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WD_345/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0345 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Leonardo da Vinci was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep" - Sigmund Freud.
-www.kausal.com/
"Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood" (1910) by Sophie De Mijolla-Mellor.
This monograph on Leonardo da Vinci was the first of this kind written by Freud, and he had great reservations about it. There were precedents, however: Isidor Sadger had written several histories of artists with pathologies (Conrad-Ferdinand Meyer, Nikolas Lenau, Heinrich von Kleist). For years Freud had been interested in Leonardo da Vinci (see his letter to Wilhelm Fliess of October 9, 1898) and identified with Leonardo's passion for investigation and the nature of his research, which created a scandal at the time. Leonardo da Vinci and his ilk—Francis Bacon, Nicolas Copernicus, Bernard Palissy—are heroes of scientific research, men who have "troubled the world's sleep" (Friedrich Hebbel).
The first of the book's six chapters discusses the passion for investigation, its infantile origins, and its drawbacks from the point of view of love, social relations, and other activities. Leonardo is a good example of such behavior because he allows Freud to contrast the inhibition (the slowness of execution) characteristic of his painting with his excessive investment in research. Freud defines the three outcomes of infantile sexual investigation: inhibition, obsession, sublimation. "[L]ibido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated at the very beginning into curiosity" (p. 79).
The second chapter is devoted to Leonardo's memory of his childhood. Freud interprets the memory as a fantasy and compares it with mythological information. Unfortunately, Freud's discussion is not pertinent, because a translation error leads him to talk about a vulture instead of a kite.
The third chapter provides a description, based on the fantasy of fellatio expressed in the memory, of a particular type of homosexuality. In this type of homosexuality, the subject identifies with his mother so he can experience self-love through other young men, objects of his homosexual choice. This discussion considers narcissistic choice long before Freud introduced the concept of narcissism.
In chapter 4 Freud continues his discussion of the memory of Leonardo's mother in his analysis of Mona Lisa's smile. Chapter 5 describes Leonardo's antagonism toward his father. Freud saw in this antagonism the origin of Leonardo's courage as an investigator, primarily in the face of religious authority. Chapter 6, which contains an important discussion of the role of chance, presents Freud's methodological conclusion on creativity.
Freud's essay on Leonardo is one of his best known works. Though Freud quotes several biographies of artists, he transforms the art form by investigating the obsessive investment associated with sublimated activity.
Source Citation:
Freud, Sigmund. (1910c). Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci. Leipzig: F. Deuticke; G.W., vol. 8, pp. 127-211. Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. SE, 11: 57-137.
Bibliography:
Barande, Ilse. (1977). Le maternel singulier: Freud et Léonard de Vinci. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne.
Eissler, Kurt R. (1961). Leonardo da Vinci. New York: International Universities Press.
-www.answers.com/topic/
leonardo-da-vinci-and-a-memory-of-his-childhood?cat=health
From LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD (1910) - Sigmund Freud.
Anyone who thinks of Leonardo's paintings will be reminded of a remarkable smile, at once fascinating and puzzling, which he conjured up on the lips of his female subjects. It is an unchanging smile, on long, curved lips; it has become a mark of his style and the name 'Leonardesque' has been chosen for it. In the strangely beautiful face of the Florentine Mona Lisa del Giocondo it has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever looks at it. This smile has called for an interpretation, and it has met with many of the most varied kinds, none of which has been satisfactory. 'For almost four centuries now Mona Lisa has caused all who talk of her, after having gazed on her so long, to lose their heads' [Gruyer].
Muther (1909, 1, 314) writes: 'What especially casts a spell on the spectator is the daemonic magic of this smile. Hundreds of poets and authors have written about this woman who now appears to smile on us so seductively, and now to stare coldly and without soul into space; and no one has solved the riddle of her smile, no one has read the meaning of her thoughts. Everything, even the landscape, is mysteriously dream-like, and seems to be trembling in a kind of sultry sensuality.'
The idea that two distinct elements are combined in Mona Lisa's smile is one that has struck several critics. They accordingly find in the beautiful Florentine's expression the most perfect representation of the contrasts which dominate the erotic life of women; the contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding -- consuming men as if they were alien beings. This is the view of Müntz (1899, 417): 'We know what an insoluble and enthralling enigma Mona Lisa Gioconda has never ceased through nearly four centuries to pose to the admirers that throng in front of her. No artist (I borrow the words from the sensitive writer who conceals himself behind the pseudonym of Pierre de Corlay) "has ever expressed so well the very essence of femininity: tenderness and coquetry, modesty and secret sensuous joy, all the mystery of a heart that holds aloof, a brain that meditates, a personality that holds back and yields nothing of itself save its radiance".' The Italian writer Angelo Conti (1910, 93) saw the picture in the Louvre brought to life by a ray of sunshine: 'The lady smiled in regal calm: her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, all the heredity of the species, the will to seduce and to ensnare, the charm of deceit, the kindness that conceals a cruel purpose, -- all this appeared and disappeared by turns behind the laughing veil and buried itself in the poem of her smile . . . Good and wicked, cruel and compassionate, graceful and feline, she laughed . . .'
Leonardo spent four years painting at this picture, perhaps from 1503 to 1507, during his second period of residence in Florence, when he was over fifty. According to Vasari he employed the most elaborate artifices to keep the lady amused during the sittings and to retain the famous smile on her features. In its present condition the picture has preserved but little of all the delicate details which his brush reproduced on the canvas at that time; while it was being painted it was considered to be the highest that art could achieve, but it is certain that Leonardo himself was not satisfied with it, declaring it to be incomplete, and did not deliver it to the person who had commissioned it, but took it to France with him, where his patron, Francis I, acquired it from him for the Louvre.
Let us leave unsolved the riddle of the expression on Mona Lisa's face, and note the indisputable fact that her smile has exercised no less powerful a fascination on the artist than on all who have looked at it for the last four hundred years. From that date the captivating smile reappears in all his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo's Mona Lisa is a portrait, we cannot assume that he added on his own account such an expressive feature to her face -- a feature that she did not herself possess. The conclusion seems hardly to be avoided that he found this smile in his model and fell so strongly under its spell that from then on he bestowed it on the free creations of his phantasy. This interpretation, which cannot be called far-fetched, is put forward, for example, by Konstantinowa (1907, 44):
'During the long period in which the artist was occupied with the portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo, he had entered into the subtle details of the features on this lady's face with such sympathetic feeling that he transferred its traits -- in particular the mysterious smile and the strange gaze -- to all the faces that he painted or drew afterwards. The Gioconda's peculiar facial expression can even be perceived in the picture of John the Baptist in the Louvre; but above all it may be clearly recognized in the expression on Mary's face in the "Madonna and Child with St. Anne".'
Yet this situation may also have come about in another way. The need for a deeper reason behind the attraction of La Gioconda's smile, which so moved the artist that he was never again free from it, has been felt by more than one of his biographers. Walter Pater, who sees in the picture of Mona Lisa a 'presence . . . expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire' [1873, 118], and who writes very sensitively of 'the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work' [ibid., 117], leads us into another clue when he declares (loc. cit.):
'Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last . . .'
Marie Herzfeld (1906, 88) has no doubt something very similar in mind when she declares that in the Mona Lisa Leonardo encountered his own self and for this reason was able to put so much of his own nature into the picture 'whose features had lain all along in mysterious sympathy within Leonardo's mind'.
Let us attempt to clarify what is suggested here. It may very well have been that Leonardo was fascinated by Mona Lisa's smile for the reason that it awoke something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind -- probably an old memory. This memory was of sufficient importance for him never to get free of it when it had once been aroused; he was continually forced to give it new expression. Pater's confident assertion that we can see, from childhood, a face like Mona Lisa's defining itself on the fabric of his dreams, seems convincing and deserves to be taken literally.
Vasari mentions that 'heads of laughing women' formed the subject of Leonardo's first artistic endeavors. The passage -- which, since it is not intended to prove anything, is quite beyond suspicion -- runs more fully according to Schorn's translation (1843, 3, 6): 'In his youth he made some heads of laughing women out of clay, which were reproduced in plaster, and some children's heads which were as beautiful as if they had been modelled by the hand of a master . . .'
Thus we learn that he began his artistic career by portraying two kinds of objects; and these cannot fail to remind us of the two kinds of sexual objects that we have inferred from the analysis of his vulture-phantasy. If the beautiful children's heads were reproductions of his own person as it was in his childhood, then the smiling women are nothing other than repetitions of his mother Caterina, and we begin to suspect the possibility that it was his mother who possessed the mysterious smile -- the smile that he had lost and that fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady.
Sigmund Freud [foreign language passages translated by Alan Tyson]
-people.virginia.edu/~djr4r/freud.html
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