jap a

Harold P. Blum 49/4

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART,

FREUD AND LEONARDO

Freud was the first to apply psychoanalysis to art, choosing for his
subject the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Observing Leonardo’s
partly fused image of the Virgin and St. Anne, he inferred that the artist
had depicted his two mothers, his biological mother and his stepmother.
This very early analytic discourse on parent loss and adoption changed
the course of the interpretation of art. Freud explored the psychology
of art, the artist, and aesthetic appreciation. Confronting the
age-old enigma of the Mona Lisa, he proposed a daring solution to
the riddle of the sphinxlike smile of this icon of art. His paper pre-
figures concepts of narcissism, homosexuality, parenting, and sub-
limation. Lacking modern methodology and theory, Freud’s pioneering
insights overshadow his naive errors. In this fledgling inquiry, based on a
childhood screen memory and limited knowledge of Leonardo’s artis-
tic and scientific contributions, Freud identified with this Renaissance
genius in his own self-analytic and creative endeavor.

P sychoanalysis is a science and an art, reciprocally enriched by the

insights of great artists and thinkers. Psychoanalysis and art, in
particular, have had a remarkable relationship, one characterized by
mutual stimulation, synergism and antagonism, convergent and diver-
gent points of view. Freud, then a neurologist, wrote to his fiancée, “I
think there is a general enmity between artists and those engaged in the
details of scientific work. We know that they possess in their art a
master key to open with ease all female hearts . . .” (Jones 1953, p. 111).
This enmity would be supplanted by his awe, admiration, and curiosity
about the creative artist, culminating in analytic explorations of the
artist and his/her art. In his Leonardo study he averred, “Kindly nature

Training and Supervising Analyst, NYU Psychoanalytic Institute; Clinical

Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine; Executive
Director, Sigmund Freud Archives.
An earlier version of this paper was presented to an International Psychoanalytical
Association Symposium, “The Artistic Representation of the Parent/Child Relation-
ship,” Florence, Italy, April 11, 1997. Submitted for publication May 5, 1999.
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

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” (Freud 1910a, p. 107). He later declared, “Before the prob-
lem of the creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (Freud
1928, p. 177).
It is remarkable how much psychoanalysis has influenced the arts,
despite recurrent doubt and dissent. Psychoanalytic interpretations of
art are utilized explicitly by art historians with citations and elabora-
tions. Analytic concepts also regularly appear in art literature, indirectly
and implicitly, as an unacknowledged influence. The initial applications
of psychoanalysis to art tended to be oversimplified, sometimes with
hypotheses masquerading as conclusions. A great landscape might
be reduced to an erotic symbol of the body or a body part. Today we can
proceed with much greater knowledge and awareness of counter-
transference and of complexity, no longer descending into drastic
reductionism. Over this century of psychoanalysis there has been a
parallel development of applied analysis and art history and criticism.
Eager to expand his horizons, Freud began his own pilgrimage,
1410
inspired by the Renaissance, a journey that was to be a transforming
exploration of culture. Following in the footsteps of the poets and artists
with whom he identified, Freud also began to visit Italy. A love affair
with that country evolved, beginning with his first visit to Venice, shortly
after the Irma Dream in the summer of 1895. He returned to Italy at the
end of the very next summer and visited Florence for the first time in
September 1896. It was an overpowering experience. There he purchased
his first art, plaster casts most likely including works by Michelangelo,
with which he decorated his consulting room. His acquisition of art and
archaeological objects would eventually culminate in an extraordinary
private collection of antiquities. His letters reveal his unique powers of
observation and assimilation. Writing to his family from Florence, he
referred to “Machiavelli, the Madonna, the Medici, and Michelangelo.”
Staying at the Torre del Gallo, which housed the Galileo museum, he
surveyed the Firenze landscape “telescopically” and pondered the
psychological motives and meanings of art. His observations and infer-
ences concerning the art and sculpture of the Renaissance had a profound
effect on him and were destined to change art criticism, history, and biog-
raphy. His repeated visits to Italy and studies of Italian art stimulated
his two major papers interpreting art, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory
of His Childhood” (1910a) and “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914).
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

His audacious and controversial paper on Leonardo stirred impas-

sioned debate and dissent as perhaps no other published application of
psychoanalysis. Despite the immature development of psychoanalysis
in 1910, the paper was a landmark in illuminating the psychological
dimensions of art. The paper introduced the new perspective of un-
conscious influence and meaning to the traditional perspectives for
understanding art (e.g., historical, social, cultural, religious, stylistic;
patron, project, and public). The paper contemplated the elusive
nature of aesthetics, the conscious and unconscious gratifications derived
from art, the subjective response of the viewer, the transference of
the artist and of the viewer, and the idea of “beauty in the eye of the
beholder.” It presented an entirely new approach to art, the psychology
of the artist, the relationship of life and art, the creative process and
product, the medium and the message. Freud gazed at Leonardo’s
Madonna and Child with St. Anne, noting its composition and thematic
construction. He envisioned Leonardo as a child with two mothers
in a familial lineage, a family romance, and that vision initiated the
psychoanalytic interpretation of art.
1411
Freud’s “Leonardo,” his first and only major excursion into the
biography of the artist, transformed biography into psychobiography.
Virtually no biography would later be written without taking into
account the childhood of the subject, the relation between the subject’s
life and work, and, in the case of the creative personality, the founda-
tions, development, direction, and sublimated transformations of the
artist’s creativity. The work on Leonardo also illuminated the signifi-
cance of access to the unconscious in the artist’s work; it presented
art as a source of insight, as well as confirmation of knowledge of
the unconscious. The psychological development of the artist could be
correlated with the development of the form, content, and com-
position of an artist’s work from the earliest drawings to the most
mature works.
Lacking a systematic methodology and analytic epistemology,
Freud’s Leonardo was daring, a radical excursion in its artful specula-
tion and analytic innovation. Despite its limitations, remarkable
insights and theoretical advances abound throughout the paper. They
include the emergence of the concept of narcissism, an understanding
of the infantile roots and narcissistic objects and identifications
involved in one particular type of homosexuality. Leonardo’s early
mothering is depicted as passionately and dangerously seductive and
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

incestuous. The paper also pioneers exploration of the preoedipal

mother-child relationship, at a time when oedipal conflict had come
into psychoanalytic prominence. The Leonardo paper is in certain
respects based on a preoedipal reconstruction of Leonardo’s infantile
relationship with his biological mother and his having had two mothers.
The paper foreshadows contemporary developmental studies of infancy
and primary object relations.
In opening the paper on Leonardo, “who is among the greatest of
the human race,” Freud (1910a) asserted, quoting Jacob Burckhardt,
that “ ‘to blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust’ is no
part of its purpose. . . . But it cannot help finding worthy of under-
standing everything that can be recognized in those illustrious models.
. . . there is no one so great as to be disgraced by being subject to the
laws which govern both normal and pathological activity with equal
cogency” (p. 63). He noted that “Leonardo himself, with his love of
truth and thirst for knowledge, would not have discouraged an attempt to
take the trivial peculiarities and riddles in his nature as a starting-point,
for discovering what determined his mental and intellectual develop-
1412
ment. We do homage to him by learning from him” (pp. 130–131).
Leonardo was artist and architect, engineer and scientist. “His
investigations extended to practically every branch of natural science,
and in every single one he was a discoverer or at least a prophet and
pioneer.” But “something kept him far away from the investigation of
the human mind” (pp. 76–77).
Leonardo was an heroic figure, the quintessential Renaissance
genius, an ego ideal with whom Freud identified and from whom he
drew inspiration (Lichtenberg 1978). Like Leonardo, Freud searched
for meaning in the most varied phenomena with an insatiable curiosity.
Like Freud, Leonardo pioneered the psychological study of character
in art. Both were interested in underlying patterns and relationships
from which they constructed structure, function, and organization.
Meaning was imparted and inferred. Leonardo’s paintings, like all
great art, are meaningful and are an artistic interpretation. In turn, the
artist’s interpretation is reinterpreted by the viewer. For Freud, art was
an activity of the human imagination whose meanings could be ana-
lytically clarified and extended in a figurative, quasi-analytic process
without a responding patient. He had referred to Leonardo jocularly as
his latest analytic patient, having written to Jung on October 17, 1909,
about a patient remarkably reminiscent of Leonardo, adding that he was
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

obtaining a book about Leonardo’s youth from Italy (Freud 1910a,

p. 60). He later sought daily “analytic” sessions with Moses—the
Moses of Michelangelo and of Freud (Blum 1991). Freud analyzed
art, and art contributed to his self-analysis and analytic thought.
Freud used remote clues, such as a fragmentary screen memory,
which only a psychoanalyst would discern, to unravel basic aspects
of Leonardo’s psychobiography. He first formulated the relationship
between the artist’s childhood and his adult art. Considering the enig-
mas of Leonardo, Freud noted the lack of any heterosexual relation-
ship; sublimation of the sexual drive in voyeurism and in art; the
substitution of scientific for sexual curiosity; and a generally peaceful
disposition paradoxically coupled with the invention of weapons.
Leonardo’s kindness coexisted with his creation of grotesque mon-
sters and anatomical drawings based on the observation of cadavers.
Leonardo studied criminals on the scaffold awaiting execution. He
could draw quickly or paint very patiently for long periods. He left
hundreds of drawings, but a small number of paintings.A great many
of his artistic and scientific projects were left unfinished.
1413
Freud’s “Leonardo” is a museum piece now far removed from
its historical and cultural context. It was published the same year
Freud (1910b,c) formally introduced and emphasized the importance
of the oedipus complex and published his study of psychogenic dis-
turbance of vision. Critics would note that it was the same year
Freud published his paper on wild analysis (1910d). Though the
Leonardo paper was a serious analytic investigation, Freud was not
unaware that it involved much that was hypothetical (Coltrera 1965).
Analysts and art historians could resist seeing; they could see too
little or too much, or lose focus. Various currents in the paper represent
different domains and levels of interpretation. Employing an oedipal
paradigm of conflict, the study continued Freud’s interest in “seduction
trauma,” as well as screen memory and infantile fantasy. It is also
remarkable for its concurrent preoedipal focus and early interest in
the infant-parent relationship. His interest in the dyadic phase and
narcissism balanced and broadened Freud’s oedipal framework.
Freud focused on one brief mention of a childhood screen memory
in Leonardo’s papers, using it to build an elaborate genetic recon-
struction. Freud made the most of this minimal but telling evidence.
Leonardo wrote of “a very early memory” that had come to him:
“while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

mouth with his tail, and struck me many times with its tail against
my lips” (Freud 1910a, p. 82). A more correct translation, as Strachey
points out in a footnote, is “with its tail inside my lips,” closer to
the symbolization of nursing or fellatio. (The possibility that being
struck might represent coercive sexual abuse was not explored.)
Freud’s mistaken use of the incorrect German translation of the
Italian nib[b]io (“kite”) as Geier (“vulture”) has been the subject of
much critical discussion (Trosman 1986; Elms 1988; Schroter 1994).
But the extraordinary preoedipal reconstruction is in fact not dependent
on and transcends the mistranslation.
Freud construed the bird’s tail in the mouth as representing fellatio,
equated with the nursing experience of infancy. The tail thus symbolized
a breast/penis. The kite was ultimately representative of the mother,
and Freud inferred that nursing at the mother’s breast was passively
transformed first to being nursed and later to fellatio. In its day, this
reconstruction of oral infancy from an adult screen memory came as a
bolt from the blue. Freud assumed that Leonardo had a loving, rather
exclusive, and extended relationship with his biological mother and
1414
that his mother fixation was displaced onto a male object at a later stage
of development. Given the assumption of a doting mother and an absent
father during the first years of Leonardo’s life, Freud further assumed
that Leonardo identified with his mother and then loved a youth, repre-
senting himself, as he wanted his mother to love him. This set of uncon-
scious identifications with mother and child became widely recognized
as an historic contribution to the psychology of a particular form of
homosexuality. Even at this very early period, Freud (1910a) noted that
it was only one form of homosexuality, implying that he recognized
a range of “homosexualities,” the various types having different dynam-
ics, constitutional dispositions, etc. Freud’s original formulation has
now also been inferred in narcissistic heterosexuals.
Freud’s reconstruction included the mother’s passionate kisses on
Leonardo’s mouth as an infant. Freud proposed that the poor, forsaken
biological mother had attempted to compensate herself and her son,
Leonardo, for the lack of a husband and father’s love. As an ungratified
mother, she presumably took her little Leonardo as a love object in
place of her husband. Freud presumed that Leonardo was robbed of
a part of his masculinity by this premature erotic overstimulation, as
well as by the absence of a father. The formulation is in essence a
revival of the seduction theory. Freud implied that this dyadic
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

seduction strongly contributed to Leonardo’s homosexuality and to

what Freud (1923) later categorized as the negative oedipus complex.
Leonardo had also chosen his object “along the path of narcissism”
(Freud 1910a, p. 100). According to Strachey, Freud’s invocation here of
the legend of Narcissus, a youth who fell in love with his own image,
was his second published reference to the subject of narcissism, the first
having appeared just months earlier in a footnote added to the second
edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (see Freud 1905b,
pp. 139–140). The Leonardo paper, then, may be considered Freud’s
first elaboration of the concept.
Freud also dealt with Leonardo’s relationship with his father.
Of particular significance was his assumption of a highly ambivalent
paternal relationship in which Leonardo was both submissive and defi-
ant. Leonardo was an illegitimate firstborn who by present accounts
was brought into his father’s house soon after his birth. The hypothesis
that his father left him a model of unfinished creations by begetting and
then abandoning him has therefore not been validated. Leonardo’s
perfectionism and his infantile maternal fixations, as well as his con-
1415
cerns with separation, castration, and death, would now also have to
be studied in connection with his incomplete projects (see Green 1992).
Freud’s inference was that Leonardo was submissive in avoiding oedi-
pal competition with his father in the erotic sphere, but that at the same
time he renounced any intellectual submission to paternal authority. In
Freud’s view, because Leonardo disdained authority and orthodoxy as
an artist and a scientist, he was free to create, experiment, and investi-
gate without being intimidated or requiring parental guidance.
Freud regarded Leonardo as having transferred his needs for nurtu-
rance and love in the experience with his overloving, overprotective
mother into what later became sublimated homosexuality and the sub-
limations of art. Leonardo’s family structure and illegitimate birth may,
according to Freud, have increased the young Leonardo’s perplexity
and curiosity about his origins, about pregnancy and babies, and about
the nature of paternal procreation. Leonardo’s illegitimacy and possible
homosexuality could have contributed to a heightened artistic achieve-
ment as a means of overcoming the social stigma attached to both.
However, Leonardo’s love of his mother, or mothers, led to another
major aspect of Freud’s psychobiographical study. Freud gazed long at
the smiles of the Virgin Mary and her mother in the painting Madonna
and Child with St. Anne, as well as the smile on the Mona Lisa (La
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

Gioconda). Through psychoanalysis he would uncover the secret of

this renowned masterpiece. Relying on psychoanalytic knowledge,
Leonardo’s artistic work and writings, and a biography of the artist,
Freud attempted a psychoanalytic solution to the centuries-old mystery
of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. Freud’s analytic eye and
bold imagination contributed to radically new interpretations of this
painting, as well as of the Madonna and Child with St. Anne and a
related cartoon that includes John the Baptist. Freud proposed that
the Mona Lisa’s smile had unconsciously reminded Leonardo of
his mother’s smile, thus reactivating the repressed memory of his
adoring biological mother. He further proposed that the Madonna
and St. Anne, mother and grandmother to the Christchild, are actually
representations, respectively, of Leonardo’s stepmother (Donna Albiera)
and his biological mother Caterina (condensed with his paternal grand-
mother Monna Lucia). Freud’s depiction of these mother figures
radically expanded the psychology of art and of adoption. The paper
has not sufficiently been recognized as an early contribution to the
psychology of adoption (see pp. 113–114). Freud’s reconstruction
1416
depended on the smiles, fusion, and apparently similar ages of the
Christchild’s mother and grandmother. Freud’s formulations may
suggest, but do not explicitly propose, the fantasy of fusion of mother
and infant.
Meyer Schapiro (1956) has noted that the London cartoon of the
Madonna with St. Anne, Christ, and John the Baptist predates the Mona
Lisa and that the smiles of the Virgin and her mother were therefore
painted before it could have reawakened the repressed memory of
Leonardo’s biological mother. Insisting on the importance of culture
and historical context, Schapiro noted that the cult of St. Anne was
prevalent in Leonardo’s day, so that the youthful representation of the
two women might not be so unusual, even if not traditional. Further, the
kite is not representative of a doting mother, but rather is disposed to
peck enviously at her growing babes and withhold food. Leonardo had
actually experimented with depicting St. Anne at different ages. He
had been exposed to an artistic tradition of smiling women, from the
Greeks on through Verrocchio, his artistic mentor. The discovery that
Caterina had had a daughter when Leonardo was two and a half years
old, and another when he was seven, tends to disprove Freud’s suppo-
sition of her impassioned, exclusive devotion to Leonardo in early
childhood (Collins 1997).
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

In the case of genius, the artist may be less influenced by teaching

and tradition than by creative imagination and a capacity for innova-
tion. Leonardo may indeed have been ambivalent toward his mother,
regarding her with animosity as well as affection, still consistent with
the interpretation of the Madonna and St. Anne as the two mothers of
the artist (Eissler 1961). Some orally dependent males are quite hostile
to women and/or maternal father figures, who may be denigrated or
idealized. In this connection, Leonardo’s androgynous figures suggest
phallic women and a merged or condensed father/mother figure. The
nipple behind his screen memory became a maternal phallus, which
he sought and disguised in his art (Green 1992). Freud’s complex
interpretation allows for the splitting or separation of the two mothers
from a single image, as well as for their fusion into a partially merged
figure, as in the London cartoon.
The ambivalent smile is both comforting and reassuring on the one
hand, sinister and seductive on the other. The maternal object is subject
to a number of splits or dualities, including birth and death, good and
bad, madonna and prostitute, young and old, phallic and castrated, bio-
1417
logical and stepmother. Like other stepchildren, so often with a back-
ground of illegitimacy, Leonardo would have a particular fear of incest.
While remaining faithful to the incestuous object, at the same time,
Leonardo shifted his rage at abandonment or lack of affection onto the
stepmother and/or other objects. However, Leonardo’s attachment to
the biological mother of his infancy, whom he may later have seen
again, was of primary object significance (Barande 1977). Separation
trauma was doubtless as important a consideration as seduction trauma,
though the former is not elucidated in Freud’s essay.
Freud considered the importance of the smile in the parent-child
relationship and reconstructed the early preoedipal mother-child rela-
tionship, both clinically and in applied analysis. This stimulated later
research on the formation of the primary object relationship, as well as
studies of nurturance, attachment, holding, the dialogue, maternal and
infant fantasies of symbiosis, oceanic reunion, and phenomena that
have come to be conceptualized as intrapsychic representation and
separation-individuation.
Particularly pertinent is the significance of the smile and, more
generally, the important role of the face, the gaze, eye contact and
aversion, play, affectomotor communication, and empathy in infant
development and the primary mother-infant relationship. The dyadic
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

partners “read” each other’s security or discomfort, pleasure or distress.

The gaze and the role of vision, touch, kinesthesia, and the “languages”
of imagery, symbolism, and kinetics are crucial also in the arts. The
eye itself is endowed with symbolic meaning. The eye may be assigned
the attributes of hands, mouth, or any erogenous zone, or of the object.
The eye may be loving or hating, protective or menacing, good or
evil. The evil eye may demand “an eye for an eye.” The all-seeing
eye of the omnipotent parent or child is associated with the magical
quality of art and, conversely, with blindness consequent to forbidden,
erotic, or hostile vision (Adams 1993). What is revealed or in the fore-
ground may disguise or divert attention from what is concealed or
in the background. Nonetheless, background and overall gestalt
contribute to meaning and interpretation.
The smile of the mother has in later psychoanalytic thought
received less attention than has the social smile of the infant. The
mother who does not smile but who frowns, scowls, or has a frozen
face is likely to have serious difficulty in mothering, and her infant is
at risk. The mother or maternal surrogate needs the complementary
1418
smile of the infant as a response that elicits mothering and contributes
to further development of the mother-child relationship during the
first years of life. Either partner may become frantic without the other’s
affective responsiveness and may frantically try to elicit engagement.
The smile of the mother and the smile of the infant are both extremely
important for the development of mothering, the primary object rela-
tionship, and the infant’s ego development.
It is of interest that Freud (1905a, pp. 146–147n) took notice of the
infant’s smile, as well as the mother’s. He pondered the origin of the
infant’s smile, which he had observed while the infant was falling asleep
at the breast, satiated. The nursing infant stares at the face of the care-
giver, who in turn looks at the infant. Later studies have demonstrated that
the first smiling of the infant is endogenous and occurs during REM or
drowsy REM sleep. The endogenous smile becomes more predictable in
the first postnatal weeks, and by eight to twelve weeks it can be elicited
by a visual “facial” configuration (hairline, eyes and nose, and motion).
Soon thereafter, exogenous smiling becomes the meaningful “social smile”
rather specifically elicited by the mother’s face. A new level of ego devel-
opment and primary object relationship has been achieved (Spitz 1965).
Motherhood reactivates the mother’s own childhood and her rela-
tionship with her own mother. The match with and capacity to adapt to
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

that particular infant and the infant’s capacity to adapt to that caregiver
have profound developmental implications. The infant is preadapted
to separate and individuate, with the caregiver’s facilitating respon-
siveness. This is necessary for the formation of cohesive and coherent
representations of self and object and the consolidation of identity. The
caregiver’s and the toddler’s mastery of ambivalence and the care-
giver’s empathic response are essential for the development of self- and
object constancy (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975). In the reciprocal
responses and transactions in the evolving primary object relationship,
the face is crucial in bonding, in the development of affects, and in
their recognition, expression, and comunication. Affects are represented
and elicit affective responses in the face-to-face visual interaction of
infant and caregiver. The brain is prewired for facial recognition, and
impairment of this neurological substrate leads to a specific disorder,
prosopagnosia, that has serious psychological and developmental
implications. The face of the caregiver is sought and recognized by
the infant, and the face retains its importance for identity and object
relations throughout life. Infants see themselves through the care-
1419
giver’s eyes and read safety or danger, approval or disapproval, in the
mother’s or caregiver’s face. Vestiges of this preverbal communica-
tion may contribute to the substrate of art and its appreciation.
A portrait depicts its subject’s character and associated features,
both revealing and concealing. In some ways it is also a disguised or
derivative portrait of the artist. The Mona Lisa could then represent
Leonardo’s feminine self, caricatured as “Leonardo in drag.” The face
of elation or depression may be more apparent than a forced or beguil-
ing smile, and artifice may be related to art. As Freud (1910a) observed,
“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” (pp. 113–114). To update Freud’s observation, the
smile may be seen to disguise the hostility and/or sadness consequent
to object loss. The smile of Caterina (Mona Lisa) could conceal the hate
and rage of the separation trauma suffered by a mother whose child was
taken from her.
The host of male artists who produced paintings of the Madonna
and Child likely also experienced a reactivation of their own child-
hood experience with their mothers. Artistic transformations provide
the overdetermined visions, playful and doleful, idealized, mystic, and
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

tragic, of parenthood and babyhood. In Raphael’s first rendering of

the subject he painted his own mother as the Virgin and himself as
the Christchild. This is consistent with Freud’s view that in Leonardo’s
painting Madonna and child are transformed representations of the
artist’s parent-child relationship.
Leonardo is thought to have painted Mona Lisa del Giocondo over
a four-year period, and to have hired entertainers to amuse her while
she posed. The prolonged work on the painting suggests another
dimension of the process, the evolving relationship and dialogue of
the artist, his model, and his real or imagined audience. If the smile
of Mona Lisa summoned a secret connection, a transference to his
lost mother of infancy, actual connections also developed between
Leonardo, his subject, and the evolving portrait. Leonardo did not
part with the portrait of Mona Lisa, and he took it with him to France,
where it remained after his death. This behavior suggests that the Mona
Lisa indeed represented a mother figure, and Mona Lisa was also the
name of Leonardo’s godmother (Collins 1992). The subject and her
portrait had become icons for Leonardo and subsequently for posterity
1420
(Trosman 1986).
Freud’s reconstruction of Leonardo’s two mothers—or, if grand-
mother and godmother are taken into account, several mothers—rever-
berates with Freud’s reconstructions in his self-analysis (Blum 1994;
Hardin 1987, 1988; Harsch 1994). His interest in Leonardo extends to
his subject’s infantile object relations. Leonardo was an illegitimate
first son, born of a woman of low social status, probably a peasant, who
soon relinquished the child to his father’s new wife. Illegitimacy may
not have had the same social and cultural significance in Quattrocento
Florence as in other times and places. But it is possible that Leonardo
might have represented, on some level, a blemish and a burden to
Caterina. Leonardo may have been exposed to shame and humiliation
as a bastard, a second-class citizen and stepson in his father’s home.
As an illegitimate child, he was not entitled to inherit, and indeed his
father’s estate was bequeathed entirely to his legitimate half-siblings.
His father’s new wife was very young, and not pregnant, at the time
Leonardo came into her care; nor did she ever bear children. Since wet
nursing was customary, it is likely that Leonardo was placed with a wet
nurse for the eighteen to twenty-two months that was typical in that
society. The paid wet nurse is likely to have been his then lactating bio-
logical mother. There are possibilities of repeated separations, losses,
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

and reunions involving not only his father, but his two mothers (Collins
1997). Thus, Leonardo’s difficulty in completing his projects, which
Freud attributed to abandonment by the father, must be reconceptual-
ized as caused by a displacement from the sinister preoedial mother of
abandonment and the seductive oedipal mother of incestuous reunion
onto the father.
The experience of two mothers or multiple caregivers can be facili-
tating or obstructive. Dual mothering may foster development if there
is relative harmony, continuity, and consistency in infant care. The
experience of separation from the first caregiver is likely to be trau-
matic for the mother as well as the infant (Bramly 1991; Schroter
1994). How does such a temporary caregiver invest her love in an
infant she knows she will have to abandon to another? How do being
a wet nurse for hire—nurturance for payment—and the envious ambiva-
lence of lower socioeconomic status influence the caregiver? If she
does form a loving attachment to the infant, the impending later
separation would be associated with anxiety, hostility, depression,
grief, and anticipatory mourning. The toddler would be exposed to
1421
maternal depression antecedent to primary object loss and enormous
narcissistic injury. If the natural mother was the wet nurse, this would
strongly influence attachment and investment, as well as the later
experience of loss and bereavement. The infant would be exposed
to the caregiver’s intense love-hate conflicts during a very vulner-
able period of ego immaturity. The “abandoned” toddler could both
internalize hate and rage and project them onto the mother figure.
Discontinuities in care and relationships tax the toddler’s capacity
for adaptation to different caregivers. There is often more than a grain
of truth to the ambivalence of a stepmother. Integration and mastery of
ambivalence are exceptionally challenged, as is the achievement of
self- and object constancy. These developmental tasks may have been
facilitated by the exceptional endowment of Leonardo, who had to
confront a disordered infancy far different from the rather blissful
symbiosis initially postulated by Freud. Leonardo’s drawings of angels
and the apocalypse reflect his unresolved ambivalence and splitting,
psychoanalytic concepts not yet formulated in 1910.
Leonardo’s interest in genealogy condenses his curiosity about his
illegitimate birth and multiple mothers. Freud’s formulation that
Leonardo sublimated his sexual curiosity in his scientific research may
be expanded. Leonardo would have been confused and curious about
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

his origins and about the relationships of his parents. St. Anne’s body
is fused with that of the Madonna, but the two women have separate
heads (Freud 1910; Melgar and Rascovsky de Salvarezza 1997), repre-
senting the fusion and differentiation of intrapsychic representa-
tions, and the isolation of affect and thought, body and mind. The
Christchild as Leonardo versus Leonardo as Christ may also represent
an internal split between the omnipotent and immortal and the mundane
and realistic. This early split may contribute to a later division between
artistic and personal identity. The artistic search for beauty and perfec-
tion compensates for narcissistic mortification and the lacerations of
loss. In Leonardo’s family romance, he is identified with the divine
child of the Virgin Mary, the aggrandized son of the idealized mother.
His lowly biological mother is glorified in his art, and his own stigma-
tized illegitimate status is transformed into that of the adored Christ-
child. Art transcends transience, and the object is immortalized and
united with the self.
Artistic creativity may first evolve from the creation of the transi-
tional object, from infant-caregiver play, and in later development
1422
from fantasy play. A child’s playful drawing can often be a precursor
of adult art. Artistic motivation and concepts may be related to identi-
fication and rivalry with maternal creation, paternity, and oedipal
conflict. Childhood illusions of divine descent or a maternal phallus
may contribute to the development of art as illusion. Creativity may
also be related to the mastery of trauma and the restitution of loss. In
the case of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s possession of the portrait was
simultaneously an effort to compensate for object loss, maintain object
constancy, and identify with the parent who keeps the child. He kept
contact with his maternal object by gazing at it, holding and touching
it, and retouching it with his paintbrush.
Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity about nature, his difficulty in com-
pleting projects, and his concern with secrets and enigmas, his own and
others’, are reflected in his art, his writings, and his scientific experi-
ments. The enigmatic smile may be related to his remarkable sfumato,
in which objects are seen as through a mysterious mist, the great
mysteries of pregnancy, birth, and death. Surface and ever receding
depth are not directly apprehended. Are these enigmatic phenomena
related to Leonardo’s mirror writing? Such writing must be deciphered
by reading it as reflected in a mirror, requiring extra time and effort.
The reflected image is a reversal or inversion of one’s handiwork,
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

and of the self or object. The mirror may represent the mother’s
mirroring of the child, whereby the child finds identity and self-repre-
sentation in the mother’s eye. Handwriting is individual, a fingerprint
of personal identity and self-expression. As both surface and depth, the
mirror Leonardo held to nature may have promoted self-object differ-
entiation and reflected a narcissistic object relationship. The mirror is
a metaphor for fantasy, duplication, and the reflection of psychic and
external reality (Shengold 1974). At what point did the mirror writing
gain or regain importance for Leonardo? Was it related to his left-hand-
edness, to bisexuality, or to homosexuality and an alternate sexual or
artistic identity? Leonardo broke with tradition in art and in life.
Leonardo recommended to artists that “when you are painting you
ought to have by you a flat mirror in which you should often look at
your work. The work will appear to you in reverse and will seem to
be by the hand of another master and thereby you will better judge
its faults. . . . It is a fault in the extreme of painters to repeat the same
movements, the same faces, and the same style of drapery in one and
the same narrative painting and to make most of the faces resemble
1423
their master . . . ” (Kemp 1989, pp. 202–203). If the mirror reflected
and projected the self, mirror writing may have favored detached self-
reflection and self-criticism in the face of narcissistic imagery. The
mirror could also represent the “other,” bisexuality, and the bipolarity
of imagination and reality. Leonardo may also have been metaphorically
describing projective identification and the role of projection and iden-
tification in artistic and scientific creativity.
Leonardo and Freud were both extraordinarily gifted in a variety
of modes of perception, imagery, symbolism, and thought. Leonardo,
doubtless a model of the Renaissance, was for Freud a creative ideal
with whom he identified. Freud’s Leonardo is a composite portrait
presenting image and idea, form and function, surface and depth, in
both art and psychoanalysis.

REFERENCES

ADAMS, L. (1993). Art and Psychoanalysis. New York: Harper Collins.

BARANDE, I. (1977). Le maternal singulier: Freud et Leonard de Vinci.
Paris: Aubier Montaigne.
BLUM, H. (1977). The prototype of preoedipal reconstruction. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association 25:757–785.
——— (1991). Freud and the figure of Moses: The Moses of Freud. Journal
 H a r o l d P. B l u m

of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39:513–536.

——— (1994). Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis: Childhood Revisited and
Recreated. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
BRAMLY, S. (1991). Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci.
New York: Harper Collins.
COLLINS, B. (1997). Leonardo, Psychoanalysis and Art History. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
COLTRERA, J. (1965). On the creation of beauty and thought. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association 13:634–703.
EISSLER, K. (1961). Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on the Enigma.
New York: International Universities Press.
ELMS, A. (1988). Freud as Leonardo: Why the first psychobiography went
wrong. Journal of Personality 56:19–40.
FREUD, S. (1905a). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Standard
Edition 8:9–236.
——— (1905b). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard Edition
7:130–243.
——— (1910a). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood.
Standard Edition 11:59–137.
1424 ——— (1910b). The psycho-analytic view of psychogenic disturbance of
vision. Standard Edition 11:211–218.
——— (1910c). A special type of choice of object made by men. Standard
Edition 11:165–175.
——— (1910d). “Wild” psycho-analysis. Standard Edition 11:221–227.
——— (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. Standard Edition 13:211–236.
——— (1923). The ego and the id. Standard Edition 19:12–66.
——— (1928). Dostoevsky and parricide. Standard Edition 21:177–194.
GREEN, A. (1992). Revelations de L’Inacheivement. Paris: Flammarion.
HARDIN, H. (1987). On the vicissitudes of Freud’s early mothering: I.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 56:628–644.
——— (1988). On the vicissitudes of Freud’s early mothering: II. Psycho-
analytic Quarterly 57:72–86; 209–223.
HARSCH, H. (1994). Freud’s identification with men who had two mothers:
Oedipus, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Moses. Psyche
48:124–153.
JONES, E. (1953). The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1. New York:
Basic Books.
KEMP, M., ED. (1989). Leonardo on Painting. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
L ICHTENBERG , J. (1978). Freud’s Leonardo: Psychobiogaphy and autobiog-
raphy of genius. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
26:863–880.
MAHLER, M., PINE, F., & BERGMAN, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART, FREUD AND LEONARDO

Human Infant. New York: Basic Books.

M ELGAR , M.C., & R A S C OV S KY D E S A LVA R E Z Z A , R. (1997). The enigma
and mother/child passion relationship in the painting of the Italian
Renaissance. Paper presented to the International Psychoanalytical
Association, Florence, Italy, April 11.
RICHTER, J.P., ED. (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Vol. 2. New
York: Dover.
SCHAPIRO, M. (1956). Leonardo and Freud: An art historical study. Journal
of the History of Ideas 17:147–178.
S CHROTER , M. (1994). Two empirical notes on Freud’s Leonardo. Inter-
national Journal of Psycho-Analysis 75:87–100.
SHENGOLD, L. (1974). The metaphor of the mirror. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 22:97–115.
SPITZ, R. (1965). The First Year of Life. New York: International Universities
Press.
TROSMAN, H. (1986). Toward a psychoanalytic iconography. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 55:130–167.

23 The Hemlocks
Roslyn Estates, NY 11576 1425
Fax: 516–621–3014
E-mail: haroldpblum@cs.com