SOURCE: “Leonardo da Vinci and the Slip of Fools,” in History of European Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1994, pp. 61-78.

In the following essay, Andersen examines the historical consequences of Freud's analysis of Leonardo's dream, which relies on a mistranslation of Leonardo's account.

About a century has passed since Sigmund Freud initiated psychobiography with a startling analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's personality. He submitted that, because Leonardo was born illegitimately to a peasant woman, his early years were spent with only a mother. Without a father to balance mothering, he was left to her tender seduction, ‘kissed by her into sexual prematurity’. He became fixed on his mother and absorbed her femininity. The fixation, Freud concluded, turned him toward homosexuality, and because his youthful sexual inquisitiveness couldn’t be wholly responded to by a monosexual parent, it became sublimated as an investigative thirst for knowledge.¹

The lure for Freud's rapt...