Leonardo da Vinci A PSYCHOSEXUAL STUDY OF AN INFANTILE REMINISCENCE

by Sigmund Freud, A. A. Brill (Translator)

Overview

When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with
frail human material, approaches the great personages of humanity, it is
not impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by
laymen. It does not strive "to blacken the radiant and to drag the
sublime into the mire"; it finds no satisfaction in diminishing the
distance between the perfection of the great and the inadequacy of the
ordinary objects. But it cannot help finding that everything is worthy
of understanding that can be perceived through those prototypes, and it
also believes that none is so big as to be ashamed of being subject to
the laws which control the normal and morbid actions with the same
strictness.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was admired even by his contemporaries as
one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, still even then he
appeared as mysterious to them as he now appears to us. An all-sided
genius, "whose form can only be divined but never deeply fathomed,"[1]
he exerted the most decisive influence on his time as an artist; and it
remained to us to recognize his greatness as a naturalist which was
united in him with the artist. Although he left masterpieces of the art
of painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and
unused, the investigator in him has never quite left the artist, often
it has severely injured the artist and in the end it has perhaps
suppressed the artist altogether. According to Vasari, Leonardo
reproached himself during the last hour of his life for having insulted
God and men because he has not done his duty to his art.[2] And even if
Vasari's story lacks all probability and belongs to those legends which
began to be woven about the mystic master while he was still living, it
nevertheless retains indisputable value as a testimonial of the judgment
of those people and of those times.

What was it that removed the personality of Leonardo from the
understanding of his contemporaries? Certainly not the many sidedness of
his capacities and knowledge, which allowed him to install himself as a
player of the lyre on an instrument invented by himself, in the court of
Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, the Duke of Milan, or which allowed
him to write to the same person that remarkable letter in which he
boasts of his abilities as a civil and military engineer. For the
combination of manifold talents in the same person was not unusual in
the times of the Renaissance; to be sure Leonardo himself furnished one
of the most splendid examples of such persons. Nor did he belong to that
type of genial persons who are outwardly poorly endowed by nature, and
who on their side place no value on the outer forms of life, and in the
painful gloominess of their feelings fly from human relations. On the
contrary he was tall and symmetrically built, of consummate beauty of
countenance and of unusual physical strength, he was charming in his
manner, a master of speech, and jovial and affectionate to everybody. He
loved beauty in the objects of his surroundings, he was fond of wearing
magnificent garments and appreciated every refinement of conduct. In his
treatise[3] on the art of painting he compares in a significant passage
the art of painting with its sister arts and thus discusses the
difficulties of the sculptor: "Now his face is entirely smeared and
powdered with marble dust, so that he looks like a baker, he is covered
with small marble splinters, so that it seems as if it snowed on his
back, and his house is full of stone splinters, and dust. The case of
the painter is quite different from that; for the painter is well
dressed and sits with great comfort before his work, he gently and very
lightly brushes in the beautiful colors. He wears as decorative clothes
as he likes, and his house is filled with beautiful paintings and is
spotlessly clean. He often enjoys company, music, or some one may read
for him various nice works, and all this can be listened to with great
pleasure, undisturbed by any pounding from the hammer and other noises."

It is quite possible that the conception of a beaming jovial and happy
Leonardo was true only for the first and longer period of the master's
life. From now on, when the downfall of the rule of Lodovico Moro forced
him to leave Milan, his sphere of action and his assured position, to
lead an unsteady and unsuccessful life until his last asylum in France,
it is possible that the luster of his disposition became pale and some
odd features of his character became more prominent. The turning of his
interest from his art to science which increased with age must have also
been responsible for widening the gap between himself and his
contemporaries. All his effo

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012124739
Publisher:	SAP
Publication date:	01/27/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
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