LEONARDO DA VINCI

I

WHEN psychoanalytic investigation, which
usually contents itself with frail human mate-
rial, approaches the great personages of hu-
manity, it is not impelled to it by motives which
are often attributed to it by laymen. It does
not strive “to blacken the radiant and to drag
the sublime into the mire”; it finds no satisfac-
tion in diminishing the distance between the
perfection of the great and the inadequacy of
the ordinary objects. But it cannot help find-
ing that everything is worthy of understanding
that can be perceived through those prototypes,
and it also believes that none is so big as to be
ashamed of being subject to the laws which con-
trol the normal and morbid actions with the
same strictness.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was ad-
I

2

mired even by his contemporaries as one of the
greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, still
even then he appeared as mysterious to them as
he now appears to us. An all-sided genius,
“whose form can only be divined but never
deeply fathomed,”¹⁾ he exerted the most deci-
sive influence on his time as an artist; and it re-
mained to us to recognize his greatness as a
naturalist which was united in him with the
artist. Although he left master-pieces of the
art of painting, while his scientific discoveries
remained unpublished and unused, the investi-
gator in him has never quite left the artist,
often it has severely injured the artist and in
the end it has perhaps suppressed the artist
altogether. According to Vasari, Leonardo
reproached himself during the last hour of his
life for having insulted God and men because
he has not done his duty to his art.² And even
if Vasari’s story lacks all probability and be-
longs to those legends which began to be woven
about the mystic master while he was still liv-
ing.

¹⁾In the words of J. Burckhard, cited by Alexandra Kon-
stantinowa, Die Entwicklung des Madonnentypus by Leonardo
da Vinci, Strassburg, 1907.

²Vite, etc. LXXXIII. 1550–1584.

3

ing, it nevertheless retains indisputable value
as a testimonial of the judgment of those peo-
ple and of those times.

What was it that removed the personality of
Leonardo from the understanding of his con-
temporaries? Certainly not the many sided-
ness of his capacities and knowledge, which al-
lowed him to install himself as a player of the
lyre on an instrument invented by himself, in
the court of Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il
Moro, the Duke of Milan, or which allowed
him to write to the same person that remark-
able letter in which he boasts of his abilities as
a civil and military engineer. For the combi-
nation of manifold talents in the same person
was not unusual in the times of the Renais-
sance; to be sure Leonardo himself furnished
one of the most splendid examples of such per-
sons. Nor did he belong to that type of genial
persons who are outwardly poorly endowed by
nature, and who on their side place no value on
the outer forms of life, and in the painful
gloominess of their feelings fly from human
relations. On the contrary he was tall and
symmetrically built, of consummate beauty of

4

LEONARDO DA VINCI

countenance and of unusual physical strength,
he was charming in his manner, a master of
speech, and jovial and affectionate to every-
body. He loved beauty in the objects of his
surroundings, he was fond of wearing magnifi-
cent garments and appreciated every refine-
ment of conduct. In his treatise ³ on the art
of painting he compares in a significant pas-
sage the art of painting with its sister arts and
thus discusses the difficulties of the sculptor:
“Now his face is entirely smeared and pow-
dered with marble dust, so that he looks like a
baker, he is covered with small marble splin-
ters, so that it seems as if it snowed on his
back, and his house is full of stone splinters,
and dust. The case of the painter is quite dif-
ferent from that; for the painter is well
dressed and sits with great comfort before his
work, he gently and very lightly brushes in the
beautiful colors. He wears as decorative
clothes as he likes, and his house is filled with
beautiful paintings and is spotlessly clean. He
often enjoys company, music, or some one may

³Traktat von der Malerei, new edition and introduction by
Marie Herzfeld, E. Diederichs, Jena, 1909.

5

LEONARDO DA VINCI

read for him various nice works, and all this
can be listened to with great pleasure, undis-
turbed by any pounding from the hammer and
other noises.”

It is quite possible that the conception of a
beaming jovial and happy Leonardo was true
only for the first and longer period of the mas-
ter’s life. From now on, when the downfall
of the rule of Lodovico Moro forced him to
leave Milan, his sphere of action and his as-
sured position, to lead an unsteady and unsuc-
cessful life until his last asylum in France, it
is possible that the luster of his disposition be-
came pale and some odd features of his char-
acter became more prominent. The turning of
his interest from his art to science which in-
creased with age must have also been respon-
sible for widening the gap between himself
and his contemporaries. All his efforts with
which, according to their opinion, he wasted his
time instead of diligently filling orders and be-
coming rich as perhaps his former classmate
Perugino, seemed to his contemporaries as ca-
pricious playing, or even caused them to sus-
pect him of being in the service of the “black

6

art.” We who know him from his sketches
understand him better. In a time in which the
authority of the church began to be substituted
by that of antiquity and in which only theo-
retical investigation existed, he the forerunner,
or better the worthy competitor of Bacon and
Copernicus, was necessarily isolated. When
he dissected cadavers of horses and human be-
ings, and built flying apparatus, or when he
studied the nourishment of plants and their be-
havior towards poisons, he naturally deviated
much from the commentators of Aristotle and
came nearer the despised alchemists, in whose
laboratories the experimental investigations
found some refuge during these unfavorable
times.

The effect that this had on his paintings was
that he disliked to handle the brush, he painted
less and what was more often the case, the
things he began were mostly left unfinished; he
cared less and less for the future fate of his
works. It was this mode of working that was
held up to him as a reproach from his contem-
poraries to whom his behavior to his art re-
mained a riddle.

7

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Many of Leonardo’s later admirers have at-
tempted to wipe off the stain of unsteadiness
from his character. They maintained that
what is blamed in Leonardo is a general char-
acteristic of great artists. They said that even
the energetic Michelangelo who was absorbed
in his work left many incompleted works,
which was as little due to his fault as to Leo-
nardo’s in the same case. Besides some pic-
tures were not as unfinished as he claimed, and
what the layman would call a masterpiece may
still appear to the creator of the work of art as
an unsatisfied embodiment of his intentions; he
has a faint notion of a perfection which he de-
spairs of reproducing in likeness. Least of all
should the artist be held responsible for the fate
which befalls his works.

As plausible as some of these excuses may
sound they nevertheless do not explain the
whole state of affairs which we find in Leo-
nardo. The painful struggle with the work,
the final flight from it and the indifference to its
future fate may be seen in many other artists,
but this behavior is shown in Leonardo to high-
 

8

LEONARDO DA VINCI

est degree. Edm. Solmi⁴ cites (p. 12) the ex-
pression of one of his pupils: “Pareva, che ad
ogni ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipin-
gere, e però no diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa
cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell’arte,
tal che egli scorgeva errori in quelle cose, che
ad altri parevano miracoli.” His last pic-
tures, Leda, the Madonna di Saint Onofrio,
Bacchus and St. John the Baptist, remained
unfinished “come quasi intervenne di tutte le
cose sue.” Lomazzo,⁵ who finished a copy of
The Holy Supper, refers in a sonnet to the fa-
miliar inability of Leonardo to finish his works:

“Protogen che il penel di sue pitture
Non levava, agguaglio il Vinci Divo,
Di cui opra non è finita pure.”

The slowness with which Leonardo worked
was proverbial. After the most thorough pre-
liminary studies he painted The Holy Supper
for three years in the cloister of Santa Maria

⁴Solmi. La resurrezione dell’ opera di Leonardo in the col-
lected work; Leonardo da Vinci. Conferenze Fiorentine,
Milan, 1910.

⁵Scognamiglio Ricerche e Documenti sulla giovinezza di
Leonardo da Vinci. Napoli, 1900.

9

LEONARDO DA VINCI

delle Grazie in Milan. One of his contem-
poraries, Matteo Bandelli, the writer of novels,
who was then a young monk in the cloister, re-
lates that Leonardo often ascended the scaffold
very early in the morning and did not leave the
brush out of his hand until twilight, never
thinking of eating or drinking. Then days
passed without putting his hand on it, some-
times he remained for hours before the paint-
ing and derived satisfaction from studying it
by himself. At other times he came directly
to the cloister from the palace of the Milanese
Castle where he formed the model of the eques-
trian statue for Francesco Sforza, in order to
add a few strokes with the brush to one of the
figures and then stopped immediately.⁶ Ac-
cording to Vasari he worked for years on the
portrait of Monna Lisa, the wife of the Floren-
tine de Gioconda, without being able to bring
it to completion. This circumstance may also
account for the fact that it was never delivered
to the one who ordered it but remained
with Leonardo who took it with him to

⁶ W. v. Seidlitz. Leonardo da Vinci, der Wendepunkt der
Renaissance, 1909, Bd. I, p. 203.

10

LEONARDO DA VINCI

France.⁷ Having been procured by King
Francis I, it now forms one of the greatest
treasures of the Louvre.

When one compares these reports about
Leonardo’s way of working with the evidence
of the extraordinary amount of sketches and
studies left by him, one is bound altogether to
reject the idea that traits of flightiness and
unsteadiness exerted the slightest influence on
Leonardo’s relation to his art. On the con-
trary one notices a very extraordinary absorp-
tion in work, a richness in possibilities in which
a decision could be reached only hesitatingly,
claims which could hardly be satisfied, and
an inhibition in the execution which could
not even be explained by the inevitable back-
wardness of the artist behind his ideal pur-
pose. The slowness which was striking in
Leonardo’s works from the very beginning
proved to be a symptom of his inhibition, a
forerunner of his turning away from painting
which manifested itself later.⁸ It was this

⁷W. v. Seidlitz, l. c. Bd. II, p. 48.

⁸W. Pater. The Renaissance, p. 107, The Macmillan Co.,
1910. “But it is certain that at one period of his life he had
almost ceased to be an artist.”

11

LEONARDO DA VINCI

slowness which decided the not undeserving
fate of The Holy Supper. Leonardo could not
take kindly to the art of fresco painting which
demands quick work while the background
is still moist, it was for this reason that he
chose oil colors, the drying of which permitted
him to complete the picture according to his
mood and leisure. But these colors separated
themselves from the background upon which
they were painted and which isolated them
from the brick wall; the blemishes of this wall
and the vicissitudes to which the room was sub-
jected seemingly contributed to the inevitable
deterioration of the picture.⁹⁾

The picture of the cavalry battle of An-
ghiari, which in competition with Michelangelo
he began to paint later on a wall of the Sala de
Consiglio in Florence and which he also left in
an unfinished state, seemed to have perished
through the failure of a similar technical proc-
ess. It seems here as if a peculiar interest,
that of the experimenter, at first reenforced the
artistic, only later to damage the art production.

⁹⁾Cf. v. Seidlitz, Bd. I die Geschichte der Restaurations– und Rettungsversuche.

12

LEONARDO DA VINCI

The character of the man Leonardo evinces
still some other unusual traits and apparent
contradictions. Thus a certain inactivity and
indifference seemed very evident in him. At a
time when every individual sought to gain the
widest latitude for his activity, which could not
take place without the development of energetic
aggression towards others, he surprised every
one through his quiet peacefulness, his shun
ning of all competition and controversies. He
was mild and kind to all, he was said to have
rejected a meat diet because he did not con
sider it just to rob animals of their lives, and
one of his special pleasures was to buy caged
birds in the market and set them free.¹⁰ He
condemned war and bloodshed and designated
man not so much as the king of the animal
world, but rather as the worst of the wild
beasts.¹¹ But this effeminate delicacy of feel
ing did not prevent him from accompanying

¹⁰Müntz. Léonard de Vinci, Paris, 1899, p. 18. (A letter
of a contemporary from India to a Medici alludes to this pe
culiarity of Leonardo. Given by Richter: The literary Works
of Leonardo da Vinci.)

¹¹F. Botazzi. Leonardo biologo e anatomico. Conferenze
Fiorentine, p. 186, 1910.

13

LEONARDO DA VINCI

condemned criminals on their way to execution
in order to study and sketch in his notebook
their features, distorted by fear, nor did it pre-
vent him from inventing the most cruel offen-
sive weapons, and from entering the service of
Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer.
Often he seemed to be indifferent to good and
evil, or he had to be measured with a special
standard. He held a high position in Cesare’s
campaign which gained for this most inconsid-
erate and most faithless of foes the possession
of the Romagna. Not a single line of Leonar-
do’s sketches betrays any criticism or sympathy
of the events of those days. The comparison
with Goethe during the French campaign can-
not here be altogether rejected.

If a biographical effort really endeavors to
penetrate the understanding of the psychic life
of its hero it must not, as happens in most biog-
raphies through discretion or prudery, pass
over in silence the sexual activity or the sex
peculiarity of the one examined. What we
know about it in Leonardo is very little but full
of significance. In a period where there was
a constant struggle between riotous licentious-

14

LEONARDO DA VINCI

ness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo pre-
sented an example of cool sexual rejection
which one would not expect in an artist and a
portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi¹² cites
the following sentence from Leonardo showing
his frigidity: “The act of procreation and
everything that has any relation to it is so dis-
gusting that human beings would soon die out
if it were not a traditional custom and if there
were no pretty faces and sensuous disposi-
tions.” His posthumous works which not only
treat of the greatest scientific problems but also
comprise the most guileless objects which to us
do not seem worthy of so great a mind (an
allegorical natural history, animal fables, wit-
ticisms, prophecies),¹³ are chaste to a degree–
one might say abstinent–that in a work of
belle lettres would excite wonder even to-day.
They evade everything sexual so thoroughly,
as if Eros alone who preserves everything liv-
ing was no worthy material for the scientific

¹²E. Solmi: Leonardo da Vinci. German Translation by
Emmi Hirschberg. Berlin, 1908.

¹³Marie Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci der Denker,
Forscher und Poet. Second edition. Jena, 1906.

15

LEONARDO DA VINCI

impulse of the investigator.¹⁴ It is known how
frequently great artists found pleasure in giv-
ing vent to their phantasies in erotic and even
grossly obscene representations; in contradis-
tinction to this Leonardo left only some ana-
tomical drawings of the woman’s internal gen-
itals, the position of the child in the womb, etc.

It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever em-
braced a woman in love, nor is it known that
he ever entertained an intimate spiritual rela-
tion with a woman as in the case of Michel-
angelo and Vittoria Colonna. While he still
lived as an apprentice in the house of his mas-
ter Verrocchio, he with other young men were
accused of forbidden homosexual relations
which ended in his acquittal. It seems that he
came into this suspicion because he employed
as a model a boy of evil repute.¹⁵ When he
was a master he surrounded himself with hand-

¹⁴⁾His collected witticisms–belle facezie,–which are not
translated, may be an exception. Cf. Herzfeld, Leonardo da
Vinci, p. 151.

¹⁵⁾According to Scognamiglio (l. c. p. 49) reference is made
to this episode in an obscure and even variously interpreted
passage of the Codex Atlanticus: “Quando io feci Domened-
dio putto voi mi metteste in prigione, ora s’io lo fo grande,
voi mi farete peggio.”

16

some boys and youths whom he took as pupils.
The last of these pupils Francesco Melzi, ac-
companied him to France, remained with him
until his death, and was named by him as his
heir. Without sharing the certainty of his
modern biographers, who naturally reject the
possibility of a sexual relation between himself
and his pupils as a baseless insult to this great
man, it may be thought by far more probable
that the affectionate relationships of Leonardo
to the young men did not result in sexual ac-
tivity. Nor should one attribute to him a high
measure of sexual activity.
The peculiarity of this emotional and sex-
ual life viewed in connection with Leonar-
do’s double nature as an artist and investiga-
tor can be grasped only in one way. Of the
biographers to whom psychological viewpoints
are often very foreign, only one, Edm. Solmi,
has to my knowledge approached the solu-
tion of the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri
Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected Leo-
nardo as the hero of a great historical novel
has based his delineation on such an under-
standing of this unusual man, and if not in dry

17

LEONARDO DA VINCI

words he gave unmistakable utterance in plas-
tic expression in the manner of a poet.¹⁶ Solmi
judges Leonardo as follows: “But the unre-
quited desire to understand everything sur-
rounding him, and with cold reflection to dis-
cover the deepest secret of everything that is
perfect, has condemned Leonardo’s works to
remain forever unfinished.”¹⁷ In an essay of
the Conferenze Fiorentine the utterances of
Leonardo are cited, which show his confession
of faith and furnish the key to his character.

“Nessuna cosa si può amare nè odiare, se
prima no si ha cognition di quella.”¹⁸

That is: One has no right to love or to
hate anything if one has not acquired a thor-
ough knowledge of its nature. And the same
is repeated by Leonardo in a passage of the
Treaties on the Art of Painting where he seems

¹⁶Merejkowski: The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci,
translated by Herbert Trench, G. P. Putnam Sons, New York.
It forms the second of the historical Trilogy entitled Christ
and Anti-Christ, of which the first volume is Julian Apostata,
and the third volume is Peter the Great and Alexei.

¹⁷Solmi l. c. p. 46.

¹⁸Filippo Botazzi, l. c. p. 193.

18

to defend himself against the accusation of ir-
religiousness:

“But such censurers might better remain si-
lent. For that action is the manner of show-
ing the workmaster so many wonderful things,
and this is the way to love so great a discoverer.
For, verily great love springs from great
knowledge of the beloved object, and if you
little know it you will be able to love it only
little or not at all.”¹⁹

The value of these utterances of Leonardo
cannot be found in that they impart to us an
important psychological fact, for what they
maintain is obviously false, and Leonardo must
have known this as well as we do. It is not
true that people refrain from loving or hat-
ing until they have studied and became famil-
iar with the nature of the object to whom they
wish to give these affects, on the contrary they
love impulsively and are guided by emotional
motives which have nothing to do with cogni-
tion and whose affects are weakened, if any-
thing, by thought and reflection. Leonardo

¹⁹Marie Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci, Traktat von der
Malerei, Jena, 1909 (Chap. I, 64).

19

only could have implied that the love practiced
by people is not of the proper and unobjection-
able kind, one should so love as to hold back
the affect and to subject it to mental elabora-
tion, and only after it has stood the test of the
intellect should free play be given to it. And
we thereby understand that he wishes to tell
us that this was the case with himself and
that it would be worth the effort of everybody
else to treat love and hatred as he himself does.
And it seems that in his case it was really
so. His affects were controlled and subjected
to the investigation impulse, he neither loved
nor hated, but questioned himself whence does
that arise, which he was to love or hate, and
what does it signify, and thus he was at first
forced to appear indifferent to good and evil,
to beauty and ugliness. During this work of
investigation love and hatred threw off their
designs and uniformly changed into intellectual
interest. As a matter of fact Leonardo was
not dispassionate, he did not lack the divine
spark which is the mediate or immediate motive
power–il primo motore–of all human activ-
ity. He only transmuted his passion into in-

20

LEONARDO DA VINCI

quisitiveness. He then applied himself to
study with that persistence, steadiness, and
profundity which comes from passion, and on
the height of the psychic work, after the cog-
nition was won, he allowed the long checked
affect to break loose and to flow off freely like
a branch of a stream, after it has accomplished
its work. At the height of his cognition when
he could examine a big part of the whole he
was seized with a feeling of pathos, and in
ecstatic words he praised the grandeur of that
part of creation which he studied, or-in reli-
gious cloak–the greatness of the creator.
Solmi has correctly divined this process of
transformation in Leonardo. According to
the quotation of such a passage, in which Leo-
nardo celebrated the higher impulse of nature
(“O mirabile necessita …”) he said: “Tale
trasfigurazione della scienza della natura in
emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, è uno dei tratti
caratteristici de manoscritti vinciani, e si trova
cento e cento volte espressa. …”²⁰

²⁰“Such transfiguration of science and of nature into emo-
tions, or one might say, religion, is one of the characteristic
traits of da Vinci’s manuscripts, which one finds expressed
hundreds of times.” Solmi: La resurrezione, etc., p. II.

21

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Leonardo was called the Italian Faust on ac-
count of his insatiable and indefatigable desire
for investigation. But even if we disregard
the fact that it is the possible retransformation
of the desire for investigation into the joys
of life which is presupposed in the Faust trag-
edy, one might venture to remark that Leon-
ardo’s system recalls Spinoza’s mode of think-
ing.

The transformation of psychic motive power
into the different forms of activity is perhaps
as little convertible without loss, as in the
case of physical powers. Leonardo’s example
teaches how many other things one must follow
up in these processes. Not to love before one
gains full knowledge of the thing loved pre-
supposes a delay which is harmful. When one
finally reaches cognition he neither loves nor
hates properly; one remains beyond love and
hatred. One has investigated instead of hav-
ing loved. It is perhaps for this reason that
Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than
those of other great men and great artists.
The storming passions of the soul-
consuming kind, in which others experience the

22

best part of their lives, seem to have missed
him.

There are still other consequences when one
follows Leonardo’s dictum. Instead of acting
and producing one just investigates. He who
begins to divine the grandeur of the universe
and its needs readily forgets his own insig-
nificant self. When one is struck with admi-
ration and becomes truly humble he easily for-
gets that he himself is a part of that living
force, and that according to the measure of
his own personality he has the right to make an
effort to change that destined course of the
world, the world in which the insignificant is
no less wonderful and important than the
great.

Solmi thinks that Leonardo’s investigations
started with his art,²¹ he tried to investigate
the attributes and laws of light, of color, of
shades and of perspective so as to be sure of
becoming a master in the imitation of nature
and to be able to show the way to others. It

²¹La resurrezione, etc., p. 8: “Leonardo placed the study of
nature as a precept to painting… later the passion for study
became dominating, he no longer wished to acquire science for
art, but science for science’ sake.”

23

is probable that already at that time he over-
estimated the value of this knowledge for the
artist. Following the guide-rope of the paint-
er’s need, he was then driven further and fur-
ther to investigate the objects of the art of
painting, such as animals and plants, and the
proportions of the human body, and to follow
the path from their exterior to their interior
structure and biological functions, which really
also express themselves in their appearance
and should be depicted in art. And finally he
was pulled along by this overwhelming desire
until the connection was torn from the de-
mands of his art, so that he discovered the gen-
eral laws of mechanics and divined the history
of the stratification and fossilization of the
Arno-valley, until he could enter in his book
with capital letters the cognition: Il sole non
si move (The sun does not move). His inves-
tigations were thus extended over almost all
realms of natural science, in every one of which
he was a discoverer or at least a prophet or
forerunner.²² However, his curiosity contin-
ued to be directed to the outer world, some-
 

²²For an enumeration of his scientific attainments see Marie

24

thing kept him away from the investigation of
the psychic life of men; there was little room
for psychology in the “Academia Vinciana,”
for which he drew very artistic and very com-
plicated emblems.

When he later made the effort to return from
his investigations to the art from which he
started he felt that he was disturbed by the
new paths of his interest and by the changed
nature of his psychic work. In the picture he
was interested above all in a problem, and be-
hind this one he saw emerging numerous other
problems just as he was accustomed in the end-
less and indeterminable investigations of nat-
ural history. He was no longer able to limit
his demands, to isolate the work of art, and
to tear it out from that great connection of
which he knew it formed part. After the most
exhausting efforts to bring to expression all
that was in him, all that was connected with it
in his thoughts, he was forced to leave it un-
finished, or to declare it incomplete.

The artist had once taken into his service

Herzfeld’s interesting introduction (Jena, 1906) to the essays
of the Conferenze Fiorentine, 1910, and elsewhere.

25

LEONARDO DA VINCI

the investigator to assist him, now the servant
was stronger and suppressed his master.

When we find in the portrait of a person one
single impulse very forcibly developed, as curi-
osity in the case of Leonardo, we look for the
explanation in a special constitution, concern-
ing its probable organic determination hardly
anything is known. Our psychoanalytic stud-
ies of nervous people lead us to look for two
other expectations which we would like to find
verified in every case. We consider it prob-
able that this very forcible impulse was already
active in the earliest childhood of the person,
and that its supreme sway was fixed by infan-
tile impressions; and we further assume that
originally it drew upon sexual motive powers
for its reënforcement so that it later can take
the place of a part of the sexual life. Such
person would then, e.g., investigate with that
passionate devotion which another would give
to his love, and he could investigate instead of
loving. We would venture the conclusion of
a sexual reënforcement not only in the impulse
to investigate, but also in most other cases of
special intensity of an impulse.

26

Observation of daily life shows us that most
persons have the capacity to direct a very tan-
gible part of their sexual motive powers to
their professional or business activities. The
sexual impulse is particularly suited to yield
such contributions because it is endowed with
the capacity of sublimation, i.e., it has the
power to exchange its nearest aim for others
of higher value which are not sexual. We
consider this process as proved, if the history
of childhood or the psychic developmental his-
tory of a person shows that in childhood this
powerful impulse was in the service of the sex-
ual interest. We consider it a further cor-
roboration if this is substantiated by a strik-
ing stinting in the sexual life of mature years,
as if a part of the sexual activity had now been
replaced by the activity of the predominant im-
pulse.

The application of these assumptions to the
case of the predominant investigation-impulse
seems to be subject to special difficulties, as one
is unwilling to admit that this serious impulse
exists in children or that children show any
noteworthy sexual interest. However, these

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

difficulties are easily obviated. The untiring
pleasure in questioning as seen in little children
demonstrates their curiosity, which is puzzling
to the grown-up, as long as he does not under-
stand that all these questions are only circum-
locutions, and that they cannot come to an end
because they replace only one question which
the child does not put. When the child be- comes older and gains more understanding this
manifestation of curiosity suddenly disappears.
But psychoanalytic investigation gives us a full
explanation in that it teaches us that many,
perhaps most children, at least the most gifted
ones, go through a period beginning with the
third year, which may be designated as the
period of infantile sexual investigation. As
far as we know, the curiosity is not awakened
spontaneously in children of this age, but is
aroused through the impression of an impor-
tant experience, through the birth of a little
brother or sister, or through fear of the same
endangered by some outward experience,
wherein the child sees a danger to his egotistic
interests. The investigation directs itself to
the question whence children come, as if the

28

child were looking for means to guard against
such undesired event. We were astonished to
find that the child refuses to give credence to the
information imparted to it, e.g., it energetically
rejects the mythological and so ingenious stork-
fable, we were astonished to find that its
psychic independence dates from this act of dis-
belief, that it often feels itself at serious vari-
ance with the grown-ups, and never forgives
them for having been deceived of the truth on
this occasion. It investigates in its own way,
it divines that the child is in the mother’s
womb, and guided by the feelings of its own
sexuality, it formulates for itself theories about
the origin of children from food, about being
born through the bowels, about the rôle of the
father which is difficult to fathom, and even
at that time it has a vague conception of the
sexual act which appears to the child as some-
thing hostile, as something violent. But as its
own sexual constitution is not yet equal to the
task of producing children, his investigation
whence come children must also run aground
and must be left in the lurch as unfinished.
The impression of this failure at the first at-
 

29

tempt of intellectual independence seems to be
of a persevering and profoundly depressing
nature.²³

If the period of infantile sexual investigation
comes to an end through an impetus of ener-
getic sexual repression, the early association
with sexual interest may result in three differ-
ent possibilities for the future fate of the in-
vestigation impulse. The investigation either
shares the fate of the sexuality, the curiosity
henceforth remains inhibited and the free ac-
tivity of intelligence may become narrowed for
life; this is especially made possible by the pow-
erful religious inhibition of thought, which is
brought about shortly hereafter through educa-
tion. This is the type of neurotic inhibition.
We know well that the so acquired mental
weakness furnishes effective support for the

²³For a corroboration of this improbable sounding assertion
see the „Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-year-old Boy,“
Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische
Forschungen, Bd. I, 1909, and the similar observation in Bd. II,
1910. In an essay concerning „Infantile Theories of Sex“
(Sammlungen kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, p. 167,
Second Series, 1909), I wrote: „But this reasoning and doubt-
ing serves as a model for all later intellectual work in prob-
lems, and the first failure acts as a paralyzer for all times.“

30

LEONARDO DA VINCI

outbreak of a neurotic disease. In a second
type the intellectual development is sufficiently
strong to withstand the sexual repression pull-
ing at it. Sometimes after the disappearance
of the infantile sexual investigation, it offers
its support to the old association in order to
elude the sexual repression, and the suppressed
sexual investigation comes back from the un-
conscious as compulsive reasoning, it is nat-
urally distorted and not free, but forceful
enough to sexualize even thought itself and to
accentuate the intellectual operations with the
pleasure and fear of the actual sexual proc-
esses. Here the investigation becomes sexual
activity and often exclusively so, the feeling of
settling the problem and of explaining things
in the mind is put in place of sexual gratifica-
tion. But the indeterminate character of the
infantile investigation repeats itself also in the
fact that this reasoning never ends, and that
the desired intellectual feeling of the solution
constantly recedes into the distance. By vir-
tue of a special disposition the third, which is
the most rare and most perfect type, escapes
the inhibition of thought and the compulsive

31

LEONARDO DA VINCI

reasoning. Also here sexual repression takes
place, it is unable, however, to direct a partial
impulse of the sexual pleasure into the uncon-
scious, but the libido withdraws from the fate
of the repression by being sublimated from the
beginning into curiosity, and by reënforcing
the powerful investigation impulse. Here,
too, the investigation becomes more or less
compulsive and a substitute of the sexual ac-
tivity, but owing to the absolute difference of
the psychic process behind it (sublimation in
place of the emergence from the unconscious)
the character of the neurosis does not manifest
itself, the subjection to the original complexes
of the infantile sexual investigation disappears,
and the impulse can freely put itself in the
service of the intellectual interest. It takes
account of the sexual repression which made it
so strong in contributing to it sublimated
libido, by avoiding all occupation with sexual
themes.

In mentioning the concurrence in Leonardo
of the powerful investigation impulse with the
stunting of his sexual life which was limited to
the so-called ideal homosexuality, we feel in-
 

32

LEONARDO DA VINCI

clined to consider him as a model example of
our third type. The most essential point of
his character and the secret of it seems to lie
in the fact, that after utilizing the infantile ac-
tivity of curiosity in the service of sexual in-
terest he was able to sublimate the greater part
of his libido into the impulse of investigation.
But to be sure the proof of this conception is
not easy to produce. To do this we would have
to have an insight into the psychic development
of his first childhood years, and it seems fool-
ish to hope for such material when the reports
concerning his life are so meager and so un-
certain; and moreover, when we deal with in-
formation which even persons of our own gen-
eration withdraw from the attention of the
observer.

We know very little concerning Leonardo’s
youth. He was born in 1452 in the little city
of Vinci between Florence and Empoli; he was
an illegitimate child which was surely not con-
sidered a great popular stain in that time. His
father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and
descendant of notaries and farmers, who took
their name from the place Vinci; his mother,

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

a certain Caterina, probably a peasant girl, who
later married another native of Vinci. Noth-
ing else about his mother appears in the life his-
tory of Leonardo, only the writer Merejkowski
believed to have found some traces of her.
The only definite information about Leonar-
do’s childhood is furnished by a legal document
from the year 1457, a register of assessment in
which Vinci Leonardo is mentioned among the
members of the family as a five-year-old ille-
gitimate child of Ser Piero.²⁴⁾ As the mar-
riage of Ser Piero with Donna Albiera re-
mained childless the little Leonardo could be
brought up in his father’s house. He did not
leave this house until he entered as apprentice
–it is not known what year–in the studio of
Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1472 Leonardo’s
name could already be found in the register of
the members of the “Compagnia dei Pittori.”
That is all.

²⁴⁾Scognamiglio l. c., p. 15.