Freud - Complete Works (394 page)

  
[
Added
1919:] A remarkable discovery has been made in the
Louvre picture by Oskar Pfister, which is of undeniable interest,
even if one may not feel inclined to accept it without reserve. In
Mary’s curiously arranged and rather confusing drapery he has
discovered the
outline of a vulture
and he interprets it as
an
unconscious picture-puzzle
:-

  
‘In the picture that represents the artist’s mother
the vulture, the symbol of motherhood
, is perfectly clearly
visible.

  
‘In the length of blue cloth, which is visible around the hip
of the woman in front and which extends in the direction of her lap
and her right knee, one can see the vulture’s extremely
characteristic head, its neck and the sharp curve where its body
begins. Hardly any observer whom I have confronted with my little
find has been able to resist the evidence of this
picture-puzzle.’ (Pfister, 1913, 147.)

   At
this point the reader will not, I feel sure, grudge the effort of
looking at the accompanying illustration, to see if he can find in
it the outlines of the vulture seen by Pfister. The piece of blue
cloth, whose border marks the edges of the picture-puzzle, stands
out in the reproduction as a light grey field against the darker
ground of the rest of the drapery.

Fig. 3.

  
Pfister continues: ‘The important question however is: How
far does the picture-puzzle extend? If we follow the length of
cloth, which stands out so sharply from its surroundings, starting
at the middle of the wing and continuing from there, we notice that
one part of it runs down to the woman’s foot, while the other
part extends in an upward direction and rests on her shoulder and
on the child. The former of these parts might more or less
represent the vulture’s wing and tail, as it is in nature;
the latter might be a pointed belly and - especially when we notice
the radiating lines which resemble the outlines of feathers - a
bird’s outspread tail, whose right-hand end,
exactly as in
Leonardo’s fateful childhood dream
[sic],
leads to the
mouth of the child, i.e. of Leonardo himself
.’

   The
author goes on to examine the interpretation in greater detail, and
discusses the difficulties to which it gives rise.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2288

   We thus find a confirmation in
another of Leonardo’s works of our suspicion that the smile
of Mona Lisa del Giocondo had awakened in him as a grown man the
memory of the mother of his earliest childhood. From that time
onward, madonnas and aristocratic ladies were depicted in Italian
painting humbly bowing their heads and smiling the strange,
blissful smile of Caterina, the poor peasant girl who had brought
into the world the splendid son who was destined to paint, to
search and to suffer.

   If Leonardo was successful in
reproducing on Mona Lisa’s face the double meaning which this
smile contained, the promise of unbounded tenderness and at the
same time sinister menace (to quote Pater’s phrase), then
here too he had remained true to the content of his earliest
memory. For his mother’s tenderness was fateful for him; it
determined his destiny and the privations that were in store for
him. The violence of the caresses, to which his phantasy of the
vulture points, was only too natural. In her love for her child the
poor forsaken mother had to give vent to all her memories of the
caresses she had enjoyed as well as her longing for new ones; and
she was forced to do so not only to compensate herself for having
no husband, but also to compensate her child for having no father
to fondle him. So, like all unsatisfied mothers, she took her
little son in place of her husband, and by the too early maturing
of his erotism robbed him of a part of his masculinity. A
mother’s love for the infant she suckles and cares for is
something far more profound than her later affection for the
growing child. It is in the nature of a completely satisfying
love-relation, which not only fulfils every mental wish but also
every physical need; and if it represents one of the forms of
attainable human happiness, that is in no little measure due to the
possibility it offers of satisfying, without reproach, wishful
impulses which have long been repressed and which must be called
perverse.¹ In the happiest young marriage the father is aware
that the baby, especially if he is a baby son, has become his
rival, and this is the starting-point of an antagonism towards the
favourite which is deeply rooted in the unconscious.

  
¹
See my
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
(1905
d
).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2289

   When, in the prime of life,
Leonardo once more encountered the smile of bliss and rapture which
had once played on his mother’s lips as she fondled him, he
had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which
forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of
women. But he had become a painter, and therefore he strove to
reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures
(whether he in fact executed them himself or had them done by his
pupils under his direction) - to Leda, to John the Baptist and to
Bacchus. The last two are variants of the same type.
‘Leonardo has turned the locust-eater of the Bible’,
says Muther, ‘into a Bacchus, a young Apollo, who, with a
mysterious smile on his lips, and with his smooth legs crossed,
gazes at us with eyes that intoxicate the senses.’ These
pictures breathe a mystical air into whose secret one dares not
penetrate; at the very most one can attempt to establish their
connection with Leonardo’s earlier creations. The figures are
still androgynous, but no longer in the sense of the
vulture-phantasy. They are beautiful youths of feminine delicacy
and with effeminate forms; they do not cast their eyes down, but
gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement
of happiness, about which silence must be kept. The familiar smile
of fascination leads one to guess that it is a secret of love. It
is possible that in these figures Leonardo has denied the
unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed over it in his
art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his
mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female
natures.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2290

V

Among the entries in Leonardo’s
notebooks there is one which catches the reader’s attention
owing to the importance of what it contains and to a minute formal
error.

   In July 1504 he writes:

   ‘Adì 9 di Luglio
1504 mercoledi a ore 7 morì Ser Piero da Vinci, notalio al
palazzo del Potestà, mio padre, a ore 7. Era
d’età d’anni 80, lasciò 10 figlioli
maschi e 2 femmine.’¹

   As we see, the note refers to the
death of Leonardo’s father. The small error in its form
consists of the repetition of the time of day ‘a ore 7'
[at 7 o’clock], which is given twice, as if Leonardo had
forgotten at the end of the sentence that he had already written it
at the beginning. It is only a small detail, and anyone who was not
a psycho-analyst would attach no importance to it. He might not
even notice it, and if his attention was drawn to it he might say
that a thing like, that can happen to anyone in a moment of
distraction or of strong feeling, and that it has no further
significance.

   The psycho-analyst thinks
differently. To him nothing is too small to be a manifestation of
hidden mental processes. He his learnt long ago that such cases of
forgetting or repetition are significant, and that it is the
‘distraction’ which allows impulses that are otherwise
hidden to be revealed.

   We would say that this note, like
the account for Caterina’s funeral and the bills of the
pupils’ expenses, is a case in which Leonardo was
unsuccessful in suppressing his affect and in which something that
had long been concealed forcibly obtained a distorted expression.
Even the form is similar: there is the same pedantic exactness, and
the same prominence given to numbers.²

  
¹
[’On July 9, 1504, Wednesday at 7
o’clock died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary at the palace of the
Podestà, my father, at 7 o’clock. He was 80 years old,
and left 10 sons and 2 daughters.’] After Müntz (1899,
13
n
.).

  
²
I am leaving on one side a greater error
made by Leonardo in this note by giving his father’s age as
80 instead of 77.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2291

   We call a repetition of this kind
a perseveration. It is an excellent means of indicating affective
colour. One recalls, for example, St. Peter’s tirade in
Dante’s
Paradiso
against his unworthy representative
on earth:

                                               
Quegli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio,

                                               
Il luogo mio, il luogo mio, che vaca

                                               
Nella presenza del Figliuol di Dio,

                                               
Fatto ha del cimiterio mio cloaca.
¹

   Without Leonardo’s
affective inhibition the entry in his diary might have run somewhat
as follows: ‘To-day at 7 o’clock my father died - Ser
Piero da Vinci, my poor father!’ But the displacement of the
perseveration on to the most indifferent detail in the report of
his death, the hour at which he died, robs the entry of all
emotion, and further lets us see that here was something to be
concealed and suppressed.

   Ser Piero da Vinci, notary and
descendant of notaries, was a man of great energy who reached a
position of esteem and prosperity. He was married four times. His
first two wives died childless, and it was only his third wife who
presented him with his first legitimate son, in 1476, by which time
Leonardo had reached the age of 24 and had long ago exchanged his
father’s home for the studio of his master Verrocchio. By his
fourth and last wife, whom he married when he was already in his
fifties, he had nine more sons and two daughters.²

   It cannot be doubted that his
father too came to play an important part in Leonardo’s
psychosexual development, and not only negatively by his absence
during the boy’s first childhood years, but also directly by
his presence in the later part of Leonardo’s childhood. No
one who as a child desires his mother can escape wanting to put
himself in his father’s place, can fail to identify himself
with him in his imagination, and later to make it his task in life
to gain ascendancy over him. When Leonardo was received into his
grandfather’s house before he had reached the age of five,
his young step-mother Albiera must certainly have taken his
mother’s place where his feelings were concerned, and he must
have found himself in what may be called the normal relationship of
rivalry with his father. As we know, a decision in favour of
homosexuality only takes place round about the years of puberty.
When this decision had been arrived at in Leonardo’s case,
his identification with his father lost all significance for his
sexual life, but it nevertheless continued in other spheres of
non-erotic activity. We hear that he was fond of magnificence and
fine clothes, and kept servants and horses, although, in
Vasari’s words, ‘he possessed almost nothing and did
little work’. The responsibility for these tastes is not to
be attributed solely to his feeling for beauty: we recognize in
them at the same time a compulsion to copy and to outdo his father.
His father had been a great gentleman to the poor peasant girl, and
the son, therefore, never ceased to feel the spur to play the great
gentleman as well, the urge ‘to out-herod Herod’,³
to show his father what a great gentleman really looks like.

  
¹
[‘He who usurps on earth my place, my
place, my place, which in the presence of the Son of God is vacant,
has made a sewer of the ground where I am buried.’] Canto
XXVII, 22-25.

  
²
Leonardo has apparently made a further
mistake in this passage in his diary over the number of his
brothers and sisters - a remarkable contrast to the apparent
exactness of the passage.