers of the Church or in a natural history book that kites are all females and can reproduce without the help of males, then a memory emerged in him that turned into this fantasy. She said that he, too, was such a cub of a kite, who had a mother, but did not have a father, and, as often happens in such long-standing memories, this was accompanied by an echo of the pleasure he received at his mother’s breast. The authors' hints at the image of the Holy Virgin and Child, dear to every artist, should have contributed to the fact that this fantasy seemed precious and significant to him. After all, in this way he came to identify himself with the infant Christ, the comforter and savior.
When we analyze a child's fantasy, we strive to separate its real content from later influences that change and distort it. In the case of Leonardo, we think we now know the real content of his fantasy: the replacement of the mother by the kite indicates that the child felt the absence of the father and lived only with the mother. The fact of Leonardo's illegitimate birth corresponds to his fantasy of a kite, which is the only reason why he could compare himself to a baby kite. But we know another reliable fact of his youth, that as a child of five he lived in his father's house; when this happened, whether a few months after his birth or a few weeks before the compilation of that cadastre, we are completely unknown. But here the interpretation of the fantasy of the kite comes forward and shows us that Leonardo spent the critical first years of his life not with his father and stepmother, but with his poor, abandoned, real mother, so that he had time to notice the absence of his father. This seems a weak and, moreover, too bold conclusion of psychoanalytic work, but with further deepening its significance will increase. The reliability of this is further enhanced by a comparison of the actual conditions of Leonardo’s childhood. It is known that his father, Signor Piero da Vinci, married the noble Donna Albiera in the year of Leonardo’s birth; The boy owed the childlessness of this marriage a documented stay in the fifth year of his life in his father’s house, or, rather, in his grandfather’s house. But it is not customary for a young woman who still expects to be blessed with children to be given an illegitimate offspring to raise from the very beginning. No doubt, years of disappointment must first have passed before they decided to accept a probably perfectly developed illegitimate child to compensate for the vainly awaited legitimate children. It would be most consistent with our interpretation of the vulture fantasies if three or even five years of Leonardo's life passed before he exchanged his single mother for a married couple. But then it was already too late. In the first three to four years of life, impressions are recorded and ways of reacting to the external world are developed, which cannot be deprived of their significance by any later experience.
If it is true that the vague memories of childhood and the fantasies built on them always contain the most essential in the spiritual development of a person, then the fact, confirmed by the fantasy of the kite, that Leonardo spent his first years of life with one mother, must have had an outstanding influence on the structure of his inner life . Under the influence of this, it was inevitable that the child, who in his childhood was presented with one problem more than other children, began to rack his brains over this riddle with particular fervor and thus early became a researcher, because great questions tormented him, where do children come from and what The father has something to do with their appearance. The feeling of this connection between his research and the history of his childhood caused him to later exclaim that he was probably destined in advance to delve into the problem of bird flight, because he was visited by a kite in his cradle. Deriving the bird's eye curiosity from childhood sexual exploration will be our next easy task.
Leonardo's childhood fantasy, the real content of the memory is represented by the element of the kite; the connection in which Leonardo himself placed his imagination clearly illuminated the significance of this content for his subsequent life. Upon further interpretation, we come across a strange problem: why was the content of this memory reworked into a homosexual situation? The mother who is breastfeeding the child - or better yet, suckling the child - is transformed into a vulture bird, which puts its tail into the child's mouth. We argue that the “coda” of the kite, by the commonly used substitution in the language, can mean nothing more than the male genital organ. But we do not understand how fantasy can come to endow the mother bird with the sign of masculinity, and in view of such absurdity we doubt whether it is possible to find a reasonable meaning in this fantasy.
In the meantime, we should not lose heart. How many dreams, seemingly absurd, have we already forced to reveal their meaning! Why should it be more difficult with children's imagination than with sleep?
Remembering that it is not good if some strangeness occurs alone, we hasten to compare it with another, even greater strangeness.
The vulture-headed goddess Mut of the Egyptians - a figure with a completely impersonal character, as Drexler defines in Roscher's dictionary - often merged with other motherhood deities with a more clearly expressed individuality, like Isis Gator, but at the same time retained her independent existence and veneration. It was a special characteristic of the Egyptian pantheon that individual gods did not drown in syncretism. Next to the composite deities, the image of an individual deity remained independent. This maternal deity with the head of a vulture was made by the Egyptians in most images with a phallus; it across the breasts, as we see, the female body also has a male penis in a state of erection.
Thus, the goddess Mut has the same combination of maternal and male character traits, as in Leonardo’s fantasy! Should we explain this coincidence by the assumption that Leonardo also knew from the books he studied the bisexual nature of the mother kite? This possibility is more than doubtful; it seems that his sources did not contain anything about this remarkable property. Rather, this coincidence can be explained by a common here and there, but still unknown motive.
ifology can tell us that bisexuality, the combination of male and female sexual traits, was found not only in Mut, but also in other deities, such as Isis Gator, but these can only be insofar as they also had a maternal nature and merged with Mut. Mythology further teaches us that other deities of the Egyptians, like Neith of Sais, from whom the Greek Athena was subsequently formed, were originally represented as bisexual, hermaphrodite; the same applied to many other Greek gods, especially from the group of Dionysus, and also to Aphrodite, who was later transformed into the female goddess of love. Therefore, one could try to explain that the phallus attached to the female body was supposed to signify the creative power of nature and that all these hermaphrodite deities express the idea that only the union of male and female can give a real representation of divine perfection. But none of these considerations explains to us the psychological riddle of why people’s imaginations provide the image that is supposed to personify the essence of the mother with the opposite sign of male strength.
The clue is infantile sexual theories. There was, no doubt, a time when the male member was associated in imagination with the mother. When a boy first directs his curiosity towards sex life, his interest becomes focused on his own sexual organ. He considers this part of his body too valuable and important to think that other people with whom he feels so much the same might not have it. Since he cannot guess that there is another equivalent type of sexual structure, he must assume that all people, including women, have the same penis as his. This prejudice is so firmly rooted in the young researcher that it is not destroyed even by observing the genitals of little girls. The evidence tells him, in any case, that there is something different here than he has, but he is unable to reconcile himself with the meaning of this discovery that girls do not have penises. The idea that a penis might be missing is scary and unbearable for him, so he makes a reconciling decision: girls also have a penis, but it is still very small, then it will grow. If, upon further observation, he sees that this expectation is not fulfilled, then another possibility presents itself to him: little girls also had a penis, but it was cut off, and a wound remained in its place. This step in theory uses one’s own experience of a painful nature; During this time he heard the threat that his precious organ would be cut off if he became too interested in it. Under the influence of this threat of castration, he reinterprets his understanding of the female genital organs; from that time on, he trembles for his male sex and at the same time despises the unfortunate creatures, over whom, according to his concepts, a terrible punishment has already been carried out.
As soon as the child fell under the power of the castration complex, when he still considered a woman equal to himself, an intense attraction to voyeurism began to appear in him, like an erotic passion. He wanted to see other people's genitals, at first, probably to compare them with his own. The erotic attraction that emanated from the mother's personality soon focused on the irresistible desire for her sexual organ, which was mistaken for the penis. With the later acquisition of knowledge that a woman does not have a penis, this desire often turns into its opposite, giving way to disgust, which by the time of puberty can become the cause of mental impotence, misogyny, and prolonged homosexuality. But the fixation of a woman’s penis, which was once an object of desire, leaves indelible marks in the mental life of a child who has carried out this part of infantile sexual exploration with special diligence. In the fetish-like adoration of a woman's foot and shoe, the foot is probably taken only as a substitute symbol of the woman's once adored and now non-existent penis; Braid cutters play, without knowing it, the role of people who perform castration on the female genital organs. There is no proper regard for the activities of childhood sexuality, and it is likely that these reports will be considered false until they completely abandon the point of view of our cultural disdain for the genitals and sexual function. To understand child psychology, one must turn to an analogy with primitive people. For us, from generation to generation, genitals are considered a subject of shame, and with the further spread of sexual repression, even disgust. With disgust, the majority of those living today submit to the dictates of the law of reproduction, feeling at the same time insulted in their human dignity and fallen. A different attitude towards sexual life remains only in the gray, lower classes of the people, but among the higher classes it hides, condemned by culture, and dares to act only under the bitter reproaches of a bad conscience. Was it different for humanity at the beginning of centuries? From the collections of antiquity carefully collected by cultural researchers, one can see that the genital organs were initially the pride and hope of the living, enjoyed divine veneration, and the divinity of their functions was transferred to all newly emerging branches of activity. Countless images of gods were born through the sublimation of the sexual essence, and by the time the connection between official religion and sexual activity disappeared from the general consciousness, secret cults tried to preserve it among a certain number of initiates. Finally, in the course of cultural development, it happened that so much of the divine and sacred was extracted from sexuality that the exhausted remnant fell into contempt. But given the ineradicability of all psychic character traits, it should not be surprising that even the most primitive forms of worship of the reproductive organs are observed until very recently, and that the usage, customs and superstitions of modern humanity contain remnants of all phases of this course of development.
We are prepared by strong biological analogies for the fact that the spiritual development of the individual briefly repeats the course of human development, and therefore we do not find it incredible that the psychoanalytic study of the child's soul reveals in the infantile assessment of the genital organs. The child's assumption of the existence of a penis in the mother is the common source from which comes the bisexual image of maternal deities, like the Egyptian Mut and the “coda” of the kite in Leonardo’s childhood fantasy. It is only through a misunderstanding that we call these images of gods hermaphrodite in the medical sense of the word. None of them actually unites the genital organs of both sexes, as they are united in some cases of deformity that excite disgust in each; they only attach to the mammary glands - the sign of motherhood - a male organ, as happens in the first child's presentation of a child. Mythology took this respectable, fantasized structure of the mother’s body back in ancient times as a belief. We can interpret the tail of the kite in Leonardo’s fantasy in this way: at the time when my infant curiosity turned to my mother, I still attributed to her a genital organ like mine. This is further evidence of Leonardo's early sexual exploration, which, in our opinion, became decisive for his entire subsequent life.
A brief reflection now forces us not to be satisfied with the explanation of the kite’s tail in Leonardo’s childhood fantasy. There seems to be something else in it that we don't yet understand. Her most amazing feature is still the fact that she turned sucking her mother’s breast into something passive, that is, into a situation of an undeniably homosexual nature. The thought of the historical possibility that Leonardo behaved as a homosexual in life raises the question of whether this fantasy indicates a long-standing connection between Leonardo's childhood relationship with his mother and his later obvious, although ideal, homosexuality? We would not dare to conclude about it from Leonardo’s distorted reminiscence if we did not know from psychoanalytic studies of homosexual patients that such a connection exists and even that it is very close and necessary.
Homosexual men, who in our time have undertaken energetic activities against legal restrictions on their sexual activity, like to present themselves through their theorists as from the very beginning a separate sexual group, a sexual intermediate stage, as a “third sex.” They are men who, organically from the very embryo, are deprived of attraction to a woman, and therefore they are attracted to a man. As willingly as one can subscribe to their demands for humane reasons, one must be just as careful about their theories, which are put forward without taking into account the mental genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis makes it possible to fill this gap and test the claims of homosexuals. He has so far been able to perform this task only on a limited number of individuals, but all the studies undertaken so far have given the same amazing result. In all our homosexual men, in early childhood, later forgotten by the individual, there was a very intense erotic attraction to a female person, usually to the mother, caused or encouraged by the too strong tenderness of the mother herself and further reinforced by the retreat into the background of the father in the life of the child. Sager points out that the mothers of his homosexual patients were often masculine women, women with energetic traits that could push the father out of his rightful position; I happened to observe the same thing, but a stronger impression was made on me by those cases where the father was absent from the very beginning or disappeared early, so that the boy was left mainly to the influence of the mother. It is almost as if the presence of a strong father guarantees the son the right decision to select an object in the opposite sex.
After this preliminary stage, a transformation occurs, the mechanism of which is known to us, but the motivating reasons for which we have not yet comprehended. Love for mother cannot develop along with consciousness; it is subject to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother, putting himself in her place, identifies himself with his mother and takes his own personality as a model, choosing objects of love similar to him. Thus he became homosexual; in essence, he returned to autoeroticism, because the boys whom the adult now loves are still only substitutes and renewers of his own childish personality, and he loves them as his mother loved him as a child. We say he finds his objects of love through narcissism, because the Greek saga calls Narcissus a youth who liked nothing better than his own image, and who was turned into a beautiful flower bearing that name.
Deeper psychological considerations justify the assertion that those who become homosexual in this way remain fixed in the subconscious to the memory image of their mother. By repressing his love for his mother, he preserves this love in his subconscious and has remained faithful to her ever since. If he seems to be running after boys like a lover, then in reality he is running from other women who could make him unfaithful. We could also prove by direct individual observations that one who seems sensitive only to male stimulation is in fact subject to the attractive force emanating from a woman, just like a normal person; but every time he hastens to transfer the irritation received from a woman to a male object and thus repeats again and again the mechanism through which he acquired his homosexuality.
We are far from exaggerating the significance of these clarifications of the mental genesis of homosexuality. It is clear that they grossly contradict the official theories of homosexuals, but we know that they are not comprehensive enough to make a final solution possible. What in practice is called homosexuality may come from a variety of psychosexual inhibitory processes, and the path we have indicated may be only one of many, and it is true only for one type of homosexuality. We must also add that with this type of homosexuality the number of cases in which all the conditions we require are fulfilled is far exceeded by the number of cases in which the same effect occurs, so that even we cannot deny the assistance of unknown constitutional factors to which others attribute the origin of all homosexuality. We would have no reason at all to enter into the mental genesis of the form of homosexuality we are studying if a strong assumption did not indicate that Leonardo, whose fantasy of the kite served as our starting point, belongs to this type of homosexual.
No matter how little is known sexually about the great artist and explorer, one still has to believe that the testimony of his contemporaries was not so grossly mistaken. In the light of these legends, he appears to us as a man whose sexual need and activity were greatly reduced, as if a higher desire raised him above the general animal need of people. Let us leave aside the question of whether he ever sought and in what way direct sexual satisfaction, or whether he could do without it completely. But we, too, have the right to look for those aspirations in him that powerfully push others to sexual action, because we cannot imagine the mental life of a person, in the construction of which sexual aspirations in the broad sense of the word, libido, would not take part, even if it deviates far from its original purpose or would be deterred from fulfillment.
We have no right to expect anything more from Leonardo other than traces of unconverted sexual desire. These same traces in their direction make it possible to classify him as homosexual. It was already indicated earlier that he took only very handsome boys and young men as his students. He was kind and indulgent to them, cared for them, looked after them himself when they were sick, as a mother cares for her children and as his own mother might look after him. Since he chose them by beauty, and not by talent, not one of them (Cesare da Sesto, G. Boltrafio, Andrea Salaino, Francesco Melzi and others) became a significant artist. Most of them failed to achieve significance independent of their teacher; they disappeared after his death, leaving no definite trace in the history of art. He probably did not personally know others who, based on their work, should rightfully be called his students, like Luini and Bazzi, nicknamed Sodoma.
We expect to encounter the objection that Leonardo’s relationship with his students has nothing to do with sexual motives at all and does not make it possible to draw any conclusions about his sexual characteristics. Against this, we want to argue with all caution that our understanding explains some strange features in the artist's behavior, which otherwise should have remained mysterious. Leonardo kept a diary; he made notes in his small notes, written from right to left, intended only for himself. In this diary, he strangely addresses himself as “you”: “Learn the multiplication of roots from Maestro Luca.” “Let Maestro D’Abbacco show you the squaring of the circle.” Or about one trip: “I’m going on my gardening business to Mailand... They told me to make two travel bags. Have them show you the Boltrafio lathe and process the stone on it. Leave the book for maestro Andrea Todesco." Or an intention of a completely different kind: “You must show in your essay that the earth is a star, like the moon or something like that, and thus prove the nobility of our world.”
In this diary, which, however, like the diaries of other mortals, he often outlines the most significant events of the day in only a few words or is completely silent, there are some passages that, because of their strangeness, are quoted by all Leonardo’s biographers. These are notes on the artist’s small expenses, pedantically precise, as if belonging to a strict philistine and thrifty owner, while there are no indications about the expenditure of large sums, and nothing at all indicates that the artist delved into the economy. One such note concerns a new raincoat purchased for student Andrea Salaino:
silver brocade………………………15 lire 4 solls.
red velvet for finishing…………..9 "-"
nurs…………………………………..9 "-"
corners………………………………….12 "-"
Another very detailed entry contains all the expenses that another student caused him with his bad traits and penchant for theft: “On April 21, 1490, I started this notebook and started again on the horse. Giacombo came to me on St. Magdalene one thousand 490, 10 years (mark in the margin: thief, deceitful, stubborn, gluttonous). The next day I ordered two shirts, a pair of trousers and a camisole to be cut for him, and when I put aside money to pay for these things, he stole money from my wallet, and it was impossible to force him to confess, although I was in I’m absolutely sure of this (note in the margin: 4 liras) ...” In the same spirit, the enumeration of the baby’s atrocities continues and ends with the count: “In the first year, a cloak, 2 liras; 6 rubles, 4 liras; 3 camisoles, 6 lire; 4 pairs of stockings, 7 liras,” etc.
Leonardo's iographers, who never dreamed of unraveling the mystery of their hero's mental life with the help of his minor shortcomings and oddities, try to use these strange accounts to characterize the maestro's kindness and caring towards his students. They forget that it is not Leonardo's behavior, but the fact that he left us this evidence that requires clarification. Since it is impossible to assume in him a desire to give us evidence of his kindness, we must think that another affective motive prompted him to make these notes. It is not easy to guess which one, and we would not be able to guess anything if these strange small accounts about the students' dresses were not explained by another account found in Leonardo's papers:
funeral expenses after death
Siberian smelt……………………………27 fl.
pound of wax………………………18 "
atafalque……………………………12 »
and carrying out the body and placing the cross...4 "
priests and 4 clerks………..20 "
bell ringing…………………..2 "
stone smiths……………………….16 »
and permission, to the authorities…………….1 "
umma……………………………..100 fl.
basic expenses:
octor……………………………4 fl.
sugar and 12 candles…………………..12 "16"
that…………………………….116 fl. –
Only the poet Merezhkovsky explains who this Katerina was. From two other short notes he concludes that Leonardo's mother, a poor peasant woman from Vinci, came to Milan in 1493 to visit her 41-year-old son, that she fell ill there, was taken by Leonardo to the hospital and, when she died, was buried by him with such honorable pomp.
That interpretation of the psychological novelist is not, of course, proof, but it represents so much inner truth, it agrees so well with everything that we already know about the manifestation of feelings in Leonardo, that I cannot refuse to recognize it as correct. He has achieved that he has forced his feelings to submit to the power of research and refrains from their free manifestation; but he also had moments when what was suppressed sought to manifest itself, and one of such cases was the death of his once so dearly beloved mother. In this bill for funeral expenses we have an unrecognizably distorted expression of grief for our mother. We are surprised how such a distortion could have happened, and we cannot understand it from the point of view of a normal psyche. But in abnormal conditions, with neuroses and especially with so-called obsessive states, we often encounter this. There we see intense feelings, but through repression they have become unconscious, expressed in petty and even absurd actions. Resisting forces succeed in so weakening the expression of these repressed feelings that their intensity seems very insignificant, but in the compulsory obsession with which these petty actions are performed, the real power of feelings, rooted in the unconscious, is revealed that would like to hide from consciousness. Only such an echo of what happened during an obsessive state can explain this calculation of Leonardo’s expenses for the burial of his mother. In the subconscious, he remained, as in childhood, attached to her with a feeling that had an erotic overtones; the resistance to the later repression of this childhood love prevented her memory from being more honorably honored in the diary, but what emerged as a compromise from this neurotic conflict had to emerge, and thus this account was written and left as a riddle for posterity .
It does not seem that it would not be impudent to apply the same point of view with which we considered the funeral bill to the accounts of expenses for students. Then they too could be explained in such a way that in Leonardo the meager remnants of sensual attraction obsessively sought to be expressed in a distorted form. His mother and his students, the likeness of his own childish beauty, were his sexual objects, insofar as this was permitted by the sexual repression that dominated him, and the obsessive need to record with pedantic precision the expenses for them was a strange disguise for this rudimentary conflict. It follows that Leonardo’s sexual life really belongs to the homosexual type, the psychological development of which we were able to find, and the homosexual situation in his fantasy about the kite becomes clear to us, since it shows only what we already knew about this type. She says: “Because of this erotic relationship with my mother, I became homosexual.”
We still can't put an end to Leonardo's vulture fantasy. In words that express too clearly the description of the sexual act (“and pushed his tail many times against my lips”), Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of the erotic relationship between mother and child. From this connection between the activity of the mother (kite) and the indication of the oral area, it is not difficult to guess another memory contained in this fantasy. We can translate it this way: my mother imprinted countless passionate kisses on my lips. The fantasy consists of memories of the mother's sucking and kissing.
beneficent nature has endowed the artist with the ability to express his most mysterious, hidden spiritual movements from himself in his creations, which greatly captivate other strangers, and they themselves do not understand why. Shouldn’t Leonardo’s life have been affected by what his memory retained as the strongest impression of childhood? This should have been expected. If we consider what profound transformations an artist’s impression must undergo before he makes a contribution to art, then it is Leonardo’s requirement for the accuracy of evidence that must be reduced to the most modest dimensions.
then he imagines Leonardo’s paintings, he will remember the amazing, seductive and mysterious smile with which he enchanted the lips of his female images. A paused smile on stretched, drawn lips; it became characteristic of him and is mainly called Leonardian. On the strangely beautiful face of the Florentine Mona Lisa Gioconda, this smile most attracted and confused the audience. She demanded an explanation and was explained in different ways and always unsatisfactorily. “What captivated the viewer was precisely the demonic spell of this smile. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about this woman, who seems to be either smiling seductively or looking coldly and soullessly into space, and no one guessed her smile, no one read her thoughts. Everything, even the landscape, is mysterious, like a dream, as if everything is trembling in sultry sensuality” (Gruyer).
The idea that two different elements were combined in Mona Lisa's smile was expressed by many critics. Therefore, they see in the facial expressions of the beautiful Florentine woman the most perfect image of the contradictions that dominate a woman’s love, restraint and seduction, tenderness full of devotion and a callous, demanding, captivating man, as something alien, sensuality. So, Münz says: “It is known what a mysterious charm the Mona Lisa Gioconda has been producing on the fans crowding in front of her for four centuries. Never has an artist (I quote the words of a subtle critic hiding under the pseudonym Pierre Corlet) “been able to convey so well the very essence of femininity: tenderness and coquetry, modesty and dull passion, the whole mystery of the secretive heart, the thinking brain and the hiding individuality, of which only a glimpse is visible...”
Italian artist Angelo Conti, seeing this picture in the Louvre, enlivened by a ray of sunlight, says: “The woman smiled calmly, expressing in this smile her instincts as a predator and the hereditary cruelty of her sex, the desire to seduce, the beauty of vice and the kindness of a cruel nature, all that alternately appears and then disappears in her laughing face, fused into the poem of this smile... Good and vicious, cruel and compassionate, graceful and ugly, she laughs..."
Leonardo painted this picture over four years, probably from 1503 to 1507, during his second stay in Florence, when he himself was over fifty years old. He used, according to Vasari, the most sophisticated methods to entertain this lady during the session and keep a smile on her face. Of all the subtleties that his brush then conveyed on the canvas, only a little has been preserved in the painting in its present form; at the time when it was written, it was considered the highest that art could create; but it is clear that Leonardo himself was not satisfied with it, which is why he declared it unfinished, did not give it to the customer, but took it with him to France, where his patron Francis I purchased it for the Louvre.
Let us leave the mystery of Mona Lisa's face unsolved and pay attention to the undoubted fact that her smile captivated the artist no less than all viewers for four hundred years. This seductive smile has been repeated since then in all his paintings and in the paintings of his students. Since Leonardo’s Mona Lisa represents a portrait, we cannot assume that he himself gave her face this so difficult to express feature and that she did not have it. In all likelihood, he found this smile in his model and fell so much under its spell that from then on he depicted it in his free creations. A similar view is expressed, for example, by A. Konstantinova:
For a long time, when the artist was busy with the portrait of Mona Lisa Gioconda, he became so imbued with it and got used to all the details of the face of this female image that he transferred his features and especially the mysterious smile and strange look to all the faces that he later painted, facial expressions the peculiarity of the Mona Lisa is noticeable even in the painting of John the Baptist in the Louvre; These features are especially clearly visible in the face of Mary in the picture of St. Anna."
It could have been otherwise. More than one of his biographers felt the need for a deeper substantiation of this attractive force with which the smile of Gioconda took possession of the artist, never to leave him. V. Pater, who sees in the painting of the Mona Lisa “the embodiment of the entire loving experience of cultured humanity” and very subtly expressed that this incomprehensible smile in Leonardo always seems to be connected with something ungodly, directs us to a different path when he says: “In the end After all, this picture is a portrait. We can trace how it has been mixed into the content of his dreams since childhood, so that if strong evidence did not speak against it, then one would think that this was the ideal woman he finally found, embodied ... "
Of course, Hertzfeld also means the same thing when he says that in the Mona Lisa Leonardo met himself, why he was able to bring so much of his own to the image, the features of which had long lived in his soul in mysterious sympathy.
Let's try to develop and clarify these opinions. So, it could be that Leonardo was riveted by the smile of the Mona Lisa, because it awakened something that had long been dormant in his soul, probably an old memory. This memory was deep enough that, once awakened, it would never leave it; he was drawn to constantly portray him again. Pater's assertion that one can trace how a face like that of the Mona Lisa can be woven into the fabric of his dreams from childhood seems plausible and deserves to be taken literally.
Asari mentions as his first artistic attempts "teste di femine che ridono" (heads of laughing women). This passage, which allows no doubt because it does not want to prove anything, reads verbatim like this: “When in his youth he made from clay several laughing women’s heads, which were cast in abundance in plaster, and several children’s heads so well that one would think , they were created by the hand of a great master..."
Thus, we learn that his artistic exercises began with the depiction of two kinds of objects, which should remind us of the two sexual objects we found in the analysis of the fantasy of the kite. If the pretty children's heads were a repetition of his own childish personality, then the smiling women were nothing more than a repetition of Katharina, his mother, and we then begin to foresee the possibility that his mother had the mysterious smile that he had lost and which had so captivated him when he found her again in a Florentine lady.
Regarding the time of painting, the painting closest to the Mona Lisa is called “St. Anne in Three,” that is, St. Anna with Mary and the Christ Child. Here you can see Leonard's smile, perfectly expressed on both women's faces. There is no way to determine how much earlier or later than the portrait of the Mona Lisa Leonardo began painting it. Since both works dragged on for years, one must, without a doubt, assume that the artist was engaged in them simultaneously. It would be most consistent with our idea if it was the deepening into the facial features of Mona Lisa that prompted Leonardo to create the composition of St. Anna. Because if Gioconda’s smile awakened in him memories of his mother, then it is clear to us that she first of all pushed him to create a glorification of motherhood and to return the smile he found from a noble lady to his mother. Therefore, we are forced to transfer our interest from the portrait of Mona Lisa to this other, hardly less beautiful picture, now also in the Louvre.
V. Anna with her daughter and grandson is a subject rarely found in Italian painting. Leonardo's image, in any case, is very different from all those hitherto known. Muter says: “Some artists, like Hans Fries, Holbein the Elder and Girolamo de Libri, depicted Anna sitting next to Mary, and a child standing between them. Others, like Jacob Cornelius in his Berlin painting, depicted a literal “St. Anne in three,” that is, they represented her holding a small figurine of Mary with an even smaller figurine of Christ in her arms.” In Leonardo, Mary sits on her mother's lap, leaning forward and extending both hands to the boy playing with the lamb, who, of course, is a little offended. The grandmother, with one hand akimbo, looks down at both with a blissful smile. The grouping, of course, is not entirely casual. The smile playing on the lips of both women, although, without a doubt, the same as in the portrait of Mona Lisa, has lost its inhospitable and mysterious character and expresses sincerity and quiet bliss.
With a certain delving into this picture, the viewer begins to understand that only Leonardo could paint it in the same way as only he could create a fantasy about a kite. This picture contains a synthesis of the history of his childhood; the details of this painting can be explained by Leonardo's personal life experiences. In his father's house he found not only his kind stepmother Donna Albiera, but also his grandmother, his father's mother, Mona Lucia, who, presumably, was no less tender with him than grandmothers generally are. This circumstance could direct his thought to the idea of childhood, protected by mother and grandmother. Another surprising feature of the picture takes on even greater significance. St. Anne, Mary's mother and the boy's grandmother, who must have been of considerable age, is depicted here perhaps a little older and more serious than St. Maria, but still a young woman with unfading beauty. Leonardo actually gave the boy two mothers: one who stretches out her hands to him, and the other, who is in the background, and he depicted both with a blissful smile of maternal happiness. This feature of the picture did not fail to arouse the surprise of writers; Muter, for example, believes that Leonardo could not decide to depict old age, folds and wrinkles and therefore made Anna a woman sparkling with beauty. Can we be satisfied with this explanation? Others found it possible to deny altogether the same age of mother and daughter (Zeydlitz). But Muter's attempt to explain is quite sufficient to prove that the impression of the youth of St. Anna really comes from the picture, and is not inspired by a trend.
Leonardo's childhood was as amazing as this painting. He had two mothers, his first real mother, Katarina, from whom he was taken between the ages of three and five, and a young, tender stepmother, his father's wife, Donna Albiera. From comparing this fact of his childhood with the previous one and combining them together, he formed the composition “St. Anne’s Three.” The maternal figure is more distant from the boy, depicting the grandmother - corresponds in its appearance and place occupied in the picture in relation to the boy, to the real former mother, Katharina. The blessed smile of St. For Anna, the artist covered up the envy that the unfortunate woman felt when she had to give up her son, just as she had previously lost her husband to her more noble rival.
Thus, another work by Leonardo confirms the assumption that the smile of Mona Lisa Gioconda awakened in Leonardo the memory of the mother of his first childhood years. Madonnas and noble ladies of Italian artists have since then had the humbly bowed head and strangely blissful smile of the poor peasant girl Katarina, who gave birth to the world a wonderful son, destined for art, research and patience.
If Leonardo managed to convey in the face of Mona Lisa the double meaning that her smile had, the promise of boundless tenderness and the ominous threat (according to Pater), then in this he remained faithful to the content of his early memories. His mother's tenderness became fatal for him, determined his fate and the hardships that awaited him. The passion of caresses, which his fantasy about the kite indicates, was more than natural: the poor abandoned mother was forced to pour out all the memories of past tenderness and her passion in maternal love; she had to do this in order to reward herself for being deprived of a husband, and also to reward the child who did not have a father to caress him. Thus, as is the case with dissatisfied mothers, she replaced her husband with a small son and, too early in the development of his eroticism, robbed him of part of his masculinity. A mother's love for her infant child, whom she feeds and cares for, is something much more deeply exciting than her later feelings for a growing child. By its nature, it is a love affair that fully satisfies not only all spiritual desires, but also all physical needs, and if it represents one of the forms of happiness achievable by a person, then this in no way follows from the ability to satisfy long-repressed desires, called perversions, without reproach. In the happiest young marriage, the father feels that the child, especially the young son, has become his rival, and from here arises a deep-rooted dislike of the preferred one.
When Leonardo, already an adult, again met that blissfully enthusiastic smile that once played on the lips of the mother who caressed him, he had long been under the power of a delay that did not allow him to ever desire such tenderness from a woman’s lips. But now he was an artist and therefore tried to create this smile again with a brush; he gave it to all his paintings, whether he painted them himself or, under his guidance, forced his students to paint them - “Leda”, “John” and “Bacchus”. The last two are variations of the same type. Muter says: “From the biblical husband who ate locusts, Leonardo made Bacchus or Apollo, who with a mysterious smile, placing too full thighs on top of each other, looks at us with a charmingly sensual gaze.” These pictures breathe mysticism, the secret of which you do not dare to penetrate; one can, at most, try to restore its connection with Leonardo’s previous creations. In the figures there is again a mixture of masculine and feminine, but no longer in the sense of the fantasy of a kite, these are beautiful young men, femininely tender, with feminine forms; they do not lower their gaze, but look with hidden triumph, as if they know about great happiness, about which they must remain silent; the familiar seductive smile makes you feel like this is a love secret. It may very well be that in these images Leonardo renounces and artificially suppresses his abnormally developed feelings, depicting in such a blissful fusion of male and female essence the fulfillment of the desire of a boy bewitched by his mother.
Between the notes in Leonardo's diary there is one that attracts the reader's attention due to the significance of its content and a tiny formal error.
n writes in July 1504: “On July 9, 1504, on Wednesday at 7 o’clock in the morning, Signor Piero da Vinci, notary in the Podestà Palace, died; my father at 7 o'clock. He was 80 years old; left 10 male and 2 female children.”
So, the note talks about the death of Leonardo's father. A small error in its form is that the definition of time “a ore 7” is repeated 2 times, as if Leonardo at the end of the phrase forgot that he had just written it at the beginning. This is just a little thing that someone else, not a psychoanalyst, would not even think about. He would not have noticed it at all, or, if it had been pointed out to him, he would have said: this can happen due to absent-mindedness or in the passion of anyone and it has no significance. The psychoanalyst thinks differently; for him everything has meaning as a manifestation of hidden mental processes; he had long ago become convinced that such forgetting or repetition is full of meaning and that thanks to “absent-mindedness” it is possible to unravel hidden motives.
We can say that this note, like the account of Katharina’s burial and the account of expenses for students, represents a case where Leonardo failed to suppress his affect and what had been hidden for a long time was expressed in a distorted form. Even the form is similar: the same pedantic precision, the same highlighting of numbers.
We call such repetition perversion. This is an excellent aid to recognize affective coloring. Let us recall, for example, the indignant speech of St. Peter against his unworthy deputy on earth from Dante's paradise:
from who, like a thief, sat on my throne,
and my throne, on my throne, which
mouth before the son of God, raised
and my cemetery is full of mountains
ditch mud; thrown down from the heights,
admiring this, it comforts the eyes.
Dante. The Divine Comedy. (Translated by M. Lozinsky)
If Leonardo had not suppressed his affect, then this place in the diary could have read something like this: “Today at 7 o’clock my father died, Signor Piero da Vinci, my poor father!” But shifted by perversion to an indifferent notification of death, to the determination of the hour of death, it takes away all the pathos from this note and allows us to guess that there was something here that needed to be hidden and suppressed. Signor Piero da Vinci, notary and descendant of notaries, was a man of great energy, thanks to which he gained respect and wealth. He was married four times; his first two wives died childless, only the third gave him his first legitimate son in 1476, when Leonardo was already twenty-four years old and had long ago exchanged his father’s house for the workshop of his teacher Verrocchio; from his fourth and last wife, whom he married at the age of fifty, he had nine more sons and two daughters.
This father, of course, also had significance for Leonardo’s psychosexual development, and not only in a negative sense due to his absence in the early years of the boy’s life, but also directly, through his presence in his later childhood years.
Anyone who feels attracted to their mother as a child cannot help but want to be in their father’s place; he identifies himself with it in fantasy and later sets himself the goal of surpassing it. When Leonardo, not even five years old, was taken into his grandfather's house, the young stepmother Albiera probably replaced his mother in his feelings, and he naturally found himself in the position of rival to his father. The tendency toward homosexuality, as is known, occurs only as one approaches puberty. When this time came for Leonardo, identification with his father lost all meaning for his sexual life, but remained in other areas of a non-erotic nature. We learn that he loved glitter and beautiful clothes, kept servants and horses, despite the fact that he, according to Vasari, “had almost nothing and worked little.” We see the reason for this passion not only in his love of beauty, but also in the obsessive desire to copy his father and surpass him. The father was a noble master in relation to the poor peasant girl, so the urge remained in his son to play the noble master, the desire to “to out Herod” (to surpass Herod), to show his father what true nobility is.
sometimes he creates as an artist, he feels like a father in relation to his creations. For Leonardo's artistic work, his identification with his father had a fatal consequence. He created his creations and no longer cared about them, just as his father did not care about him. His father’s later care for him could not change anything in this obsessive desire, because it came from the impressions of his first childhood years, and was repressed and remained in the unconscious irreparably by later experiences.
During the Renaissance, as well as much later, every artist needed a high-ranking gentleman and patron, a patron who gave him orders, in whose hands his fate lay. Leonardo found his patron in the ambitious, luxury-loving, subtle politician, but fickle and frivolous Lodovic Sforza, nicknamed Moro. At his court in Milan he spent the most brilliant period of his life; here he developed his creativity most strongly, as evidenced by “The Last Supper” and the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. He left Milan before the disaster struck over Lodovic Moreau, who died a prisoner in a French prison.
When this news about his patron reached Leonardo, he wrote in his diary: “The Duke lost his land, his property, his freedom, and not a single thing he undertook was completed.” It is surprising and, of course, not without significance that he here makes to his patron the very reproach that posterity should have made to him, as if he wanted to make someone from the category of fathers responsible for the fact that he himself left his works unfinished. In fact, he was not unfair to the Duke.
but if imitation of his father harmed him as an artist, then antagonism towards his father was an infantile condition of his equally great creativity in the field of research. In Merezhkovsky's excellent comparison, he was like a man who woke up too early, when it was still dark and when everyone else was still asleep. He dared to express a bold position that protects all free research: “Whoever, in the struggle of opinions, relies on authority, works with his memory, instead of working with his mind.” Thus he became the first of the new explorers of nature; the first since the times of the Greeks, he approached the secrets of nature, relying only on observation and his own experience, and a lot of knowledge and foresight were the reward of his courage. But if he taught to disdain authority and discard imitation of “old men” and kept pointing to the study of nature as the source of all truth, then he was only repeating in the highest sublimation accessible to man a conviction that had once already formed in a boy looking at the world in surprise. If we translate this from scientific abstraction back to concrete personal experience, then the old people and authority correspond to the father, and nature is the gentle, kind mother who nurtured him. While for most people - even now, as in ancient times - the need to cling to some kind of authority is so strong that the world seems to them to be shaken if something threatens this authority, only Leonardo could do without this support; he would not have been capable of this if in the first years of his life he had not learned to cope without his father. The courage and independence of his later scientific research suggests that infantile sexual exploration is not retarded by the father, but the renunciation of sexuality gives it further development.
If someone, like Leonardo, had escaped the bullying of his father in his childhood and thrown off the chains of authority in his research, it would be incredible to expect from this person that he would remain a believer and could not abandon dogmatic religion. Psychoanalysis has taught us to see the intimate connection between the father complex and faith in God; he showed us that the personal God is psychologically nothing more than an idealized father, and we see daily that young people lose religious faith as soon as the authority of the father collapses for them. Thus, in the parental complex we discover the roots of the religious need; the omnipotent, righteous God and beneficent nature appear to us as a majestic sublimation of father and mother, nay, a renewal and restoration of early childhood ideas about both. Biologically, religiosity is explained by long-lasting helplessness and the need for the protection of the human child. When he subsequently recognizes his true helplessness and powerlessness against the powerful factors of life, he reacts to them as in childhood and tries to hide their bleakness by renewing his infantile defenses.
It seems that Leonardo's example does not refute this view of religious belief. Accusations against him of unbelief or, which was the same thing at that time, of falling away from the Christian faith were raised against him already during his lifetime and were definitely noted in his first biography, written by Vasari. In the second edition of his Biography, published in 1568, Vasari published these notes. It is quite clear to us that Leonardo, knowing the extreme sensitivity of his era to religious issues, refrained from directly expressing his attitude towards Christianity in his notes. As a researcher, he did not at all succumb to the suggestions of the Holy Scriptures about the creation of the world; he disputed, for example, the possibility of a global flood and believed, as confidently as modern scientists in geology, thousands of years.
Among his “prophecies” there are many that should offend a sensitive Christian, such as, for example, about the worship of holy icons: “They will speak to people who do not listen to anything, whose eyes are open, but do not see anything; they will contact them and receive no response; they will pray for the mercies of him who has ears and does not hear; they will light candles for those who are blind.”
or about mourning on Good Friday: “Throughout all of Europe, numerous peoples are mourning the death of one person who died in the East.”
In the art of Leonardo they said that in his figures of saints the last remnant of church dogmatism disappeared, that he brought them closer to the human in order to embody in them great and beautiful human feelings. Muter praises him for defeating decadence and returning to humanity the right to have passions and joyfully enjoy life. In the notes where Leonardo delves into the solution of the great mysteries of nature, there is no lack of expression of admiration for the Creator as the final cause of all these wonderful mysteries, but nothing indicates a desire to consolidate his personal connection with this powerful deity. The aphorisms into which he invested the deep wisdom of the last years of his life breathe the humility of a man who submits to the necessary laws of nature and expects no relief from the goodness or mercy of God. There can hardly be any doubt that Leonardo conquered both dogmatic and personal religion and, through his work as a researcher, moved very far from the worldview of a Christian believer.
According to previously expressed views on the development of the child's soul, we can assume that Leonardo's first study in childhood had as its subject the problems of sexuality. But he himself reveals this quite clearly, connecting his desire for exploration with the fantasy of the kite. He presents his work on the problem of bird flight as something that fell to his lot by a special predestination of fate. One very unclear passage in his notes, which sounds like a prediction, treats bird flight, best of all proves with what affective interest he was attracted by the desire to learn the art of flying himself: “This big bird will take its first flight from the ridge of the Great Swan, will fill the world with wonder and all scriptures with praise, and eternal glory will be given to the nest where she was born.” Leonardo probably hoped that he himself would someday be able to fly; and we know from the dreams containing this desire what happiness is expected from the fulfillment of this hope. Why do many people dream that they can fly? Psychoanalysis responds to this that flying or turning into a bird is only a disguise of another desire, to the solution of which more than one verbal and material bridge leads. If curious children are told that a large bird, like a stork, brings small children, if the ancients depicted the phallus as winged, if in German Vogeln is the most common designation for male sexual activity, the Italians directly call the male organ l'uccello (bird), then this only small links in a large chain that show us that the ability to fly in a dream means nothing more than the desire to be capable of sexual activity. This is an early infantile desire. If an adult remembers his childhood, it seems to him to be a happy time, when they rejoice in the present and, without wanting anything, go towards the future, so the adult envies children. But the children themselves, if they could give information about this, would probably report something else. Probably, childhood is not the blissful idyll that it seems to us later, if the desire to become an adult and do what adults do makes children strive to quickly relive the years of childhood. This desire guides all their games. If children, during a period when curiosity is directed towards sexual exploration, feel that an adult knows something grandiose in this mysterious and such an important area in which they are forbidden to know and act, then an irresistible desire awakens in them to achieve this very thing, and they express this desire in a dream in the form of flying or prepare this hidden form of desire for future similar dreams. Thus, aviation, which has finally achieved its goal in our time, is also rooted in infantile eroticism.
confessing that since childhood he felt a special personal attraction to the problem of flying, Leonardo proves to us that his childhood curiosity was directed towards the sexual; this we must assume based on our studies of modern children. This problem alone escaped the repression that later made Leonardo alien to sexuality; from childhood until full intellectual maturity, he maintained an interest in this problem, only slightly changing its meaning; and it is very likely that he succeeded in the desired art in the primitive sexual sense as little as art in mechanics, and that both of them remained unattainable desires for him.
The great Leonardo generally remained a child in some things all his life; They say that all great people retain something childish in themselves. As an adult, he continued to play, as a result of which he sometimes seemed strange and unpleasant to his contemporaries. When we see that he made skillful mechanical toys for palace festivities and ceremonial receptions, we are dissatisfied that the artist wastes his energy on such trifles. He himself, apparently, did this not without pleasure, because Vasari reports that he did it even when no one entrusted it to him: “There (in Rome) he made dough from wax and, when it was still liquid, he molded very thinly made of animals filled with air; when he inflated them, they flew, when the air came out, they fell to the ground. To a rare lizard found by the Belvedere gardener, he attached wings from the skin taken from another lizard, and filled them with mercury, so that they moved and trembled when it ran; then he gave her eyes, a beard and horns, tamed her, put her in a box and terrified his friends with her.” Often these toys served him to express deep ideas: “He gave me sheep intestines to clean out so cleanly that they could fit in handfuls; he brought them into a large room, placed a couple of bellows in the next room, attached intestines to them and inflated them so that they filled the entire room and everyone had to run into a corner; showing how they gradually became transparent and airy, how at first they occupied only a small place, and then spread further and further in space, Leonardo compared them to a genius.” The same pleasure in amusing himself with innocent concealment and skillful disguise is expressed in his fables and riddles; the latter, written in the form of “predictions,” are almost all meaningful in meaning, but extremely devoid of wit. The games and jokes that Leonardo allowed his imagination to indulge in sometimes greatly misled his biographers, who did not understand his character. Leonardo's Milanese manuscripts contain, for example, drafts of letters to “Diodarius of Syria, governor of the sacred Sultanate of Babylonia,” in which Leonardo presents himself as an engineer sent to these countries of the East to carry out famous work, defends himself against accusations of slowness, and gives a geographical description of cities and mountains , talks about a natural phenomenon that happened there during his stay (see Münz and Herzfeld).
Ichter in 1881 wanted to prove from these passages that Leonardo was actually in the service of the Egyptian Sultan, compiled these travel notes there, and even adopted the Mohammedan religion in the East. He was supposed to stay there until 1483, before his relocation to Milan to the court of the Duke. But it was not difficult for critics of other authors to guess in the descriptions of Leonardo’s imaginary journey to the East what they really were - fantasies of the young artist, which he created with himself, in which he, perhaps, expressed his desires to see the world and experience adventures.
A similar creation of fantasy is probably the "Academia Vinciana", the assumption of the existence of which is based on five or six very skillfully disguised emblems with inscriptions of the academy. Vasari talks about these drawings, but does not mention the academy. Münz, who placed a similar design on the cover of his great work on Leonardo, is one of the few who believe in the reality of the Academia Vinciana.
It is very possible that this desire to play disappeared from Leonardo at a more mature age, that it also turned into the activity of a researcher, which was the last and highest manifestation of his personality. But the fact that it persisted for so long shows us how slowly those who experienced the highest and later unattainable erotic bliss in childhood are torn away from their childhood.
There can be no doubt that modern readers find all biographies written from the point of view of pathology tasteless. They say that by analyzing a great man from the point of view of pathology, one can never come to an understanding of his significance and his activities; therefore, it is only a futile undertaking to study in him what can be found with the same success in any other person. But such criticism is so obviously unfair that it can only be understood as an excuse or hypocrisy. Pathography is not generally intended to make the activities of a great man understandable, and one cannot reproach anyone for not fulfilling what he never promised. The true motives for this opposition are completely different. They can be unraveled if we take into account that biographers are attached to their hero in a very special way. They often choose someone as the object of their study because, for reasons of their personal feelings, they relate to him with particular effectiveness. Then they work on his idealization, with the goal of bringing the great man into the ranks of their infantile models, such as, for example, reviving the child’s idea of a father. Pursuing this desire, they erase individual features in his appearance, smooth out the traces of life’s struggle with internal and external obstacles, do not recognize any human weaknesses and imperfections in him and then give us a cold, alien, ideal image instead of a person whom we could feel although and distant, but dear. It is a pity that they do this, because in this way they sacrifice truth for illusion, and for the sake of their infantile fantasy they neglect the opportunity to penetrate into the wonderful secrets of human nature.
Leonardo, with his love of truth and desire for knowledge, would not have refused the experience of unraveling the conditions of his mental and intellectual development from the little oddities and mysteries of his nature. By learning from him, we honor him. We do not detract from his greatness by studying the sacrifice which his development from a child required, and by comparing the moments which imposed the tragic mark of failure on his personality.
We emphatically declare that we never considered Leonardo to be neurotic or, to use an unfortunate expression, “nervous.” Anyone who is dissatisfied that we even dare to apply to him views drawn from pathology still clings tightly to prejudices that we have already managed to abandon. We no longer think that it is possible to draw a sharp line between health and illness, between the normal and the nervous, and that neurotic traits should be considered evidence of general imperfection. We now know that neurotic symptoms serve as substitutes for certain repressed actions that we had to perform during the period of our development from a child into a civilized person, that we all produce similar substitutions and that only their number, intensity and distribution give in practice the concept of illness and allow us to conclude about constitutional imperfection. Based on small signs in Leonardo’s personality, we must bring him closer to that neurotic type, which we call the type of obsession, equate his research with the obsessive dreams of neurotics, his delays in their so-called abulia.
The purpose of our work was to explain the delays in Leonardo's sex life and his artistic activity. May we be allowed to make a general overview of everything that we could discover in the course of the development of his psyche. We have no way of penetrating his heredity, but we do learn that the accidental circumstances of his childhood had a deeply harmful influence on him. His illegitimate birth removes him from the influence of his father until almost his fifth year and places him in the tender care of his mother, to whom he is the only consolation. Caressed by her and thereby precociously sexually developed, he inevitably had to enter the phase of infantile sexual activity, of which the only reliable manifestation is the intensity of his infantile sexual exploration. The desire to look and know was most excited by his early childhood impressions; the erogenous oral zone acquires a meaning that lasts forever. From later contrary behavior, such as excessive pity for animals, we can conclude that in this period of childhood there was no lack of strong sadistic traits.
the energetic effort of repression breaks off this childhood fascination and establishes predispositions which must manifest themselves at puberty. Aversion to everything grossly sensual is the most striking result of the transformation. Leonardo can live through withdrawal and appear asexual. When the waves of sexual excitement awoke in the young man, they did not make him sick, pushing him towards expensive and harmful surrogates; a large share of sexual desire, thanks to the early emergence of sexual curiosity, was able to be sublimated into the desire for knowledge in general and thus avoided repression. A much smaller part of the libido remained for sexual purposes and represents an atrophied sexual life in the adult Leonardo. Due to the repression of libido towards the mother, this small part turns into homosexuality and is expressed in ideal love for boys. In the unconscious there remains a fixation towards the mother and the blissful memories of their relationship; but it freezes in a passive state. Thus, the amount of sexual desire in Leonardo’s soul is distributed between repression, fixation and sublimation.
From an unknown childhood, Leonardo appeared before us as an artist and sculptor. This specific talent could be strengthened by the early awakening in the first years of childhood of the desire to look. We would like to show how artistic activity proceeds from basic mental drives, if it were precisely here that our means did not betray us. Therefore, we are content with clarifying the hardly yet controversial fact that the artist’s work also gives rise to his sexual desire, and we point to the information about Leonardo, reported by Vasari, that the heads of smiling women and handsome boys, that is, images of his sexual objects, were his first artistic experiments. At first, as a teenager, Leonardo seems to work freely, without delay. Since in his outer life he takes his father as a model, in Milan, where fate sent him a substitute father in the person of Duke Louis Moreau, he experiences a time of male creative power and artistic productivity. But it soon justifies the observation that the almost complete suppression of real sexual life does not provide the most favorable conditions for the activity of sublimated sexual desire. This activity reflects real sexual life, so activity and the ability to make quick decisions begin to weaken, the tendency to hesitate and procrastinate, apparently, is harmful already in “The Last Supper” and, under the influence of shortcomings in technology, decides the fate of this great work. So slowly a process takes place in him that can be equated to regression in neurotics.
the artist who developed during puberty is overpowered by the researcher who became determined in childhood; the second sublimation of his erotic aspirations recedes before the one formed earlier, during the first repression. He becomes a researcher, first serving his art, then independently of it and leaving it.
With the loss of a patron who replaces his father, and the darkening of his life, this regressive replacement grows more and more. He becomes “impacientissimo al penello” (obsessed with the brush), as the correspondent of Margravine Isabella d’Este writes, who certainly wanted to have another painting by him. His distant childhood gained power over him. But research, which has now replaced artistic creativity for him, apparently bears some of the features that constitute the distinctive signs of the activity of unconscious drives - insatiability, unshakable perseverance, lack of ability to apply to circumstances.
And at the height of mature age, after fifty years, in that period of life when a woman’s sex life has just frozen, and a man’s libido often makes another energetic leap, a new change occurs in Leonardo. The even deeper layers of his soul become active again, and this new regression is favorable for his art, which is about to fade away. He meets a woman who awakens in him the memory of the happy, blissfully enthusiastic smile of his mother, and under the influence of this the desire that led him to the beginning of his artistic experiments, to sculpt smiling women, awakens in him again. He paints the “Mona Lisa”, “St. Anne of Three” and a number of paintings full of mystery, distinguished by a mysterious smile. Thus, thanks to his earliest erotic spiritual experiences, he celebrates triumph, once again overcoming the delay in his art. This last development of his is blurred for us in the darkness of approaching old age.
His intellect rose even earlier to the highest levels of activity, and his worldview left his time far behind.
Above, I gave reasons that give me the right to understand the course of Leonardo’s development in this way, to dissect his life in a similar way, to explain his fluctuations between art and science.
If, regarding this presentation, I have to hear even from friends and experts in psychoanalysis the verdict that I simply wrote a psychological novel, then I will answer that I, of course, do not overestimate the reliability of my conclusions. I, along with others, succumbed to the charm emanating from this great and mysterious man, in whose nature powerful passions are felt, which, however, manifested themselves only in such a strangely muted way.
Whatever the truth about Leonardo’s life, we cannot give up trying to substantiate it psychoanalytically before we solve another problem. We must define in general terms the boundaries that are given to the activity of psychoanalysis in biography, so that we do not consider every lack of explanation a failure. The material for psychoanalytic research is dates in the history of life and, on the one hand, accidents, events and environmental influences, and on the other, information about the individual’s response to this.
Relying on its knowledge of the psychic mechanism, psychoanalysis tries to understand the essence of the individual dynamically by his reaction, to discover his initial mental motivations and their later transformations and development. If this is successful, then the life behavior of the individual is revealed from the interaction of nature and fate, internal forces and external factors. When such an attempt, as perhaps in the case of Leonardo, does not lead to correct conclusions, then the fault here is not in the fallacy or imperfection of the method of psychoanalysis, but in the inaccuracy and scarcity of material and information available about this person. The failure, therefore, lies solely with the author of the biography, who forced psychoanalysis to work with such unsatisfactory material.
Oh, even having at its disposal the widest historical material and with a good acquaintance with the psychic mechanism, psychoanalytic research in two important points will not be able to prove the necessity that an individual could become only one way and not another.
For Leonardo, we had to accept that the accident of his illegitimate birth and the passionate love of his mother for him had the most decisive influence on the formation of his character and his later fate in that the sexual repression that came after this childhood phase of life pushed him to sublimate his libido into a passion for knowledge and established sexual passivity for the rest of his life. But this repression did not have to occur after the first erotic satisfaction of childhood; for another it might not have occurred at all or would have been expressed to a much lesser extent. We must admit here a certain amount of freedom that cannot be predicted by psychoanalysis. It is just as little possible to predict the result of this repression as the only possible one. Another, perhaps, would not be lucky enough to keep the main part of the libido from being repressed, sublimating it into curiosity; under similar circumstances as Leonardo's, he would have endured a prolonged cessation of mental work or an irresistible predisposition to obsessional neurosis. Two features of Leonardo remain unexplained by psychoanalytic work: his exceptional tendency to repression and his outstanding ability to sublimate primitive drives.
treatments and their transformation is the most that is available to psychoanalysis. But then it gives way to biological research. The tendency to repress, as well as the ability to sublimate, we are forced to attribute to the organic foundations of character, and a mental superstructure is erected on them. Since artistic talent and performance are closely related to sublimation, we must add that the essence of artistic activity is also inaccessible to psychoanalysis. Modern biology is inclined to explain the main features of the organic constitution of man by the combination of male and female principles in matter; his handsome appearance, as well as the fact that he was left-handed, provide some support for this. But let us not leave the soil of purely psychological research. Our goal remains, as before, to find the connection between external experiences and the response of the individual to them with his drives. If psychoanalysis does not explain to us the reasons for Leonardo’s artistry, it still makes clear to us the manifestations and shortcomings of his talent. It still seems that only a person who survived Leonardo’s childhood could paint the “Mona Lisa” and “Saint Anne”, doom his works to such a sad fate and progress so uncontrollably in the field of knowledge, as if the key to all his creations and failures was hidden in a child's fantasy about a kite.
Is it possible to rely on the results of a study that ascribes such outstanding importance in a person’s fate to the accidents of the position of parents, making the fate of Leonardo, for example, dependent on his illegitimate birth and the infertility of his first stepmother, Donna Albiera? I think this reproach is unfair; if chance is considered unworthy to decide our fate, then this is simply a return to the worldview, the victory over which Leonardo prepared when he wrote that the sun is motionless. We are, of course, offended that a righteous God and good Providence do not better protect us from such influences during the most defenseless period of our lives. At the same time, we willingly forget that, in essence, everything in our life is accidental, starting from our birth as a result of the meeting of a sperm with an egg, an accident, which therefore participates in the laws and necessity of nature and does not depend on our desires and illusions. The division of the determinism of our life between the “necessities” of our constitution and the “accidents” of our childhood cannot yet be determined in particular; but in general there can be no doubt about the importance of our first childhood years. We still do not adore nature enough, which, in the vague words of Leonardo, reminiscent of the speeches of Hamlet, “is full of innumerable causes that have never been subjected to experience.” Each of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless experiments in which these areas of nature must be subjected to experience.
notes
Published according to the edition: Freud 3. Leonardo da Vinci. Childhood memory. M.; Pg., b. G.
about the words of Jacob Burckhardt, cited by Alexandra Konstantinova in “The Evolution of the Madonna Type in Leonardo da Vinci” (Strasbourg, 1907).
He got up and tried to sit up in bed, overcoming his ill health. But still it was clear how bad he was, because he did not do everything in art that was intended for him (V a s a r i D. Vite... LXXXIII, 1550-1584 - Vasari G. Lives...)
"Traktat von der Malerei", republished by Maria Herzfeld with her introduction (Jena, 1909).
S o 1 m i E. La resurrezione dell’opera di Leonardo, no: Leonardo da Vinci. Conference Florentine. Milano, 1910 (Solmi E. Restoration of the works of Leonardo, according to the article “Leonardo da Vinci” in the Conferenza Fiorentina, Milan, 1910).
cognamiglio Y. Ricerche e Document! sulla giovinezza di Leonardo da Vinci. Napoli, 1900 (J. Sconamiglio. Studies and documents on Leonardo da Vinci on the threshold of his youth. Naples, 1910).
on Seidlitz W. Leonardo da Vinci, der Wendepunkt der Renaissance, 1909. Bd. I. S. 203. (Von Seydlitz W. Leonardo da Vinci - the culmination of the Renaissance, 1909. Bd. I. S. 203.)
bid. Bd. II. S. 48.
a t e r W. Die Renaissance. Aufl 2. 1906. “Still, there is no doubt that at a certain period of his life he almost ceased to be an artist.”
0
R. y V o n S e i d I i t z W. Bd. I. Die Geschichte der Restaurations und Rettungsversuche (Von Seydlitz W. Bd. I: History of restoration and rescue of what was lost).
1
M u n t z. E. Leonardo da Vinci. Paris, 1899. S. 18 (A letter from a contemporary from India to one of the Medicis hints at this oddity of Leonardo. According to Richter: The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci - Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci).
2
o t a z z i F. Leonardo biologo e anatomico. Conference Florentine, 1910. P. 186 (Botacci F. Leonardo - biologist and anatomist, according to: Conference Fiorentine, 1910. P. 186).
3
o1mi E. Leonardo da Vinci.
4
erzfeld Marie. Leonardo da Vinci der Denker, Forscher und Poet. Aufl., Jena, 1906 (Hertzfeld Maria. Leonardo da Vinci - thinker, researcher and poet. Introduction).
5
Perhaps, in this regard, a minor exception is the jokes he collected, which have not yet been translated.
6
This incident explains, according to Sconamiglio, the dark and variously understood passage in the Codex Atlanticus: “When I turned to God and told him what pleased him, you threw me into prison; I wanted to do great things, but you did me harm.”
7
ErezhkovskyD. C. Christ and Antichrist. Part II: Resurrected Gods.
8
o 1 m i V. Leonardo da Vinci. Berlin, 1908.
9
V o t a z z i F. Leonardo biologo e anatomico. P. 193 (Botacci F. Leonardo biologist and anatomist. P. 193).
0
HerzfeldM. Leonardo da Vinci. Traktat von der Malerei. S. 54 (Hertzfeld M. Treatise on painting. P. 54.).
1
Solmi E. La resurrezione... P. 11.
2
See the list of his scientific works in the excellent biographical introduction by Marie Herzfeld (Jena, 1906), in the individual essays of the Conferenze Florentine (1910), etc.
3
To reinforce this seemingly incredible conclusion, see "Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy" and a similar observation in the article "The Theory of Childhood Sexuality": "This digging and doubting becomes a model for later mental work on problems, and the first failure continues to have a paralyzing effect for all time."
4
cognamiglio. Op. cit. P. 15.
5
N o g a r o 1 1 o. Hieroglyphica.
6
o s with h e r. Lexikon der griechisches und romischen Mythologie. Artikel "Mut": Bd. II, 1894-1897; L a n z o n e. Dizionario di mitologia egizia. Torino, 1882 (Rocher. Dictionary of Greek and Roman mythology. Art. "Mut": Bd. I; Lanzoni. Dictionary of Egyptian mythology. Turin, 1882).
7
N a g t I e b e n H. Champollion. Sein Leben und sein Werke, 1906 (Haptleben X. Champollion. His life and his work, 1906).
8
about the testimony of Plutarch.
9
These are mainly the studies of I. Sadger, which I can confirm with my own experience. Moreover, I know that W. Stekel in Vienna and Ferenczi in Budapest arrived at the same results.
0
Leonardo behaves like a man who is accustomed to confessing to others every day and who now replaces this other with a diary. For an idea of who it could be, see Merezhkovsky.
1
whether the sitter (see Merezhkovsky).
2
statue of the horseman Francesco Sforza.
3
See: Merezhkovsky (p. 372). As a sad proof of the unreliability of the already meager information about Leonardo’s intimate life, I point out that Solmi conveys the same account with significant changes. What seems most strange is that florins are replaced by soldi. It must be assumed that the florins in this account do not mean the old “guilders”, but a later coin used, which was equal to 12/3 lire or 33’/3 soldi. Solmi considers Katarina to be a servant who at one time ran Leonardo’s household. I could not get to the source where both accounts came from.
4
Katarina arrived on July 16, 1493" - "Giovanina is a fabulous face, ask Katarina at the hospital about her."
5
The form in which Leonardo’s repressed sensuality was forced to express itself, thoroughness and pecuniary interest belong to the character traits stemming from anal eroticism (see “Character and anal eroticism.”
6
o n t i A. Leonardo pittore, by: Conferenze Florentine. P. 93.
7
The same is proposed by Merezhkovsky, who, however, composed Leonardo’s childhood, which deviates in significant features from ours, created from a fantasy about a kite. But if Leonardo himself had such a smile, then legend would hardly fail to introduce us to this coincidence.
8
. Konstantinova: “Maria looks with deep feeling at her pet with a smile reminiscent of the mysterious expression of Gioconda,” and in another place about Maria: “The smile of Gioconda plays in her features.”
9
I will not talk about the larger mistake that Leonardo made in this note, giving his 77-year-old father 80 years.
0
Apparently, Leonardo also made a mistake in counting his brothers and sisters at this point in the diary, which stands in strange contradiction with the accuracy of the note.
1
o Herzfeld, the “Great Swan” is the peak of Monte Cerero, near Florence.
2
See: Vasari G. (translation by Schorn, 1843).
3
Moreover, he lost a lot of time in drawing the lace weave, where the thread could be traced from one end to the other as it described a complete ring-shaped pattern; a very difficult and beautiful drawing of this kind is engraved on copper with the words in the middle: “Leonardus Vinici Academia” (p. 8).
4
This critical remark should not be specifically applied only to the biography of Leonardo.
According to the publication: Freud 3. Leonardo da Vinci. Childhood memory. M.
From the Big Encyclopedic Dictionary:
SUBLIMATION - in psychology - the mental process of transforming and switching the energy of affective drives for the purposes of social activity and cultural creativity. The concept was introduced by S. Freud (1900), who considered sublimation as one of the types of transformation of drives (libido), opposite to repression.
IBIDO (LAT. LIBIDO - ATTRACTION - desire, desire), in sexology, sexual desire. One of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis by S. Freud, meaning predominantly unconscious sexual desires, capable (as opposed to the desire for self-preservation) of repression and complex transformation (pathological regression or sublimation, etc.).
C. G. Jung, in a polemic with Freud, deprived libido of an exclusively sexual nature, considering it as psychic energy in general, a kind of metaphysical principle of the psyche.