* * *

Freud's theory of the sublimation of sexuality is based on his much broader view of human sexuality and the unconscious. His starting point is the libido, the voracious, biological sexual appetite that is awakened in infancy and smolders deep within the subconscious of every human being. It is an animalistic drive, one that often cannot be acknowledged if it is directed toward an object deemed socially inappropriate (such as one's mother or father). In such instances, the impulse must be deeply suppressed within the human subconscious. The act of repression, however, is insufficient to contain the full force of the libido. Libidinal energy, for Freud, is sometimes described in mechanistic terms: it is a force that must be released, either directly, on the original object of libidinal desire, or, if that is not available, on a suitable substitute. On other occasions, a chemical metaphor is used: sublimation is the transformation of one kind of drive into another, much as water is transformed into vapor. In either case, sexual impulses are transferred or transformed away from their original object toward another (socially acceptable) and often “higher” object, such as scientific inquiry or artistic creativity. In this sense, sublimation is an act of redirection—taking a primal, biological urge and forcing it to take a different path. In this manner, sublimation begets civilization.Footnote ⁴

Freud began to think about sublimation as early as 1897, and later explored the concept as related to major human cultural achievements, especially in a 1908 work entitled “Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.” By 1909, Freud was committed to writing about Leonardo and his “genius,” wishing to find a key to Leonardo's scientific acumen and creative potential. For Freud, sublimation would be the solution to the “mystery” of this multifaceted personality, and the theory would score a major triumph if it could account for this most renowned of virtuosi. To uncover the secret of Leonardo's career, Freud looked at Leonardo's writings, but also carefully analyzed a variety of Leonardo's sketches and paintings. The famous Mona Lisa was of particular interest. All of these works, according to Freud, provided clues to the source of Leonardo's encyclopedic knowledge and artistic talent. They all allowed him to construct a complicated “psychobiography” (one of the first of the genre) of the great man. In late 1909, this work became all-consuming, and Freud wrote to Jung that his work on Leonardo had become an “obsession.”Footnote ⁵ The result was, in the first place, a presentation to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in December 1909, and then, six months later, the publication of Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, as Volume 7 of the Papers on Applied Psychology. This work was translated into English as Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.Footnote ⁶

In the book, Freud begins with his usual provocative approach—axiomatically stating that the key to human personality is found in sexuality. In Leonardo's case, Freud believed that a true psychologist had to begin with a curious and telling fact—that Leonardo was reportedly a lifelong ascetic, consistent in forgoing all sexual pleasure, even refusing to discuss sexuality or engage in sexual humor. Such behavior distinguished him from his contemporaries and was thus a key to understanding his uniqueness. In other words, Freud believed that Leonardo's “cool repudiation of sexuality” and his genius were closely linked.Footnote ⁷

For Freud, not only was sexuality at the root of personality, but also early sexual experiences were the most formative in human psychological development. Before he began writing his essay on Leonardo, Freud had already written voluminously on the importance of sexual experiences in childhood for the formation of a sexual personality (including in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905, and On the Sexual Theories of Children, published in 1908).Footnote ⁸ Freud tested these insights in his approach to Leonardo's sexual life, or rather lack thereof. Leonardo's asceticism, according to Freud, had its source in his experiences as a very young boy. Freud's psychobiography of Leonardo thus begins with Leonardo the child, as recalled in the adult Leonardo's earliest memory—a very peculiar dream: “It seems to me that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.”Footnote ⁹

From this single account of a single dream, Freud was able to develop an all-encompassing narrative about Leonardo's childhood experiences and their impact on his psychological development. The vulture in the dream, according to Freud, referenced an ancient cultural symbol of motherhood that traced back to early Christian theologians and even back to the Egyptians. The vulture symbolized virgin motherhood—vultures were believed to conceive without mating. The vulture in Leonardo's dream thus simultaneously represented Leonardo's own mother and his absent father, or, in other words, the story of Leonardo's confirmed illegitimate birth. Leonardo grew up alone with his mother in his earliest childhood years, and the boy was all that the mother had. She lavished her deep affection on this young child, and therefore the tail of the bird represented this affection—the violent sexual caresses that were symbolically captured by the vulture thrusting her tail into Leonardo's mouth.Footnote ¹⁰

Freud thus interprets Leonardo's dream as an expression of Leonardo's aroused and then repressed love for his own mother—his feelings for her were inappropriate and therefore hidden in the recesses of his subconscious. Freud then links this to another piece of evidence gleaned from sources about Leonardo's life—that he had been accused, but acquitted, of seducing young boys. Freud had already developed a theory that homosexuality had its origins in childhood, when young boys experienced the overbearing love of a doting mother combined with an absent or aloof father.Footnote ¹¹

Indirectly, Leonardo's love for his mother, transformed into a desire for other men, became an enormous physical and psychological force that Leonardo had to release. For reasons Freud does not clearly explain, Leonardo chose not to release it in the sexual act, and this fateful choice made him a genius: he had the ability to take intense sexual desire, displace it from its original object or objects, and then channel it into dispassionate scientific analysis and intense artistic creativity. In Freud's terms, Leonardo “sublimated” these intense desires, and allowed the full force of his socially unacceptable passions to pass into the fully legitimate and higher pursuits of science and art. The terms borrowed from physics are not accidental; sublimation is described as a process in which a force that is dammed up in one place will be released through another opening. Here is the extended metaphor, regarding Leonardo's scientific aims:

The satisfaction of intellectual and creative pursuits is thus Leonardo's substitute satisfaction, one that can only be achieved through denying the original object of desire.

In Leonardo, Freud sees sublimation as directed primarily toward an insatiable desire for knowledge—his sexual desire converted itself into a desire to do research. Attainment of abstract knowledge becomes a substitute for the sexual act. Freud believed that such sublimation, again, has its origins in childhood, as children begin very early to “research” sexual questions. Some of these children, when they learn to repress their sexual impulses, repress their curiosity as well. But more exceptional types are able to channel the repressed impulses into a more complete and broader-ranging curiosity. Indeed, for Freud, in exemplary cases such as Leonardo's, the sublimation of sexual instinct into a quest for knowledge is so perfect that the quest itself avoids sexual themes, and can find satisfaction in the attainment of knowledge of a scientific and abstract sort. Freud notes that Leonardo wrote little about sexuality or the sexual act—evidence of the perfect replacement of one object of his sexual impulses by another.Footnote ¹³

But Leonardo also sublimates his sexual energies into art, and here Freud looks for a very different kind of evidence. In art, Freud finds visual clues to the original psychological impulses that were sublimated in the creative process. Freud's was thus a novel approach to art appreciation—seeking the evidence for a psychological state in symbolic images within the artwork, using a methodology similar to the one elaborated in his Interpretation of Dreams (published in 1900). For Freud, if art is sublimated sexual desire, then traces of the original object of desire must be found in the artwork. Unlike scientific inquiry, creativity cannot fully escape the original object of sexual longing.Footnote ¹⁴

For this reason, Freud proposes in Leonardo that sublimation provides the solution to the art-interpretation question that dogged so many observers of the portrait of the Mona Lisa: the “mystery” of her smile.Footnote ¹⁵ For Freud, the portrait was painted “with the help of the oldest of all of his erotic impulses”—his childhood love for his own mother. Freud offers a guess: the Mona Lisa must have had a smile that reminded Leonardo of his own mother, “the smile that he had lost and that fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady . . . [and] awoke something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind.” It was an ambivalent smile, one that characterized, according to Freud, all women who love: “perfect representation of the contrasts which dominate the erotic life of women . . . between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding—consuming men as if they were alien beings.”Footnote ¹⁶ Leonardo's mother lavished this kind of doting but fiercely demanding love on her son, and he now acted in response to that affection by using his desire to paint a perfect depiction of the source of his desire. Not only that, but every painting thereafter, such as Leda and John the Baptist, had traces of the smile that betrayed all of Leonardo's suppressed longings:

The circularity of Freud's argument here is in full force—Leonardo must have sublimated his desire for his mother in his painting, the Mona Lisa therefore is a product of sublimated desire, which means her smile is the smile of the original object of desire, which reveals that desire for his mother must have led Leonardo to paint the portrait. In any case, for Freud, sublimation, in all of its intensity, leaves the traces of sexuality on the higher products of its vital essence.Footnote ¹⁸

For Freud, sublimation was the source of all culture, not simply artistic and scientific pursuits. All higher human endeavors were the products of unsatisfied libidinal impulses, and clues to the libidinal roots of human creations could be found within the creations themselves. Leonardo was a true genius utilizing his deepest libidinal urges for works requiring incredible talent and artistic mastery. But ordinary human beings also experienced sublimation on a more mundane level: “Observation of men's daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity.” In some, this leads to genius, in others, to normalcy. Nevertheless, all of human achievement is powered, to some extent, by the instinctual that is suppressed at the very early stages of human development.Footnote ¹⁹

Freud finally finished his Leonardo essay with relief, both because he had rid himself of his “obsession” and because his essay was so well received. Even after serious mistakes in the text were discovered, he never revised his conclusions. Later he would write to Lou Andreas Salome that this was “one of the most beautiful things” he had ever written.Footnote ²⁰

* * *

The footnotes of Leonardo reveal that Freud consulted many sources in his research, but the German translation of the historical novel by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Leonardo da Vinci, was primary. In 1906, Freud included the book in a short list of less famous works that had influenced him. Freud's copy of the novel is held in his library in London, and it reveals that he read the German translation very carefully, making markings on thirty-eight pages of the text, beginning on page 149 and continuing to the end of the book. Only one other book cited in his Leonardo essay is found in his library, and it contains no markings.Footnote ²¹

Freud scholars often mention Freud's reliance on Merezhkovskii's novel, but rarely dwell on the full significance of Freud's use of it. Instead, the book is mostly seen as a piece of popular fiction, an “erudite potboiler,” and thus an accidental source of some of Freud's biographical facts and interpretations of Leonardo.Footnote ²² For instance, scholars usually point out that Freud used the version of Leonardo's dream of the bird as recounted by Merezhkovskii, which introduced one of the more significant errors into Freud's text: the bird, rendered accurately as “kite” (korshun in Russian) was mistranslated as “vulture” in the German, an error of foundational significance, since Freud's entire argument about Leonardo's love for his mother rests on a complicated cultural understanding of the vulture as a bird that symbolizes “motherhood.”Footnote ²³ But otherwise, it is implied that only Freud's original mind could glean anything of use from the novel's pages. Peter Gay, for example, is positively withering about Merezhkovskii and genuinely puzzled that Freud might find anything of value in Merezhkovskii's “unreflective, undiscriminating, almost philistine” novel, or that he might tolerate “Merezhkovsky's muddy and pretentious metaphysics.”Footnote ²⁴ Jutta Birmele is less strident, and is unique in her serious attempt to understand what Freud gathered from Merezhkovskii's account, but she concisely sums up Freud scholarship on this subject: “it is difficult to appreciate from our perspective what Freud and his contemporaries saw in Merezkovsky.” Both Gay and Birmele are quick to point out the distinctly religious project that shaped Merezhkovskii's novel, and both contrasted this with Freud's supposed “training as a scientist,” whose “philosophy was grounded in scientific empiricism,” to use Birmele's words.Footnote ²⁵

Temporarily leaving aside the question whether Freud really was a “scientist,” using anything like an empirical method in his intensely speculative writings on Leonardo, it is important to note that Freud's interest in Merezhkovskii was broader and deeper than these scholars would care to admit. Freud did not simply read Merezhkovskii's Leonardo, he also read the entire trilogy, entitled Christ and Antichrist, of which Leonardo was only the second volume. Freud separately praised the third volume, Peter and Alexis, for its treatment of the hostility between father and son. Furthermore, Merezhkovskii's Tolstoy and Dostoevsky provided material for Freud's famous essay Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928); and Merezhkovskii's novel about Egypt, The Messiah, as well as his book of aphorisms, The Secret of the East (both in Freud's surviving library), contain plot elements identical to those found in Moses and Monotheism.Footnote ²⁶ Finally, in Freud's Leonardo itself, there are multiple tributes to Merezhkovskii's writings: both the novel and the entire trilogy of which it is a part are characterized as “great,” and Merezhkovskii is lauded as a “psychological novelist.” Most importantly, pace Birmele, Freud credited Merezhkovskii as one of only two authors who understood the “peculiarity” of Leonardo's “emotional and sexual life,” and Freud praised Merezhkovskii for daring to base his entire novel “on this understanding.”Footnote ²⁷ Thus Freud scholarship understates the case when it considers Merezhkovskii a mere source for a few facts about Leonardo's life—clearly, Freud gathered important psychological insights into sexuality from Merezhkovskii's novel.

Merezhkovskii's influence on Freud is mapped with remarkable accuracy in the markings that Freud made in his copy of the text. Freud almost never wrote commentary in the margins of his books, and even his markings are very rare. When he marked a passage with a vertical line in the margin, it was an indication that the passage deserved special emphasis or should be quoted.Footnote ²⁸ A close look at the thirty-eight passages Freud marked in Merezhkovskii's Leonardo demonstrates that almost every biographical feature of Leonardo found in Freud's essay is also found in Merezhkovskii's novel, including his deep affection for his mother (Merezhkovskii invents a scene where Leonardo sleeps in his mother's bed, which Freud marked), his love of knowledge, his sexual chastity, hints at Leonardo's attraction to boys and the accusations that he seduced them, the kite (vulture) dream, the desire to fly, and the relationship with the Mona Lisa as a “secret of love.” Freud explicitly acknowledged that he took from Merezhkovskii the theory that Leonardo's mother visited him in her old age, and that Leonardo's mother had a particular smile, which followed Leonardo all of his life. Moreover, nearly every Leonardo quote in Freud's text is also marked by Freud in his copy of the Merezhkovskii text.Footnote ²⁹

More importantly, Freud's borrowing of these significant details from Merezhkovskii's novel points toward a deeper influence of the novelist on the psychoanalyst. Freud saw Merezhkovskii as a writer with special insight into sexuality, the Leonardo case being but one manifestation of this broader achievement. Freud's borrowings from the Russian author influenced his own approach to Leonardo's sexuality and its implications for understanding his genius. To fully grasp this, however, it is important to see Merezhkovskii's novel as more than a trite piece of fiction. It is, instead, a literary expression of Merezhkovskii's aesthetic and philosophical worldview, particularly a view of the sexuality shaped within the distinctive artistic–philosophical culture of the Russian Silver Age, in which Merezhkovskii played a vital role. For Merezhkovskii, as for Freud, knowledge and art were indeed erotic products, albeit of a very different sort.

The Russian “Silver Age” is a retrospectively characterized philosophical, literary, and artistic phenomenon that arose in Russian during the last years of the imperial Russian state. Silver Age writers, painters, philosophers, and theologians shared a common fundamental aesthetic philosophy called “symbolism,” an aesthetic that sought to reconceptualize human attitudes toward art, beauty, and love. For the symbolists, artistic endeavor had a distinct link to the spiritual, and to the divine, and thus had a privileged place in approaches to knowledge, faith, and even human relationships.Footnote ³⁰

The foundational symbolist principles that undergird the Silver Age are best expressed in Merezhkovskii's own artistic manifesto, cumbersomely entitled “On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New Currents in Russian Literature.” In this text, Merezhkovskii accuses the modern technological and industrial era of the late nineteenth century of causing “the absence of a higher idealistic culture, the civilized barbarism amidst the grandiose inventions of technology.” “In essence,” he writes, “the entire generation of the end of the nineteenth century carries in its soul an indignation against the suffocating, deadly positivism that lies like a stone on our hearts.” The purpose of art, for Merezhkovskii, was revolt—a revolt in the name of the spiritual, the divine, and in the name of elevating humanity above the mechanistic principles that governed the age.Footnote ³¹

In the symbolist project there is something of the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, a similar yearning for the reawakening of spiritual life and for an artistic quest for the supernatural. Unlike the Romantics, however, Silver Age poets, philosophers, and artists of all kinds sought to avoid what they saw as the dualism of Romantic impulses: the flight from the material into the spiritual, the preference for the “soul” over the “body,” and the celebration of the “ideal” over the “real.” Symbolism, instead, sought the reconciliation of binary opposites, integrating previous literary and artistic theories of “realism” into a higher, spiritual synthesis.Footnote ³²

The work of the Orthodox theologian and philosopher Vladimir Solov′ev figured heavily in the symbolist project, particularly in its aesthetics. Two key Christian principles in Solov′ev's philosophy were particularly important: “materialization of the spirit (incarnation) and the spiritualization of matter (transfiguration).” When Christ was born, God became man, and this incarnation of the divine into the human became the model of future Christian understanding of the “person”: as a combination of divine potential and human reality.Footnote ³³ When Christ was transfigured on Mount Tabor, this too served as a turning point in the relation between God and man—human beings were shown that earthly flesh could be “divinized,” achieving not a renunciation of the human for the divine, but an overcoming of the dualism between flesh and spirit, between the material and spiritual. For Solov′ev, the human endeavor that could best serve the task of awakening humanity to its divine potential was art. The task of art was “internally transfiguring, spiritualizing matter,” or “the transformation of physical life into its spiritual counterpart.”Footnote ³⁴

Following Solov′ev, Silver Age poets and writers described this type of spiritually driven art as “symbolic,” and “symbolism” became the aesthetic theoretical expression of Solov′ev's theological principles. Merezhkovskii, for example, saw the “symbol” as a powerful means of rebelling against the realist art of the day, but without a flight into the meaningless abstractions of philosophical or religious speculation. A symbol was, like incarnation and transfiguration, a raising up of the material into the spiritual, an infusing of the divine into the earthly. As a concrete example of the mechanism of a symbol, Merezhkovskii deployed the Parthenon:

The symbol thus did not abandon realism or the material, but rather sought to show how the material world could point to the limitless and to the eternal.

The symbolist project did not confine itself to a reworking of artistic or literary principles—its aims were far higher. Moreover, the Christian elements of the symbolist project were sometimes appropriated and adapted to Jewish and even pagan worldviews. Using as their motto Fyodor Dostoevsky's dictum that “Beauty will save the world,” symbolists of all inclinations believed that the quest for a new aesthetics would lead to spiritual regeneration in Russia and Europe. This desire to transform humanity through art led to the complete identification of art with life. The credo of what later became known as “life-creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo) played an essential role in the aesthetics of the symbolists. Artists turned their lives into art not merely by using biographical material for their poetry and literature, but by seeking to make their lives conform to their aesthetic beliefs.Footnote ³⁶ Perhaps the most articulate reflection on the principles undergirding the phenomenon of zhiznetvorchestvo came from the poet Valerii Briusov:

For the Silver Age, Eros played a central part in the quest for incarnation and transfiguration in art and, for many poets and writers, it was also the source of the project of “life-creation.” Like the overall symbolist project, the Silver Age theory of Eros evolved against the modern conceptions of sexuality that prevailed in late nineteenth-century Russian society. In the 1890s, Russian traditionalists and radicals battled over the questions of prostitution, divorce, free love, and contraception. The vocabulary of the debate was increasingly borrowed from the scientific theories of sexuality migrating from Europe, including Richard Krafft-Ebing's influential Psychopathia Sexualis, translated into Russian in 1887, which detailed the various sorts of sexual disorder prevalent in modernity. Sexuality was also debated in literary circles by a number of prominent writers, including Leo Tolstoy, who greatly influenced public conversation on sexuality in 1889 with the distribution, and later publication, of his story The Kreutzer Sonata. Both in the story and then openly in an “explanation” published afterward, Tolstoy forcefully argued that “love” in modern society was little more than a thin veneer of respectability covering brutish, animalistic passions that degraded men and transformed women into mere objects of lust. The only solution was sexual abstinence, both within marriage and without.Footnote ³⁸ Even more controversial was the eclectic and idiosyncratic Vasillii Rozanov, who sought, from the 1890s on, to remove all shame and stigma from the sexual act, fertility, and childbirth. His was an outright revolt against what he perceived to be the Christian hatred of sexuality, and Rozanov celebrated what he knew of pagan fertility cults, and advocated, among other things, that the church require all newlyweds to remain in church after the marriage ritual until the marriage was consummated.Footnote ³⁹

For many Silver Age thinkers, including philosophers and theologians such as Nikolai Berdiaev and Pavel Florenskii, and poets such as Viacheslav Ivanov and Merezhkovskii himself, these debates were premised on a misconception of sexuality. The asceticism of Tolstoy, the scientific approach of Krafft-Ebing, the biological reductionism of Rozanov, all of these were too rooted in the material understanding of sexuality prevalent in modernity. For Silver Age thinkers, Eros needed to be rehabilitated, as a concept that could overcome the philosophical materialism and mind–body dualism. Merezhkovskii and his Silver Age counterparts sought a religious response to the question of love, especially sexual love, which would expose both the poverty of materialist philosophy and the hatred of the flesh supposedly characteristic of traditional Christian Orthodox and Platonic approaches to sexuality. Here they returned to the core principles of the Silver Age philosophy, infusing the material with the spiritual through concepts such as incarnation and transfiguration.

Yet again, it was Vladimir Solov′ev who pointed the way. Solov′ev sought explicitly to respond to Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and the scientific works of Krafft-Ebing in his 1892 essay the “Meaning of Love.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Borrowing from, but heavily modifying, Plato's insights on Eros as expressed in the Symposium, Solov′ev saw Eros as the diametric opposite of Tolstoy's “lust.” For Solov′ev, the attitude toward Eros depended on the perspective from which it was viewed. If seen as the mere satisfaction of biological desires, then it was indeed “shameful.” To desire another's body, and then to satisfy that desire, Solov′ev equated with the then much discussed abnormality of “fetishism”—the unnatural desire for a part of a human being as opposed to the whole. Sex with a prostitute was, in his words, the acting out of a fetish—as it was the desire for the dead flesh of the prostitute, and not for her entire person, body and soul. The modern world, Solov′ev believed, was thus fetishistic: placing primacy on the material aspect of sexuality. Even marriage, if viewed simply as the legal regulation of biological desires, was a trivial thing, unworthy of the spiritual side of a human being. But, crucially, Solov′ev was very careful to explicitly dismiss purely “spiritual” love as no less “impotent,” because it refused or denied the material reality of the beloved.Footnote ⁴¹

Viewed properly, sexuality, for Solov′ev, had to be understood as a divine gift—one that blessed those who possessed it. Love forces human beings out of themselves, requires them to see the “other” in a different light, one that accords “for another the same absolute central significance which . . . we are conscious of only in our own selves.” More importantly, it allows people to see the other as both empirical and bodily, and at the same time in all of their divine potential—“in God.” Solov′ev designated this the twofold nature of love:

Eros, then, was the means of personally achieving the theological aims of incarnation and transfiguration. In true love, for Solov′ev, the “Divine essence receives the means for its definitive, ultimate incarnation in the individual life of a human.” And true love also “is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.”Footnote ⁴³

The Silver Age conception of sexuality was heavily influenced by Solov′ev, and poets, artists, and thinkers used Solov′ev to explore the central question of the relationship between sexuality and artistic creativity. Because, as Solov′ev defined it, both art and love aspired to the uniting of the material and spiritual in symbolic fashion, and both sought the transfiguration of matter, Eros was the key impetus to art, broadly conceived. We can see this in a number of poetic and philosophical essays written by Silver Age figures. Viacheslav Ivanov, poet and classicist, wrote prominently on the importance of Eros for art: “When an aesthetic phenomenon is experienced erotically, the artistic creation becomes symbolic. The enjoyment of beauty, like an attraction to physical beauty, becomes the initial step in an erotic ascent . . . The symbol is the creative principle of love, the guiding Eros.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And Nikolai Berdiaev, the Christian existentialist philosopher, wrote in a similar vein, “Love is the way to revealing the secret of the person, to a comprehension of the person in the depth of his being . . . In God the lover meets the beloved; in God he sees the beloved person . . . Erotic energy is the eternal source of creativity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Merezhkovskii and Zinaida Gippius paid tribute to Solov′ev's new formulation of a Christian understanding of sexuality in making “marriage” the central topic of the Religious-Philosophical Meetings they organized in 1901–3. These were attended by important figures within the Russian Orthodox Church and by many of the artists and philosophers of the Silver Age, including Nikolai Berdiaev, the artist Alexander Benois, and the poet Valery Briusov. Five of the twenty-one panels were devoted to the topic of “Marriage,” more than any other subject, and Merezhkovskii participated heavily in the discussions of sexuality.Footnote ⁴⁶

While Solov′ev was ambiguous about the relation of Eros to sexual consummation (in places in the “Meaning of Love” he declares it to be where love should finally end, not where it begins), for many artists of the Silver Age, true Eros avoids it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Some, like Berdiaev and the poet Alexander Blok, justified this privileging of celibacy by observing that procreative love leads to death (through the creation of new human beings destined to die). But others emphasized more strongly that the rejection of physical lust constituted the rejection of a poor substitute for the true aim of Eros, which was divine ascent. True love leads to transfiguration; sexual consummation is mere fleshly union, unworthy of the full power of Eros. Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Blok, and Nikolai Berdiaev all celebrated the ability of Erotic desire to achieve human transformation, if the temptation of lust was avoided. Berdiaev put it most simply: “Sex energy contains the source of creative ecstasy and the prophetic vision of genius . . . sex life is possible, even much more intense, without the sexual act.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's biography of Leonardo da Vinci was written against and within these debates. Merezhkovskii's Leonardo modeled the idea of Eros as the source of transfigurative and symbolic art, making Leonardo the exemplar of Silver Age “life creation.” For Merezhkovskii, Eros was central to the story of Leonardo—both of his scientific research and of his artistic work. Indeed, like Freud after him, Merezhkovskii believed that Leonardo's scientific genius and creativity were founded on Eros.

Merezhkovskii repeatedly emphasized that Leonardo was chaste. In the novel, observers regularly opined that he “did not love ordinary, coarse male talk about women,” and he refused sexual activity not from any religious or moral impulse, but rather “just as he did not eat meat, because it seemed to him not forbidden, but repulsive, so he stayed away from women, because every physical possession seemed to him not sinful, but crude.” But this did not mean that Leonardo failed to experience erotic desire—quite the opposite. In the novel, Leonardo chose not to express his Eros in sexual consummation, but both spoke and lived the deeply held belief that that his scientific research and his artistic productions were erotic efforts.Footnote ⁴⁹

The link between love and knowledge is explored throughout the novel, and Freud marked some of the most important passages developing the theme. One character in the novel declares that Leonardo feels curiosity “like an inextinguishable lust, like a hot coal, which nothing can extinguish.” Indeed, one of the central puzzles in Leonardo is precisely the question of how love and knowledge are linked. At one point, Leonardo's student Giovanni states the philosophical dilemma in this fashion: “The apostle asserts that knowledge comes from love, but Leonardo that love comes from knowledge. Which is right? I cannot decide this, nor can I live without deciding.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In the novel's initial pages, it appears that Leonardo believes that Eros is tightly bound to dispassionate knowledge: that a detached, scientific view of the world would be rewarded by an omniscient, godlike embrace of that world. This interpretation of Leonardo would be in tune with the nineteenth-century vision of Leonardo as a proto-Enlightenment figure, a daring genius who challenged the dark superstition of religion and promoted reason and analysis as necessary for true, comprehensive knowledge. As noted by Rachel Blass, Freud precisely underscored this approach to Leonardo's scientific endeavors, because when Freud “longs for the reign of what he refers to as ‘our God Logos,’ as he expresses his hope for the domination of reason in mental life, it appears to be the unifying aim of Eros that he has in mind.”Footnote ⁵¹ Throughout the novel, as Freud observed through his markings, Leonardo is seen calmly observing a spider eating his victim and impassively sketching the faces of condemned men as they are led to execution. This view of Leonardo is best expressed through a nightmare of Giovanni's, in which a cold and ruthless “double” of Leonardo appears to the student and declares, “there is no Christ, but there is love; great love, the daughter of great knowledge, he that knows all, loves all . . . Before there was love from weakness, miracles, and ignorance; but now, through power, truth, and knowledge, inasmuch as the Serpent did not lie: taste the of the Tree of Knowledge, and ye shall be as the gods.”Footnote ⁵²

Merezhkovskii, on the other hand, suggested something subtler: Giovanni's dream misled him—Leonardo both believed that all-comprehending knowledge of the world and of the Creator of that world would lead to an all-encompassing love of it, and vice versa. The wholeness of being requires love and knowledge to be intertwined. Here again, Merezhkovskii attempts to overcome the materialism and dualism of the modern age by presenting Leonardo as the “forerunner,” a kind of prophet of the Russian symbolist project itself, a man who endeavored to synthesize the material with the spiritual. This truth is finally revealed to Giovanni in a painting, Leonardo's The Virgin and Child with St Anne:

St Anne and St Mary thus symbolized the two paths to human understanding: through religious love leading to revelatory knowledge, and through contemplative knowledge leading to the acquisition of the love of God and His creation. “Great love is the daughter of great knowledge” was thus no unidirectional, causal statement, but an expression of a loving relationship between two halves of a human being, the reason and the soul. True knowledge could only be acquired through love of the created world, and true love of that world was reinforced and strengthened by knowledge of it, in all of its scientific and intimate detail.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Merezhkovskii, scientific endeavor was indeed erotic—it was a kind of divine ascent—a desire to know the God-created universe. This was at the root of Leonardo's scientific genius.

The relationship between Eros and art is more clearly expressed in the novel. The most definitive example is found in the depiction of Leonardo's painting of the portrait of the Mona Lisa. The chaste Leonardo experiences, for the first time, the acute and unconsummated longing of Eros during his painting of the portrait—an Eros that is symbolically expressed in the portrait itself. Like Freud, Merezhkovskii is clear that the brilliance of the portrait is rooted in the strength of Leonardo's erotic desires.

Though the painting of Mona Lisa's portrait was always done in the presence of others, gestures and oblique conversations lead to the formation of a strong, secret bond between Leonardo and his sitter. They “understand one another, almost without words, at a mere hint,” and Leonardo feels that “she had words which suddenly made her akin to him, close, closer than all that he knew, his sole and eternal companion and sister.” For the first time in his life, Leonardo is tempted to abandon his self-imposed chastity, and succumb to sexual temptation—in Merezhkovskii's phrasing, “to cross over the charmed circle which separated fantasy from life.” But he refrained. In a passage that reads as almost Freudian, Merezhkovskii explains the result of this deferral of desire: “But each time this wish appeared, he would repress it, and every time that he was victorious over her living charms, the ghostly figure of her was banished to the canvas, and became more lifelike and more real.” The process can be interpreted as sublimation: the repression of physical sexual desire transfers it from its original object to a substitute on canvas, and the portrait thus contains traces of what is suppressed.Footnote ⁵⁵

Unconsummated Eros leads to beautiful art. Passages like these have led scholars of sexuality in Russia to argue that Merezhkovskii, along with other Silver Age artists and writers, championed “sublimation” as the key to spiritual flourishing. Olga Matich argues specifically that Silver Age writers wanted sublimation as a kind of “arousal” without “consummation,” which created an aesthetics of “neurasthenia” and an obsession with “blood, castration, and fetishism.” For Jenifer Presto, this symbolist “sublimation of sex” distinctly calls for a Freudian interpretation of the aesthetic practice of symbolism. The fact that these Russian authors formulated their ideas before Freud was first translated into Russian in 1911 led one scholar to argue that they “advanced a theory of sublimation similar to Freud's before Freud,” as if two parallel theories of sublimation developed unconnected one with another.Footnote ⁵⁶ It speaks to the modesty of Russian intellectual and cultural historians that they cannot imagine that Freud would have been influenced by Russian theories of sexuality.

Freud's theory of sublimation was not taken from Merezhkovskii's novel, since Freud had long developed his views on sexuality before reading the text. But in the case of Leonardo, Freud's main interlocutor was Merezhkovskii: Freud clearly wrote his fullest expression of the theory of sublimation in engagement with Merezhkovskii's ideas. Freud found in Merezhkovskii's novel the original, convincing, if fictional, psychobiography, which placed great emphasis on the psychological makeup of the genius Leonardo—as a man able to take his most fervent desires and bend them toward scientific and creative expression. Freud chose Leonardo as the subject of his essay on sublimation precisely because Merezhkovskii had presented him with the basic outlines of such a study. This is at the heart of Freud's declaration that Merezhkovskii shared his own understanding of sexuality as lying at the heart of Leonardo's genius.

Merezhkovskii's influence on Freud also helped to shape the style of the Leonardo essay. Freud scholars have commented on the literary and speculative style of Freud's Leonardo, and Freud himself acknowledged that if critics accused him of writing a “psychoanalytic novel,” he could not dismiss the accusation out of hand. Later, he confessed in a letter that his Leonardo essay was “partly fictional.” Freud found something seductive in the freedom of fiction to speculate on the life and mind of another, without requiring the verification of observable fact. This was what he admired in Merezhkovskii's work.Footnote ⁵⁷ Remarkably, then, Freud's Leonardo can be seen as a fictional rewriting of another work of fiction.Footnote ⁵⁸

What came out of Freud's borrowing and reworking of Merezhkovskii's text was not identical to the original, because it is erroneous to define the Silver Age approach to sexuality as “sublimation.” Sublimation is, as Crone quite rightly notes, steeped in “Freud's intransigent atheism and materialism,” and thus cannot be reconciled, in its very premises, with the theologically grounded views of human nature developed by Solov′ev and Merezhkovskii.Footnote ⁵⁹ Freud had to rewrite the Merezhkovskii narrative to make it a story about sublimation, and reimagine the Merezhkovskii tale using the terminology and insights of psychoanalysis. As such, the Leonardo essay is a distinct product of what George Makari has called Freud's anxiety over the scientific status of psychoanalytic thought, and his continuous efforts to ground psychoanalysis on objectively observable phenomena. Freud may have believed that Merezhkovskii intuited extremely important connections between sexuality, research, and art. But that intuition could not remain in the subtle realm of fictional symbolic truth; it had to be reduced to unicausal, mechanical, and objectively observable principles. In the end, however, Freud had no actual evidence of Leonardo's state of mind and found his sources in Merezhkovskii's insights. It would thus be difficult to contrast Freud's “analysis” with Merezhkovskii's “fiction.” Instead, it is better to see Freud's essay as something else: as a kind of “scientific” narrative or scientific fiction.Footnote ⁶⁰

A closer analysis of the quotations Freud used in his book, especially the crucial “vulture” quote, reveals just how much rhetorical effort Freud expended to render his interpretation of Merezhkovskii's narrative scholarly and “scientific.” Every quotation attributed to Leonardo in Freud's text is also found, marked, in Freud's copy of Merezhkovskii's novel, including the vulture dream passage. In Leonardo, Freud disguised his tracks, however, by attributing the Leonardo quotes to numerous other sources, both German and Italian, nearly all of which were published after the German translation of the novel. It is this attempt to hide the true source of his quotations that obscures the real reason for the “vulture” error. By consulting other German and Italian sources that contained the quote about the dream, Freud had ample opportunity to learn that the word nibbio was actually the word for “kite.” (James Strachey, editor of Freud's English-language works, was one of the first to try to blame this error on Marie Herzfeld's book on Leonardo, which Freud also cited multiple times in his text. But her translation was accurate.) The work of Hans Israëls has convincingly demonstrated that Freud himself was aware of two translations of nibbio, since he alternated between them when he presented his Leonardo findings to the Vienna Psychological Society in 1909, sometimes speaking of the bird in the dream as a “vulture” and sometimes as a “kite.”Footnote ⁶¹

Why did he keep a translation he knew was erroneous? The simplest answer is that, by the time he had come around to bolstering his psychobiography with a host of scholarly sources, sources which would give his speculations scientific and scholarly grounding, Freud was already wedded to the complicated psychoanalytic theory of the vulture as symbol of illegitimate motherhood that he had developed after reading Merezhkovskii. His later research on Leonardo, and his accumulation of multiple, scholarly, sources on Leonardo's life and work, were not intended to investigate this question more fully, but rather to lend a scientific, scholarly veneer to a speculative counternarrative based on a single piece of fiction.Footnote ⁶²

Additionally, the vocabulary that Freud used to rewrite Merezhkovskii's novel also points toward Freud's intense desire to make all psychological insight scientific. Freud systematically stripped away the symbolic, spiritual elements in Merezhkovskii's psychological constructs, radically simplifying all multifaceted interpretations into monocausal explanations, rendered in clinical language. Multiple examples of this process can be found by comparing the two texts. For instance, both Merezhkovskii and Freud place great importance on Leonardo's fundamental creative impotence—his inability to finish any task that he began, especially his portrait of the Mona Lisa and his painting of the Last Supper. According to Merezhkovskii, this impotence, defined as an inability to bring any work to completion, was symbolic of his status as “precursor” or “forerunner,” the man who foresaw the true path to human flourishing in the full reconciliation of the material with the spiritual—of science and art—but therefore also as the one not chosen to accomplish that reconciliation. Freud, after carefully noting these passages in Merezhkovskii's novel, rewrote Leonardo's impotence as sexual impotence—the consequence of a sexual chastity so complete and final that it harmed Leonardo's mind. For Freud, impotence was pathological: “the almost total repression of a real sexual life does not provide the most favourable conditions for the exercise of sublimated sexual trends . . . a process which can only be compared to the regressions in neurotics.”Footnote ⁶³

A second example can be found in the competing interpretations of the dream of the “vulture” and Leonardo's general obsession with flight. For Merezhkovskii, the “vulture” dream was part of Leonardo's desire to become the symbolic reincarnation of Icarus—to use science to give “wings” to humanity so that it could spiritually soar toward the transcendent. The dream was much like Leonardo's later waking fantasy of flying “on the back of a great swan,” a similarly hubristic desire for mankind to achieve spiritual heights. In the novel, Leonardo whispers, “There shall be . . . there shall be wings! If not I, then another, all the same. The spirit did not lie: those who know shall have wings like the gods!” In Freud's psychoanalytic version, not only is the dream itself reduced to verifiable evidence of a mother's sexual advances on her son, but dreams and fantasies of flying in general are rendered as “nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance,” which is born in childhood. Leonardo was “frustrated” in his fulfillment of this desire, but we moderns need to know that “aviation, too, which in our day is at last achieving its aim, has its infantile erotic roots.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Finally, Freud's scientific rewriting of the Merezhkovskii narrative renders spiritual love into a basic egoistic energy, whose physical force must be released. For Freud, love had to become instinctual sexual desire in order for it to become a proper object of scientific analysis. As mechanical force, it could be redirected, expressed, or suppressed—with the help of the psychoanalyst, guiding the patient to healthy management of the sexual urge. By objectifying desire, one could make it passive in the face of scientific study, and controllable with the help of expertise.Footnote ⁶⁵

This can best be seen in Freud's revision of Merezhkovskii's story of the painting of the Mona Lisa. In Merezhkovskii's tale, desire is not something egoistic, originating solely in a single person, but rather something that arises as external to both the lover and the beloved. Moreover, it is a desire expressed not as a mechanical force, but as an emotional and spiritual relationship. Leonardo and Mona Lisa shared a “secret of love”—a mutual erotic bond, “a secret which drew them together and set them apart from all.” In the novel, Leonardo himself reflects that he had as little use for the abstract, disembodied “Platonic” view of love as he did for the “crude” sexual act. True to the Solov′evian belief that Eros overcomes dualism, Merezhkovskii instead portrays the love between Leonardo and Mona Lisa as both spiritual and physical. They felt a spiritual kinship: “She had sayings which would suddenly make her akin to him, near to him, nearer than all those he knew.”Footnote ⁶⁶ But that kinship was also expressed through their physical and material bodies: “the living Mona Lisa herself was beginning to resemble Leonardo more and more, as is sometimes the case with people who live together uninterruptedly for many years,” indeed, she looked like “a feminine double of Leonardo himself.” Even an outside observer could see that the bounded, limited nature of their relationship as sitter and artist was overcome through their divinizing love for each other, and so that which was limited both temporally and materially simultaneously became infinite and limitless: “Leonardo and Mona Lisa were like two mirrors, which, reflecting one into another, were deepening into infinity.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Such closeness required avoiding the sexual act—what Merezhkovskii termed “the temptations of the abyss.”Footnote ⁶⁸ But, unlike “sublimation” in the Freudian sense, the suppression of Leonardo's temptations does not mechanically turn into a portrait that is an exterior expression of an interior state of an individual artist. This is no mechanical redirection of sexual energy. Instead, the sitter and the artist, by avoiding the expression of their bond in sexual consummation, choose to express it in something more mystical: “could he have desired a more perfect union with his beloved than these profound and mystical caresses,—in the construction of an immortal image, of a new being, which was conceived and born of them both, even as a child is born of its father and mother and is her and him together.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The metaphor of “birthgiving” was carefully selected. For Merezhkovskii, the eschewing of physical caresses is not a subconscious suppression of a physical instinct, but a choice in favor of a spiritual bond, one that does not deny the material but is expressed within it. Because their love is not consummated, it can be “incarnated” in the painting, and the physical painting reveals and points toward a more mystical understanding of the way in which two people can become, in transfigured terms, “one flesh.” Here we see the influence of Solov′ev—despite the denial of sexual consummation there is not a denial of the “material,” or of the flesh. Rather, the relationship demonstrates the power of Eros both for incarnation and for transfiguration in art. Moreover, the very process of painting the portrait, as described by Merezhkovskii, exemplifies the Silver Age view of art as “life-creation,” in this case the rendering of a living, actual relationship onto a canvas.Footnote ⁷⁰

For Freud, by contrast, the Mona Lisa, as a living woman, had to be written out of the story. She could have no effect on Leonardo except as an external stimulus to his sexual desire. Her personality was unimportant; she was key to Leonardo's painting only insofar as she possessed a “smile,” one that triggered Leonardo's old desires. For Freud, the entire importance of the narrative rests on Leonardo's internal state:

The smile triggered an old desire, the old desire created energy that had to be expressed, so Leonardo redirected that energy to the canvas. The only trace of his original internal drive is found in the painted “smile”—the sole clue to the meaning of the portrait. This, for Freud, was the true interpretation of Merezhkovskii's phrase “secret of love.” No longer a shared secret between lovers, it is now a lonely secret of a solitary individual suffering from suppressed sexual desire, and it is only hinted at on the canvas that receives that desire.Footnote ⁷¹

The difference between sublimation of sexuality, as elaborated by Freud, and transfigurative Eros, as expressed by Merezhkovskii, has multiple implications. In the first place, Freudian Eros is based on self-deception. Farrell has noted that Freud inverted the old Platonic model of Eros in a particular way, by arguing that while Plato thought that Eros sought the ultimate truth, Freud believed that Eros needed to be repressed and redirected in order for truth to be revealed. In other words, sublimation involved lying to oneself about the truth of one's impulses:

This is true in Freud's rewriting of Merezhkovskii's novel as well—Leonardo no longer chooses to love the Mona Lisa in transfigurative fashion, but is deceived by his desires to paint her as an expression of desire for his mother. Art is thus similarly reduced to a kind of self-deception, in which a single, hidden “real” meaning is veiled and can only be revealed using the scientific expertise of a psychoanalyst. Freudian art interpretation thus follows what Kuspit has described as Freud's own suspicion of visual art as a medium of expression that had the potential to elicit a variety of emotional states, some of which could elude scientific categorization. Freud overcame this anxiety by insisting that art could be boiled down to a few core psychoanalytic explanations. As Kuspit writes, “The paradox of art for Freud is that just when it is most successful as art it hides, even falsifies, the psychological truth. It is the irony of sublimation: aesthetic sublimation is a big lie, psychologically speaking, however necessary socially.”Footnote ⁷³

A second effect of the Freudian reading of Eros as an egoistic, internal phenomenon (and thus subject to scientific analysis and control) suggests a narrow philosophical approach to human relationships. In Freud's rendering, our desire for another is purely the product of our own internal biological drives—and hence that other is easily replaced by another person, or by an object or creative process. The full objectification of the other is thus the inevitable result of Freudian sexuality. Jean Laplanche sees this as the problem of “the other” in Freudian psychoanalysis. Insofar as others impinge on our consciousness, they do so entirely through the mediation of our ego, and their own desires and personalities have little import except as filtered by the individual. He writes,

This problem of the “other,” combined with the view of Eros as “self-deception,” bequeaths to modern sexuality a hermeneutics of suspicion, always seeking the “real” meaning of relationships in egoistic, biological essentialism, discounting the reality of the “other” in interpersonal relations.

* * *

What is lost, then, in the Freudian rewriting of Merezhkovskii is a fuller vision of Eros as “transfigurative,” requiring individuals to perceive human relationships and culture as a whole as containing the potential to reveal the “other” as a total human person. For Merezhkovskii and other writers of the Silver Age, the force of Eros is precisely aimed at driving the individual out of herself or himself, and entering into the reality, the life, the subjectivity of another. This view of Eros was later developed more fully by the Silver Age theologian Pavel Florenskii, who would argue quite forcefully against the psychological interpretation of love in the modern era. According to Florenskii, the “psychological” view “doomed” individuals to “the self-enclosedness of ontological egotism and purely internal states.” Such modern individuals “love only illusorily, not going out of themselves through love.”Footnote ⁷⁵ For Florenskii, this ignored the fundamental power of love, in “the overcoming of the boundaries of selfhood, in the going out of oneself.” In his words:

Florensky thus reveals how Freudian theories of sublimation, to the extent that they have permeated modern culture, have encouraged individuals to focus inward and to view love as an internal state, valuable only as self-expression. The Silver Age view of love, by contrast, regards love as an opening up of the self to another self (an “I” to a “not-I”), revealing the infinite value and potential of the other through deeper, “spiritual communion.”Footnote ⁷⁷