78

IV

THE vulture phantasy of Leonardo still ab-
sorbs our interest. In words which only too
plainly recall a sexual act (“and has many
times struck against my lips with his tail”),
Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of the erotic
relations between the mother and the child. A
second memory content of the phantasy can
readily be conjectured from the association of
the activity of the mother (of the vulture) with
the accentuation of the mouth zone. We can
translate it as follows: My mother has
pressed on my mouth innumerable passionate
kisses. The phantasy is composed of the
memories of being nursed and of being kissed
by the mother.

A kindly nature has bestowed upon the artist
the capacity to express in artistic productions
his most secret psychic feelings hidden even to
himself, which powerfully affect outsiders who

MONNA LISA

79

are strangers to the artist who are un-
able to state whence this emotivity comes.
Should there be no evidence in Leonardo’s work
of that which his memory retained as the
strongest impression of his childhood? One
would have to expect it. However, when one
considers what profound transformations an
impression of an artist has to experience before
it can add its contribution to the work of art,
one is obliged to moderate considerably his ex-
pectation of demonstrating something definite.
This is especially true in the case of Leonardo.

He who thinks of Leonardo’s paintings will
be reminded by the remarkably fascinating and
puzzling smile which he enchanted on the lips
of all his feminine figures. It is a fixed smile
on elongated, sinuous lips which is considered
characteristic of him and is preferentially des-
ignated as “Leonardesque.” In the singular
and beautiful visage of the Florentine Monna
Lisa del Giocondo it has produced the greatest
effect on the spectators and even perplexed
them. This smile was in need of an interpre-
tation, and received many of the most varied
kind but none of them was considered satis-

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

factory. As Gruyer puts it: “It is almost
four centuries since Monna Lisa causes all
those to lose their heads who have looked upon
her for some time.”¹

Muther states:² “What fascinates the
spectator is the demoniacal charm of this smile.
Hundreds of poets and writers have written
about this woman, who now seems to smile
upon us seductively and now to stare coldly
and lifelessly into space, but nobody has solved
the riddle of her smile, nobody has interpreted
her thoughts. Everything, even the scenery is
mysterious and dream-
like, trembling as if in
the sultriness of sensuality.”

The idea that two diverse elements were
united in the smile of Monna Lisa has been felt
by many critics. They therefore recognize in
the play of features of the beautiful Floren-
tine lady the most perfect representation of the
contrasts dominating the love-
life of the
woman which is foreign to man, as that of re-
serve and seduction, and of most devoted ten-
derness and inconsiderateness in urgent and

¹Seidlitz: Leonardo da Vinci, II Bd., p. 280.

²Geschichte der Malerei, Bd. I, p. 314.

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

consuming sensuality. Müntz ³⁾ expresses him-
self in this manner: „One knows what inde-
cipherable and fascinating enigma Monna Lisa
Gioconda has been putting for nearly four cen-
turies to the admirers who crowd around her.
No artist (I borrow the expression of the deli-
cate writer who hides himself under the pseu-
donym of Pierre de Corlay) has ever trans-
lated in this manner the very essence of
femininity: the tenderness and coquetry, the
modesty and quiet voluptuousness, the whole
mystery of the heart which holds itself aloof,
of a brain which reflects, and of a personality
who watches itself and yields nothing from her-
self except radiance. . . .“ The Italian An-
gelo Conti ⁴⁾ saw the picture in the Louvre il-
lumined by a ray of the sun and expressed him-
self as follows: „The woman smiled with a
royal calmness, her instincts of conquest, of
ferocity, the entire heredity of the species, the
will of seduction and ensnaring, the charm of
the deceiver, the kindness which conceals a

³⁾l. c. p. 417.

⁴⁾A. Conti: Leonardo pittore, Conferenze Fiorentine, l. c.
p. 93.

82

cruel purpose, all that appears and disappears
alternately behind the laughing veil and melts
into the poem of her smile. . . . Good and
evil, cruelty and compassion, graceful and cat-
like, she laughed. . . ."

Leonardo painted this picture four years,
perhaps from 1503 until 1507, during his sec-
ond sojourn in Florence when he was about the
age of fifty years. According to Vasari he ap-
plied the choicest artifices in order to divert the
lady during the sittings and to hold that smile
firmly on her features. Of all the graceful-
ness that his brush reproduced on the canvas
at that time the picture preserves but very lit-
tle in its present state. During its production
it was considered the highest that art could
accomplish; it is certain, however, that it did
not satisfy Leonardo himself, that he pro-
nounced it as unfinished and did not deliver it
to the one who ordered it, but took it with him
to France where his benefactor Francis I, ac-
quired it for the Louvre.

Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of
Monna Lisa unsolved, and let us note the un-
equivocal fact that her smile fascinated the art-

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

ist no less than all spectators for these 400
years. This captivating smile had thereafter
returned in all of his pictures and in those of
his pupils. As Leonardo’s Monna Lisa was a
portrait we cannot assume that he has added
to her face a trait of his own so difficult to ex-
press which she herself did not possess. It
seems, we cannot help but believe, that he found
this smile in his model and became so charmed
by it that from now on he endowed it on all
the free creations of his phantasy. This ob-
vious conception is, e.g., expressed by A. Kon-
stantinowa in the following manner:⁵⁾

“During the long period in which the master
occupied himself with the portrait of Monna
Lisa del Gioconda, he entered into the physi-
ognomic delicacies of this feminine face with
such sympathy of feeling that he transferred
these creatures, especially the mysterious smile
and the peculiar glance, to all faces which he
later painted or drew. The mimic peculiarity
of Gioconda can even be perceived in the pic-
ture of John the Baptist in the Louvre. But
above all they are distinctly recognized in the

⁵⁾l. c. p. 45.

84

features of Mary in the picture of St. Anne of
the Louvre.”
But the case could have been different. The
need for a deeper reason for the fascination
which the smile of Gioconda exerted on the
artist from which he could not rid himself has
been felt by more than one of his biographers.
W. Pater, who sees in the picture of Monna
Lisa the embodiment of the entire erotic ex-
perience of modern man, and discourses so ex-
cellently on “that unfathomable smile always
with a touch of something sinister in it, which
plays over all Leonardo’s work,” leads us to
another track when he says:⁶
“Besides, the picture is a portrait. From
childhood we see this image defining itself on
the fabric of his dream; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this
was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at
last.”
Herzfeld surely must have had something
similar in mind when stating that in Monna
Lisa Leonardo encountered himself and there-

⁶W. Pater: The Renaissance, p. 124, The Macmillan Co.,
1910.

85

fore found it possible to put so much of his own
nature into the picture, whose features from
time immemorial have been imbedded with
mysterious sympathy in Leonardo’s soul.⁷⁾

Let us endeavor to clear up these intimations.
It was quite possible that Leonardo was fasci-
nated by the smile of Monna Lisa, because it
had awakened something in him which had
slumbered in his soul for a long time, in all
probability an old memory. This memory was
of sufficient importance to stick to him once it
had been aroused; he was forced continually to
provide it with new expression. The assur-
ance of Pater that we can see an image like that
of Monna Lisa defining itself since Leonardo’s
childhood on the fabric of his dreams, seems
worthy of belief and deserves to be taken liter-
ally.

Vasari mentions as Leonardo’s first artistic
endeavors, heads of women who laugh.⁸
The passage, which is beyond suspicion, as it
is not meant to prove anything, reads more pre-
cisely as follows: ⁹ He formed in his youth

⁷ M. Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci, p. 88.

⁸ Scognamiglio, l. c. p. 32.

⁹ L. Schorn, Bd. III, 1843, p. 6.

86

some laughing feminine heads out of lime,
which have been reproduced in plaster, and
some heads of children, which were as beauti-
ful as if modeled by the hands of a mas-
ter. . . .”

Thus we discover that his practice of art be-
gan with the representation of two kinds of ob-
jects, which would perforce remind us of the
two kinds of sexual objects which we have in-
ferred from the analysis of his vulture phan-
tasy. If the beautiful children’s heads were
reproductions of his own childish person, then
the laughing women were nothing else but re-
productions of Caterina, his mother, and we
are beginning to have an inkling of the possi-
bility that his mother possessed that mysteri-
ous smile which he lost, and which fascinated
him so much when he found it again in the
Florentine lady.¹⁰

The painting of Leonardo which in point
of time stands nearest to the Monna Lisa is

¹⁰The same is assumed by Merejkowski, who imagined a
childhood for Leonardo which deviates in the essential points
from ours, drawn from the results of the vulture phantasy.
But if Leonardo himself had displayed this smile, tradition
hardly would have failed to report to us this coincidence.

ST. ANNE

87

the so-called Saint Anne of the Louvre, repre-
senting Saint Anne, Mary and the Christ child.
It shows the Leonardesque smile most beauti-
fully portrayed in the two feminine heads. It
is impossible to find out how much earlier or
later than the portrait of Monna Lisa Leo-
nardo began to paint this picture. As both
works extended over years, we may well as-
sume that they occupied the master simulta-
neously. But it would best harmonize with
our expectation if his deep interest in the fea-
tures of Monna Lisa would have instigated
Leonardo to form the composition of Saint
Anne from his phantasy. For if the smile of
Gioconda had conjured up in him the memory
of his mother, he would naturally understand
that he was first urged to produce a glorifica-
tion of motherhood, and to give back to her the
smile he found in that prominent lady. We
may thus allow our interest to glide over from
the portrait of Monna Lisa to this other hardly
less beautiful picture, now also in the Louvre.
Saint Anne with the daughter and grand-
child is a subject seldom treated in the Italian
art of painting; at all events Leonardo’s rep-

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

resentation differs widely from all that is oth-
erwise known. Muther states: ¹¹
“Some masters like Hans Fries, the older
Holbein, and Girolamo dei Libri, made Anne
sit near Mary and placed the child between the
two. Others like Jakob Cornelicz in his Ber-
lin pictures, represented Saint Anne as holding
in her arm the small figure of Mary upon which
sits the still smaller figure of the Christ child.”
In Leonardo’s picture Mary sits on her moth-
er’s lap, bent forward and is stretching out both
arms after the boy who plays with a little
lamb, and must have slightly maltreated it.
The grandmother has one of her unconcealed
arms propped on her hip and looks down on
both with a blissful smile. The grouping is
certainly not quite unconstrained. But the
smile which is playing on the lips of both
women, although unmistakably the same as in
the picture of Monna Lisa, has lost its sinister
and mysterious character; it expresses a calm
blissfulness.¹²

¹¹l. c. p. 309.

¹²A. Konstantinowa, l. c., says: “Mary looks tenderly
down on her beloved child with a smile that recalls the mys-
terious expression of la Gioconda.” Elsewhere speaking of

89

On becoming somewhat engrossed in this
picture it suddenly dawns upon the spectator
that only Leonardo could have painted this pic-
ture, as only he could have formed the vulture
phantasy. This picture contains the synthesis
of the history of Leonardo’s childhood, the de-
tails of which are explainable by the most inti-
mate impressions of his life. In his father’s
home he found not only the kind step-mother
Donna Albiera, but also the grandmother, his
father’s mother, Monna Lucia, who we will as-
sume was not less tender to him than grand-
mothers are wont to be. This circumstance
must have furnished him with the facts for the
representation of a childhood guarded by a
mother and grandmother. Another striking
feature of the picture assumes still greater sig-
nificance. Saint Anne, the mother of Mary
and the grandmother of the boy who must have
been a matron, is formed here perhaps some-
what more mature and more serious than Saint
Mary, but still as a young woman of unfaded
beauty. As a matter of fact Leonardo gave
Mary she says: “The smile of Gioconda floats upon her
features.”

90

the boy two mothers, the one who stretched out
her arms after him and another who is seen in
the background, both are represented with the
blissful smile of maternal happiness. This
peculiarity of the picture has not failed to ex-
cite the wonder of the authors. Muther, for
instance, believes that Leonardo could not
bring himself to paint old age, folds and
wrinkles, and therefore formed also Anne as a
woman of radiant beauty. Whether one can
be satisfied with this explanation is a question.
Other writers have taken occasion to deny gen-
erally the sameness of age of mother and
daughter.¹³ However, Muther’s tentative ex-
planation is sufficient proof for the fact that
the impression of Saint Anne’s youthful ap-
pearance was furnished by the picture and is
not an imagination produced by a tendency.

Leonardo’s childhood was precisely as re-
markable as this picture. He has had two
mothers, the first his true mother, Caterina,
from whom he was torn away between the age
of three and five years, and a young tender
step-mother, Donna Albiera, his father’s wife.

¹³Cf. v. Seidlitz, l. c. Bd. II, p. 274.

91

By connecting this fact of his childhood with
the one mentioned above and condensing them
into a uniform fusion, the composition of Saint
Anne, Mary and the Child, formed itself in him.
The maternal form further away from the boy
designated as the grandmother, corresponds in
appearance and in spatial relation to the boy,
with the real first mother, Caterina. With the
blissful smile of Saint Anne the artist actually
disavowed and concealed the envy which the
unfortunate mother felt when she was forced
to give up her son to her more aristocratic rival,
as she had once before her lover.
Our feeling that the smile of Monna Lisa
del Gioconda awakened in the man the memory
of the mother of his first years of childhood
would thus be confirmed from another work
of Leonardo. Following the production of
Monna Lisa, Italian artists depicted in Ma-
donnas and prominent ladies the humble dip-
ping of the head and the peculiar blissful smile
of the poor peasant girl Caterina, who brought
to the world the noble son who was destined to
paint, investigate, and suffer.
When Leonardo succeeded in reproducing in

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

the face of Monna Lisa the double sense com-
prised in this smile, namely, the promise of
unlimited tenderness, and sinister threat (in the
words of Pater), he remained true even in this
to the content of his earliest reminiscence.
For the love of the mother became his destiny,
it determined his fate and the privations which
were in store for him. The impetuosity of the
caressing to which the vulture phantasy points
was only too natural. The poor forsaken
mother had to give vent through mother’s love
to all her memories of love enjoyed as well as
to all her yearnings for more affection; she was
forced to it, not only in order to compensate
herself for not having a husband, but also the
child for not having a father to love it. In
the manner of all ungratified mothers she
thus took her little son in place of her husband,
and robbed him of a part of his virility by
maturing too early his erotic life. The love
of the mother for the suckling whom she
nourishes and cares for is something far deeper
reaching than her later affection for the grow-
ing child. It is of the nature of a fully
gratified love affair, which fulfills not only

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

all the psychic wishes but also all physical
needs, and when it represents one of the forms
of happiness attainable by man it is due, in
no little measure, to the possibility of gratify-
ing without reproach also wish feelings which
were long repressed and designated as per-
verse.¹⁴ Even in the happiest young married
life the father feels that his child, especially
the little boy has become his rival, and this
gives origin to an antagonism against the fa-
vorite son which is deeply rooted in the uncon-
scious.

When in the prime of his life Leonardo re-
encountered that blissful and ecstatic smile as
it had once encircled his mother’s mouth in
caressing, he had long been under the ban of
an inhibition, forbidding him ever again to
desire such tenderness from women’s lips. But
as he had become a painter he endeavored to
reproduce this smile with his brush and fur-
nish all his pictures with it, whether he exe-
cuted them himself or whether they were done
by his pupils under his direction, as in Leda,

¹⁴Cf. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, translated
by A. A. Brill, 3rd edition, 1930, Monograph series.

94

St. John, and Bacchus. The latter two are va-
riations of the same type. Muther says:
“From the locust eater of the Bible Leonardo
made a Bacchus, an Apollo, who with a mys-
terious smile on his lips, and with his soft
thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated
eyes.” These pictures breathe a mysticism
into the secret of which one dares not pene-
trate; at most one can make the effort to con-
struct the connection to Leonardo’s earlier
productions. The figures are again androgy-
nous but no longer in the sense of the vulture
phantasy, they are pretty boys of feminine ten-
derness with feminine forms; they do not cast
down their eyes but gaze mysteriously tri-
umphant, as if they knew of a great happy
issue concerning which one must remain quiet;
the familiar fascinating smile leads us to infer
that it is a love secret. It is possible that in
these forms Leonardo disavowed and artisti-
cally conquered the unhappiness of his love
life, in that he represented the wish fulfillment
of the boy infatuated with his mother in such
blissful union of the male and female nature.