Freud - Complete Works (386 page)

  
⁴
See
von Seidlitz (1909,
1
) for the history of the attempts to
restore and preserve the picture.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2247

   The miscarriage of a similar
technical experiment appears to have caused the destruction of the
Battle of Anghiari, the painting which, in competition with
Michelangelo, he began to paint some time afterwards on a wall of
the Sala del Consiglio in Florence, and which he also abandoned in
an unfinished condition. Here it seems as if an alien interest - in
experimentation - at first reinforced the artistic one, only to
damage the work later on.

   The character of Leonardo the man
showed some other unusual traits and apparent contradictions. A
certain inactivity and indifference seemed obvious in him. At a
time when everyone was trying to gain the widest scope for his
activity - a goal unattainable without the development of energetic
aggressiveness towards other people - Leonardo was notable for his
quiet peaceableness and his avoidance of all antagonism and
controversy. He was gentle and kindly to everyone; he declined, it
is said, to eat meat, since he did not think it justifiable to
deprive animals of their lives; and he took particular pleasure in
buying birds in the market and setting them free.¹ He
condemned war and bloodshed and described man as not so much the
king of the animal world but rather the worst of the wild
beasts.² But this feminine delicacy of feeling did not deter
him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution
in order to study their features distorted by fear and to sketch
them in his notebook. Nor did it stop him from devising the
cruellest offensive weapons and from entering the service of Cesare
Borgia as chief military engineer. He often gave the appearance of
being indifferent to good and evil, or he insisted on measurement
by a special standard. He accompanied Cesare in a position of
authority during the campaign that brought the Romagna into the
possession of that most ruthless and faithless of adversaries.
There is not a line in Leonardo’s notebooks which reveals any
criticism of the events of those days, or any concern in them. A
comparison suggests itself here with Goethe during the French
campaign.

  
¹
Müntz (1899, 18). A letter of a
contemporary from India to one of the Medici alludes to this
characteristic behaviour of Leonardo. (See J. P.
Richter.)

  
²
Bottazzi (1910, 186).

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2248

   If a biographical study is really
intended to arrive at an understanding of its hero’s mental
life it must not - as happens in the majority of biographies as a
result of discretion or prudishness - silently pass over its
subject’s sexual activity or sexual individuality. What is
known of Leonardo in this respect is little: but that little is
full of significance. In an age which saw a struggle between
sensuality without restraint and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo
represented the cool repudiation of sexuality - a thing that would
scarcely be expected of an artist and a portrayer of feminine
beauty. Solmi quotes the following sentence of his which is
evidence of his frigidity: ‘The act of procreation and
everything connected with it is so disgusting that mankind would
soon die out if it were not an old-established custom and if there
were not pretty faces and sensuous natures.’¹ His
posthumous writings, which not only deal with the greatest
scientific problems but also contain trivialities that strike us as
scarcely worthy of so great a mind (an allegorical natural history,
animal fables, jokes, prophecies),² are chaste - one might say
even abstinent - to a degree that would cause surprise in a work of
belles lettres
even to-day. So resolutely do they shun
everything sexual that it would seem as if Eros alone, the
preserver of all living things, was not worthy material for the
investigator in his pursuit of knowledge.³ It is well known
how frequently great artists take pleasure in giving vent to their
phantasies in erotic and even crudely obscene pictures. In
Leonardo’s case on the contrary we have only some anatomical
sketches of the internal female genitals, the position of the
embryo in the womb and so on.
⁴

  
¹
Solmi (1908).

  
²
Herzfeld (1906).

  
³
An exception to this (though an unimportant
one) is perhaps to be found in his collected witticisms -
belle
facezie
- which have not been translated. See Herzfeld (1906,
151).

  
⁴
[
Footnote added
1919:] Some
remarkable errors are visible in a drawing made by Leonardo of the
sexual act seen in anatomical sagittal section, which certainly
cannot be called obscene. They were discovered by Reitler (1917)
and discussed by him in the light of the account which I have given
here of Leonardo’s character:

  
‘It is precisely in the process of portraying the act of
procreation that this excessive instinct for research has totally
failed - obviously only as a result of his even greater sexual
repression. The man’s body is drawn in full, the
woman’s only in part. If the drawing reproduced in Fig. 1 is
shown to an unprejudiced onlooker with the head visible but all the
lower parts covered up, it may be safely assumed that the head will
be taken to be a woman’s. The wavy locks on the forehead, and
the others, which flow down the back approximately to the fourth or
fifth dorsal vertebra, mark the head as more of a woman’s
than a man’s.

  
‘The woman’s breast reveals two defects. The first
indeed is an artistic one, for its outline gives it the appearance
of a breast that is flabby and hangs down unpleasingly. The second
defect is anatomical, for Leonardo the researcher had obviously
been prevented by his fending off of sexuality from ever making a
close examination of a nursing woman’s nipples. Had he done
so he would have been bound to notice that the milk flows out of a
number of separate excretory ducts. Leonardo, however, drew only a
single duct extending far down into the abdominal cavity and
probably in his view drawing the milk from the
cisterna
chyli
and perhaps also connected in some way with the sex
organs. It must of course be taken into consideration that the
study of the internal organs of the human body was at that time
made extremely difficult, since the dissection of bodies was
regarded as desecration of the dead and was most severely punished.
Whether Leonardo, who had certainly only very little material for
dissection at his disposal, knew anything at all of the existence
of a lymph-reservoir in the abdominal cavity is therefore in fact
highly questionable, although in his drawing he included a cavity
that is no doubt intended to be something of the sort. But from his
making the lactiferous duct extend still further downwards till it
reaches the internal sex organs we may suspect that he was trying
to represent the synchronization of the beginning of the secretion
of milk and the end of pregnancy by means of visible anatomical
connections as well. However, even if we are ready to excuse the
artist’s defective knowledge of anatomy by referring it to
the circumstances of his time, the striking fact still remains that
it is precisely the female genital that Leonardo has treated so
carelessly. The vagina and something that looks like the
portio
uteri
can no doubt be made out, but the lines indicating the
uterus itself are completely confused.

Fig. 1

  
‘The male genital on the other hand is depicted by Leonardo
much more correctly. Thus, for instance, he was not satisfied with
drawing the testis but also put in the epididymis, which he drew
with perfect accuracy.

  
‘What is especially remarkable is the posture in which
Leonardo makes coitus take place. Pictures and drawings by famous
artists exist which depict
coitus a tergo
,
a latere
,
etc., but when it comes to a drawing of the sexual act being
performed standing up, we must surely suppose that there was a
sexual repression of quite special strength to have caused it to be
represented in this isolated and almost grotesque way. If one wants
to enjoy oneself it is usual to make oneself as comfortable as
possible: this of course is true for both the primal instincts,
hunger and love. Most of the peoples of antiquity took their meals
in a lying position and it is normal in coitus to-day to lie down
just as comfortably as did our ancestors. Lying down implies more
or less a wish to stay in the desired situation for some
time.

  
‘Moreover the features of the man with the feminine head are
marked by a resistance that is positively indignant. His brows are
wrinkled and his gaze is directed sideways with an expression of
repugnance. The lips are pressed together and their corners are
then drawn down. In this face can be seen neither the pleasure of
love’s blessings nor the happiness of indulgence: it
expresses only indignation and aversion.

  
‘The clumsiest blunder, however, was made by Leonardo in
drawing the two lower extremities. The man’s foot should in
point of fact have been his right one; for since Leonardo depicted
the act of union in an anatomical sagittal section it follows of
course that the man’s left foot would be above the plane of
the picture. Conversely, and for the same reason, the woman’s
foot should have belonged to her left side. But in fact Leonardo
has interchanged male and female. The male figure has a left foot
and the female one a right foot. This interchange is easiest to
grasp if one recalls that the big toes lie on the inner sides of
the feet.

  
‘This anatomical drawing alone would have made it possible to
deduce the repression of libido - a repression which threw the
great artist and investigator into something approaching
confusion.’

  
[
Added
1923:] These remarks of Reitler’s have been
criticized, it is true, on the ground that such serious conclusions
should not be drawn from a hasty sketch, and that it is not even
certain whether the different parts of the drawing really belong
together.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2249

   It is doubtful whether Leonardo
ever embraced a woman in passion; nor is it known that he had any
intimate mental relationship with a woman, such as
Michelangelo’s with Vittoria Colonna. While he was still an
apprentice, living in the house of his master Verrocchio, a charge
of forbidden homosexual practices was brought against him, along
with some other young people, which ended in his acquittal. He
seems to have fallen under this suspicion because he had employed a
boy of bad reputation as a model.¹ When he had become a
Master, he surrounded himself with handsome boys and youths whom he
took as pupils. The last of these pupils, Francesco Melzi,
accompanied him to France, remained with him up to his death and
was named by him as his heir. Without sharing in the certainty of
his modern biographers, who naturally reject the possibility that
there was a sexual relationship between him and his pupils as a
baseless insult to the great man, we may take it as much more
probable that Leonardo’s affectionate relations with the
young men who - as was the custom with pupils at that time - shared
his existence did not extend to sexual activity. Moreover a high
degree of sexual activity is not to be attributed to him.

  
¹
According to Scognamiglio (1900, 49) there
is a reference to this episode in an obscure and even variously
read passage in the Codex Atlanticus: ‘Quando io feci
Domeneddio putto voi mi metteste in prigione, ora s’io lo fo
grande, voi mi farete peggio.’ [‘When I represented the
Lord God as a baby, you put me in prison; now if I represent him as
an adult you will do worse to me. ‘]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2250

   There is only one way in which
the peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life can be understood
in connection with Leonardo’s double nature as an artist and
as a scientific investigator. Among his biographers, to whom a
psychological approach is often very alien, there is to my
knowledge only one, Edmondo Solmi, who has approached the solution
of the problem; but a writer who has chosen Leonardo as the hero of
a great historical novel, Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, has made
a similar reading of this unusual man the basis of his portrait and
has given clear expression to his conception, not indeed in plain
language, but (after the way of writers of imagination) in plastic
terms.¹ Solmi’s verdict on Leonardo is as follows (1908,
46): ‘But his insatiable desire to understand everything
around him, and to fathom in a spirit of cold superiority the
deepest secret of all that is perfect, had condemned
Leonardo’s work to remain for ever unfinished.’