Contributions to the neue freie presse 23 страница

We are far from wishing to exaggerate the importance of these explanations of the psychical genesis of homosexuality. It is quite obvious that they are in sharp contrast to the official theories of those who speak for homosexuals, but we know that they are not sufficiently comprehensive to make a conclusive explanation of the problem possible. What is for practical reasons called homosexuality may arise from a whole variety of psychosexual inhibitory processes; the particular process we have singled out is perhaps only one among many, and is perhaps related to only one type of ‘homosexuality’. We must also admit that the number of cases of our homosexual type in which it is possible to point to the determinants which we require far exceeds the number of those where the deduced effect actually, takes place; We should not have had any cause at all for entering into the psychical genesis of the form of homosexuality we have studied if there were not a strong presumption that Leonardo, whose phantasy of the vulture was our starting point, was himself a homosexual of this very type.

Few details are known about the sexual behaviour of the great artist and scientist, but we may place confidence in the probability that the assertions of his contemporaries were not grossly erroneous. In the light of these traditions, then, he appears as a man whose sexual need and activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher aspiration had raised him above the common animal need of mankind. It may remain open to doubt whether he ever sought direct sexual satisfaction - and if so, in what manner - or whether he was able to dispense with it altogether. We are however justified in looking in him too for the emotional currents which drive other men imperatively on to perform the sexual act; for we cannot imagine the mental life of any human being in the formation of which sexual desire in the broadest sense - libido - did not have its share, even if that desire has departed far from its original aim, or has refrained from putting itself into effect.

We cannot expect to find in Leonardo anything more than traces of untransformed sexual inclination. But these point in one direction and moreover allow him to be reckoned as a homosexual. It has always been emphasized that he took only strikingly handsome boys and youths as pupils. He treated them with kindness and consideration, looked after them, and when they were ill nursed them himself, just as a mother nurses her children and just as his own mother might have tended him. As he had chosen them for their beauty and not for their talent, none of them - Cesare da Sesto, Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Francesco Melzi and others - became a painter of importance. Generally they were unable to make themselves independent of their master, and after his death they disappeared without having left any definite mark on the history of art. The others, whose works entitled them to be called his pupils, like Luini and Bazi, called Sodoma, he probably did not know personally.

We realize that we shall have to meet the objection that Leonardo’s behaviour towards his pupils has nothing at all to do with sexual motives and that it allows no conclusions to be drawn about his particular sexual inclination. Against this we wish to submit with all caution that our view explains some peculiar features of the artist’s behaviour which would otherwise have to remain a mystery. Leonardo kept a diary; he made entries in his small hand (written from right to left) which were meant only for himself. It is noteworthy that in this diary he addressed himself in the second person. ‘Learn the multiplication of roots from Master Luca.’ (Solmi, 1908, 152). ‘Get Master d’Abacco to show you how to square the circle.’ (Loc. cit.) Or on the occasion of a journey: ‘I am going to Milan on business to do with my garden... Have two baggage trunks made. Get Boltraffio to show you the turning-lathe and get him to polish a stone on it. Leave the book for Master Andrea il Todesco.’ (Ibid., 203.)¹ Or a resolution of very different importance: ‘You have to show in your treatise that the earth is a star, like the moon or something like it, and thus prove the nobility of our world.’ (Herzfeld, 1906, 141.)

¹ Leonardo is behaving here like someone whose habit it was to make his daily confession to another person and who uses his diary as a substitute for him. For a conjecture as to who this person may have been, see Merezhkovsky (1903, 367).7

In this diary, which, by the way, like the diaries of other mortals, often dismisses the most important events of the day in a few words or else passes them over in complete silence, there are some entries which on account of their strangeness are quoted by all Leonardo’s biographers. They are notes of small sums of money spent by the artist - notes recorded with a minute exactness, as if they were made by a pedantically strict and parsimonious head of a household. There is on the other hand no record of the expenditure of larger sums or any other evidence that the artist was at home in keeping accounts. One of these notes has to do with a new cloak which he bought for his pupil Andrea Salaino:¹

Silver brocade.... 15 lire 4 soldi

Crimson velvet for trimming. 9 lire - soldi

Braid..... - lire 9 soldi

Buttons..... - lire 12 soldi

Another very detailed note brings together all the expenses he incurred through the bad character and thievish habits of another pupil:² ‘On the twenty-first day of April, 1490, I began this book and made a new start on the horse.³ Jacomo came to me on St. Mary Magdalen’s day, 1490: he is ten years old.’ (Marginal note: ‘thievish, untruthful, selfish, greedy.’) ‘On the second day I had two shirts cut out for him, a pair of trousers and a jacket, and when I put the money aside to pay for these things, he stole the money from my purse, and it was never possible to make him own up, although I was absolutely sure of it.’ (Marginal note: ‘4 lire...’) The report of the child’s misdeeds runs on in this way and ends with the reckoning of expenses: ‘In the first year, a cloak, 2 lire; 6 shirts, 4 lire; 3 jackets, 6 lire; 4 pairs of stockings, 7 lire; etc.’4

¹ The text is that given by Merezhkovsky (1903, 282).

² Or model.

³ For the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza.

4 The full text is to be found in Herzfeld (1906, 45).8

Nothing is further from the wishes of Leonardo’s biographers than to try to solve the problems in their hero’s mental life by starting from his small weaknesses and peculiarities; and the usual comment that they make on these singular accounts is one which lays stress on the artist’s kindness and consideration for his pupils. They forget that what calls for explanation is not Leonardo’s behaviour, but the fact that he left these pieces of evidence of it behind him. As it is impossible to believe that his motive was that of letting proofs of his good nature fall into our hands, we must assume that it was another motive, an affective one, which led him to write these notes down. What motive it was is not easy to guess, and we should be unable to suggest one if there were not another account found among Leonardo’s papers which throws a vivid light on these strangely trifling notes about his pupils’ clothing, etc.:

Expenses after Caterina’s death for her funeral 27 florins

2 pounds of wax..... 18 “

For transporting and erecting the cross.. 12 “

Catafalque..... 4 ”

Pall-bearers..... 8 ”

For 4 priests and 4 clerks.... 20 ”

Bell-ringing..... 2 ”

For the grave-diggers..... 16 ”

For the licence - to the officials... 1 ”

—————

Total 108 florins

Previous expenses

For the doctor.. 4 florins

For sugar and candles. 12 ”

16 florins

—————

Grand total 124 florins.¹

¹ Merezhkovsky (1903, 372). - As a melancholy example of the uncertainty that surrounds the information, which is in any case scanty enough, about Leonardo’s private life, I may mention the fact that the same account is quoted by Solmi (1908, 104) with considerable variations. The most serious one is that soldi are given instead of florins. It may be assumed that florins in this account do not mean the old ‘gold florins’ but the monetary units which were used later and were worth 1 2/3 lire or 33 1/3 soldi. Solmi makes Caterina a servant who had looked after Leonardo’s household for some time. The source from which the two versions of these accounts were taken was not accessible to me.

The novelist Merezhkovsky alone is able to tell us who this Caterina was. From two other short notes¹ he concludes that Leonardo’s mother, the poor peasant woman of Vinci, came to Milan in 1493 to visit her son, who was then 41; that she fell ill there, was taken to hospital by Leonardo, and when she died was honoured by him with this costly funeral.

This interpretation by the psychological novelist cannot be put to the proof, but it can claim so much inner probability, and is so much in harmony with all that we otherwise know of Leonardo’s emotional activity, that I cannot refrain from accepting it as correct. He had succeeded in subjecting his feelings to the yoke of research and in inhibiting their free utterance; but even for him there were occasions when what had been suppressed obtained expression forcibly. The death of the mother he had once loved so dearly was one of these. What we have before us in the account of the costs of the funeral is the expression - distorted out of all recognition - of his mourning for his mother. We wonder how such distortion could come about, and indeed we cannot understand it if we treat it as a normal mental process. But similar processes are well known to us in the abnormal conditions of neurosis and especially of what is known as ‘obsessional neurosis’. There we can see how the expression of intense feelings, which have however become unconscious through repression, is displaced on to trivial and even foolish actions. The expression of these repressed feelings has been lowered by the forces opposed to them to such a degree that one would have had to form a most insignificant estimate of their intensity; but the imperative compulsiveness with which this trivial expressive act is performed betrays the real force of the impulses - a force which is rooted in the unconscious and which consciousness would like to deny. Only a comparison such as this with what happens in obsessional neurosis can explain Leonardo’s account of the expenses of his mother’s funeral. In his unconscious he was still tied to her by erotically coloured feelings, as he had been in childhood. The opposition that came from the subsequent repression of this childhood love did not allow him to set up a different and worthier memorial to her in his diary. But what emerged as a compromise from this neurotic conflict had to be carried out; and thus it was that the account was entered in the diary, and has come to the knowledge of posterity as something unintelligible.

¹ ‘Caterina arrived on July 16, 1493.’ - ‘Giovannina - a fabulous face - Call on Caterina in the hospital and make enquiries.’0

It does not seem a very extravagant step to apply what we have learnt from the funeral account to the reckonings of the pupils’ expenses. They would then be another instance of the scanty remnants of Leonardo’s libidinal impulses finding expression in a compulsive manner and in a distorted form. On that view, his mother and his pupils, the likenesses of his own boyish beauty, had been his sexual objects - so far as the sexual repression which dominated his nature allows us so to describe them - and the compulsion to note in laborious detail the sums he spent on them betrayed in this strange way his rudimentary conflicts. From this it would appear that Leonardo’s erotic life did really belong to the type of homosexuality whose psychical development we have succeeded in disclosing, and the emergence of the homosexual situation in his phantasy of the vulture would become intelligible to us: for its meaning was exactly what we have already asserted of that type. We should have to translate it thus: ‘It was through this erotic relation with my mother that I became a homosexual.’¹

¹ The forms of expression in which Leonardo’s repressed libido was allowed to show itself - circumstantiality and concern over money are among the traits of character which result from anal erotism. See my ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).1

IV

We have not yet done with Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. In words which only too plainly recall a description of a sexual act (‘and struck me many times with its tail against my lips’), Leonardo stresses the intensity of the erotic relations between mother and child. From this linking of his mother’s (the vulture’s) activity with the prominence of the mouth zone it is not difficult to guess that a second memory is contained in the phantasy. This may be translated: ‘My mother pressed innumerable passionate kisses on my mouth.’ The phantasy is compounded from the memory of being suckled and being kissed by his mother.

Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates; and these works have a powerful effect on others who are strangers to the artist, and who are themselves unaware of the source of their emotion. Can it be that there is nothing in Leonardo’s life work to bear witness to what his memory preserved as the strongest impression of his childhood? One would certainly expect there to be something. Yet if one considers the profound transformations through which an impression in an artist’s life has to pass before it is allowed to make its contribution to a work of art, one will be bound to keep any claim to certainty in one’s demonstration within very modest limits; and this is especially so in Leonardo’s case.

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.¹ 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. ‘Voilà quatre siècles bientôt que Monna Lisa fait perdre la tête à tous ceux qui parlent d’elle, après l’avoir longtemps regardée.’²

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] The connoisseur of art will think here of the peculiar fixed smile found in archaic Greek sculptures - in those, for example, from Aegina; he will perhaps also discover something similar in the figures of Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio and therefore have some misgivings in accepting the arguments that follow.

² [‘For almost four centuries now Mona Lisa has caused all who talk of her, after having gazed on her for long, to lose their heads.’] The words are Gruyer’s, quoted by von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 280).

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): ‘On sait quelle énigme indéchiffrable et passionnante Monna Lisa Gioconda ne cesse depuis bientôt quatre siècles de proposer aux admirateurs pressés devant elle. Jamais artiste (j’emprunte la plume du délicat écrivain qui se cache sous le pseudonyme de Pierre de Corlay) "a-t-il traduit ainsi l’essence même de la fémininité: tendresse et coquetterie, pudeur et sourde volupté, tout le mystère d’un coeur qui se réserve, d’un cerveau qui réfléchit, d’une personnalité qui se garde et ne livre d’elle-même que son rayonnement..."'¹ The Italian writer Angelo Conti (1910, 93) saw the picture in the Louvre brought to life by a ray of sunshine. ‘La donna sorrideva in una calma regale: i suoi istinti di conquista, di ferocia, tutta l’eredità della specie, la volontà della seduzione e dell’ agguato, la grazia del inganno, la bontà che cela un proposito crudele, tutto ciò appariva alternativamente e scompariva dietro il velo ridente e si fondeva nel poema del suo sorriso... Buona e malvagia, crudele e compassionevole, graziosa e felina, ella rideva...’²

¹ [‘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".’]

² [‘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...’]3

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 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’, 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’, leads us to 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 ‘teste di femmine, che ridono’¹ formed the subject of Leonardo’s first artistic endeavours. 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.²

The painting of Leonardo’s which stands nearest to the Mona Lisa in point of time is the so-called ‘St. Anne with Two Others’, St. Anne with the Madonna and child. In it the Leonardesque smile is most beautifully and markedly portrayed on both the women’s faces. It is not possible to discover how long before or after the painting of the Mona Lisa Leonardo began to paint this picture. As both works extended over years, it may, I think, be assumed that the artist was engaged on them at the same time. It would best agree with our expectation if it was the intensity of Leonardo’s preoccupation with the features of Mona Lisa which stimulated him to create the composition of St. Anne out of his phantasy. For if the Gioconda’s smile called up in his mind the memory of his mother, it is easy to understand how it drove him at once to create a glorification of motherhood, and to give back to his mother the smile he had found in the noble lady. We may therefore permit our interest to pass from Mona Lisa’s portrait to this other picture - one which is hardly less beautiful, and which to-day also hangs in the Louvre.

¹ [’Heads of laughing women.’] Quoted by Scognamiglio (1900, 32).

² The same assumption is made by Merezhkovsky. But the history of Leonardo’s childhood as he imagines it departs at the essential points from the conclusions we have drawn from the phantasy of the vulture. Yet if the smile had been that of Leonardo himself tradition would hardly have failed to inform us of the coincidence.6

St. Anne with her daughter and her grandchild is a subject that is rarely handled in Italian painting. At all events Leonardo’s treatment of it differs widely from all other known versions. Muther (1909, 1, 309) writes:

‘Some artists, like Hans Fries, the elder Holbein and Girolamo dai Libri, made Anne sit beside Mary and put the child between them. Others, like Jakob Cornelisz in his Berlin picture, painted what was truly a "St. Anne with Two Others"; in other words, they represented her as holding in her arms the small figure of Mary upon which the still smaller figure of the child Christ is sitting.’ In Leonardo’s picture Mary is sitting on her mother’s lap, leaning forward, and is stretching out both arms towards the boy, who is playing with a young lamb and perhaps treating it a little unkindly. The grandmother rests on her hip the arm that is not concealed and gazes down on the pair with a blissful smile. The grouping is certainly not entirely unconstrained. But although the smile that plays on the lips of the two women is unmistakably the same as that in the picture of Mona Lisa, it has lost its uncanny and mysterious character; what it expresses is inward feeling and quiet blissfulness.¹

After we have studied this picture for some time, it suddenly dawns on us that only Leonardo could have painted it, just as only he could have created the phantasy of the vulture. The picture contains the synthesis of the history of his childhood: its details are to be explained by reference to the most personal impressions in Leonardo’s life. In his father’s house he found not only his kind stepmother, Donna Albiera, but also his grandmother, his father’s mother, Monna Lucia, who - so we will assume - was no less tender to him than grandmothers usually are. These circumstances might well suggest to him a picture representing childhood watched over by mother and grandmother. Another striking feature of the picture assumes even greater significance. St. Anne, Mary’s mother and the boy’s grandmother, who must have been a matron, is here portrayed as being perhaps a little more mature and serious than the Virgin Mary, but as still being a young woman of unfaded beauty. In point of fact Leonardo has given the boy two mothers, one who stretches her arms out to him, and another in the background; and both are endowed with the blissful smile of the joy of motherhood. This peculiarity of the picture has not failed to surprise those who have written about it; Muther, for example, is of the opinion that Leonardo could not bring himself to paint old age, lines and wrinkles, and for this reason made Anne too into a woman of radiant beauty. But can we be satisfied with this explanation? Others have had recourse to denying that there is any similarity in age between the mother and daughter.² But Muther’s attempt at an explanation is surely enough to prove that the impression that St. Anne has been made more youthful derives from the picture and is not an invention for an ulterior purpose.

¹ Konstantinowa (1907): ‘Mary gazes down full of inward feeling on her darling, with a smile that recalls the mysterious expression of La Gioconda.’ In another passage she says of Mary: ‘The Gioconda’s smile hovers on her features.’ ² Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 274, notes).7

Leonardo’s childhood was remarkable in precisely the same way as this picture. He had had two mothers: first, his true mother Caterina, from whom he was torn away when he was between three and five, and then a young and tender stepmother, his father’s wife, Donna Albiera. By his combining this fact about his childhood with the one mentioned above (the presence of his mother and grandmother) and by his condensing them into a composite unity, the design of ‘St. Anne with Two Others’ took shape for him. The maternal figure that is further away from the boy - the grandmother - corresponds to the earlier and true mother, Caterina, in its appearance and in its special relation to the boy. The artist seems to have used the blissful smile of St. Anne to disavow and to cloak the envy which the unfortunate woman felt when she was forced to give up her son to her better-born rival, as she had once given up his father as well.¹

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