Freud, Da Vinci: Psychoanalysis & Art Analysis

A childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci. iA re-analysis.
Men will speak to men who hear nothing, who have their eyes open
and do not see; they will talk to them and receive no answer; They
will beg pity on those who have ears and do not hear, and they will
light lights before a blind man.
Quoted by Sigmund Freud
SUBLIMIS 1ii, which rises, which is held in the air.
When Leonardo says that before feeling love or hate for something
you have to know it, he is not saying that he represses his affections
towards what he is knowing as long as he does not know it, but that
he aspires, through knowing that, to experience a love or a hatred
even more authentic, more accurate, to the extent that, as Leonardo
does, always through slow and successive approximations, we get
closer to the truth it contains. Leonardo does not repress his
affections, which he details in writing and in such a way that no one
in his time, or ever, perhaps, finds out or understands what he has
written, that is, his opinion and his most intimate reflections, not just
in terms of what he loves (even before he meets him or as he gets to
know him), but in terms of what he hates or dislikes, things he hates
to exist or happen, but still investigates and even invents.
The word discover comes from a Vulgar and Pan-Roman Latin
formation that has remained in all the Romance languages. A
complicated lexical formation replaced the verb denudare, to
undress, remove clothing or strip someone of something for
discooperire. Operire means to cover, from which terms such as
operculum, lid, come, to designate organs that cover others such as
the gills of fish. 2Cooperire means to cover, to cover entirely and
completely, that is, to cover. Then Vulgar Latin added dis to
cooperire, not in the sense of “multiple-way separation” that came
from classical Latin, but with the sense of des (reversal of an action
already done). Discooperire meant to uncover something that was
1All
etymological definitions in this text come from the same web page (see note at
the end)
2See Sigmund Freud's studies with eels
previously it had covered up or remained hidden, hence our word
"discover." What meaning does the word "discover" have for us
today? In what sense is someone a discoverer? Is it someone who
investigates something and reveals it to us, makes it clear to us,
presents it to us or re-presents it to us or is it someone who
undresses us, strips us of something and then uses us as a cover to
invest, reverse, a action like covering something, which had already
been done?
Can we not say that while Leonardo investigated something to
discern that something for us and then sift through it, Freud
dedicated himself to discovering us, re-inverting and re-investing us,
stripping us to later use that as a cover and/or, from the Greek ,
calyptra, to "cover", "cover", himself, or perhaps someone ? ( Sifting
means separating the bad seed from the good.)
It seems that Freud was never entirely clear whether he loved or
hated what he was investigating, nor what he aspired to with his
projects. The "Freudian Academy", unlike the Vincentian, was not
simply a "game", a mere entertainment with which Da Vinci wasted
his "time." Unlike Freud, it seems that, as Freud points out,
"Leonardo came to take up his brushes only reluctantly, leaving the
few pictorial works he undertook largely unfinished and unconcerned
about their subsequent fate... his longing for knowledge remained
oriented towards the outside world, as if there were something that
kept him from the investigation of the psychic life of man. In the
'Vincian Academy', for which he drew artistically complicated
emblems, a very small place was granted to psychology."
Freud also says: "Investigated instead of working and creating... as
Solmi believes, driven by the desire to perfect his art, studying the
qualities and laws of light, colors, shadows and perspective, with the
in order to achieve the highest mastery in the imitation of Nature and
show others the path that could lead them to it." But then he adds:
"He probably already had an exaggerated idea of the value of this
knowledge for the artist." 3And then: "Later, and following the
orientation of the pictorial needs, he went on to the external
investigation of the objects of painting, … and then to that of their
internal structure and their vital functions, elements that are also
expressed in the appearance and they demand a representation of
art. ... But his longing for knowledge remained oriented towards the
outside world, as if there were something that kept him away from
the investigation of the psychic life of man."
Freud says that Leonardo "barely granted a small place" to
psychology, as can be seen in his Monna Lisa (and this is an irony), to
which he granted only 4 years of his life!, or in The Last Supper, in
which Leonardo lavished himself between 4 and 6 years, according to
the different sources, while his Saint Anne, with the Virgin or in the
Child or The Virgin, the Child Jesus and Saint Anne was, apparently, a
commission that was made to Leonardo in 1499, of which there were
some cartoons like the one on display at the National Gallery, and
finally, the painting dating from between 1508 and 1510, lacking, as
can be seen, any hint of "psychological" deepening of the characters
represented or portrayed... For Freud his knowledge, that of
Leonardo, was oriented to the outside world, to the world of the
apparent, of fiction.
The point is that Leonardo did not intend to "create ." He was not
interested in "the creative" at all, as could be the case of Botticelli
whom Leonardo, as a painter, rightly reproaches for wanting to be
"creative" and not conforming to the study and representation of
things as they are. His aim was to know and copy from nature, from
what was already created. But in Freud, the artistic that he sees, or
sometimes seems to see, is confused as something merely visual,
external, apparent -which he later blames on the painter, perhaps in
terms of "fixation", of fixing his eyes on-, with the "creativity." From
crerare derives the verb to engender. And beget is made up of in
(penetrate) and generate (produce.) But produce, from Latin, comes
from the Latin verb producere: pro, towards and ducere, guide, drive.
3I
cannot fathom how the importance that Leonardo attached to the study of all
those things that Freud lists could be conceived as "exaggerated." The results of
this magnificent "exaggeration" are visible to all of us.
Which means that it seems that there are two meanings to beget and
to produce. One requires penetration, and the other is simply
spawning something to go or guide or drive forward, and there is no
talk of "penetration." Because penetration is entering the interior of
something, entering reaching the bottom. Today we speak only of
"productivity" without there being any need to get to the bottom of
it. Freud also seems not to know very well when one should speak of
generating something in one direction or the other.
"... The child's desire to know testifies to his tireless questioning,
which seems so enigmatic to the adult while he does not realize that
all these questions are nothing more than detours around a central
question and that they cannot have an end because the child
substitutes them a single question, which, however, he will never
pose directly. When the child reaches a more advanced period of
childhood and has expanded his knowledge, this manifestation of the
desire to know is frequently suddenly interrupted." No, what is
interrupted is not his desire or desire to know, but a new stage
begins that implies that the child already knows something, that he
has already understood something, which for the moment is enough
for him. 4The child does not want to know more about this, not for
now, because what could encyclopedic knowledge contribute to him,
and/or graphically represented or visualized and/or "adultified" on
that specific topic? His previous questions about the origin of man
and things, about his own origin, also about the sexual, came from
his authentic emotional and intellectual curiosity. In this new stage,
the child focuses his attention on another series of things that
intrigue him, that the environment offers him or sometimes spares
him, and for which he is completely receptive, and that, although
they are related to those other somewhat earlier, because all the
things that man gets to know, to know, are related to each other, yes
they are a detour until something inside him leads him to the full
satisfaction of some desire, to experience with his own body what is
that, for example. It is not a desire that the child has repressed, it is
simply a desire. On the other hand, it seems to me quite obvious that
even when the child manages to ask, to use the newly acquired
4Confusion
of tongues, S. Ferenczi
language to speak, to communicate orally and to ask, the child's
reflections and intuitions about himself and everything else begin as
soon as and/or at the same time that their "thinking apparatus" is
developing affectively, sensorially and cognitively, which initially is
only emotional. The child would be considering these same
questions, but perhaps in a somewhat "diffuse" or "confused" way,
and although relational, intimate. That look that the infant gives to
his mother is also a way of asking, what is all this so incredibly
beautiful, mom, that is happening to me/us? What are you mom, and
what am I and who would become my dad, and what is this that I
feed on? Because human communication begins long before we use
language.
"Psychoanalytic research provides us with a complete explanation of
all this, showing us that many children, perhaps the majority and
certainly the most intelligent, go through a stage from the age of
three that we could describe as a period of infantile sexual
investigation. Desire of knowing does not arise, as far as we know,
spontaneously in children of this age, but is provoked by the
impression of an important event: the birth of a sibling or the fear of
such a possibility, considered by the child as a threat to his interests
selfish
… The investigation falls on the problem of the origin of children, as if
the childish subject were looking for a way to avoid such an
unwanted event. We thus find out to our astonishment that the child
refuses to believe the data that is usually provided to him on this
matter; for example, the fable of the stork, so mythologically
significant, and that this act of disbelief initiates his intellectual
independence and sometimes his opposition to the adult, who will
never forgive his deception."
Here Freud describes his own experience regarding his childhood
research.
Freud tells us that "... To my knowledge, only once did Leonardo
include something about his childhood in his scientific notes." What
may seem true if we take as a reference only his notes. But not if we
take as a reference Leonardo's multiple works or what we know
about his "infantilism." And he continues: "In a place where he deals
with the flight of vultures he is suddenly interrupted to follow a
recollection of his earliest childhood years that arises in his memory:
'It seems as if I were predestined to deal so extensively with the
vulture, for one of the earliest recollections of my childhood is that,
while I was in the cradle, one of these animals came up to me,
opened my mouth with its tail, and hit me with it, repeatedly,
between the lips.'” Freud says : "We are, therefore, before a
childhood memory and certainly very unique, both for its content
and for the time in which it is located. It is perhaps not impossible for
an individual to retain memories of the time of infancy, but neither
can it be considered as proven thing." It may very well be conceivable
that Leonardo had such an unusually early memory, or it may be that
Leonardo's lactation lasted a few years, or it may be that Leonardo
imagined that it took place when he was in the cradle and not in bed,
or that he wanted to place that memory that could have happened to
him because Leonardo played with the birds, at a very early time, for
whatever unconscious reasons they were. Freud follows. “In any
case, the content of this memory of Leonardo, that is, the fact that a
vulture approached his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail,
seems to us so improbable and fabulous, that we are inclined to
accept a different hypothesis, with which we avoid the two
difficulties indicated above. The scene with the vulture would not
constitute a memory of Leonardo, but an afterthought transferred by
him to his childhood. Here Freud insists on confusing the fact that we
can have a memory of something that has really happened to us, no
matter how much our memory is not exact, with what we fantasize,
imagine, want to believe has happened to us. "The childhood
memories of men sometimes have no other origin. Instead of being
reproduced from the moment they are imprinted, as happens with
the conscious memories of adulthood, they are evoked after a long
time, when childhood has passed already past, and then they appear
deformed, falsified and put at the service of ulterior tendencies, so
that they are not strictly distinguishable from fantasies." (As if adults
could not distort, forget or falsify their "memories" of what could
have happened to them yesterday.) And then he says: "The best way
we can explain its nature is by thinking about the birth of the
historical chronicle in ancient peoples ... While the town was small
and weak, it did not think of writing its history and devoted itself to
tilling its soil, defending its existence against its neighbors, expanding
its domains and enriching itself. This was a heroic era without
history." And then: "But it was followed by another in which the
people became self-aware, felt rich and powerful, and felt the need
to find out where they came from and how they got to where they
are today. The Story, which had begun by simply noting the events of
the present, he then turned his gaze towards the past, brought
together traditions and legends, interpreted the survivals of the past
in uses and customs and thus created a history of the prehistoric
past. But this prehistory speaks of constituting, hopelessly, rather an
expression of contemporary opinions and desires than an image of
the past, since much of it had fallen into oblivion, another was
preserved distorted, many survivals were wrongly interpreted under
the influence of the circumstances of the moment and above all not
history was written for reasons of objective illustration, but with the
purpose of acting on contemporaries." In other words, 1. Suddenly,
for Freud, there is no point of truth, not even symbolic, neither in
legends, nor in tales, nor in myths, nor in the oral transmission that
people used before appearing writing. And then, 2. Perhaps Freud is,
unconsciously speaking of his own invention, psychoanalysis: which,
according to him, would serve to act on the contemporary, and no
longer to illustrate in an "objective" way those memories and events
of the past that can be that they are true, regardless of how we want
to interpret them. "The conscious memory that men preserve of the
events of their maturity can be compared to this redaction of History,
and their childhood memories correspond, both by their origin and
by their authenticity, to the history of the primitive age of a people,
history much later than the facts and biasedly rectified." In other
words, Freud (and later also others...), attributes to the patient and
the unconscious the tendentiousness that is theirs. I do not see in
this memory of Leonardo any tendentiousness, other than that it is
related to his desire to investigate birds, investigate their flight,
everything about them, and fly. In any case, he is innocent as long as
he does not suspect that his memory could in the future be
interpreted as a sign of homosexuality. "This fantasy has a singularly
passive character and recalls certain dreams and fantasies of women
or passive homosexuals (those who play the female role in the sex
trade)." It does not seem to me that there can be any relationship
between the "passive fantasy" of women with the passive fantasy of
homosexuals who present themselves as women to trade, beyond
the fact that, as Freud well points out, they would only be fantasies:
passivity strict "sexual" cannot be given, except in the context of
necrophilia. And I also don't understand why it is surprising that a
child might have a "uniquely passive" memory or fantasy. Can't a
man have such a fantasy without being said to necessarily be a
"sexual" or "homo-sexual" passive fantasy? But then Freud adds:
"...Behind the fantasy nothing else is hidden than a reminiscence of
the act of suckling from the mother's breast or being suckled by the
mother, a beautiful human scene that Leonardo, like so many other
painters, reproduced in his paintings of the Madonna with Child." 1.
In the event that we see in this memory a reminiscence of the
breastfeeding scene, in breastfeeding there is no completely passive
attitude on the part of the child. Precisely, if the child does not suck,
if he does not make that effort, he cannot receive food. The whole
body, the mind of the child, actively participate in the moment. And
2. How is it that from talking about the man having to have had a
fantasy of a homosexual type, we come to the scene of
breastfeeding. 5It seems to me that it is indisputable that any
situation that is established between two, Freud interprets it as a
relationship in which one of the two dominates and the other is
subjugated, or simply submits. Freud naturally does not understand
what goes through the mind of someone who "enjoys" having to,
according to him, "submit": "In any case, it is still incomprehensible
to us that this reminiscence, of equal importance in both sexes, was
transformed by Leonardo in a passive homosexual fantasy." And he
continues: "Where does this animal come from and how does it
appear included in the place where we find it? An idea arises in us,
faced with this question, so distant at first sight, that we almost feel
inclined to renounce it. In the sacred hieroglyphs of the ancient
Egyptians, the image corresponding to the mother is always that of
5In
his paper on the case of little Hans, Freud says that the child's identification of
the cow's udders with the penis, with his "little thing", is repugnant to the mind.
But here Sigmund Freud does exactly the same thing that that child did in his
naivety.
the vulture.The Egyptians also worshiped a mother deity with the
head of a vulture or with several heads, of which at least one was a
vulture. The name of this goddess was pronounced Mut, a
circumstance which makes us think of a possible connection of it with
our word 'mother' (Mutter), unless it be a question of a purely casual
similarity. relation to the concept of mother, but at first we do not
see how this circumstance will help us in our work of interpretation,
since we cannot attribute such knowledge to Leonardo, since the
translation of the hieroglyphs Physics did not become possible until
the discoveries of François Champollion. … We are also interested in
finding out how the ancient Egyptians came to choose the vulture as
a symbol of motherhood. … the vulture was considered to be the
symbol of motherhood, due to the belief that there were only female
vultures and that this species of birds lacked males. The Natural
History of the ancients also knew a counterpart to this limitation,
since it held that among the beetles, also worshiped by the Egyptians
as divinities, there were only males. … But then, how was the
fertilization of the vultures carried out, if there were only females?
Horapolio's book eases this difficulty for us, affirming that, at a
certain time of the year, these birds remain motionless in the air,
open their vaginas and are fertilized by the wind. … Among such
books there was no lack of works, both ancient and contemporary, of
Natural Sciences, and all of them already existed in print at that time,
being, in addition, Milan, residence of our artist, the main focus of
the nascent art of printing in Italy.
'Caeterum hanc fabulam de vulturibus cupide amplexi sunt Patres
Ecclesiastici, ut ita argument ex rerum natura petito refutarent eos,
qui Virginis partum negabant; itaque apud omnes fere hujus rei
mentio occurrit.' 'But this is a vulture story.'
... the fable of the unisexuality and the fertilization of the vultures
was not limited to an indifferent anecdote, such as that of the
beetles, since the fathers of the Church seized it to use it as an
argument taken from Natural History against the who doubted the
Sacred History [of Mary's virginity]. If, according to the most reliable
data of antiquity, vultures were impregnated by the wind, why
couldn't something analogous to a human female once have
happened? Such an application caused "almost all" the fathers of the
Church to recount the fable of the vulture in their writings, and thus
we can no longer doubt that through such powerful patrons it also
reached Leonardo. … Having once read in a Father of the Church or in
a Natural History book that all vultures were female and reproduced
without needing the cooperation of the male, a memory arose in him
that was transformed into the cited fantasy; but whose meaning was
that he too had been such a vulture's young, that he had had a
mother, but no father, and to this memory was later added, in the
only way in which such early impressions can express themselves, an
echo of the pleasure found in the suckling of the maternal breast.
The relationship of his fantasy with the representation of the Virgin
nursing the Child, so pleasing to all artists, had to contribute to
making it highly valuable and important for Leonardo, because
through it he identified himself with the Child Jesus, consolation and
redeemer of all and not from a single woman." Indeed, the fable of
the female vulture that bears children without the need of a male
would surely reach Leonardo's ears. And it is almost certain that, like
so many others, he associated this with the idea that his mother
could have fathered him without participation of his father since in
fact the father was not present during his first years of life, which
could have led him to identify with the child Jesus, so that we can
interpret this memory of Leonardo, as he himself says, in the sense of
that he was predestined to investigate that bug (and incidentally the
virginity of his mother and the Virgin), perhaps to find out what was
true about what was said that he could get pregnant thanks to 'the
wind.' In other words, Leonardo seems to start from the
astonishment or disbelief that this story caused him. Moreover, then
we see that Leonardo will not only dedicate himself to investigating
this peculiar bird, which they say was not a vulture but a kite, but
also extends his investigation to all the birds, women and mothers
and fetuses, but also to the flight of birds and to the wind. In other
words, we wonder, what was in the milk of Leonardo's mut mother
that incited him to want to take flight, something that this child
prodigy achieved... If by any chance Leonardo had ever had a
homoerotic fantasy, it seems to us quite e-seer that he sublimated it
very precociously.
But the most serious thing is, as we all already know, and as I
mentioned before, that Leonardo was talking about a kite, and not
about a vulture. However, Freud tells us about a vulture because it
seems that Leonardo's book that "coincidentally" came into the
hands of Freud was "a bad translation." Nothing is 100% "casual." If
Freud clung to that bad translation as he did (I don't know what could
have caused the translator's mistake... which we won't be able to
"analyze" here), it wasn't "for nothing." He needed that bird to be a
vulture and not a kite or any other bird, because if it hadn't been a
vulture he wouldn't have been able to connect anything. He needed
to believe that for Leonardo the precious scene for all artists, of the
child suckling from the Virgin, was a homosexual act. The mother
who breastfeeds a child submits and dominates the child. Cows'
udders are penises, and mothers' teats are the same. Ergo, every
male who is breastfed, who submits to the mother, has to be, by
"default", homosexual. And all this as a result of the fact that Freud
firmly believes that the activity-passivity dichotomy exists, and that
he cannot conceive of himself as that newborn who was seeing
himself dominated and subdued by his mother, and has to project his
conflicts with his Mom, a woman who does dominate and subjugate
him, in the others, in order to be able to flee in horror from what he
thinks his homosexual fantasies towards his father's figure must have
been and that perhaps they weren't even such.
But in addition, Freud needs Leonardo to dedicate himself to the
investigation of vulture birds in particular because, like eels, they
seem to be animals whose way of mating and reproducing, their
sexuality or genitality, was at least strange, mysterious or debatable .
For Freud, Leonardo was interested in unraveling the mystery of the
vulture's genitality, and not "studying the flight of the vulture", nor
the possibility of flight in general. I don't remember ever seeing a
drawing by Leonardo that even represented, for example, vaginal
penetration by the phallus, or a drawing of a phallus (I'm not saying
there can't be one); I do remember the very precise drawing of the
female sexual organ and that of the fetus in the womb. That is,
Leonardo feels a scientific interest, or a scientific "love" for the
woman and for the woman with her baby, which is also a way of
flying (or "floating"), both for the baby and for the mother. And
coincidentally, breastfeeding is too.
"... A brief reflection warns us now that we should not end our
analysis of Leonardo's childhood fantasy with the clarification of the
meaning of the vulture's tail, since it still contains several other
unknowns. The most singular of all of them is that of substituting the
act of suckling from the mother's breast for the fact of being
breastfed 6, that is, an active situation for a passive one, and of an
undoubted homosexual nature, taking into account the historical
tradition that Leonardo behaved throughout his life as a man of
homosexual feelings 7, we are forced to question whether this
fantasy does not reveal a causal link between Leonardo's infantile
relations with his mother and his later overt, albeit ideal,
homosexuality. We would not dare to deduce such a connection
from Leonardo's distorted memories if psychoanalytical
investigations of homosexual patients would not have shown us the
real existence of such a relationship, which is also intimate and
necessary... Sadger 8emphasizes that the mothers of his homosexual
patients were in many cases masculine women, of energetic
character, who could displace the father from his position in family
life or replace him. … It even seems that the existence of an energetic
father guarantees the son the right decision in his choice of sexual
object, that is, the choice of a sexual object of the opposite sex." It
seems to me that Caterina's character could not correspond with that
stereotype of a manly woman described by Sadger, who, due to her
energetic character, displaces the father from "his position" and who
euphemistically seems to want to tell us that Freud could have
treated the son with "excessive tenderness" if not to say that he
stimulated him with erotic touches and not exactly "tender" The
father here, an apparently strong-willed man with a high social
status, left on his own foot after impregnating this peasant girl, and,
6This
that Freud explains, as either I heterosexually breastfeed you or you will
breastfeed me, as a homosexual, it never happens.
7There must be endless "very reliable" sources for what Leonardo felt inside,
naturally based on equally "reliable" "behavioral" observations.
8Unfortunately, about Sadger, I have found the following article
https://www.revistadelibros.com/isidor-sadger-y-sigmund-freud/, which only
serves us is to generate even more confusion
as Freud tells us before, leaving the wife and son abandoned and
longing for the presence of that father. No one displaced the father
here. If the father being an energetic man depends on the son not
being homosexual, the biography of many gay men denies this in a
big way. nera I would say fast-paced and forceful. The mere idea that
Leonardo could have inferred that his mother had conceived him by
divine grace or the wind as the Child Jesus... as Freud formulates
above, already reveals to us that this woman could not have been
perceived by Leonardo as a manly woman. The images of women
that we see in each and every one of Da Vinci's paintings speak to us
of women who are no longer beautiful, but deeply dedicated to their
son, tender and intelligent, and not manly. And I do not say this
because I believe that Leonardo was "right" (sic) in terms of his
choice of "object", but only to give a somewhat different
interpretation in terms of what Freud believes he reads well and
rigorously, without reaching see their own unconscious contents that
are manifested in almost every line of this text. Almost anyone who is
knowledgeable about Freud's mother's relationship to Freud and to
Freud's elderly father, and to Freud's actions, will quickly come to the
same conclusions as I have.
“… The boy represses his love for his mother, substituting himself for
her; that is, identifying with her and taking her own person as a
model, in whose likeness she chooses her new erotic objects. In this
way, he becomes homosexual or, rather, he passes into auto-erotism,
since the children who are the object of his love are nothing more
than substitute persons and reproductions of his own infantile
person, whom he loves as his mother loved him in his early years. We
say then that he finds his erotic objects along the path of narcissism,
referring to the Greek legend of that adolescent named Narcissus, to
whom nothing was as loved as his own image, reflected in the water,
and who was transformed by the gods into the beautiful flower that
still bears his name. … When he seems to pursue other boys with
burning love, what he does is run away from women, who could lead
him to commit infidelity. ... What for practical reasons we call
homosexuality can arise from very diverse psychosexual processes of
coercion, and the process we discovered is perhaps only one among
many, referring only to one of the various types of 'homosexuality'. ...
we have to consider it plausible that his contemporaries did not
make gross mistakes when judging his personality." Here again is that
contradiction of what Freud observes or deduces: was Da Vinci's
mother a manly woman or, on the contrary, was she a woman who
tenderly cared for his son as Da Vinci "of his 'disciples'"? What was
Da Vinci "dressing"? "Having chosen them for their beauty and not
for their talent, none of his disciples -Cesare de Sesto, G. Boltraffio ,
Andrea Salaino, Francesco Melzi, etc. - became a renowned artist.
Most of them failed to acquire their own personality and disappeared
without bequeathing a defined physiognomy to the history of art.
Other artists who must be considered as disciples of Leonardo and
continuators of his pictorial technique, thus Luini and Bazzi, called
the Sodom, probably did not get to know him." Freud deduces that
Leonardo chose disciples for their beauty and not for their talents as
something clearly related to his tendency to homosexuality without
noticing that Leonardo never really intended to create an Academy, a
Vincentian school. And he also deduces that this lack of sexual
activity and need that the observations of his contemporaries about
the personality of this distinguished teacher, which could not be gross
errors of judgment, indicates that Leonardo must have had some kind
of sexual problem. Freud always tells us that he does not conceive of
a man not being sexually active or not having sexual needs, that he is
"passive." We already know the anecdote that Freud tells us about
his father picking up the hat. For Freud, that attitude of the old father
was something unimaginable in a man, unbearable and very
humiliating. I think that what Freud reproached the old father, and
surely with good reason, was not having been able to put a stop to
his mother's continuous erotic advances towards him. In any case, I
am not aware that Freud expressed indignation at his mother's
behavior and her unstoppable harassment. … "The appearance of the
homosexual situation in his fantasy of the vulture would then be
understandable to us, since it would only mean what we have
previously stated with respect to said type, and its translation would
be the following: Because of my erotic relationship with my mother I
have become a homosexual.... My mother put countless passionate
kisses on my mouth. [That is, according to Freud, the bird opened
Leonardo's mouth to kiss his lips. This fantasy of Freud and/or
assigned to Leonardo, to me it seems more similar to how the
mother barely brushes the baby's lips so that the baby would part
them in order to breastfeed him, that is, the other way around, and
before... But even so, it may be the case that the mother, once the
child opens his lips, half-asleep, and that "he can't manage to s-bottle
him", plays affectionately with the child as if to wake him up. In any
case, Leonardo's memory does not indicate that no one had "introduced" nothing through the lips, unless it is a "secretillo", a bit of
"breath", of wind, of "fresh air."] The fantasy is thus composed of
two memories: that of being suckled by the mother [as we have said,
this is not true] and to be kissed by her." [As we have said, this is not
true either.] Here suddenly Freud sees infinite and passionate kisses
that are highly erotic or even perverse, where he had previously said
that he saw breastfeeding. He obviously refers to his own mother.
"In the beautifully singular face of Giocondo's Florentine Monna Lisa
he has most intensely fascinated and intrigued the beholders. He
needed an interpretation and has found endless, but none
satisfactory: ... Muther 9writes: 'That which fascinates the beholder is
the demonic charm of this smile… Hundreds of poets and writers
have written about this woman, who seems to smile seductively at us
as soon as she lets a cold and soulless look lose herself in the
distance, but none have deciphered her smile or interpreted her
thoughts. in this painting, even the landscape seems submerged in a
dense and ardent sensuality.'" In my life I have seen in the Mona Lisa
what Muther, Mut? seems to have seen: a soulless and cold gaze?
Nor do I see excessive "seduction" in that rather slightly inquisitive
and reflective smile, of which you already know, and calm, or
anything transmits me special "ardor", although it does density in the
sense of something that has been condensed, in which it has
deepened, and sensuality typical of a sufficiently mature woman who
pleases herself and others, without higher "orgiastic expectations."
Many seem to have been fixed to the lips of this lady, to the enigma
of her smile - just as Freud was fixed to the lips of Leonardo and the
"tail" of the bird: to the "external" of the bird, and not to the internal
9We
don't know who Muther is. In 1909 he published Geschichte der Narelei,
History of nonsense or stupidity. Footnote, Complete Works, Volume II, New
Library
meaning that all this had for the child Leonardo-, but few seem to
have noticed how that smile connects with the expression of
Leonardo's eyes, etc., as if they were unable to see a face, or a mirror
there. And yet, later Freud clarifies us: "... Leaving the Gioconda's
physiognomic enigma unsolved, we will record the undoubted fact
that her smile 10fascinated the artist with no less intensity than all
those who have contemplated her in the four hundred years that
have elapsed since then . The enigmatic smile returns, from this
moment on, in all his paintings and in those of his disciples In the
case of a portrait, we cannot suppose that Leonardo lent such an
expressive physiognomic feature to the face of the sitter without, in
reality, We will have to admit, then, that Leonardo found such a smile
in his model [surely the mother] and was so captivated by her
attractiveness, that from that moment on he adorned all the free
creations of his fantasy with it. 11by A. Konstantinowa in the following
10Your
smile. The inner one, the one that Leonardo had been looking for for a long
time, investigating, that of his beautiful mother, that smile in which he had felt
loved, alive and reflected as a human being
11 La Gioconda was painted by Leonardo between 1503 and 1516 or 1519. In 1506
he received another commission and left this canvas unfinished. He never
delivered it to his client, Francesco del Giocondo. The Burlington House Cartoon,
never finished either, was created between 1500-1501 and 1505. And The Virgin,
Child and Saint Anne, between 1510 and 1513. As can be clearly seen, the Madonna
on the Cartoon already has a similar smile. to that of La Gioconda. On Wikipedia it
is said that it is "a life-size cartoon that combines two popular themes in Florentine
painting of the fifteenth century: the Virgin (Mary) and Child with Saint John the
Baptist (son of the relative of Mary Elizabeth) and the Virgin and the Child with
Saint Anne (Mary's mother).In this way, the three generations of Christ's family are
represented: Saint Anne has her daughter Mary on her knees and the latter
entertains the Child who turns to Saint John .
There is a subtle interplay between the gazes of the four figures, with Saint Anne
smiling at her daughter Mary, while her eyes are fixed on her son, whom Saint John
is also looking at. Santa Ana gives the Virgin a strange look, full of feeling, as if she
already imagined the sufferings that Mary will have to endure. There is little clarity
in the delineation of the four bodies; the heads of the two women, in particular,
seem to emerge from the same body. Leonardo strove to reproduce a polycentric
sense of movement, making the two characters merge into a single complex, in
which the head of Saint Anne [perhaps Leonardo's paternal grandmother] stands
out. The Virgin Mary's expression is extraordinarily tender, but at the same time
the face has a majestic, unearthly beauty that suggests deep maternal devotion.
The enigmatic gesture of Saint Anne pointing her index finger towards the sky
appears again in two of Leonardo's last paintings, his Saint John the Baptist and his
Bacchus, and is considered the quintessential Leonardesque gesture. It seems to
suggest that there are feelings and thoughts that are beyond normal human
understanding. The landscape in the background is barely outlined.
The style is reminiscent of The Last Supper and the monumental figures of the
apostles represented in it. Some authors have perceived in this drawing the
influence of classical sculpture." In Leonardo Da Vinci's Imaginary Inversion, Julia
Virgós quotes Freud, saying, "Freud gives an account in La Gioconda of the meeting
of two elements in the life of the woman: 'the reserve and the seduction, the
tenderness full of surrender and the sensuality in ruthless stalking that devours
the man like something foreign'. It is from the painting of La Gioconda that
Leonardo's activity becomes fruitful again, and he transfers that same strange
smile and his particular look to all the faces he later draws. 'The deepening of the
features of Monna Lisa would have prompted Leonardo to capture the composition
of Santa Ana from his fantasy. Indeed, if the smile of La Gioconda summoned him
to the memory of his mother, we would understand that this prompted him from
the beginning to create a deification of motherhood and to return to the mother
the smile that he had found in the noble lady.'" No I want to cite another "Lacanian
study" that wants to interpret Leonardo also from Freud's point of view, but here
too assisted by Lacan's erudition, just as Virgos tries to do, which follows its own
analysis thus: "Lacan takes the L scheme to indicate the four places in play through
the box. Santa Ana is located in the place of the Other, since she is in the third place
in front of the imaginary axis in which the Virgin and the child are located by the
action of idealized love, and finally the lamb, which represents the object of
sacrifice, occupies the fourth place, that of the subject, but also that of death. In the
painting you can perceive a semi-symbiosis in the bodies of Santa Ana and the
Virgin. "It's kind of a double." A work that is in turn the double of another
unfinished one: the Burlington House cartoon in London, whose composition
differs from the previous one. In it, the women appear even more united. Leonardo
felt the need to eliminate this fusion and San Juan is replaced by the lamb. In this
fourth term, Lacan says, the theme of death must be found. This is "what will kill
Leonardo's sexuality."
Santa Ana shows the raised finger, a gesture that is found in all of Leonardo's work,
which Lacan translates as the indication of that lack of being, manque-a-être.
Lacan will here give his version of Leonardo's inversion, leaving the question of
sexual inversion in suspense and using that term to highlight the prevalent
character of the imaginary relationship for da Vinci, presented in his notebook
annotations. Annotations made in mirror. "He directs and orders himself from his
imaginary other." A mirage relationship. Lacan points out that the relation of
identification of the self with the other that was inaugurated in Leonardo is
essential to understand how the identifications from which the subject's self
progresses are constituted. And even more, correlative to all sublimation is a
process of desubjectivation or naturalization of the Other, in which we see an
inversion of the relations between the self and the other take place on the
imaginary plane.
way: 'During the long time that the master devoted to the portrait of
Monna Lisa, he was infused with such an intense involvement of
feeling in the enc before that female face, which later transferred
Lacan attributes Leonardo's intense creative energy "to the way of conceiving
nature whose presence has to be grasped. It is the absolutely primordial element.
It is an other to be opposed whose signs one tries to decipher, becoming its double,
and if it can so to speak, its co-creator".
What can we extract from all this without bringing, to make matters worse, the
respective Freudo-Lacanian or Lacan-Feudian elaborations, of the phallic mothers
or the obvious, ominous, narcissistic, of Leonardo? In the first place, that the
homosexuality attributed by Freud to Leonardo, Lacan suddenly converts it into
the simple mirror calligraphy (in-version of calligraphy) that Leonardo uses to
write his copious "notes", and that in principle means nothing more than that: he
invests it. Lacan thus leaves in suspense the idea that Leonardo suffered from any
other type of "in-version." But he tells us: "He directs and orders himself from his
imaginary other." The author of the article clarifies that, according to Lacan: "the
relationship of identification of the self with the other that was inaugurated in
Leonardo is essential to understand how the identifications from which the
subject's self progresses are constituted. And even more , correlative to all
sublimation is a process of desubjectivation or naturalization of the Other, in
which we see an inversion of the relations between the self and the other take
place on the imaginary plane." Which is very easy to understand, given that what
Leonardo inaugurates is exactly what each and every one of us inaugurates, even
before we were born, except that Leonardo was a genius, something that not all of
us can become. When Lacan says that "Leonardo's intense creative energy was
due" to the way of conceiving the nature whose presence has to be grasped. It is
the absolutely essential element. It is an other that must be opposed whose signs
are trying to decipher, becoming its double, and if it can be said that way, its cocreator.", the only thing he is talking about is empathizing, co-creating each other,
that is to say, to love, and any other interpretation that you want to give to
Leonardo's works, are not going to make us dizzy or that we too start to "in-quire ."
Lacan says nothing about Freud's tremendous error, but simply goes on to tell us
about it, but in another "way", he gives us his -version- in, which, as I say, is not
even worth sharing, because here there is no phallic mother either. none and the
finger pointing upwards, towards the sky, is not an index of anything other than
pointing upwards, that is, towards the sky, and towards anywhere, because it does
not matter, so that we look at everything once and for all that which is far beyond
our boundless narcissism of wanting at all costs to finish the damn work and
thereby become "famous." It is here, Lacan wanted to say, that, deep down, he
understands, "where at last, Leonardo's (and Freud's) sexuality die." Because the
self and the "imaginary" other are one, and the only thing to do is start
investigating; there is no "time" for l'autre: you have to start Flying right now...
them - especially the enigmatic smile and the very singular look - to
all the faces that he later had to paint or draw. all in La Virgen con el
Niño y Santa Ana, also preserved in this same museum.'"
For Freud, Leonardo's identification with his father "had a fatal
consequence" for pictorial activity. "He created the work and
immediately ceased to deal with it, as his father had done with him."
1. If Leonardo manages to identify with his father, homosexuality is
called into question. 2. Freud obviously confuses productivity, mere
"productivity" and "utility," with what is authentic creation. I think it
is very appropriate here to refer the reader to the book The
Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler. "… he wrote in his Diary: 'The duke
lost his estates, his fortune and his freedom, and did not complete
any of his works.' It is singular, and of course very significant, that
Leonardo addressed here to his padrone the same reproach that
posterity [I, who "belong to that posterity", Leonardo, I honestly have
nothing to reproach him with] had to do to him, as if he wanted to
cast on a person belonging to the paternal series the responsibility
incumbent on him for leaving his works unfinished... In any case, the
reproach he made to the duke was perfectly justified... But if as an
artist he was harmed by his imitation of his father, the rebellion
against him constituted the infantile condition of his achievements as
an investigator, not least." I don't understand what Freud means
about his art being "impaired."
"... when he taught to despise authority and to reject the imitation of
the ancients, continually indicating the study of Nature as the source
of all truth, he did nothing but repeat in the highest possible
sublimation for man the decision that before was imposed on the
child, …" In this new appreciation that Sigmund Freud makes about
Leonardo's sublimation, it seems that Freud does not know very well
what "Authority" Leonardo taught that one had to "despise", nor
what it was that Nature insisted Leonardo that it was necessary to
investigate.
"While other humans - and both today and in the most primitive
times - desperately need an authority to lean on, to the point that
they feel the whole world waver when that authority seems
threatened, Leonardo could do without such support." We must
distinguish between that "authority" -false-, which Freud says that
other humans need (he does not say here "we need"), and the true
one. "authority" that even Leonardo did not even dream of doing
without.
"... The daring and independence of their further scientific
investigation presuppose an infantile sexual investigation not
restricted by the father, and they continue it, separating it from the
sexual one..." 1. The "investigation sexual ion" of Leonardo, was not
restricted, Freud tells us, by his father. Sigmund Freud's, on the other
hand, was "alibited", but in her case, by what we see, by her mother.
2. Leonardo's "sexual research" never ceased to be "sexual research."
That is, to sublimate does not mean to separate "sexual research",
but to amplify that "sexual" research to everything else. Sex, from
the Latin sexus, which derives from secare, to cut, in the sense of
establishing a section specifically in relation to the human race. On
the one hand the "section" of the females and on the other the
"section" of the males, or a sector. In Latin, the word sector refers to
the one who cuts, to the cutter (-tor is the agent). A derivative of
sector in Spanish is that of what is "limited." This would mean that
Leonardo, instead of "delimiting" or "sectioning", what he wants is to
"join or tie the ends", to know, to approach the "truth", without
avoiding the ambiguity that such an attempt implies, and hence the
brilliant, hypnotic for those who see it for the first time in their lives,
and the "indecipherable" ambiguity of the Mona Lisa, in which some
"think" they see the great Leonardo. Because as Freud tells us "When
an individual has escaped in his childhood, like Leonardo, the
intimidation exercised by the father (phrase added in 1925), and has
broken, in his investigative activity, the chains of authority, it cannot
be expected to remain within a dogmatic religion." Freud was unable
to "escape" the "fearsome" intimidation exerted by his father, who
never existed as such, except in his maddened, terrible confusion,
because his mother "chained" him by "sectioning" them, to the
father of the son, of so that the child, nor perhaps the "father", could
never know or come close to the "truth": his own "pater-maternal"
"ambiguity." "... Psychoanalysis has revealed to us an intimate
connection between the father complex and the belief in God and
has shown us that the personal God is not, psychologically, but an
overcoming of the father, revealing to us innumerable cases of young
subjects who lose the religious faith insofar as paternal authority falls
to the ground for them. In the paternal-maternal complex we
recognize, then, the root of religious necessity." (It should be added,
that of Sigmund Freud.)
Librodot A childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci Sigmund Freud Librodot 42
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