Freud - Complete Works (389 page)

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2262

   If we examine with the eyes of a
psycho-analyst Leonardo’s phantasy of the vulture, it does
not appear strange for long. We seem to recall having come across
the same sort of thing in many places, for example in dreams; so
that we may venture to translate the phantasy from its own special
language into words that are generally understood. The translation
is then seen to point to an erotic content. A tail,
‘
coda
’, is one of the most familiar symbols and
substitutive expressions for the male organ, in Italian no less
than in other languages; the situation in the phantasy, of a
vulture opening the child’s mouth and beating about inside it
vigorously with its tail, corresponds to the idea of an act of
fellatio
, a sexual act in which the penis is put into the
mouth of the person involved. It is strange that this phantasy is
so completely passive in character; moreover it resembles certain
dreams and phantasies found in women or passive homosexuals (who
play the part of the woman in sexual relations).

   I hope the reader will restrain
himself and not allow a surge of indignation to prevent his
following psycho-analysis any further because it leads to an
unpardonable aspersion on the memory of a great and pure man the
very first time it is applied to his case. Such indignation, it is
clear, will never be able to tell us the significance of
Leonardo’s childhood phantasy; at the same time Leonardo has
acknowledged the phantasy in the most unambiguous fashion, and we
cannot abandon our expectation - or, if it sounds better, our
prejudice - that a phantasy of this kind must have
some
meaning, in the same way as any other psychical creation: a dream,
a vision or a delirium. Let us rather therefore give a fair hearing
for a while to the work of analysis, which indeed has not yet
spoken its last word.

   The inclination to take a
man’s sexual organ into the mouth and suck at it, which in
respectable society is considered a loathsome sexual perversion, is
nevertheless found with great frequency among women of to-day - and
of earlier times as well, as ancient sculptures show -, and in the
state of being in love it appears completely to lose its repulsive
character. Phantasies derived from this inclination are found by
doctors even in women who have not become aware of the
possibilities of obtaining sexual satisfaction in this way by
reading Krafft Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
or from
other sources of information. Women, it seems, find no difficulty
in producing this kind of wishful phantasy spontaneously.¹
Further investigation in forms us that this situation, which
morality condemns with such severity, may be traced to an origin of
the most innocent kind. It only repeats in a different form a
situation in which we all once felt comfortable - when we were
still in our suckling days (‘
essendo io in
culla
’)² and took our mother’s (or
wet-nurse’s) nipple into our mouth and sucked at it. The
organic impression of this experience - the first source of
pleasure in our life - doubtless remains indelibly printed on us;
and when at a later date the child becomes familiar with the
cow’s udder whose function is that of a nipple, but whose
shape and position under the belly make it resemble a penis, the
preliminary stage has been reached which will later enable him to
form the repellent sexual phantasy.

  
¹
On this point compare my ‘Fragment of
an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905
e
).

  
²
[‘While I was in my
cradle.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2263

   Now we understand why Leonardo
assigned the memory of his supposed experience with the vulture to
his suckling period. What the phantasy conceals is merely a
reminiscence of sucking - or being suckled - at his mother’s
breast, a scene of human beauty that he, like so many artists,
undertook to depict with his brush, in the guise of the mother of
God and her child. There is indeed another point which we do not
yet understand and which we must not lose sight of: this
reminiscence, which has the same importance for both sexes, has
been transformed by the man Leonardo into a passive homosexual
phantasy. For the time being we shall put aside the question of
what there may be to connect homosexuality with sucking at the
mother’s breast, merely recalling that tradition does in fact
represent Leonardo as a man with homosexual feelings. In this
connection, it is irrelevant to our purpose whether the charge
brought against the young Leonardo was justified or not. What
decides whether we describe someone as an invert is not his actual
behaviour, but his emotional attitude.

   Our interest is next claimed by
another unintelligible feature of Leonardo’s childhood
phantasy. We interpret the phantasy as one of being suckled by his
mother, and we find his mother replaced by - a vulture. Where does
this vulture come from and how does it happen to be found in its
present place?

   At this point a thought comes to
the mind from such a remote quarter that it would be tempting to
set it aside. In the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians the
mother is represented by a picture of a vulture.¹ The
Egyptians also worshipped a Mother Goddess, who was represented as
having a vulture’s head, or else several heads, of which at
least one was a vulture’s.² This goddess’s name
was pronounced
Mut
. Can the similarity to the sound of our
word
Mutter
[‘mother’] be merely a coincidence?
There is, then, some real connection between vulture and mother -
but what help is that to us? For have we any right to expect
Leonardo to know of it, seeing that the first man who succeeded in
reading hieroglyphics was François Champollion
(1790-1832)?³

   It would be interesting to
enquire how it could be that the ancient Egyptians came to choose
the vulture as a symbol of motherhood. Now the religion and
civilization of the Egyptians were objects of scientific curiosity
even to the Greeks and the Romans: and long before we ourselves
were able to read the monuments of Egypt we had at our disposal
certain pieces of information about them derived from the extant
writings of classical antiquity. Some of these writings were by
well-known authors, such as Strabo, Plutarch and Ammianus
Marcellinus; while others bear unfamiliar names and are uncertain
in their source of origin and their date of composition, like the
Hieroglyphica
of Horapollo Nilous and the book of oriental
priestly wisdom which has come down to us under the name of the god
Hermes Trismegistos. We learn from these sources that the vulture
was regarded as a symbol of motherhood because only female vultures
were believed to exist; there were, it was thought, no males of
this species.
⁴
A counterpart
to this restriction to one sex was also known to the natural
history of antiquity: in the case of the scarabaeus beetle, which
the Egyptians worshipped as divine, it was thought that only males
existed.
⁵

  
¹
Horapollo (
Hieroglyphica
 
1
, 11): ‘
Μητέgα
δε
γgάΦουτες . . . γΰπαζωγgαΦοΰσιυ.
’
[‘To denote a
mother . . . they delineate a
vulture.’]

  
²
Roscher (1894-97), Lanzone
(1882).

  
³
Hartleben (1906).

  
⁴
‘
γΰπα
δε άggευα σΰ
Φασι
γιυέσθαι
ποτε άλλά
θηλείας
άπάσας
.’ [‘They say that no male
vulture has ever existed but all are females.’] Quoted by von
Römer (1903, 732).

  
⁵
Plutarch: ‘Veluti scarabaeos mares
tantum esse putarunt Aegyptii sic inter vultures mares non inveniri
statuerunt.’ [‘Just as they believed that only male
scarabs existed, so the Egyptians concluded that no male vultures
were to be found.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2264

   How then were vultures supposed
to be impregnated if all of them were female? This is a point fully
explained in a passage in Horapollo.¹ At a certain time these
birds pause in mid-flight, open their vagina and are impregnated by
the wind.

   We have now unexpectedly reached
a position where we can take something as very probable which only
a short time before we had to reject as absurd. It is quite
possible that Leonardo was familiar with the scientific fable which
was responsible for the vulture being used by the Egyptians as a
pictorial representation of the idea of mother. He was a wide
reader and his interest embraced all branches of literature and
learning. In the Codex Atlanticus we find a catalogue of all the
books he possessed at a particular date,² and in addition
numerous jottings on other books that he had borrowed from friends;
and if we may judge by the extracts from his notes by
Richter,³ the extent of his reading can hardly be
overestimated. Early works on natural history were well represented
among them in addition to contemporary books; and all of them were
already in print at the time. Milan was in fact the leading city in
Italy for the new art of printing.

   On proceeding further we come
across a piece of information which can turn the probability that
Leonardo knew the fable of the vulture into a certainty. The
learned editor and commentator on Horapollo has the following note
on the text already quoted above: ‘Caeterum hanc fabulam de
vulturibus cupide amplexi sunt Patres Ecclesiastici, ut ita
argumento ex rerum natura petito refutarent eos, qui Virginis
partum negabant; itaque apud omnes fere hujus rei mentio
occurit.’
⁴

  
¹
Horapollonis Niloi Hieroglyphica
,
ed. Leemans (1835, 14). The words that refer to the vulture’s
sex run:

‘
πητέgα
μέυ, έπειδή
άggευ έυ
τούτφ τ
v
γέυει
τώυ ζώωυ
σύχ
ύπάgχει
.’
[‘(They use the picture of a
vulture to denote) a mother, because in this race of creatures
there are no males.’]

  
²
Müntz (1899, 282).

  
³
Müntz, (ibid.).

  
⁴
[‘But this story about the vulture
was eagerly taken up by the Fathers of the Church, in order to
refute, by means of a proof drawn from the natural order, those who
denied the Virgin Birth. The subject is therefore mentioned in
almost all of them.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2265

   So the fable of the single sex of
vultures and their mode of conception remained something very far
from an unimportant anecdote like the analogous tale of the
scarabaeus beetle; it had been seized on by the Fathers of the
Church so that they could have at their disposal a proof drawn from
natural history to confront those who doubted sacred history. If
vultures were described in the best accounts of antiquity as
depending on the wind for impregnation, why could not the same
thing have also happened on one occasion with a human female? Since
the fable of the vulture could be turned to this account
‘almost all’ the Fathers of the Church made a practice
of telling it, and thus it can hardly be doubted that Leonardo too
came to know of it through its being favoured by so wide a
patronage.

   We can now reconstruct the origin
of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. He once happened to read in
one of the Fathers or in a book on natural history the statement
that all vultures were females and could reproduce their kind
without any assistance from a male: and at that point a memory
sprang to his mind, which was transformed into the phantasy we have
been discussing, but which meant to signify that he also had been
such a vulture-child - he had had a mother, but no father. With
this memory was associated, in the only way in which impressions of
so great an age can find expression, an echo of the pleasure he had
had at his mother’s breast. The allusion made by the Fathers
of the Church to the idea of the Blessed Virgin and her child - an
idea cherished by every artist - must have played its part in
helping the phantasy to appear valuable and important to him.
Indeed in this way he was able to identify himself with the child
Christ, the comforter and saviour not of this one woman alone.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2266

   Our aim in dissecting a childhood
phantasy is to separate the real memory that it contains from the
later motives that modify and distort it. In Leonardo’s case
we believe that we now know the real content of the phantasy: the
replacement of his mother by the vulture indicates that the child
was aware of his father’s absence and found himself alone
with his mother. The fact of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth is
in harmony with his vulture phantasy; it was only on this account
that he could compare himself to a vulture-child. But the next
reliable fact that we possess about his youth is that by the time
he was five he had been received into his father’s household.
We are completely ignorant when that happened - whether it was a
few months after his birth or whether it was a few weeks before the
drawing-up of the land-register. It is here that the interpretation
of the vulture phantasy comes in: Leonardo, it seems to tell us,
spent the critical first years of his life not by the side of his
father and stepmother, but with his poor, forsaken, real mother, so
that he had time to feel the absence of his father. This seems a
slender and yet a somewhat daring conclusion to have emerged from
our psycho-analytic efforts, but its significance will increase as
we continue our investigation. Its certainty is reinforced when we
consider the circumstances that did in fact operate in
Leonardo’s childhood. In the same year that Leonardo was
born, the sources tell us, his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, married
Donna Albiera, a lady of good birth; it was to the childlessness of
this marriage that the boy owed his reception into his
father’s (or rather his grandfather’s) house - an event
which had taken place by the time he was five years old, as the
document attests. Now it is not usual at the start of a marriage to
put an illegitimate offspring into the care of the young bride who
still expects to be blessed with children of her own. Years of
disappointment must surely first have elapsed before it was decided
to adopt the illegitimate child - who had probably grown up an
attractive young boy - as a compensation for the absence of the
legitimate children that had been hoped for. It fits in best with
the interpretation of the vulture phantasy if at least three years
of Leonardo’s life, and perhaps five, had elapsed before he
could exchange the solitary person of his mother for a parental
couple. And by then it was too late. In the first three or four
years of life certain impressions become fixed and ways of reacting
to the outside world are established which can never be deprived of
their importance by later experiences.