The Uncanny

Freud opens his essay on the famous Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci by claiming that the psychical functioning of the most brilliant of people is equally as mysterious as that of the mentally-unwell patients with whom psychiatric research is normally concerned. With this, Freud embarks on a biography of da Vinci. During his early years, da Vinci had a great capacity for pleasure, and though he was amicable and pleasant, increased the sense of mystery around him with by exhibiting a retiring nature. Accusations of alchemy and witchcraft led da Vinci away from the arts and toward the sciences. Da Vinci had a habit of leaving paintings unfinished and was a slow worker. Though da Vinci produced an exceptional number of sketches, his inhibition was a “harbinger” of his latter retirement from painting, according to Freud.

Da Vinci was contradictory in other ways, too. While other artists promoted themselves aggressively, da Vinci was passive, and even a vegetarian. Yet he also designed weapons of war. Conflict during his lifetime is unremarked in his notes. Da Vinci also had an ascetic sexuality. A charge of unlawful homosexual practices was brought against him but ended with his acquittal. His apprentices were all handsome youths and the last became his heir. Da Vinci wrote that one ought not to love or hate until one has a thorough knowledge of the nature of something. Freud asserts that “his emotions were restrained and subjected to the investigative drive; he neither loved not hated, but asked himself about the provenance and significance of what he was supposed to love or hate” (53).

Thus, Freud argues, da Vinci transformed his passions into a lust for knowledge. This excessive drive found its roots in his childhood, Freud claims, and “gained strength by harnessing forces that originally belonged to the subject’s sexual life” (56).

Freud says that children also undergo a period of “infantile sexual research” (57). Sexual repression leads to one of three outcomes: 1) the inhibition of the intelligence (characterized by neurotic inhibition),2) the sexualization and excessive enjoyment of thinking, or 3) an amalgam of the previous two. In the third and “most perfect” solution, the libido avoids repression by strengthening the investigative drive. The third type involves a sublimation, rather than an irruption, from the unconscious, as is seen in neurosis. Freud claims that da Vinci is an exemplar of sexuality harnessed in the service of intellectual curiosity.

Little is known about da Vinci’s youth, save that he was born the illegitimate son of a notary father. Leonardo was brought up in his father’s house, leaving to enter the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio as an apprentice.