Leonardo da Vinci

When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with frail
human material, approaches the great personages of humanity, it is not
impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by laymen. It does
not strive "to blacken the radiant and to drag the sublime into the mire"; it
finds no satisfaction in diminishing the distance between the perfection of
the great and the inadequacy of the ordinary objects…
Leonardo da Vinci was admired even by his contemporaries as one of the
greatest men of the Italian Renaissance, still even then he appeared as
mysterious to them as he now appears to us. An all-sided genius, "whose form
can only be divined but never deeply fathomed," he exerted the most decisive
influence on his time as an artist; and it remained to us to recognize his
greatness as a naturalist which was united in him with the artist. Although he
left masterpieces of the art of painting, while his scientific discoveries
remained unpublished and unused, the investigator in him has never quite left
the artist, often it has severely injured the artist and in the end it has
perhaps suppressed the artist altogether. According to Vasari, Leonardo
reproached himself during the last hour of his life for having insulted God
and men because he has not done his duty to his art. And even if Vasari's
story lacks all probability and belongs to those legends which began to be
woven about the mystic master while he was still living, it nevertheless
retains indisputable value as a testimonial of the judgment of those people
and of those times. What was it that removed the personality of Leonardo from
the understanding of his contemporaries?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of
psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through
dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.