II
As far as I know Leonardo only once interspersed in his scientific descriptions a communication from his childhood. In a passage where he speaks about the flight of the vulture,[1] he suddenly interrupts himself in order to follow up a memory from very early years which came to his mind.
“It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.”[2]
We have here an infantile memory and to be sure of the strangest sort. It is strange on account of its content and account of the time of life in which it was fixed. That a person
- ↑ Unfortunately, the german translation geier (english: vulture), which Maria Herzfeld had used for the italian word nibio in the first edition of her book Leonardo da Vinci, der Denker, Forscher und Poet was not exactly the kite Leonardo da Vinci had meant: a small hawk-like bird of prey, common in the Vinci area, which is occasionally a scavenger. This disappointed Freud because, as he confessed to Lou Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 9 February 1919, he regarded the Leonardo essay as “the only beautiful thing I have ever written” (german: “der Leonardo, das einzig Schöne, das ich je geschrieben, bereitet sich jetzt zur zweiten Auflage.”). Some Freudian scholars, such as Erich Neumann in his book Art and the Creative Unconscious, have made attempts to repair the theory by incorporating the kite. (Wikisource contributor note)
- ↑ Cited by Scognamiglio from the Codex Atlanticus, p. 65.
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