52

III

THE element of the vulture represents to us
the real memory content in Leonardo’s child-
hood phantasy; the association into which Leo-
nardo himself placed his phantasy threw a
bright light on the importance of this content
for his later life. In continuing the work of
interpretation we now encounter the strange
problem why this memory content was elabo-
rated into a homosexual situation. The
mother who nursed the child, or rather from
whom the child suckled was transformed into
a vulture which stuck its tail into the child’s
mouth. We maintain that the “coda” (tail)
of the vulture, following the common substitut-
ing usages of language, cannot signify any-
thing else but a male genital or penis. But we
do not understand how the phantastic activity
came to furnish precisely this maternal bird
with the mark of masculinity, and in view of

53

this absurdity we become confused at the possi-
bility of reducing this phantastic structure to
rational sense.

However, we must not despair. How many
seemingly absurd dreams have we not forced
to give up their sense! Why should it become
more difficult to accomplish this in a childhood
phantasy than in a dream!

Let us remember the fact that it is not good
to find one isolated peculiarity, and it has
ten to add another to it which is still more
striking.

The vulture-headed goddess Mut of the
Egyptians, a figure of altogether impersonal
character, as expressed by Drexel in Roscher’s
lexicon, was often fused with other maternal
deities of living individuality like Isis and
Hathor, but she retained besides her separate
existence and reverence. It was especially
characteristic of the Egyptian pantheon that
the individual gods did not perish in this amal-
gamation. Besides the composition of deities
the simple divine image remained in her inde-
pendence. In most representations the vul-
ture-headed maternal deity was formed by the

54

Egyptians in a phallic manner,¹⁾ her body which
was distinguished as feminine by its breasts
also bore the masculine member in a state of
erection.

The goddess Mut thus evinced the same
union of maternal and paternal characteristics
as in Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. Should we
explain this concurrence by the assumption that
Leonardo knew from studying his book the
androgynous nature of the maternal vulture?
Such possibility is more than questionable; it
seems that the sources accessible to him con-
tained nothing of remarkable determination.
It is more likely that here as there the agree-
ment is to be traced to a common, effective and
unknown motive.

Mythology can teach us that the androgy-
nous formation, the union of masculine and
feminine sex characteristics, did not belong to
the goddess Mut alone but also to other deities
such as Isis and Hathor, but in the latter per-
haps only insofar as they possessed also a
motherly nature and became fused with the
goddess Mut.²⁾ It teaches us further that

¹⁾See the illustrations in Lanzone l. c. T. CXXXVI–VIII.

²⁾v. Römer l. c.

55

LEONARDO DA VINCI

other Egyptian deities such as Neith of Sais
out of whom the Greek Athene was later
formed, were originally conceived as androg-
ynous or dihermaphroditic, and that the same
held true for many of the Greek gods, espe-
cially of the Dionysian circle, as well as for
Aphrodite who was later restricted to a femi-
nine love deity. Mythology may also offer
the explanation that the phallus which was
added to the feminine body was meant to de-
note the creative primitive force of nature, and
that all these hermaphroditic deistic forma-
tions express the idea that only a union of the
masculine and feminine elements can result in
a worthy representation of divine perfection.
But none of these observations explain the
psychological riddle, namely, that the phan-
tasy of men takes no offense at the fact that a
figure which was to embody the essence of the
mother should be provided with the mark of
the masculine power which is the opposite of
motherhood.

The explanation comes from the infantile
sexual theories. There really was a time in
which the male genital was found to be com-
 

56

patible with the representation of the mother.
When the male child first directs his curiosity
to the riddle of the sexual life, he is dominated
by the interest for his own genitals. He finds
this part of the body too valuable and too im-
portant to believe that it would be missing in
other persons to whom he feels such a resem-
blance. As he cannot divine that there is still
another equally valuable type of genital forma-
tion he must grasp the assumption that all per-
sons, also women, possess such a member as he.
This preconception is so firm in the youthful
investigator that it is not destroyed even by
the first observation of the genitals in little
girls. His perception naturally tells him that
there is something different here than in him,
but he is unable to admit to himself as the con-
tent of this perception that he cannot find this
member in girls. That this member may be
missing is to him a dismal and unbearable
thought, and he therefore seeks to reconcile it
by deciding that it also exists in girls but it
is still very small and that it will grow later.³

³Cf. the observations in the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische
und Psychopathologische Forschungen, Vol. I, 1909.

57

If this expectation does not appear to be ful-
filled on later observation he has at his disposal
another way of escape. The member also ex-
isted in the little girl but it was cut off and on
its place there remained a wound. This prog-
ress of the theory already makes use of his own
painful experience; he was threatened in the
meantime that this important organ will be
taken away from him if it will form too much
of an interest for his occupation. Under the
influence of this threat of castration he now
interprets his conception of the female genital,
henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity,
but at the same time he will look with contempt
upon those unhappy creatures upon whom, in
his opinion, this cruel punishment had already
been visited.

Before the child came under the domination
of the castration complex, at the time when he
still held the woman at her full value, he began
to manifest an intensive desire to look as an
erotic activity of his impulse. He wished to
see the genitals of other persons, originally
probably because he wished to compare them
with his own. The erotic attraction which

58

emanated from the person of his mother soon
reached its height in the longing to see her
genital which he believed to be a penis. With
the cognition acquired only later that the
woman has no penis, this longing often be-
comes transformed into its opposite and gives
place to disgust, which in the years of puberty
may become the cause of psychic impotence, of
misogyny and of lasting homosexuality. But
the fixation on the once so vividly desired ob-
ject, the penis of the woman, leaves ineradi-
cable traces in the psychic life of the child,
which has gone through that fragment of in-
fantile sexual investigation with particular
thoroughness. The fetich-like reverence for
the feminine foot and shoe seems to take the
foot only as a substitutive symbol for the once
revered and since then missed member of the
woman. The “braid-slashers” without know-
ing it play the part of persons who perform the
act of castration on the female genital.

One will not gain any correct understanding
of the activities of the infantile sexuality and
probably will consider these communications
unworthy of belief, as long as one does not re-
 

59

LEONARDO DA VINCI

linquish the attitude of our cultural deprecia-
tion of the genitals and of the sexual functions
in general. To understand the infantile psy-
chic life one has to look to analogies from
primitive times. For a long series of genera-
tions we have been in the habit of considering
the genitals or pudenda as objects of shame,
and in the case of more successful sexual re-
pression as objects of disgust. The majority
of those living to-day only reluctantly obey the
laws of propagation, feeling thereby that their
human dignity is being offended and degraded.
What exists among us of the other conception
of the sexual life is found only in the unculti-
vated and in the lower social strata; among the
higher and more refined types it is concealed as
culturally inferior, and its activity is ventured
only under the embittered admonition of a
guilty conscience. It was quite different in
the primitive times of the human race. From
the laborious collections of students of civiliza-
tion one gains the conviction that the genitals
were originally the pride and hope of living be-
ings, they enjoyed divine worship, and the
divine nature of their functions was trans-
 

60

ported to all newly acquired activities of man-
kind. Through sublimation of its essential
elements there arose innumerable god-
figures, and at the time when the relation of official re-
ligions with sexual activity was already hidden
from the general consciousness, secret cults
labored to preserve it alive among a number of
the initiated. In the course of cultural devel-
opment it finally happened that so much godli-
ness and holiness had been extracted from sex-
uality that the exhausted remnant fell into con-
tempt. But considering the indestructibility
which is in the nature of all psychic impressions
one need not wonder that even the most prim-
itive forms of genital worship could be demon-
strated until quite recent times, and that lan-
guage, customs and superstitions of present
day humanity contain the remnants of all
phases of this course of development.⁴

Important biological analogies have taught
us that the psychic development of the individ-
ual is a short repetition of the course of devel-
opment of the race, and we shall therefore not
find improbable what the psychoanalytic in-
 

⁴Cf. Richard Payne Knight: The Cult of Priapus.

61

LEONARDO DA VINCI

vestigation of the child’s psyche asserts con-
cerning the infantile estimation of the genitals.
The infantile assumption of the maternal penis
is thus the common source of origin for the
androgynous formation of the maternal dei-
ties like the Egyptian goddess Mut and the vul-
ture’s “coda” (tail) in Leonardo’s childhood
phantasy. As a matter of fact, it is only
through misunderstanding that these deistic
representations are designated hermaphroditic
in the medical sense of the word. In none of
them is there a union of the true genitals of
both sexes as they are united in some deformed
beings to the disgust of every human eye; but
besides the breast as a mark of motherhood
there is also the male member, just as it ex-
isted in the first imagination of the child about
his mother’s body. Mythology has retained
for the faithful this revered and very early
fancied bodily formation of the mother. The
prominence given to the vulture-tail in Leo-
nardo’s phantasy we can now translate as fol-
lows: At that time when I directed my tender
curiosity to my mother I still adjudged to her a
genital like my own. A further testimonial

62

LEONARDO DA VINCI

of Leonardo’s precocious sexual investigation,
which in our opinion became decisive for his
entire life.

A brief reflection now admonishes us that
we should not be satisfied with the explanation
of the vulture-
phantasy. It seems as if it contained more
than we as yet understand. For its more
striking feature really consisted in the fact that
the nursing at the mother’s breast was trans-
formed into being nursed, that is into a passive
act which thus gives the situation an undoubted
homosexual character. Mindful of the his-
torical probability that Leonardo behaved in
life as a homosexual in feeling, the question ob-
trudes itself whether this phantasy does not
point to a causal connection between Leonar-
do’s childhood relations to his mother and the
later manifest, if only ideal, homosexuality.
We would not venture to draw such conclusion
from Leonardo’s disfigured reminiscence were
it not for the fact that we know from our
psychoanalytic investigation of homosexual
patients that such a relation exists, indeed it
really is an intimate and necessary relation.

63

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Homosexual men who have started in our
times an energetic action against the legal
limitations of their sexual activity are fond of
representing themselves through theoretical
spokesmen as evincing a sexual variation,
which may be distinguished from the very be-
ginning, as an intermediate stage of sex or as
“a third sex.” In other words, they maintain
that they are men who are forced by organic
determinants originating in the germ to find
that pleasure in the man which they cannot feel
in the woman. As much as one would wish to
subscribe to their demands out of humane con-
siderations, one must nevertheless exercise re-
serve regarding their theories which were
formulated without regard for the psychic
genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis of-
fers the means to fill this gap and to put to test
the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true
that psychoanalysis fulfilled this task in only a
small number of people, but all investigation
thus far undertaken brought the same surpris-
ing results.⁵ In all our male homosexuals

⁵Prominently among those who undertook these investiga-
tions are I. Sadger, whose results I can essentially corroborate

64

there was a very intensive erotic attachment to
a feminine person, as a rule to the mother,
which was manifest in the very first period of
childhood and later entirely forgotten by the
individual. This attachment was produced or
favored by too much love from the mother her-
self, but was also furthered by the retirement
or absence of the father during the childhood
period. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the
mothers of his homosexual patients were often
man-women, or women with energetic traits of
character who were able to crowd out the
father from the place allotted to him in the
family. I have sometimes observed the same
thing, but I was more impressed by those cases
in which the father was absent from the be-
ginning or disappeared early so that the boy
was altogether under feminine influence. It
almost seems that the presence of a strong
father would assure for the son the proper de-
cision in the selection of his object from the op-
posite sex.

from my own experience. I am also aware that Stekel of
Vienna, Ferenczi of Budapest, and Brill of New York, came
to the same conclusions.

65

Following this primary stage, a transfor-
mation takes place whose mechanisms we know
but whose motive forces we have not yet
grasped. The love of the mother cannot con-
tinue to develop consciously so that it merges
into repression. The boy represses the love
for the mother by putting himself in her place,
by identifying himself with her, and by taking
his own person as a model through the simi-
larity of which he is guided in the selection of
his love object. He thus becomes homosex-
ual; as a matter of fact he returns to the stage
of autoerotism, for the boys whom the grow-
ing adult now loves are only substitutive per-
sons or revivals of his own childish person,
whom he loves in the same way as his mother
loved him. We say that he finds his love ob-
ject on the road to narcism, for the Greek
legend called a boy Narcissus to whom nothing
was more pleasing than his own mirrored
image, and who became transformed into a
beautiful flower of this name.

Deeper psychological discussions justify the
assertion that the person who becomes homo-
sexual in this manner remains fixed in his un-

66

conscious on the memory picture or his mother.
By repressing the love for his mother he con-
serves the same in his unconscious and hence-
forth remains faithful to her. When as a
lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus
runs away from women who could cause him
to become faithless to his mother. Through
direct observation of individual cases we could
demonstrate that he who is seemingly receptive
only of masculine stimuli is in reality influenced
by the charms emanating from women just like
a normal person, but each and every time he
hastens to transfer the stimulus he received
from the woman to a male object and in this
manner he repeats again and again the mechan-
ism through which he acquired his homosex-
uality.

It is far from us to exaggerate the impor-
tance of these explanations concerning the
psychic genesis of homosexuality. It is quite
clear that they are in crass opposition to the
official theories of the homosexual spokesmen,
but we are aware that these explanations are
not sufficiently comprehensive to render pos-
sible a final explanation of the problem. What

67

LEONARDO DA VINCI

one calls homosexual for practical purposes
may have its origin in a variety of psychosex-
ual inhibiting processes, and the process recog-
nized by us is perhaps only one among many,
and has reference only to one type of “homo-
sexuality.” We must also admit, that the
number of cases in our homosexual type which
shows the conditions required by us, exceeds by
far those cases in which the resulting effect
really appears, so that even we cannot reject
the supposed coöperation of unknown consti-
tutional factors from which one was otherwise
wont to deduce the whole of homosexuality.
As a matter of fact there would be no occasion
for entering into the psychic genesis of the
form of homosexuality studied by us if there
were not a strong presumption that Leonardo,
from whose vulture-phantasy we started, really
belonged to this one type of homosexuality.

As little as is known concerning the sexual
behavior of the great artist and investigator,
we must still trust to the probability that the
testimonies of his contemporaries did not go
far astray. In the light of this tradition he ap-
pears to us as a man whose sexual need and

68

activity were extraordinarily low, as if a higher
striving had raised him above the common ani-
mal need of mankind. It may be open to doubt
whether he ever sought direct sexual gratifica-
tion, and in what manner, or whether he could
dispense with it altogether. We are justified,
however, to look also in him for those emo-
tional streams which imperatively force others
to the sexual act, for we cannot imagine a hu-
man psychic life in whose development the sex-
ual desire in the broadest sense, the libido, has
not had its share, whether the latter has with-
drawn itself far from the original aim or
whether it was detained from being put into
execution.

Anything but traces of unchanged sexual de-
sire we need not expect in Leonardo. These
point however to one direction and allow us to
count him among homosexuals. It has always
been emphasized that he took as his pupils only
strikingly handsome boys and youths. He
was kind and considerate towards them, he
cared for them and nursed them himself when
they were ill, just like a mother nurses her chil-
dren, as his own mother might have cared for

69

him. As he selected them on account of their
beauty rather than their talent, none of them
–Cesare da Sesto, G. Boltraffio, Andrea Sa-
laino, Francesco Melzi and the others–ever
became a prominent artist. Most of them
could not make themselves independent of their
master and disappeared after his death without
leaving a more definite physiognomy to the his-
tory of art. The others who by their produc-
tions earned the right to call themselves his
pupils, as Luini and Bazzi, nicknamed Sodoma,
he probably did not know personally.
We realize that we will have to face the ob-
jection that Leonardo’s behavior towards his
pupils surely had nothing to do with sexual
motives, and permits no conclusion as to his
sexual peculiarity. Against this we wish to
assert with all caution that our conception ex-
plains some strange features in the master’s be-
havior which otherwise would have remained
enigmatical. Leonardo kept a diary; he made
entries in his small hand, written from right to
left which were meant only for himself. It is
to be noted that in this diary he addressed him-
self with “thou”: “Learn from master Lucca

70

the multipli-
cation of roots.” ⁶ “Let master
d’Abacco show thee the square of the circle.” ⁷
Or on the occasion of a journey he entered in
his diary:

“I am going to Milan to look after the affairs
of my garden… order two pack-sacks to be
made. Ask Boltraffio to show thee his turn-
ing-lathe and let him polish a stone on it.–
Leave the book to master Andrea il Todesco.” ⁸
Or he wrote a resolution of quite different sig-
nificance: “Thou must show in thy treatise
that the earth is a star, like the moon or resem-
bling it, and thus prove the nobility of our
world.” ⁹

In this diary, which like the diaries of other
mortals often skim over the most important
events of the day with only few words or ig-
nore them altogether, one finds a few entries
which on account of their peculiarity are cited

⁶ Edm. Solmi: Leonardo da Vinci, German translation, p.
152.

⁷ Solmi, l. c. p. 203.

⁸ Leonardo thus behaves like one who was in the habit of
making a daily confession to another person whom he now
replaced by his diary. For an assumption as to who this
person may have been see Merejkowski, p. 309.

⁹ M. Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci, 1906, p. 141.

71

LEONARDO DA VINCI

by all of Leonardo’s biographers. They show
notations referring to the master’s petty ex-
penses, which are recorded with painful ex-
actitude as if coming from a pedantic and
strictly parsimonious family father, while there
is nothing to show that he spent greater sums,
or that the artist was well versed in household
management. One of these notes refers to a
new cloak which he bought for his pupil
Andrea Salaino:¹⁰

Silver brocade  Lira 15 Soldi 4
Crimson velvet for trimming  ” 9 ” 0
Braid  ” 0 ” 9
Buttons  ” 0 ” 12

Another very detailed notice gives all the ex-
penses which he incurred through the bad qual-
ities and the thieving tendencies of another
pupil or model: “On 21st day of April, 1490,
I started this book and started again the
horse.¹¹ Jacomo came to me on Magdalene
day, 1490, at the age of ten years (marginal
note: thievish, mendacious, willful, glutton-
ous). On the second day I ordered for him

¹⁰The wording is that of Merejkowski, l. c. p. 237.

¹¹The equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza.

72

two shirts, a pair of pants, and a jacket, and as
I put the money away to pay for the things
named he stole the money from my purse, and
it was never possible to make him confess, al-
though I was absolutely sure of it (marginal
note: 4 Lira . . .).” So the report continues
concerning the misdeeds of the little boy and
concludes with the expense account: “In the
first year, a cloak, Lira 2: 6 shirts, Lira 4: 3
jackets, Lira 6: 4 pair of socks, Lira 7, etc.”¹²

Leonardo’s biographers, to whom nothing
was further than to solve the riddle in the
psychic life of their hero from these slight
weaknesses and peculiarities, were wont to re-
mark in connection with these peculiar accounts
that they emphasized the kindness and consid-
eration of the master for his pupils. They for-
get thereby that it is not Leonardo’s behavior
that needs an explanation, but the fact that he
left us these testimonies of it. As it is impos-
sible to ascribe to him the motive of smuggling
into our hands proofs of his kindness, we must
assume that another affective motive caused
him to write this down. It is not easy to con-
 

¹²The full wording is found in M. Herzfeld, l. c. p. 45.

73

LEONARDO DA VINCI

jecture what this motive was, and we could not
give any if not for another account found
among Leonardo’s papers which throws a bril-
liant light on these peculiarly petty notices
about his pupils’ clothes, and others of a
kind:¹³

Burial expenses following the death of
Caterina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

74

The writer Merejkowski is the only one who
can tell us who this Caterina was. From two
different short notices he concludes that she
was the mother of Leonardo, the poor peasant
woman from Vinci, who came to Milan in
1493 to visit her son then 41 years old. While
on this visit she fell ill and was taken to the
hospital by Leonardo, and following her death
she was buried by her son with such sumptuous
funeral.¹⁴

This deduction of the psychological writer of
romances is not capable of proof, but it can lay
claim to so many inner probabilities, it agrees
so well with everything we know besides about
Leonardo’s emotional activity that I cannot re-
frain from accepting it as correct. Leonardo
succeeded in forcing his feelings under the yoke

life, meager as it is, I mention the fact that the same expense
account is given by Solmi with considerable variation (German
translation, p. 104). The most serious difference is the substi-
tution of florins by soldi. One may assume that in this ac-
count florins do not mean the old “gold florins,” but those used
at a later period which amounted to 1²/3 lira or 33½ soldi.
Solmi represents Caterina as a servant who had taken care of
Leonardo’s household for a certain time. The source from
which the two representations of this account were taken was
not accessible to me.

¹⁴⁾ “Caterina came in July, 1493.”

75

of investigation and in inhibiting their free ut-
terance, but even in him there were episodes in
which the suppression obtained expression, and
one of these was the death of his mother whom
he once loved so ardently. Through this ac-
count of the burial expenses he represents to us
the mourning of his mother in an almost un-
recognizable distortion. We wonder how such
a distortion could have come about, and we cer-
tainly cannot grasp it when viewed under nor-
mal mental processes. But similar mecha-
nisms are familiar to us under the abnormal
conditions of neuroses, and especially in the so-
called compulsion neurosis. Here one can ob-
serve how the expressions of more intensive
feelings have been displaced to trivial and even
foolish performances. The opposing forces
succeeded in debasing the expression of these
repressed feelings to such an extent that one is
forced to estimate the intensity of these feel-
ings as extremely unimportant, but the impera-
tive compulsion with which these insignificant
acts express themselves betrays the real force
of the feelings which are rooted in the uncon-
scious, which consciousness would wish to dis-

76

avow. Only by bearing in mind the mecha-
nisms of compulsion neurosis can one explain
Leonardo’s account of the funeral expenses of
his mother. In his unconscious he was still
tied to her as in childhood, by erotically tinged
feelings; the opposition of the repression of
this childhood love which appeared later stood
in the way of erecting to her in his diary a
different and more dignified monument, but
what resulted as a compromise of this neurotic
conflict had to be put in operation and hence
the account was entered in the diary which thus
came to the knowledge of posterity as some-
thing incomprehensible.

It is not venturing far to transfer the in-
terpretation obtained from the funeral ex-
penses to the accounts dealing with his pupils.
Accordingly we would say that here also we
deal with a case in which Leonardo’s meager
remnants of libidinous feelings compulsively
obtained a distorted expression. The mother
and the pupils, the very images of his own boy-
ish beauty, would be his sexual objects—as far
as his sexual repression dominating his nature
would allow such manifestations—and the

77

compulsion to note with painful circumstantial-
ity his expenses on their behalf, would desig-
nate the strange betrayal of his rudimentary
conflicts. From this we would conclude that
Leonardo’s love-life really belonged to that
type of homosexuality, the psychic development
of which we were able to disclose, and the ap-
pearance of the homosexual situation in his
vulture-phantasy would become comprehen-
sible to us, for it states nothing more or less
than what we have asserted before concerning
that type. It requires the following interpre-
tation: Through the erotic relations to my
mother I became a homosexual.¹⁵

¹⁵The manner of expression through which the repressed
libidio could manifest itself in Leonardo, such as circum-
stantiality and marked interest in money, belongs to those
traits of character which emanate from anal eroticism. Cf.
Character und Analerotik in the second series of my Samm-
lung zur Neurosenlehre, 1909, also Brill’s Psychoanalysis, its
Theories and Practical Applications, Chap. XIII, Anal Eroti-
cism and Character, Saunders, Philadelphia.