34

II

As far as I know Leonardo only once in
terspersed in his scientific descriptions a com
munication from his childhood. In a passage
where he speaks about the flight of the vulture,
he suddenly interrupts himself in order to fol
low up a memory from very early years which
came to his mind.

“It seems that it had been destined before
that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with
the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very
early memory, when I was still in the cradle,
a vulture came down to me, he opened my
mouth with his tail and struck me a few times
with his tail against my lips.”¹⁾

We have here an infantile memory and to
be sure of the strangest sort. It is strange on
account of its content and account of the time
of life in which it was fixed. That a person

¹⁾Cited by Scognamiglio from the Codex Atlanticus, p. 65.

35

could retain a memory of the nursing period is
perhaps not impossible, but it can in no way
be taken as certain. But what this memory of
Leonardo states, namely, that a vulture opened
the child’s mouth with its tail, sounds so im-
probable, so fabulous, that another conception
which puts an end to the two difficulties with
one stroke appeals much more to our judgment.
The scene of the vulture is not a memory of
Leonardo, but a phantasy which he formed
later, and transferred into his childhood. The
childhood memories of persons often have no
different origin, as a matter of fact, they are
not fixated from an experience like the con-
scious memories from the time of maturity and
then repeated, but they are not produced until
a later period when childhood is already past,
they are then changed and disguised and put in
the service of later tendencies, so that in gen-
eral they cannot be strictly differentiated from
phantasies. Their nature will perhaps be best
understood by recalling the manner in which
history writing originated among ancient na-
tions. As long as the nation was small and
weak it gave no thought to the writing of its

36

history, it tilled the soil of its land, defended
its existence against its neighbors by seeking
to wrest land from them and endeavored to
become rich. It was a heroic but unhistoric
time. Then came another age, a period of
self-realization in which one felt rich and pow-
erful, and it was then that one experienced
the need to discover whence one originated
and how one developed. The history-writing
which then continues to register the present
events throws also its backward glance to the
past, it gathers traditions and legends, it in-
terprets what survived from olden times into
customs and uses, and thus creates a history
of past ages. It is quite natural that this his-
tory of the past ages is more the expressions
of opinions and desires of the present than a
faithful picture of the past, for many a thing
escaped the people’s memory, other things be-
came distorted, some trace of the past was mis-
understood and interpreted in the sense of the
present; and besides one does not write history
through motives of objective curiosity, but be-
cause one desires to impress his contempor-
aries, to stimulate and extol them, or to hold the

37

LEONARDO DA VINCI

mirror before them. The conscious memory
of a person concerning the experiences of his
maturity may now be fully compared to that of
history writing, and his infantile memories, as
far as their origin and reliability are concerned
will actually correspond to the history of the
primitive period of a people which was com-
piled later with purposive intent.

Now one may think that if Leonardo’s story
of the vulture which visited him in his cradle
is only a phantasy of later birth, it is hardly
worth while giving more time to it. One
could easily explain it by his openly avowed
inclination to occupy himself with the problem
of the flight of the bird which would lend to
this phantasy an air of predetermined fate.
But with this depreciation one commits as great
an injustice as if one would simply ignore the
material of legends, traditions, and interpreta-
tions in the primitive history of a people. Not-
withstanding all distortions and misunder-
standings to the contrary they still represent
the reality of the past; they represent what the
people formed out of the experiences of its past
age under the domination of once powerful and

38

LEONARDO DA VINCI

to-
day still effective motives, and if these dis-
tortions could be unraveled through the knowl-
edge of all effective forces, one would surely
discover the historic truth under this legendary
material. The same holds true for the infan-
tile reminiscences or for the phantasies of indi-
viduals. What a person thinks he recalls from
his childhood, is not of an indifferent nature.
As a rule the memory remnants, which he him-
self does not understand, conceal invaluable
evidences of the most important features of his
psychic development. As the psychoanalytic
technique affords us excellent means for bring-
ing to light this concealed material, we shall
venture the attempt to fill the gaps in the his-
tory of Leonardo’s life through the analysis of
his infantile phantasy. And if we should not
attain a satisfactory degree of certainty, we
will have to console ourselves with the fact that
so many other investigations about this great
and mysterious man have met no better fate.

When we examine Leonardo’s vulture-
phantasy with the eyes of a psychoanalyst then it
does not seem strange very long; we recall that
we have often found similar structures in

39

dreams, so that we may venture to translate
this phantasy from its strange language into
words that are universally understood. The
translation then follows an erotic direction.
Tail, “coda,” is one of the most familiar sym-
bols, as well as a substitutive designation of the
male member which is no less true in Italian
than in other languages. The situation con-
tained in the phantasy, that a vulture opened
the mouth of the child and forcefully belabored
it with its tail, corresponds to the idea of fella-
tio, a sexual act in which the member is placed
into the mouth of the other person. Strangely
enough this phantasy is altogether of a passive
character; it resembles certain dreams and
phantasies of women and of passive homosex-
uals who play the feminine part in sexual re-
lations.

Let the reader be patient for a while and not
flare up with indignation and refuse to follow
psychoanalysis because in its very first applica-
tions it leads to an unpardonable slander of the
memory of a great and pure man. For it is
quite certain that this indignation will never
solve for us the meaning of Leonardo’s child-
 

40

hood phantasy; on the other hand, Leonardo
has unequivocally acknowledged this phantasy,
and we shall therefore not relinquish the ex-
pectation–or if you prefer the preconception–
that like every psychic production such as
dreams, visions and deliria this phantasy, too,
must have some meaning. Let us therefore
lend our unprejudiced ears for a while to psy-
choanalytic work which after all has not yet
uttered the last word.

The desire to take the male member into the
mouth and suck it, which is considered as one
of the most disgusting of sexual perversions,
is nevertheless a frequent occurrence among
the women of our time–and as shown in old
sculptures was the same in earlier times–and
in the state of being in love seems to lose en-
tirely its disgusting character. The physician
encounters phantasies based on this desire,
even in women who did not come to the knowl-
edge of the possibility of such sexual gratifica-
tion by reading v. Krafft-Ebing’s Psycho-
pathia Sexualis or through other information.
It seems that it is quite easy for the women
themselves to produce such wish-phanta-

41

LEONARDO DA VINCI

sies.² Investigation then teaches us that this
situation, so forcibly condemned by custom,
may be traced to the most harmless origin. It
is nothing but the elaboration of another situa-
tion in which we all once felt comfort, namely,
when we were in the suckling-age (“when I was
still in the cradle”) and took the nipple of our
mother’s or wet-nurse’s breast into our mouth
to suck it. The organic impression of this first
pleasure in our lives surely remains indelibly
impregnated; when the child later learns to
know the udder of the cow, which in function
is a breast-nipple, but in shape and in position
on the abdomen resembles the penis, it obtains
the primary basis for the later formation of
that disgusting sexual phantasy.

We now understand why Leonardo displaced
the memory of the supposed experience with
the vulture to his nursing period. This phan-
tasy conceals nothing more or less than a rem-
iniscence of nursing—or being nursed—at the
mother’s breast, a scene both human and beau-
tiful, which he as well as other artists under-

²Cf. here the “Bruchstück einer Hysterieanalyse,” in Neu-
rosenlehre, Second series, 1909.

42

LEONARDO DA VINCI

took to depict with the brush in the form of the
mother of God and her child. At all events,
we also wish to maintain, something we do not
as yet understand, that this reminiscence,
equally significant for both sexes, was elabo-
rated in the man Leonardo into a passive homo-
sexual phantasy. For the present we shall not
take up the question as to what connection
there is between homosexuality and suckling
at the mother’s breast, we merely wish to recall
that tradition actually designates Leonardo as
a person of homosexual feelings. In consider-
ing this, it makes no difference whether that ac-
cusation against the youth Leonardo was justi-
fied or not. It is not the real activity but the
nature of the feeling which causes us to decide
whether to attribute to some one the character-
istic of homosexuality.

Another incomprehensible feature of Leo-
nardo’s infantile phantasy next claims our in-
terest. We interpret the phantasy of being
wet-
nursed by the mother and find that the
mother is replaced by a vulture. Where does
this vulture originate and how does he come
into this place?

43

LEONARDO DA VINCI

A thought now obtrudes itself which seems
so remote that one is tempted to ignore it. In
the sacred hieroglyphics of the old Egyptians
the mother is represented by the picture of the
vulture.³ These Egyptians also worshiped a
motherly deity, whose head was vulture like, or
who had many heads of which at least one or
two was that of a vulture.⁴ The name of this
goddess was pronounced Mut; we may question
whether the sound similarity to our word
mother (Mutter) is only accidental? So the
vulture really has some connection with the
mother, but of what help is that to us? Have
we a right to attribute this knowledge to Leo-
nardo when François Champollion first suc-
ceeded in reading hieroglyphics between 1790-
1832?⁵

It would also be interesting to discover in
what way the old Egyptians came to choose the
vulture as a symbol of motherhood. As a mat-
ter of fact the religion and culture of Egyptians

³⁾Horapollo: Hieroglyphica I, II. Μητέρα δὲ γράφοντες
... γῦπα ζωγραφοῦσιν.

⁴⁾Roscher: Ausf. Lexicon der griechischen und römischen
Mythologie. Artikel Mut. II Bd., 1894–1897.—Lanzone.
Dizionario di Mitologia egizia. Torino, 1882.

⁵⁾H. Hartleben, Champollion. Sein Leben und sein Werk, 1906.

44

LEONARDO DA VINCI

were subjects of scientific interest even to the
Greeks and Romans, and long before we our-
selves were able to read the Egyptian monu-
ments we had at our disposal some communica-
tions about them from preserved works of clas-
sical antiquity. Some of these writings be-
longed to familiar authors like Strabo, Plu-
tarch, Aminianus Marcellus, and some bear un-
familiar names and are uncertain as to origin
and time, like the hieroglyphica of Horapollo
Nilus, and like the traditional book of oriental
priestly wisdom bearing the godly name
Hermes Trismegistos. From these sources
we learn that the vulture was a symbol of
motherhood because it was thought that this
species of birds had only female vultures and
no males.⁶⁾ The natural history of the ancients
shows a counterpart to this limitation among
the scarabæus beetles which were revered by
the Egyptians as godly, no females were sup-
posed to exist.⁷⁾

⁶ “γῦπα δὲ ἄρρενα οὐ φασιγίνεσθαι ποτε, ἀλλὰ θηλείας ἀπάσας,”
cited by v. Römer. Über die androgynische Idee des Lebens,
Jahrb. f. Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, V, 1903, p. 732.

⁷ Plutarch: Veluti scarabaeos mares tantum esse putarunt
Aegyptii sic inter vultures mares non inveniri statuerunt.

45

LEONARDO DA VINCI

But how does impregnation take place in vul-
tures if only females exist? This is fully an-
swered in a passage of Horapollo.⁸ At a cer-
tain time these birds stop in the midst of their
flight, open their vagina and are impregnated
by the wind.

Unexpectedly we have now reached a point
where we can take something as quite prob-
able which only shortly before we had to reject as
absurd. It is quite possible that Leonardo was
well acquainted with the scientific fable, ac-
cording to which the Egyptians represented the
idea of mother with the picture of the vulture.
He was an omnivorous reader whose interest
comprised all spheres of literature and knowl-
edge. In the Codex Atlanticus we find an in-
dex of all books which he possessed at a cer-
tain time,⁹ as well as numerous notices about
other books which he borrowed from friends,
and according to the excerpts which Fr. Rich-
ter¹⁰ compiled from his drawings we can

⁸Horapollinis Niloi Hieroglyphica edidit Conradus Leemans
Amstelodami, 1835. The words referring to the sex of the
vulture read as follows (p. 14): “μητέρα μὲν ἐπειδὴ ἄρρεν
ἐν τούτῳ γένει τῶν ζώων οὐχ ὑπάρχει.”

⁹E. Müntz, l. c., p. 282. ¹⁰E. Müntz, l. c.

46

hardly overestimate the extent of his reading.
Among these books there was no lack of older
as well as contemporary works treating of nat-
ural history. All these books were already in
print at that time, and it so happens that Milan
was the principal place of the young art of book
printing in Italy.

When we proceed further we come upon a
communication which may raise to a certainty
the probability that Leonardo knew the vulture
fable. The erudite editor and commentator of
Horapollo remarked in connection with the text
(p. 172) cited before: Caeterum hanc fabulam
de vulturibus cupide amplexi sunt Patres Ec-
clesiastici, ut ita argumento ex rerum natura
petito refutarent eos, qui Virginis partum nega-
bant; itaque apud omnes fere hujus rei mentio
occurrit.

Hence the fable of the monosexuality and
the conception of the vulture by no means re-
mained as an indifferent anecdote as in the case
of the analogous fable of the scarabæus beetles;
that church fathers mastered it in order to have
it ready as an argument from natural history
against those who doubted the sacred history.

47

If according the best information from antiq-
uity the vultures were directed to let them-
selves be impregnated by the wind, why should
the same thing not have happened even once in
a human female? On account of this use the
church fathers were “almost all” in the habit
of relating this vulture fable, and now it can
hardly remain doubtful that it also became
known to Leonardo through so powerful a
source.

The origin of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy
can be conceived in the following manner:
While reading in the writings of a church
father or in a book on natural science that the
vultures are all females and that they know to
procreate without the coöperation of a male, a
memory emerged in him which became trans-
formed into that phantasy, but which meant to
say that he also had been such a vulture child,
which had a mother but no father. An echo
of pleasure which he experienced at his moth-
er’s breast was added to this in the manner as
so old impressions alone can manifest them-
selves. The allusion to the idea of the holy
virgin with the child, formed by the authors,

48

which is so dear to every artist, must have con-
tributed to it to make this phantasy seem to him
valuable and important. For this helped him
to identify himself with the Christ child, the
comforter and savior of not alone this one
woman.

When we break up an infantile phantasy we
strive to separate the real memory content
from the later motives which modify and dis-
tort the same. In the case of Leonardo we
now think that we know the real content of the
phantasy. The replacement of the mother by
the vulture indicates that the child missed the
father and felt himself alone with his mother.
The fact of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth fits in
with his vulture phantasy; only on account of it
was he able to compare himself with a vulture
child. But we have discovered as the next
definite fact from his youth that at the age of
five years he had already been received in his
father’s home; when this took place, whether a
few months following his birth, or a few weeks
before the taking of the assessment of taxes, is
entirely unknown to us. The interpretation of
the vulture phantasy then steps in and wants

49

to tell us that Leonardo did not spend the first
decisive years of his life with his father and his
step-
mother but with his poor, forsaken, real
mother, so that he had time to miss his father.
This still seems to be a rather meager and
rather daring result of the psychoanalytic ef-
fort, but on further reflection it will gain in
significance. Certainty will be promoted by
mentioning the actual relations in Leonardo’s
childhood. According to the reports, his fa-
ther Ser Piero da Vinci married the prominent
Donna Albiera during the year of Leonardo’s
birth; it was to the childlessness of this mar-
riage that the boy owed his legalized reception
into his father’s or rather grandfather’s house
during his fifth year. However, it is not cus-
tomary to offer an illegitimate offspring to a
young woman’s care at the beginning of mar-
riage when she is still expecting to be blessed
with children. Years of disappointment must
have elapsed before it was decided to adopt the
probably handsomely developed illegitimate
child as a compensation for legitimate children
who were vainly hoped for. It harmonizes
best with the interpretation of the vulture-
 

50

LEONARDO DA VINCI

phantasy, if at least three years or perhaps five
years of Leonardo’s life had elapsed before he
changed from his lonely mother to his father’s
home. But then it had already become too
late. In the first three or four years of life im-
pressions are fixed and modes of reactions are
formed towards the outer world which can
never be robbed of their importance by any
later experiences.

If it is true that the incomprehensible child
hood reminiscences and the person’s phantasies
based on them always bring out the most sig-
nificant of his psychic development, then the
fact corroborated by the vulture phantasy, that
Leonardo passed the first years of his life alone
with his mother must have been a most de-
cisive influence on the formation of his inner
life. Under the effect of this constellation it
could not have been otherwise than that the
child which in his young life encountered one
problem more than other children, should have
begun to ponder very passionately over this
riddle and thus should have become an investi-
gator early in life. For he was tortured by the
great questions where do children come from

51

and what has the father to do with their origin.
The vague knowledge of this connection be
tween his investigation and his childhood his
tory has later drawn from him the exclama
tion that it was destined that he should deeply
occupy himself with the problem of the bird’s
flight, for already in his cradle he had been
visited by a vulture. To trace the curiosity
which is directed to the flight of the bird to the
infantile sexual investigation will be a later
task which will not be difficult to accomplish.