How Sigmund Freud Tried to Solve the "Mystery" of Leonardo da Vinci's Genius

The idea that proficiency in activities such as playing chess or writing poetry can be “driven” by frustrated, unconscious sexual desire is now fairly well-known. But Sigmund Freud, writing more than a century ago, was considered radical in his explanation of how sexual impulses could be transformed into creative or intellectual forces—a process he called “sublimation.”

Psychoanalyst Alix Strachey, in his 1915 article explaining Freud’s theory, wrote that “in sublimation a man copes with his murderous impulses not by becoming a pacifist but by becoming a criminal lawyer, a war correspondent, a crime reporter, or a writer of books on blood and thunder.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that Freud himself saw the roots of culture as sexual, given the importance of sexuality in his account of the mind. But what is surprising is how much trouble this idea of sublimation caused Freud. It was this trouble that sparked my interest in this neglected idea. I spent a year researching it, which resulted in my new book, Understanding Sublimation. I discovered that Freud’s theory of sublimation is about puzzles and the attempts to solve them.

This becomes clear in Freud’s main discussion of the subject—an essay he wrote in 1910 about one of the great enigmas of art history, Leonardo da Vinci. Freud wanted to know how the Renaissance polymath combined the highest artistic achievements with a technological imagination that seemingly anticipated modern science and engineering. He also asked: Why did he leave many of his paintings unfinished, and why are his most famous works still considered so enigmatic and strange?

Read more: Leonardo da Vinci’s mother may have been a slave: here’s what the discovery reveals about Renaissance Europe

Freud’s obsession with da Vinci dovetailed with his broader interest in how a child’s unconscious memories of his earliest relationships (always charged with Freud’s sexuality) might stimulate or inhibit creativity later in life. Because da Vinci left such detailed notes about his chaste and disciplined life, Freud felt justified in his assumptions: here was someone whose erotic life had been transformed into intellectual and creative pursuits.

Freud believed this might explain why da Vinci had such extraordinary cognitive and artistic abilities, and why his works are so strange and difficult to decipher.

Freud thought that what was most striking about da Vinci was his combination of scientific problem-solving with artistic creation. He believed that there was a fundamental conflict between these activities.

Freud’s work with his patients often revealed such psychic conflicts or tensions, and his long process of psychoanalysis led him to conclude that they were related to the complexities of the person’s early life.

In the case of da Vinci, Freud begins with the moment when the artist was unable to complete one of his major projects—painting The Battle of Anghiari for a public building in Florence—because of a failed technical experiment. “It seems,” Freud wrote, “as if an extraneous interest—in experimentation—at first strengthened the artistic interest, only to later harm the work.”

This emphasis on incompatible drives or impulses is central to Freud’s attempt to resolve da Vinci’s riddle. The key phrase is “foreign interest.” Da Vinci’s conflict between painting and experimentation is imagined by Freud as an uneasy coexistence in the psyche of egoism and the interfering foreign invader. He meant that while the ego sees itself as the master of its own home, the psyche also includes desires that transcend personal identity and that seem to come from elsewhere.

Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci (ca. 1503). Freud wrote about Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile.
Louvre Museum

When it comes to famous paintings that have baffled art critics for centuries, Freud sees da Vinci dramatizing once again this split between the creative self and some unknown, enigmatic impulse. The famous, enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa encompasses, he writes, “the contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and the sensuality that absolutely demands—and absorbs—men.”

Freud believes that the duality of da Vinci’s portrayals of women (both Madonnas and whores) is unconsciously linked to the mother-child relationship, especially in early care and breastfeeding. The sublimation of this primary sexual relationship in art, Freud believes, makes the paintings enigmatic, even uncanny (da Vinci’s paintings haunt many art historians).

The terrible thing is that the beauty and delicacy of the image are ambiguous through something else, an “alien” element suggesting erotic passion and even destructive desire. According to Freud, at the very root of human subjectivity lies a radical ambiguity: if our early life is full of care and love, it is also full of enigmatic desire.

Freud’s answer to da Vinci’s riddle was not, then, some key to a mystical Renaissance symbolic code in the style of Dan Brown. It was a wild speculation, inspired or imaginary, that saw in his work, with its fantastic inventiveness, a puzzling ambiguity that threatened the very possibility of coherent artistic expression.

It is this enigmatic challenge to interpretation that makes Freud’s idea of sublimation more than just a banal sense of sexuality as useful “energy” for other activities. For Freud, what da Vinci shows us in the enigma of his painting has a universal significance precisely because it transcends a single, closed meaning and thus opens us to our own fundamental incompleteness.

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