A Childhood Memory: Leonardo Da Vinci, Part II
In the previous article, some traits of Leonardo’s personality were given. It concluded by saying that Leonardo, that enigmatic being from the Renaissance era, felt a great repulsion regarding sex. I quoted some phrases this artist uttered to show what he was like. All of this forms part of a psychoanalytic study performed by Freud.
At this time, I will present another part of the Freudian analysis of Leonardo; this part is much more interesting than the previous one, given that through one of Leonardo’s childhood memories, Freud discovered the obsessive idea that the ingenious artist carried with him throughout his entire life.
As we know, Leonardo was a student of Nature and at one time he was doing research on the flight of vultures; in the middle of taking notes, he recounted one of his childhood memories; which states the following: “Finding myself in the crib, a vulture approached, opened my mouth with its tail and struck me with it, repeatedly, between my lips.” Faced with such an account, Freud asks himself two questions: Is it possible that somebody could have memories from the breast-feeding age? Is the content of the story not an unrealistic and fabulous excess? To the first question he answers: it is not impossible for an individual to conserve memories from the breast-feeding age, but nor can this be considered to be a proven fact. And in response to the second question he states: it does not deal with a childhood memory but rather a later fantasy transferred by him to his childhood.
However, what Freud was looking for was not to verify if it was a fantasy or if the content of the experience lived was real or unreal. What he proposed was to break it down, word by word, in order to find the real meaning of what Leonardo was recounting, with the purpose of studying vultures.
Since Leonardo was a man with a tremendous interest in knowledge and, as a result, read whatever fell into his hands, Freud assumes that the large base of knowledge that the artist possessed had been an influencing factor in the realization, or better said, the creation of the strange childhood fantasy. He found it to be strange since the content was an unrealistic event, and he discovered, firstly, that the story, once translated into psychoanalytic language, had an erotic orientation.
Before continuing with the impressions of Freud, it is necessary to refer to some important events in the life of Leonardo. Leonardo born out of wedlock, something that in his time was not socially considered to be a serious blemish. His mother, Catalina, had relations with Ser Piero Da Vinci, but upon the birth of Leonardo, Ser Piero abandoned Catalina with his son and married Donna Albiera. The first 5 years of Leonardo’s life pass at the side of the abandoned mother who treats her son, trying to provide him the affection that she continued to need from Piero and that she considers that Ser Piero should give his son. He is this treated as a man, given that she lacks a husband to accompany her in her tender function as mother. This arouses in Leonardo a precocious sexuality, which he represses. His repression leads him to the point of substituting himself for his mother, and thinking as her, he chooses erotic models of his same sex. This fact makes Freud reach the conclusion that, due to the tender caresses of his mother and the absence of his father, Leonardo repressed the love that every child feels for their mother, erotically, substituting himself for her and thus converting himself into a homosexual.
Now, continuing with Leonardo’s childhood memory or fantasy: Freud goes back to antiquity.
He searches for the meaning of the vulture. He finds that for the Egyptians, this animal was the goddess of motherhood. This was because there was a belief that within the species of vultures there were only females. How did they conceive, you may ask yourself? It was said that upon reaching a certain time of year, the female vultures remained motionless in the air, opened their vagina and were fertilized by the wind. Freud, in light of the legend of the vultures, concludes that the conflict lived by Leonardo in his first years and his excessive thirst for knowledge made him convince himself that he was a vulture offspring, who had only a mother and no father.
Freud for a time forgets about antiquity and returns to the content of Leonardo’s childhood fantasy. If you reread the recounting of his fantasy at the beginning of this article, you will be able to realize something: it is a purely sexual story. The vulture’s tail signifies the sexual organ of a man which Leonardo covers with the image of the vulture’s tail; then he recounts a fellatio, i.e., a sexual act in which the virile organ is introduced inside the mouth of the person used to achieve active satisfaction.
The act described above, which is considered by bourgeois society as one of the most repugnant sexual perversions, loses its repulsive character for a woman in love and furthermore, all those who, grimace dumbfounded would be amazed to know the supremely innocent source of this activity; it is nothing other than the transformation of an activity which as children we adored: drinking milk from our mother’s breast.
