95

V

AMONG the entries in Leonardo’s diaries
there is one which absorbs the reader’s atten-
tion through its important content and on ac-
count of a small formal error. In July, 1504,
he wrote:

“Adi 9 Luglio, 1504, mercoledi, a ore 7 mori
Ser Piero da Vinci notalio al palazzo del Po-
testà, mio padre, a ore 7. Era d’età d’anni 80,
lasciò 10 figlioli maschi e 2 feminine.”¹

The notice as we see deals with the death of
Leonardo’s father. The slight error in its
form consists in the fact that in the computa-
tion of the time “at 7 o’clock” is repeated two
times, as if Leonardo had forgotten at the end
of the sentence that he had already written it
at the beginning. It is only a triviality to

¹“On the 9th of July, 1504, Wednesday at 7 o’clock died Ser
Piero da Vinci, notary at the palace of the Podesta, my father,
at 7 o’clock. He was 80 years old, left 10 sons and 2 daugh-
ters.” (E. Müntz, I. c. p. 13.)

96

which any one but a psychoanalyst would pay
no attention. Perhaps he would not even no-
tice it, or if his attention would be called to it
he would say “that can happen to anybody dur-
ing absent-mindedness or in an affective state
and has no further meaning.”

The psychoanalyst thinks differently; to him
nothing is too trifling as a manifestation of hid-
den psychic processes; he has long learned that
such forgetting or repetition is full of mean-
ing, and that one is indebted to the “absent-
mindedness” when it makes possible the be-
trayal of otherwise concealed feelings.

We would say that, like the funeral account
of Caterina and the expense account of the
pupils, this notice, too, corresponds to a case in
which Leonardo was unsuccessful in suppress-
ing his affects, and the long hidden feeling
forcibly obtained a distorted expression. Also
the form is similar, it shows the same pedantic
precision, the same pushing forward of num-
bers.²

We call such a repetition a perseveration.

²I shall overlook a greater error committed by Leonardo in
his notice in that he gives his 77-year-old father 80 years.

97

LEONARDO DA VINCI

It is an excellent means to indicate the affective
accentuation. One recalls for example Saint
Peter’s angry speech against his unworthy rep-
resentative on earth, as given in Dante’s Para-
diso: ³

“Quegli ch’usurpa in terra il luoga mio
Il luoga mio, il luogo mio, che vaca
Nella presenza del Figliuol di Dio,
Fatto ha del cimiterio mio cloaca.”

Without Leonardo’s affective inhibition the
entry into the diary could perhaps have read as
follows: To-day at 7 o’clock died my father,
Ser Piero da Vinci, my poor father! But the
displacement of the perseveration to the most
indifferent determination of the obituary to
dying-hour robs the notice of all pathos and lets
us recognize that there was something here to
conceal and to suppress.
Ser Piero da Vinci, notary and descendant
of notaries, was a man of great energy who at-
tained respect and affluence. He was married
four times, the two first wives died childless,

³“He who usurps on earth my place, my place,
which is void in the presence of the Son of God, has made out
of my cemetery a sewer.” Canto XXXVII.

98

and not till the third marriage has he gotten
the first legitimate son, in 1476, when Leonardo
was 24 years old, and had long ago changed
his father’s home for the studio of his master
Verrocchio. With the fourth and last wife
whom he married when he was already in the
fifties he begot nine sons and two daughters.⁴

To be sure the father also assumed impor-
tance in Leonardo’s psychosexual development,
and what is more, it was not only in a negative
sense, through his absence during the boy’s first
childhood years, but also directly through his
presence in his later childhood. He who as a
child desires his mother, cannot help wishing to
put himself in his father’s place, to identify
himself with him in his phantasy and later
make it his life’s task to triumph over him.
As Leonardo was not yet five years old when
he was received into his paternal home, the
young step-mother, Albiera, certainly must
have taken the place of his mother in his feel-
ing, and this brought him into that relation of

⁴It seems that in that passage of the diary Leonardo also
erred in the number of his sisters and brothers, which stands
in remarkable contrast to the apparent exactness of the same.

99

LEONARDO DA VINCI

rivalry to his father which may be designated
as normal. As is known, the preference for
homosexuality did not manifest itself till near
the years of puberty. When Leonardo ac-
cepted this preference the identification with
the father lost all significance for his sexual
life, but continued in other spheres of non-
erotic activity. We hear that he was fond of
luxury and pretty raiments, and kept servants
and horses, although according to Vasari’s
words “he hardly possessed anything and
worked little.” We shall not hold his artistic
taste entirely responsible for all these special
likings; we recognize in them also the compul-
sion to copy his father and to excel him. He
played the part of the great gentleman to the
poor peasant girl, hence the son retained the
incentive that he also play the great gentleman,
he had the strong feeling “to out-herod
Herod,” and to show his father exactly how
the real high rank looks.

Whoever works as an artist certainly feels
as a father to his works. The identification
with his father had a fateful result in Leo-
nardo’s works of art. He created them and

100

LEONARDO DA VINCI

then troubled himself no longer about them,
just as his father did not trouble himself
about him. The later worriments of his father
could change nothing in this compulsion, as the
latter originated from the impressions of the
first years of childhood, and the repression
having remained unconscious was incorrigible
through later experiences.

At the time of the Renaissance, and even
much later, every artist was in need of a gen-
tleman of rank to act as his benefactor. This
patron was wont to give the artist commissions
for work and entirely controlled his destiny.
Leonardo found his patron in Lodovico Sforza,
nicknamed Il Moro, a man of high aspirations,
ostentations, diplomatically astute, but of an
unstable and unreliable character. In his
court in Milan, Leonardo spent the best period
of his life, while in his service he evinced his
most uninhibited productive activity as is evi-
denced in The Last Supper, and in the eques-
trian statue of Francesco Sforza. He left
Milan before the catastrophe struck Lodovico
Moro, who died a prisoner in a French prison.
When the news of his benefactor’s fate reached

101

Leonardo he made the following entry in his
diary: “The duke has lost state, wealth, and
liberty, not one of his works will be finished by
himself.”⁵ It is remarkable and surely not
without significance that he here raises the
same reproach to his benefactor that posterity
was to apply to him, as if he wanted to lay the
responsibility to a person who substituted his
father-series, for the fact that he himself left
his works unfinished. As a matter of fact he
was not wrong in what he said about the Duke.
However, if the imitation of his father hurt
him as an artist, his resistance against the
father was the infantile determinant of his per-
haps equally vast accomplishment as an artist.
According to Merejkowski’s beautiful compari-
son he was like a man who awoke too early in
the darkness, while the others were all still
asleep. He dared utter this bold principle
which contains the justification for all inde-
pendent investigation: “Chi disputa allegando
l’autorità non adopra l’ingegno ma piuttosto la
memoria” (Whoever refers to authorities in
disputing ideas, works with his memory rather

⁵⁾v. Seidlitz, l. c., II, p. 270.

102

than with his reason).⁶ Thus he became the
first modern natural philosopher, and his cour-
age was rewarded by an abundance of cogni-
tions and anticipations; since the Greek period
he was the first to investigate the secrets of na-
ture, relying entirely on his observation and his
own judgment. But when he learned to de-
preciate authority and to reject the imitation
of the “ancients” and constantly pointed to the
study of nature as the source of all wisdom, he
only repeated in the highest sublimation at-
tainable to man, which had already obtruded
itself on the little boy who surveyed the world
with wonder. To retranslate the scientific ab-
stractions into concrete individual experiences,
we would say that the “ancients” and authority
only corresponded to the father, and nature
again became the tender mother who nourished
him. While in most human beings to-day, as
in primitive times, the need for a support of
some authority is so imperative that their world
becomes shaky when their authority is men-
aced, Leonardo alone was able to exist without
such support; but that would not have been

⁶Solmi, Conf. fior, p. 13.

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

possible had he not been deprived of his fa-
ther in the first years of his life. The bold-
ness and independence of his later scientific
investigation presupposes that his infantile sex-
ual investigation was not inhibited by his fa-
ther, and this same spirit of scientific independ-
ence was continued by his withdrawing from
sex.

If any one like Leonardo escapes in his child-
hood his father’s intimidation and later throws
off the shackles of authority in his scientific in-
vestigation, it would be in gross contradiction
to our expectation if we found that this same
man remained a believer and unable to with-
draw from dogmatic religion. Psychoanalysis
has taught us the intimate connection between
the father complex and belief in God, and daily
demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose
their religious belief as soon as the authority of
the father breaks down. In the parental com-
plex we thus recognize the roots of religious
need; the almighty, just God, and kindly nature
appear to us as grand sublimations of father
and mother, or rather as revivals and restora-
tions of the infantile conceptions of both par-

104

ents. Religiousness is biologically traced to the
long period of helplessness and need of help
of the little child. When the child grows up
and realizes his loneliness and weakness in the
presence of the great forces of life, he perceives
his condition as in childhood and seeks to dis-
avow his despair through a regressive revival
of the protecting forces of childhood.^6a

It does not seem that Leonardo’s life dis-
proves this conception of religious belief. Ac-
cusations charging him with irreligiousness,
which in those times was equivalent to re-
nouncing Christianity, were brought against
him already in his lifetime, and were clearly
described in the first biography given by Va-
sari.⁷ In the second edition of his Vite (1568)
Vasari left out this observation. In view of
the extraordinary sensitiveness of his age in
matters of religion it is perfectly comprehen-
sible to us why Leonardo refrained from di-
rectly expressing his position to Christianity
in his notes. As investigator he did not per-
mit himself to be misled by the account of the
creation of the holy scriptures; for instance,

^6aCf. Freud: Totem and Taboo, transl. by Brill, Dodd, Mead
& Co., N. Y., 1918.

⁷Müntz, l. c., La Religion de Leonardo, p. 292, etc.

105

he disputed the possibility of a universal flood,
and in geology he was as unscrupulous in cal-
culating with hundred thousands of years as
modern investigators.

Among his “prophecies” one finds some
things that would perforce offend the sensi-
tive feelings of a religious Christian, e.g.
Praying to the images of Saints, reads as fol-
lows: ⁸

“People talk to people who perceive nothing,
who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall
talk to them and receive no answer; they shall
adore those who have ears and hear nothing;
they shall burn lamps for those who do not
see.”

Or: Concerning mourning on Good Friday
(p. 297):

“In all parts of Europe great peoples will be-
wail the death of one man who died in the
Orient.”

It was asserted of Leonardo’s art that he
took away the last remnant of religious attach-
ment from the holy figures and put them into
human form in order to depict in them great

⁸ Herzfeld, p. 292.

106

and beautiful human feelings. Muther praises
him for having overcome the feeling of deca-
dence, and for having returned to man the right
of sensuality and pleasurable enjoyment. The
notices which show Leonardo absorbed in
fathoming the great riddles of nature do not
lack any expressions of admiration for the
creator, the last cause of all these wonderful
secrets, but nothing indicates that he wished
to hold any personal relation to this divine
force. The sentences which contain the deep
wisdom of his last years breathe the resigna-
tion of the man who subjects himself to the
laws of nature and expects no alleviation from
the kindness or grace of God. There is hardly
any doubt that Leonardo had vanquished dog-
matic as well as personal religion, and through
his work of investigation he had withdrawn far
from the world aspect of the religious Chris-
tian.

From our views mentioned before in the de-
velopment of the infantile psychic life, it be-
comes clear that also Leonardo’s first inves-
tigations in childhood occupied themselves
with the problems of sexuality. But he him-

107

self betrays it to us through a transparent
veil, in that he connects his impulse to investi-
gate with the vulture phantasy, and in empha-
sizing the problem of the flight of the bird as
one whose elaboration devolved upon him
through special concatenations of fate. A
very obscure as well as a prophetically sound-
ing passage in his notes dealing with the flight
of the bird demonstrates in the nicest way with
how much affective interest he clung to the
wish that he himself should be able to imitate
the art of flying: “The human bird shall take
his first flight, filling the world with amaze-
ment, all writings with his fame, and bringing
eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.”
He probably hoped that he himself would
sometimes be able to fly, and we know from
the wish fulfilling dreams of people what bliss
one expects from the fulfillment of this hope.

But why do so many people dream that they
are able to fly? Psychoanalysis answers this
question by stating that to fly or to be a bird
in the dream is only a concealment of another
wish, to the recognition of which one can reach
by more than one linguistic or objective bridge.

108

When the inquisitive child is told that a big
bird like the stork brings the little children,
when the ancients have formed the phallus
winged, when the popular designation of the
sexual activity of man is expressed in Ger-
man by the word “to bird” (vögeln), when the
male member is directly called l’uccello (bird)
by the Italians, all these facts are only small
fragments from a large collection which
teaches us that the wish to be able to fly signi-
fies in the dream nothing more or less than the
longing for the ability of sexual accomplish-
ment. This is an early infantile wish. When
the grown-up recalls his childhood it appears to
him as a happy time in which one is happy for
the moment and looks to the future without
any wishes, it is for this reason that he envies
children. But if children themselves could in
form us about it they would probably give dif-
ferent reports. It seems that childhood is not
that blissful Idyl into which we later distort
it, that on the contrary children are lashed
through the years of childhood by the wish to
become big, and to imitate the grown ups.
This wish instigates all their playing. If in

109

the course of their sexual investigation chil
dren feel that the grown up knows something
wonderful in the mysterious and yet so im
portant realm, what they are prohibited from
knowing or doing, they are seized with a vio
lent wish to know it, and dream of it in the
form of flying, or prepare this disguise of the
wish for their later flying dreams. Thus avia
tion, which has attained its aim in our times,
has also its infantile erotic roots.

By admitting that he entertained a special
personal relation to the problem of flying since
his childhood, Leonardo bears out what we
must assume from our investigation of chil
dren of our times, namely, that his childhood
investigation was directed to sexual matters.
At least this one problem escaped repression
and later estranged him from sexuality. From
childhood until the age of perfect intellectual
maturity this subject, slightly varied, continued
to hold his interest, and it is quite possible that
he was as little successful in his cherished art
in the primary sexual sense as in his desires
for mechanical matters, that both wishes were
denied to him.

110

As a matter of fact the great Leonardo re-
mained infantile in some ways throughout his
whole life; it is said that all great men retain
something of the infantile. As a grown up he
still continued playing, which sometimes made
him appear strange and incomprehensible to
his contemporaries. When he constructed the
most artistic mechanical toys for court festivi-
ties and receptions we are dissatisfied thereby
because we dislike to see the master waste his
power on such petty stuff. He himself did not
seem averse to giving his time to such things.
Vasari reports that he did similar things even
when not urged to it by request: “There (in
Rome) he made a doughy mass out of wax,
and when it softened he formed thereof very
delicate animals filled with air; when he blew
into them they flew in the air, and when the
air was exhausted they fell to the ground. For
a peculiar lizard caught by the wine-grower
of Belvedere Leonardo made wings from skin
pulled off from other lizards, which he filled
with mercury so that they moved and trem-
bled when it walked; he then made for it eyes,
a beard and horns, tamed it and put it in a lit-

111

tle box and terrified all his friends with it.”⁹
Such playing often served him as an expression
of serious thoughts: “He had often cleaned
the intestines of a sheep so well that one could
hold them in the hollow of the hand; he brought
them into a big room, and attached them to
a blacksmith’s bellows which he kept in an ad-
jacent room, he then blew them up until they
filled up the whole room so that everybody
had to crowd into a corner. In this manner
he showed how they gradually became trans-
parent and filled up with air, and as they were
at first limited to very little space and grad-
ually became more and more extended in the
big room, he compared them to a genius.”¹⁰
His fables and riddles evince the same playful
pleasure in harmless concealment and artistic
masking, the riddles were put into the form
of prophecies; almost all are rich in ideas and
to a remarkable degree devoid of wit.
The plays and jumps which Leonardo al-
lowed his phantasy have in some cases quite
misled his biographers who misunderstood this

⁹⁾ Vasari, translated by Schorn, 1843.

¹⁰⁾ Ebenda, p. 39.

112

part of his nature. In Leonardo’s Milanese
manuscripts one finds, for example, outlines
of letters to the “Diodario of Sorio (Syria),
viceroy of the holy Sultan of Babylon,” in
which Leonardo presents himself as an en-
gineer sent to these regions of the Orient in
order to construct some works. In these let-
ters he defends himself against the reproach
of laziness, he furnishes geographical descrip-
tions of cities and mountains, and finally dis-
cusses a big elementary event which occurred
while he was there.¹¹

In 1881, J. P. Richter had endeavored to
prove from these documents that Leonardo
made these traveler’s observations when he
really was in the service of the Sultan of Egypt,
and that while in the Orient he embraced the
Mohammedan religion. This sojourn in the
Orient should have taken place in the time of
1483, that is, before he removed to the court
of the Duke of Milan. However, it was not
difficult for other authors to recognize the il-

¹¹Concerning these letters and the combinations connected
with them see Müntz, l. c., p. 82; for the wording of the same
and for the notices connected with them see Herzfeld, l. c.,
p. 223.

113

lustrations of this supposed journey to the
Orient as what they really were, namely, phan-
tastic productions of the youthful artist which
he created for his own amusement, and in
which he probably brought to expression his
wishes to see the world and experience adven-
tures.

A phantastic formation is probably also the
“Academia Vinciana,” the acceptance of which
is due to the existence of five or six most clever
and intricate emblems with the inscription of
the Academy. Vasari mentions these draw-
ings but not the Academy.¹² Müntz who
placed such ornament on the cover of his big
work on Leonardo belongs to the few who
believe in the reality of an “Academia Vin-
ciana.”

It is probable that this impulse to play dis-
appeared in Leonardo’s maturer years, that it
became discharged in the investigating activity.

¹²Besides, he lost some time in that he even made a drawing
of a braided cord in which one could follow the thread from
one end to the other, until it formed a perfectly circular figure;
a very difficult and beautiful drawing of this kind is engraved
on copper, in the center of it one can read the words: “Leo-
nardus Vinci Academia” (p. 8).

114

which signified the highest development of his
personality. But the fact that it continued so
long may teach us how slowly one tears himself
away from his infantilism after having en
joyed in his childhood supreme erotic happiness
which is later unattainable.