Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Leonardo’s own wording encourages the idea that fantasy is present. Though he calls the incident a memory, it has a sort of blurred quality which expresses that uncertainty one has about early memories and the extent to which they are constructions rather than genuine recollections. His earliest memory was that ‘it seemed’ to him that a kite came down. There is a tentativeness. He is grasping back at something which is potent in his mind but not quite clear to his reason. He thinks it happened, but maybe it did not. He has already used the word ‘seems’ earlier in the sentence: it ‘seems to be my destiny’ to study kites. The word ‘destiny’ is also interesting, because in this context it suggests what we would call a compulsion or fixation. He is saying that something impels him to keep returning to this bird, to keep writing about it so ‘particularly’. ‘Destiny’ conveys that this is something other than conscious volition, that some hidden process is at work.

  In one sense, Leonardo’s thing about kites is precisely connected to his renewed interest in human flight in the years around 1505. The small codex ‘On the Flight of Birds’, now in Turin, was composed at this time. It includes a famous pronouncement: ‘The big bird will take its first flight above the back of the Great Cecero, filling the universe with amazement, filling all the chronicles with its fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.’23 This is generally taken to mean that Leonardo was planning a trial flight of his flying-machine or ‘big bird’ from the summit of Monte Ceceri, near Fiesole, just north of Florence. A jotting on the same folio of the codex shows his presence near Fiesole in March 1505.24 Thus the memory of the kite comes to mind at a time when he is intensely preoccupied with the possibility of human flight, and becomes a kind of personalized source for that preoccupation. The kite flew down to him and showed him his ‘destiny’ while he was still in his cradle.

  Birds in flight, from the Turin Codex of c. 1505.

  The first psychological study of Leonardo’s kite fantasy was by Freud: Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (‘A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci’), published in 1910. Freud essentially analyses the story as if it were a dream, with unconscious meanings and memories coded within it. The key to it, he thinks, is the infant Leonardo’s relationship with his mother. Some of what he says on this score is untenable because he argues connections with the mother based on symbolic associations of the vulture (he was using a faulty German translation of Leonardo’s note, which incorrectly rendered the bird as Geier, a vulture).25 His learned excursus into Egyptian vulture-symbolism must be discarded, along with much else that seems to the biographer too specifically or elaborately ‘Freudian’. But the basic perception – that this dream or fantasy of Leonardo’s, specifically placed in his cradle, is connected with his feelings about his mother – seems a valuable psychoanalytical insight.

  According to Freud, the kite putting its tail in the infant’s mouth is a buried memory of being breast-fed: ‘What the fantasy conceals is merely a reminiscence of sucking – or being suckled – at his mother’s breast, a scene of human beauty that he, like so many artists, undertook to depict with his brush.’ (Freud is referring here to the Litta Madonna, painted in Milan in the late 1480s.) Being breast-fed is ‘the first source of pleasure in our life’, and the impression of it remains ‘indelibly printed on us’.26 But this idea that the kite’s tail represents the mother’s nipple can take us only so far, because the fantasy is not just, or even primarily, an image of infantile security. The feel of it is quite different. The bird’s action seems to become threatening, intrusive, percussive. This might be taken to mean that Leonardo’s feelings about his mother were themselves ambivalent, that a fear of her rejection or hostility is expressed in this more oppressive overtone. One recalls the birth of Caterina’s first daughter in 1454, when Leonardo was two: an age at which a child is prone to feel the advent of a new baby as a disaster of removed maternal affection. Alternatively – and this is more Freud’s line – the disturbing aspect of the kite’s tail is phallic, representing the threatening competition of the father.

  Freud applied these perceptions to what he knew of Leonardo’s upbringing, which in 1910 was not as much as we know today, though the outline of it was clear enough from Antonio da Vinci’s informative catasto declarations, which had been published a few years earlier. The fantasy ‘seems to tell us’, Freud says, that Leonardo ‘spent the critical first years of his life not by the side of his father and stepmother but with his poor, forsaken, real mother’. In this critical phase of infancy, ‘certain impressions become fixed and ways of reacting to the outside world are established,’ and what here became established was precisely the father’s extraneousness. Ser Piero was absent from the home, outside the intense circle of the mother–child relationship, but was also a threat to it, a potential disruption. Thus the kite fantasy suggests an early tension between the comfort of the mother and the threat of the father, setting the scene for later tensions: ‘No one who as a child desires his mother can escape wanting to put himself in his father’s place, can fail to identify himself with him in his imagination, and later to make it his task in life to gain ascendancy over him.’27 That Leonardo’s father had died in 1504 – close enough to the approximate date of the note about the kite – may be significant. Critics of Freud’s analysis say that this is piling highly speculative psychology on top of highly speculative history, and they are right, but it has a coherence to it. In the matter of Leonardo’s childhood we have only nuances of knowledge, and the speculations of Dr Freud seem to me to be worth listening to.

  There is another piece of writing by Leonardo about kites, not apparently known to Freud, which leads into the same sort of terrain. In this, Leonardo cites a folkloric association of the kite with invidia – envy or jealousy: ‘One reads of the kite that when it sees its offspring in the nest becoming too fat, out of envy it pecks at their ribs and refuses to feed them.’28 This is from his ‘bestiary’, a collection of emblematic sayings and stories about animals, inscribed in a small notebook he was using in Milan in the mid-1490s. It is therefore some years earlier than the writing down of the kite ‘memory’. It echoes a passage from a popular miscellany, the Fiore di virtù, by the thirteenth-century friar Tommaso Gozzadini – a book Leonardo is known to have owned. While it does not have the weight of personal association which freights the more famous memory, it seems to link interestingly with it. Here too we have a relationship between a kite and a baby (in this case its own chicks). The keynote of the vignette is the withdrawal of parental love. What should be a comforting and sustaining figure – the bird on the nest feeding its young – becomes an image of disturbing hostility: the kite ‘pecks’ the child with its beak, as in the memory it ‘strikes’ the child with its tail. Again one could take this either as a fear of the mother turning from feeder to destroyer (‘quod me nutrit me destruit’ in the old emblematic tag) or as a fear of the father as a hostile rival for his mother’s affections. Again the kite leads to an area of childhood fears and tensions.29

  Another passage that would certainly have interested Freud occurs in one of Leonardo’s collections of profezie – those riddles and word-games humorously cast into prophetic mode. One of the fascinations of these is their tendency to communicate unexpected meanings beyond the answer to the riddle. An example is the prophecy which says, ‘Feathers will raise men, as they do birds, towards heaven.’ The stated answer is ‘quills’, which write uplifting words; but the covert answer would seem to be ‘human flight’. Similarly, ‘Flying creatures will support men with their very feathers’ (answer: ‘feather beds’).30 The most compelling of these is the profezia whose answer is simply ‘dreaming’, and which is surely nothing less than an account of Leonardo’s own troubled dreams:

  It will seem to men that they see unknown destructions in the sky. It will seem that they are flying up into the sky, and then they are fleeing in terror from the flames that pour down from there. They will hear all kinds of animals speaking in human l
anguage. Their bodies will glide in an instant to various parts of the world without moving. In the midst of darkness they will see the most wonderful splendours. O marvel of the human species, what frenzy has led you thus? You will speak with animals of every species and they will speak with you in human language. You will see yourself fall from great heights without harming yourself. Torrents will sweep you along and mingle in their rapid course…

  The next line is rendered illegible by a tear in the paper. Visible is ‘Usera[i] car[… ]n madre e sorell [… ]’. Carlo Pedretti conjectures that the sentence read, ‘Userai carnalmente con madre e sorelle’ – ‘You will have sex with your mother and sisters.’ He compares a phrase in the bestiary, on the lustfulness of the camel: ‘Se usasse continuo con la madre e sorelle mai le tocca…’31 Thus these dreams of ‘flying up into the sky’ and ‘speaking with animals’ mingle strangely with a fantasy of incestuous relations with the mother. Once again we are in the kind of terrain mapped out by Freud in his analysis of the kite fantasy.

  These psychological undertones are also discernible in one of Leonardo’s most mysterious paintings – his Leda and the Swan (Plate 29). The painting is lost, but can be partly reconstructed from preliminary sketches by Leonardo and from full-size copies by his pupils or followers. The earliest known sketches are dated to 1504–5 – precisely contemporary with the note about the kite. The theme is from classical mythology. Jupiter or Zeus, in love with the Spartan princess Leda, transforms himself into a swan and impregnates her, and from their union are born – or, in the paintings, quite literally hatched – two pairs of twins: Castor and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra. This – the bird, the mother, the half-bird children hatching strangely from their shells in the foreground – seems to revisit once more the ambit of the kite fantasy. Like that fantasy, the painting is clearly connected with Leonardo’s preoccupation with flight at this time. ‘Cecero’ – as in Monte Ceceri, from which Leonardo planned to launch his ‘big bird’ or flying-machine in c. 1505 – means ‘swan’ in Florentine dialect.

  Another painting, the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne, adds a curious footnote to this kite story. The painting is late, c. 1510, but a version was in existence – in the form of a full-scale preparatory cartoon – by 1501, so it too belongs broadly to this period of Leonardo’s early fifties. The painting is patently on a theme of motherhood. St Anne is the mother of Mary, though it is often noted that Leonardo’s depiction of her makes her look much the same age as Mary, and thus seems another reflection of the tangled relations of Leonardo’s childhood, with its trinity of Caterina,

  Bird children: a detail from the Uffizi Leda and the Swan.

  Albiera and Lucia – mother, stepmother and grandmother. There the matter might have rested but for the curious discovery by a Freudian follower, Oskar Pfister, of a ‘hidden bird’ lurking in the folds of the Virgin’s gown or mantle. This was in 1913, and Pfister – following the original Freudian slip – calls the bird a vulture, but this is not critical. The ‘bird’ is best obtained by turning the composition on its side. Once pointed out, it certainly seems to be there, but (like those implanted memories of childhood) is it really there? This is what Pfister saw: ‘In the length of blue cloth which is visible around the hip of the woman in front [i.e. Mary], and which extends in the direction of her lap and her right knee, one can see the vulture’s extremely characteristic head, its neck, and the sharp curve where its body begins.’ He discerned the bird’s wing as following the length of the cloth where it runs down to Mary’s foot. Another part of the cloth ‘extends in an upward direction and rests on her shoulder and on the child’, and here Pfister saw the bird’s ‘outspread tail’, complete with ‘radiating lines which resemble the outlines of feathers’. And, strangest of all – ‘exactly as in Leonardo’s fanciful childhood dream’ – the tail ‘leads to the mouth of the child, i.e. to Leonardo himself’.32

  There are three possible explanations of this ‘picture puzzle’, as Pfister

  The hidden bird discerned by Oskar Pfister in the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne.

  called it. The first is that Leonardo deliberately put a bird there. The second is that he has involuntarily projected the bird’s shape into this meditation on motherhood. The third is that the bird is no more than a chance alignment of lines and shadows, and has no significance other than as a rendition of drapery – a virtuoso painterly skill which Leonardo had been honing for thirty years. The safest answer is the last one – if safety is what one wants.

  In these ways this first memory – of a bird which ‘came to’ him in his cradle – echoes to him across the years, intertwined with feelings of maternal love and loss, and with the vaunting ambition of mechanical flight, as if he might thereby meet again that half-remembered, half-imagined visitor from the sky.

  AT THE MILL

  Just out of Vinci, on the right-hand side of the road leading north towards Pistoia, is a large stone house called Il Molino della Doccia. It is now a private house, but within living memory it was still a working olive-mill or frantoio, and it was certainly known as such to Leonardo, who captioned a swift but precise sketch of an olive-press with the words ‘Molino della Doccia di Vinci’. He drew this in about 1504 or 1505, presumably on a visit back home.33 It belongs to the same period as his note about the kite, and perhaps it too contains an element of reminiscence. Standing there in the Molino della Doccia he is surrounded by the sights and smells of his childhood.

  Leonardo was a country boy. He grew up, broadly speaking, on the farm – whether at his stepfather’s smallholding at Campo Zeppi or his grandfather’s modest estates around Vinci – and he was immersed from his earliest years in the world of agricultural production: of ploughing and ditching, of planting and harvesting, of orchards and grain-fields and vineyards and olive-groves. Even more than wine, olive-oil was the typical, identifying product of the Tuscan hill-country. Besides its culinary virtues, the oil was used as fuel for lamps, as a lubricant, as a medicine or ointment, and for various other practical purposes. In Vinci and a thousand places like it the olive-harvest was an affair which involved the whole community; it still has a special place in Tuscan village life. An old country jingle announces that the olives are ready by early October – ‘Per Santa Reparata [8 October] l’oliva è oliata’ – but in fact the harvest is an event straggling over several weeks between October and early December. The fruit was beaten down with long sticks, typically a stem of the cane-grass Phragmites communis, which grows in profusion along the rivers. One of Leonardo’s ‘prophecies’ contains an image of the olive-harvest: ‘There will pour down from the direction of the sky that which gives us food and light.’ The answer to this riddle is ‘olives falling from the olive-trees’.34 Gathered up in baskets, the fruit was taken to olive-mills like the Molino della Doccia to be ground and pressed. Today’s olive-mills tend to be powered by electricity rather than by water or animals, but some still use the basic system of stone-milling and torque-pressing employed in Leonardo’s day. The frantoio’s humid aromatic air, the slithery floor, the pitchers of cloudy greenish oil, the prized olio nuovo – all these are unchanged.

  Next to Leonardo’s sketch of the olive-press at the Molino della Doccia, and clearly inspired by it, is a more complicated mechanism which he captions, ‘Da macinare colon ad acqua’ – ‘For grinding colours by means of water’. This reminds us that the painter too worked with the fruits and products of the land. The colours he used came from plants, barks, earths and minerals, which needed to be milled and ground to turn them into usable powdered pigment. There are frequent references to studio apprentices having the job of ‘grinding colours’, usually with a pestle and mortar. The device sketched out on this sheet is designed to mechanize this task.35

  Agricultural labour, from a sheet of drawings of c. 1506–8.

  Machine for grinding colours inspired by the Vinci olive-press.

  There is a connection here between the processing of olives in the olive-mill and th
e processing of paints in the artist’s workshop. The connection is even closer when one remembers that Leonardo was pre-eminently a painter in oils. The oils most frequently used for painting were linseed and walnut: Leonardo experimented throughout his life with different mixes – adding various kinds of turpentine, crushed mustard seed, and so on – but these were the staples. Both were produced in the same way, and using the same kind of machinery, as olive-oil (which was not generally used for painting because it was too thick). A note in the Codex Atlanticus suggests his personal involvement in the pressing of walnut oil: ‘Walnuts are surrounded by a thick rind like a skin, and if you do not remove it when you make oil from them, this skin tinges the oil, and when you work with it the skin separates and comes to the surface of a picture, and this is what makes it change [i.e. discolour].’36

  There are other drawings of olive-presses in his notebooks, and they may well belong within this context of producing oil for painting. A horse-drawn mechanism described as a ‘press for olives and nuts’ is closely analysed in one of the Madrid notebooks. The specifications for this are very precise: ‘The iron piece marked a is one finger wide,’ and ‘The bag which holds the nuts or olives is of thick wool, woven like the saddle-girth of a mule.’37

  There is a continuity here from childhood. The olive-mills of Vinci are a kind of prototype of the artist’s workshop: the grinding and pressing, the pungent smell of fresh oils.

  Another rural activity that Leonardo would undoubtedly have seen as a child was the weaving of wickerwork baskets out of shoots of osier. This was a speciality of the region, in which the osier willow (Salix viminalis) abounds. It is in fact connected with the very name of Vinci, and so had a special appeal for Leonardo.