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, 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." cheap oil paintings
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 could retain a memory
of the nursing period is perhaps not impossible, but it can in no way be taken
as certain. But what this memory of Leonardo states, namely, that a vulture
opened the child's mouth with its tail, sounds so improbable, so fabulous, that
another conception which puts an end to the two difficulties with one stroke
appeals much more to our judgment. The scene of the vulture is not a memory of
Leonardo, but a phantasy which he formed later, and transferred into his
childhood. The childhood memories of persons often have no different origin, as
a matter of fact,cheap oil paintings for sale, they are not fixated from an experience like the conscious
memories from the time of maturity and then repeated, but they are not produced
until a later period when childhood is already past, they are then changed and
disguised and put in the service of later tendencies, so that in general they
cannot be strictly differentiated from phantasies. Their nature will perhaps be
best understood by recalling the manner in which history writing originated
among ancient nations. As long as the nation was small and weak it gave no
thought to the writing of its history, it
tilled the soil of its land,paintings reproductions, defended its existence against its neighbors by
seeking to wrest land from them and endeavored to become rich. It was a heroic
but unhistoric time. Then came another age, a period of self-realization in
which one felt rich and powerful, and it was then that one experienced the need
to discover whence one originated and how one developed. The history-writing
which then continues to register the present events throws also its backward
glance to the past, it gathers traditions and legends, it interprets what
survived from olden times into customs and uses, and thus creates a history of
past ages. It is quite natural that this history of the past ages is more the
expressions of opinions and desires of the present than a faithful picture of
the past,oil paintings wholesale, for many a thing escaped the people's memory, other things became
distorted, some trace of the past was misunderstood and interpreted in the sense
of the present; and besides one does not write history through motives of
objective curiosity, but because one desires to impress his contemporaries, to
stimulate and extol them, or to hold the mirror
before them. The conscious memory of a person concerning the experiences of his
maturity may now be fully compared to that of history writing, and his infantile
memories, as far as their origin and reliability are concerned will actually
correspond to the history of the primitive period of a people which was compiled
later with purposive intent. oil paintings for sale uk
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