IRENE CAESAR'S ESSAY "LEONARDO THE TRICKSTER" #1
LEONARDO THE TRICKSTER
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN VS. SIGMUND FREUD ON CREATIVITY AND RENAISSANCE
#1
Carnival turn-abouts
The purpose of this essay is to try to decipher a famous childhood recollection of Leonardo da Vinci about Kite:
"This writing distinctly about the Kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a Kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips."1
I will analyze two rival -- art historical and psychoanalytic -- interpretations of this recollection by Leonardo, and also some sociological data about sodomy in Renaissance Florence that became available only recently. I will try to solve the mystery of the Kite on the grounds of aesthetics, and I will base my analysis primarily on the concept of the Renaissance created by Mikhail Bakhtin in his monograph "Rabelais and his world" (1940). This is the first attempt to apply Bakhtinís method of research and interpretation to the visual arts. Bakhtin stressed such features of the Renaissance as:
1. Carnival not only being a possibility of mocking everybody and everything during special time of the Carnivals but being also the underlying basis of the whole Renaissance culture: "The Renaissance is, so to speak, a direct "Carnivalization" of human consciousness, philosophy and literature"2. Only later on "in the seventeenth century ... generalization, empirical abstraction, and typification acquired a leading role in the world picture"3;
2. Polyphony or simultaneous coexistence of everything with everything as if in space, not in time4. Instead of the Medieval -- narrow, vertical, and extratemporal -- model of the world, with its absolute top and bottom, its hierarchical system of ascents and descents, a new Renaissance model gave the leading role to the "horizontal lines"5. Bakhtin stressed that sublimation is connected with the Medieval vertical model of the world -- with its "fear and all gloomy seriousness", and ìthis is why the material bodily lower stratum is needed, for it gaily and simultaneously materializes and unburdens. It liberates objects from the snares of false seriousness, from illusions and sublimations inspired by fear"6;
3. Ambivalence of the ìdouble imagesî or "turnabouts" uniting two poles of the becoming and the end of a metamorphosis in one simultaneous self-sufficient continuum, for example, in the image of Pregnant death and in all conceivable variations of "two bodies in one: the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born"7;
4. A new type of individuality, which connects with the world not as a part with a whole, but as a whole with the whole; and in this "two-bodied whole" of the world, there cannot be any "naturalist atomization of reality, of an abstract and tendentious approach"8 of the bourgeois ego. This means that man "receives at his birth the seeds of every form of life", ìhe may choose the seedî, ìhe grows and forms it in himselfî, and "man can become a plant or an animal, but he can also become an angel and a son of God."9
The Carnival quality is here the all-embracing and ambivalent integrity of the world with all its incompatible opposites and incomparable extremes -- all the sides of the sphere with a man who for the first time in the history of civilization seeks to take a central position in the
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world. Polyphony and ambivalence are the guaranties of the free incompleteness of the world where in the dialogue of top and bottom, front and back, face and buttocks, life and death, "everything descends into the earth and the bodily grave in order to die and to be reborn"10. Carnival had not yet separated itself as a definite style, genre, attitude and accent of the car- nivalesque, burlesque, grotesque, parody and satire, but it was the most centripetal force of the parental culture, the new heuristic principle11 applicable to all the sides of reality, either joyful or tragic.
"Mother Vulture"
The controversy about Leonardoís recollection started with Sigmund Freud and his essay ìLeonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhoodî (1910)12. The main conclusions by Freud are:
The Kite signifies Leonardoís ìpleasure-givingî mother. The tail signifies both the motherís nipple and the coda, the penis, via the intermediary signifier of a "cowís udder," which resembles both a womanís breast and a penis. The beating of the tail inside the mouth signifies fellatio and passive homosexuality13. Mistakenly translating Nibbio as Vulture, Freud treats Leonardoís Kite as a Vulture of Egyptian mythology, a mother-goddess being an Androgyne and so possessing both male and female attributes and capable of self-impregnation or Immaculate Conception14;
Leonardoís record of a Kite is "a phantasy transposed to his childhood"15 or a typical ìscreen memoryî projecting the present instinctual urgencies of the individual into his past. This fake memory signifies Leonardoís suppressed erotic attraction to his mother, which has its source in the ìinfantile traumaî of being an illegitimate child, abandoned by father until a certain age and so excessively loved by mother16;
Because of pathology/"obsessional neurosis,"17 Leonardo became a genius and an ìideal homosexualî ("it is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in passion"18). His homosexuality was an ideal one because Leonardo has sublimated his ìidî, and sublimated it so much that he had also inadvertently sublimated his very art by the "instinct
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to research." So the results of such hypothetical sublimation were his partly suppressed sexuality and completely and finally suppressed art. Freud writes:
"We Ö took our motherís nipple into our mouth and sucked at it. The organic impression of this experience -- the first source of pleasure in our life -- doubtless remains indelibly printed on us; and when at a later date the child becomes familiar with the cowís udder whose function is that of a nipple, but whose shape and position under the belly make it resemble a penis, the preliminary stage has been reached which will later enable him to form the repellent sexual phantasy."19
Here we have two main principles of signification according to Freud: (1) Indelibility of signifier ñ one cannot help but associates the breast with the udder, and the udder with the penis; (2) Association by external resemblance. But if Freud is right, and such external re- semblance is substantially significant and indelible; then all farmers should be sexual (and homosexual) maniacs.
Freud bases his analysis on a circular principle of subconscious self-identification ("likeness", "substitution"20) of ego with the pleasure-giving object, yet Leonardo himself warned artists against automatic duplication of self-resemblances in their creations21. Arguing from the self-identification of Leonardo with his mother, Freud interprets Leonardoís mother as, maybe, his own mother or as some extra-sensitive, hysterical and sentimental woman of the petty-bourgeois class, to which Freud belonged. He says that Leonardoís words about the tail of the Vulture, striking within his lips, ìmay be translated: "My mother pressed innumerable passionate kisses on my mouthíî, and that Leonardo was ìbeing kissed by her into precocious sexual maturity", so that ìthe erotogenic zone of the mouth was given an emphasis"22. But if one wants to see what peasant women, like Leonardoís mother, were like in the Renaissance, he could take a look at the rough, heavy and humble peasants of Peter Bruegel the Elder.
The Freudian method is based on his denial of all ambivalence and his tacit compliance with some established hierarchical norm. If there are no faults and peculiarities detected by
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Freudianism in the personality of an artist, then everything is interpreted directly (plus for plus and minus for minus): if an artist is drawing the smiley faces of women, then his mother is/was nice. But if it detects some contradictions in dissected personality, then it looks for some ìdisguised motivesî, and replaces positive signifiers with the negative ones: if an artist is drawing the smiley faces of women, but is not reported to have had sex with women, he has an earmark of this or that complex. Furthermore, if an artist is caught in anything irregular and non-uniform, then all the ìsublimeî sides of the artistís personality would be misconstrued (inverted or overturned); and the imposed opposite meaning will be hypertrophied, with the least possible pathological charge of narcissism: Leonardo's vegetarianism together with kindness to animals conceal his repressed sadistic feelings. Then all the tragic sides of an art- istís personality would be hypertrophied even further into pathological cases of misogyny, misanthropy, cannibalism and sadism: the depiction of the Deluge by Leonardo conceals his desire for the death of all Humanity and so on.
In the history of art, the psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo is almost a dominant one. Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in his classical study on Leonardo (1967) that Leonardo propounds "unanswerable riddles"23, suitable only for the "psychologist". In reality, Sir Clark literally repeated not just ìpsychologicalî, but Freudian claims about Leonardoís ìmiscar- riage of willî which he called "a disease of the will"24 and "indifferent inhumanity"25. He wrote that Leonardoís homosexuality ìexplains the element of frustration which even those who are most conscious of his greatness are bound to admitî, and tells that this is the domain of the psychologist, not the art critic.26
In his well-known essay "Leonardo and Freud: an art-historian study" (1956), Meyer Schapiro protested against the organic/physiological/reductionist extremes of the Freudian
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position and proved that some of the Freudian associations were not correct, but he himself based his method on similar principles. Schapiro suggested three readings of the symbol of the Kite:
1. The Kite designates a member of avian species Leonardo has studied; tail is significant because of its special role in flight; the Kite concerned Leonardoís "ambition";
2. Record on the Kite is similar to the will-known "literary pattern"27 speaking both of some representative of animal or insect kingdom in relation to the infantís mouth (ants filling the mouth of King Midas, bees settling on the lips of Plato). Use of the Kite-allegory em- phasizes Leonardoís ambition;
3. The Kite designates Leonardoís "pecking-pain-giving-motherî by association with Leonardo's fable on Envy: ìWe read of the Kite that, when it sees its young ones growing too big in the nest, out of envy it pecks their sides, and keeps them without food."28. Leo- nardoís ambition disguised his neurosis connected by Schapiro again with Leonardo's mother.
All the above interpretations of Schapiroís (a) concern only Leonardo's instincts and his knowledge and imitation of the established cultural patterns; (b) lead again to the Mother-complex and Neurosis-hypothesis. Schapiro's thesis of a "pecking-pain-giving-mother" just cosmetically revises the Freudian thesis of a ìpleasure-giving-motherî. He says: "A psycholo- gist could infer from his interest in this bit of natural history [Leonardoís allegorical natural history] that Leonardo did not forgive Caterina his illegitimacy and her willingness to aban- don him to a stepmother"29.
To "fixation upon mother", Schapiro added one other, more appropriate kind of "fixation"30 upon canon and tradition, so that Leonardo could have differed from the other High Renaissance artists only by the quantitative features, by more at perfection, more at tradition, more at hierarchical compliance, more at school. And Schapiro totally dropped the homosexuality of Leonardo ñ the so-called "break-through" made by Freud.
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So Schapiro falls under the same fallacy of monovalence as Freud. Freud offers sublimation, but does not believe in any form of the sublime -- civilization, morals and religion, as well as in the ability of an individual to cope with Freudian complexes. Schapiro offers the coher- ence of art-historical development, but if an artist is, according to Schapiro, a monovalent part of the whole, which is external in its totality, then this artist will never be able to get out of his narrow horizon and create something significant for his historical continuum as a whole. When Leonardo does not fit into the Procrustean Bed of dogmatic art history, then Schapiro is more then willing to give him up for mutilation by psychoanalysis:
"The aggressive feelings of Leonardo are better illustrated by the unconstrained fantasies of violence in both his writings and pictures and by his misanthropic taste for the ugly, the deformed and caricatural in the human face than by his vegetarianism and his release of captive birds."31
Schapiro's approach also shows that just historical, art-historical or any unilateral approach does not help in the understanding of how the unique phenomenon of Leonardo differs from the templates and canons of his epoch.
In his monograph, ìLeonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on The Enigmaî (1961), K. R. Eissler rebuts Schapiroís argumentation against Freud and supports the Freudian interpretation of Leonardo's Kite. Eissler criticizes his contemporary for forcing ìthe historical prototypesî (to be ìa medium of traditionî) on the individuality of an artist, and revitalizes the importance of conflict and spontaneity in artistic creativity. But instead of Schapiroís paradigm of canon and imitation in the form of "traditional taleî and ìreality pursuit"32, Eissler revives again the very old Freudian tale of latent narcissism ñ unconscious imitation of tradition and auto-imitation.
By overusing Freudian law of overdetermination and joining Schapiro in more "appropriate substitutes" of Freudís solutions, Eissler enhanced Freudian "subjectís external vicissi-
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tudes"33 and ìgenitalityî with even more generalized instinctual template of "orality". He talks about Leonardo's impulse to devour and his fear of being devoured ("Leonardo's personal world must have had a strongly cannibalistic flavor and one of his fears must have been that of been devoured"), about Leonardo's "terror and fright", "trauma" (ìhe feared lest he be traumatized by the hostility of nature and his human environmentî), about Leonardo's sadism ("man and his moral values are comprehensibly experienced in terms of oral sadism"34).
In Leonardo's drawings of violence and destruction, Eissler sees the decomposition of personality and "a chain of identical actions of wanton and destruction"35. Leonardo-Cannibal devours the whole world ìto take with him to his grave everything he has loved despite everything"36. For Eissler, the more chaste your morality ñ the more beastly your suppressed desire: "Here the full contempt of the man who is orally fixated is expressed, it serves to deny equivalent wishes in himself"37. Finally, Eisslerís verdict is that geniushood is a special case of pathology -- "neurotic or psychotic or perverse or even criminal"38.
James Saslow (CUNY) in his book ìGanymede in the Renaissanceî (1986), totally supports the Freudian hypotheses of Leonardoís infantile trauma, "atrophy of sexual life", misogyny, "anxiety about all submission to physical drives, whether heterosexual or homosexual"39, sublimation of the two conflicting sexual opposites within the "desexualized"40, quasi-qualitative, "undifferentiated whole"41, and "overpowerful instinct for research." He represents Leonardo as a disqualified, desexualized, depersonalized, atrophied, and indifferent individual.
In her book "Art and Psychoanalysis" (1993), Laurie S. Adams (CUNY) follows the same line of phallic/vagina substitutions, narcissism and neurotic decomposition of personality in respect to Leonardo. She equates his genius or being not like others to pathology, his vegetarianism to his guilt and cannibalism, his anatomic studies to sadism and his "creating a ter-
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rifying painting of Medusa, maternal figures against a background of the dark, jagged rocks on the paintings" to "vagina dentata horror."42