SOURCE: “Strategies of Persuasion: The Case of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Reading Freud's Reading, edited by Sander L. Gilman, Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller, and Valerie D. Greenberg, New York University Press, 1994, pp. 129-45.

In the following essay, Birmele de-emphasizes the significance of Freud's reliance on a faulty translation of Leonardo, arguing that Freud was interested not in asserting the biographical certainty of his analysis of Leonardo, but in demonstrating the way in which psychoanalysis may be used within the context of biography.

“Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history, whom each of us must recreate for himself.”¹ Kenneth Clark's characterization of Leonardo's enigmatic personality seems to represent as much of a problem for biographers of our time,² more than half a millennium after Leonardo's birth, as it did in 1939 when Clark's book was published, or, for that matter, for Leonardo's first biographer Giorgio Vasari, who was able to...