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VI

It would be futile to disregard the fact that
at present, readers find every pathography un-
savory. This attitude is excused with the re-
proach that from a pathographic elaboration
of a great man one never obtains an under-
standing of his importance and his attainments,
that it is therefore useless mischief to study
in him things which could just as well be found
in anybody. However, this criticism is so
clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when
viewed as a pretext and a disguise for some-
thing. As a matter of fact pathography does
not aim at making comprehensible the attain-
ments of the great man; no one should really
be blamed for not doing something which one
never promised. The real motives for the op-
position are quite different. One finds them
when one bears in mind that biographers are
fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner.

116

Frequently they take the hero as the object of
study because, for reasons of their personal
emotional life, they bear him a special affec-
tion from the very outset. They then devote
themselves to a work of idealization which
strives to enroll the great man among their in-
fantile models, and to revive through him, as
it were, the infantile conception of the father.
For the sake of this wish they wipe out the in-
dividual features in his physiognomy, they rub
out the traces of his life’s struggle with inner
and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in
him anything of human weakness or imperfec-
tion; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal
form instead of the man to whom we could feel
distantly related. It is to be regretted that
they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth
to an illusion, and for the sake of their infan-
tile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to
penetrate into the most attractive secrets of hu-
man nature.¹

Leonardo himself, judging from his love for
the truth and his inquisitiveness, would have

¹This criticism holds quite generally and is not aimed at
Leonardo’s biographers in particular.

117

interposed no objections to the effort of-
covering the determinations of his psychic and
intellectual development from the trivial pe-
culiarities and riddles of his nature. We re-
spect him by learning from him. It does no
injury to his greatness to study the sacrifices
which his development from the child must
have entailed, and to compile the factors which
have stamped on his person the tragic feature
of failure.

Let us expressly emphasize that we have
never considered Leonardo as a neurotic or as
a “nervous person” in the sense of this awk-
ward term. Whoever takes it amiss that we
should even dare apply to him viewpoints
gained from pathology, still clings to preju-
dices which we have at present justly given up.
We no longer believe that health and disease,
normal and nervous, are sharply distinguished
from each other, and that neurotic traits must
be judged as proof of general inferiority. We
know to-day that neurotic symptoms are sub-
stitutive formations for certain repressive acts
which have to be brought about in the course
of our development from the child to the cul-
 

118

tural man, that we all produce such substitu-
tive formations, and that only the amount, in-
tensity, and distribution of these substitutive
formations justify the practical conception of
illness and the conclusion of constitutional in-
feriority. Following the slight signs in Leo-
nardo’s personality we would place him near
that neurotic type which we designate as the
“compulsive type,” and we would compare his
investigations with the “reasoning mania” of
neurotics, and his inhibitions with the so-called
“abulias” of the latter.

The object of our work was to explain the
inhibitions in Leonardo’s sexual life and in his
artistic activity. For this purpose we shall
now sum up what we could discover concern-
ing the course of his psychic development.

We were unable to gain any knowledge about
his hereditary factors, on the other hand we
recognize that the accidental circumstances of
his childhood produced a far reaching disturb-
ing effect. His illegitimate birth deprived him
of the influence of a father until perhaps his
fifth year, and left him to the tender seduction
of a mother whose only consolation he was.

119

Having been kissed by her into sexual prema-
turity, he surely must have entered into a phase
of infantile sexual activity of which only one
single manifestation was definitely evinced,
namely, the intensity of his infantile sexual
investigation. The impulse for looking and
inquisitiveness were most strongly stimulated
by his impressions from early childhood; the
erogenous mouth-zone received an accentuation
which it had never given up. From his later
contrasting behavior, as the exaggerated sym-
pathy for animals, we can conclude that this
infantile period did not lack a strong sadistic
trait.

An energetic shift of repression put an end to
this infantile excess, and established the disposi-
tions which became manifest in the years of
puberty. The most striking result of this trans-
formation was a turning away from all gross
sensual activities. Leonardo was able to lead
a life of abstinence and thus gave the impres-
sion of an asexual person. When the floods
of pubescent excitement came over him they
did not make him ill by forcing him to costly
and harmful substitutive formations; owing to

120

his early preference for sexual inquisitiveness,
the greater part of the sexual needs could be
sublimated into a general thirst for knowledge
and thus elude repression. A much smaller por-
tion of the libido was applied to sexual aims,
and represented the stunted sexual life of the
grown up. In consequence of the repression
of the love for the mother this portion assumed
a homosexual attitude and manifested itself as
ideal love for boys. The fixation on the
mother, as well as the happy reminiscences of
his relations with her, was preserved in his
unconscious but remained for the time in an
inactive state. In this manner repression,
fixation, and sublimation participated in the
disposal of the contributions which the sex-
ual impulse furnished to Leonardo’s psychic
life.

From the obscure age of boyhood Leonardo
appears to us as an artist, a painter, and sculp-
tor, thanks to a specific talent which was prob-
ably enforced in the first years of childhood by
the early awakening of the impulse for looking.
We would gladly report in what way his artis-
tic activity depends on the psychic primitive

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

forces were it not that our material is here
inadequate. We content ourselves by em-
phasizing the fact, concerning which hardly
any doubt still exists, that the productions of
the artist give outlet also to his sexual desire,
and in the case of Leonardo we can refer to
the information imparted by Vasari, namely,
that heads of laughing women and pretty boys,
or representations of his sexual objects, at-
tracted attention among his first artistic efforts.
It seems that during his flourishing youth
Leonardo at first worked in an uninhibited
manner. As he took his father as a model for
his outer conduct in life, he passed through a
period of manly creative power and artistic pro-
ductivity in Milan, where favored by fate he
found a substitute for his father in the duke
Lodovico Moro. But the experience of others
was soon confirmed in him, to wit, that almost
complete suppression of the real sexual life
does not furnish the most favorable conditions
for the activity of the sublimated sexual striv-
ings. The prototype of his sexual life asserted
itself, his activity and ability to quick decisions
began to weaken, the tendency to reflection and

122

delay was already noticeable as a disturbance
in The Holy Supper, and with the influence of
the technique determined the fate of this mag-
nificent work. Slowly a process developed in
him which can be put parallel only to the re-
gressions of neurotics. His development at
puberty into the artist was outstripped by the
early infantile determinant of the investigator,
the second sublimation of his erotic impulses
receded in the face of the primitive one which
was prepared at the first repression. He became
an investigator, first in service of his art, later
independently and away from his art. With
the loss of his patron, the substitute for his fa-
ther, and with the increasing difficulties in his
life, the regressive displacement extended in
dimension. He became “impacientissimo al
pennello” (most impatient with the brush) as
reported by a correspondent of the countess
Isabella d’Este who desired to possess at any
cost a painting from his hand.² His infantile
past had obtained control over him. The in-
vestigation, however, which now took the place
of his artistic production, seems to have born

²Seidlitz II, p. 271.

123

certain traits which betrayed the activity of un-
conscious impulses; this was seen in his in-
satiability, his regardless obstinacy, and in his
lack of ability to adjust himself to actual con-
ditions.

At the summit of his life, in the age of the
first fifties, at a time when the sex charac-
teristics of women have already undergone a
regressive change, and when the libido in men
not infrequently ventures into an energetic
advance, a new transformation came over
him. Still deeper strata of his psychic content
became active again, but this further regres-
sion was of benefit to his art which was in a
state of deterioration. He met the woman
who awakened in him the memory of the happy
and sensuously enraptured smile of his mother,
and under the influence of this awakening he
reacquired the stimulus which guided him in
the beginning of his artistic efforts when he
formed the smiling woman. He painted
Monna Lisa, Saint Anne, and a number of
mystic pictures which were characterized by
the enigmatic smile. With the help of his old-
est erotic feelings he triumphed in conquering

124

once more the inhibition in his art. This last
development faded away in the obscurity of the
approaching old age. But even before this his
intellect rose to the highest capacity of a view
of life, which was far in advance of his time.

In the preceding chapters I have shown what
justification one may have for such represen-
tation of Leonardo’s course of development,
for this manner of arranging his life and ex-
plaining his wavering between art and science.
If after accomplishing these things I should
provoke the criticism from even friends and
adepts of psychoanalysis, that I have only writ-
ten a psychoanalytic romance, I should answer
that I certainly did not overestimate the relia-
bility of these results. Like others I suc-
cumbed to the attraction emanating from this
great and mysterious man, in whose being one
seems to feel powerful propelling passions,
which after all can only evince themselves so
remarkably subdued.

But whatever may be the truth about Leo-
nardo’s life we cannot relinquish our effort to
investigate it psychoanalytically before we have
finished another task. In general we must

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

mark out the limits which are set up for the
working capacity of psychoanalysis in biog-
raphy so that every omitted explanation should
not be held up to us as a failure. Psycho-
analytic investigation has at its disposal the
data of the history of the person’s life, which
on the one hand consists of accidental events
and environmental influences, and on the other
hand of the reported reactions of the individ-
ual. Based on the knowledge of psychic mech-
anisms it now seeks to investigate dynamically
the character of the individual from his reac-
tions, and to lay bare his earliest psychic motive
forces as well as their later transformations
and developments. If this succeeds then the
reaction of the personality is explained through
the coöperation of constitutional and accidental
factors or through inner and outer forces. If
such an undertaking, as perhaps in the case of
Leonardo, does not yield definite results then
the blame for it is not to be laid to the faulty
or inadequate psychoanalytic method, but to
the vague and fragmentary material left by
tradition about this person. It is, therefore,
only the author who forced psychoanalysis to

126

furnish an expert opinion on such insufficient
material, who is to be held responsible for the
failure.

However, even if one had at his disposal a
very rich historical material and could make
the best use of the psychic mechanisms, a
psychoanalytic investigation could not possibly
furnish a definite view, if it concerns two im-
portant questions, that the individual could
turn out only so and not differently. Concern-
ing Leonardo we had to represent the view
that the accident of his illegitimate birth and
the pampering of his mother exerted the most
decisive influence on his character formation,
and on his later fate, through the fact that
the sexual repression following this infantile
phase caused him to sublimate his libido into
a thirst for knowledge, which conditioned his
sexual inactivity for his entire later life. The
repression, however, which followed the first
erotic gratification of childhood did not have
to take place, in another individual it would
perhaps not have taken place or it would have
turned out not nearly as profuse. We must
recognize here a degree of freedom which

127

can no longer be solved psychoanalytically.
One is as little justified in representing the issue
of this shift of repression as the only one pos-
sible. It is quite probable that another person
would not have succeeded in withdrawing the
main part of his libido from the repression
through sublimation into a desire for knowl-
edge; under the same influences as Leonardo
another person might have sustained a per-
manent injury to his intellectual work or an
uncontrollable disposition to compulsion neuro-
sis. The two characteristics of Leonardo
which remained unexplained through psycho-
analytic effort are first, his particular tendency
to repress his impulses, and second, his extraor-
dinary ability to sublimate the primitive im-
pulses.

The impulses and their transformations are
the last things that psychoanalysis can discern.
Henceforth it leaves the place to biological in-
vestigation. The tendency to repression, as
well as the ability to sublimate, must be traced
back to the organic bases of the character, upon
which alone the psychic structure springs up.
As artistic talent and productive ability are

128

intimately connected with sublimation we have
to admit that also the nature of artistic attain-
ment is psychoanalytically inaccessible to us.
Biological investigation of our time endeavors
to explain the chief traits of the organic con-
stitution of a person through the fusion of male
and female predispositions in the material
sense; Leonardo’s physical beauty as well as
his left-handedness furnish here some support.
However, we do not wish to leave the ground
of pure psychologic investigation. Our aim
remains to demonstrate the connection between
outer experiences and reactions of the person
over the path of the activity of the impulses.
Even if psychoanalysis does not explain to us
the fact of Leonardo’s artistic accomplishment,
it still gives us an understanding of the expres-
sions and limitations of the same. It does
seem as if only a man with Leonardo’s child-
hood experiences could have painted Monna
Lisa and Saint Anne, and could have prepared
his works for that sad fate and so attain un-
heard of fame as a naturalist; it seems as if
the key to all his attainments and failures

129

was hidden in the childhood phantasy of the
vulture.
But may one not take offense at the results
of an investigation which concede to the acci-
dents of the parental constellation so decisive
an influence on the fate of a person, which, for
example, subordinates Leonardo’s fate to his
illegitimate birth and to the sterility of his first
step-mother Donna Albiera? I believe that
one has no right to feel so; if one considers
accident as unworthy of determining our fate,
it is only a relapse to the pious aspect of life,
the overcoming of which Leonardo himself
prepared when he put down in writing that the
sun does not move. We are naturally grieved
over the fact that a just God and a kindly provi-
dence do not guard us better against such in-
fluences in our most defenseless age. We
thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact
everything in our life is accident from our very
origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and
ovum, an accident, which nevertheless partici-
pates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature,
lacking only the connection to our wishes and

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

illusions. The division of life’s determinants
into the “fatalities” of our constitution and the
“accidents” of our childhood may still be in-
definite in individual cases, but taken alto-
gether one can no longer entertain any doubt
about the importance of precisely our first
years of childhood. We all still show too little
respect for nature, which in Leonardo’s deep
words recalling Hamlet’s speech “is full of in-
finite reasons which never appeared in experi-
ence.” ³ Every one of us human beings cor-
responds to one of the infinite experiments in
which these “reasons of nature” force them-
selves into experience.

³La natura è piena d’infinite ragionè che non furono mai in
isperienza, M. Herzfeld, l. c. p. II.

THE END