When Leonardo succeeded in reproducing in
the face of Monna Lisa the double sense comprised in this smile, namely, the
promise of unlimited tenderness, and sinister threat (in the words of Pater), he
remained true even in this to the content of his earliest reminiscence. For the
love of the mother became his destiny, it determined his fate and the privations
which were in store for him. The impetuosity of the caressing to which the
vulture phantasy points was only too natural. The poor forsaken mother had to
give vent through mother's love to all her memories of love enjoyed as well as
to all her yearnings for more affection; she was forced to it,
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to compensate herself for not having a husband, but also the child for not
having a father who wanted to love it. In the manner of all ungratified mothers
she thus took her little son in place of her husband, and robbed him of a part
of his virility by the too early maturing of his eroticism. The love of the
mother for the suckling whom she nourishes and cares for is something far deeper
reaching than her later affection for the growing child. It is of the nature of
a fully gratified love affair,
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fulfills
not only all the psychic wishes but also all physical needs, and when it
represents one of the forms of happiness attainable by man it is due, in no
little measure, to the possibility of gratifying without reproach also wish
feelings which were long repressed and designated as perverse. Even in the happiest recent marriage the father feels that his child, especially
the little boy has become his rival, and this gives origin to an antagonism
against the favorite one which is deeply rooted in the unconscious.
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When in the prime of his life Leonardo re-encountered that blissful and
ecstatic smile as it had once encircled his mother's mouth in caressing, he had
long been under the ban of an inhibition, forbidding him ever again to desire
such tenderness from women's lips. But as he had become a painter he endeavored
to reproduce this smile with his brush and furnish all his pictures with it,
whether he executed them himself or whether they were done by his pupils under
his direction, as in Leda,
John, and Bacchus.
The latter two are variations of the same type. Muther says: "From the locust
eater of the Bible Leonardo made a Bacchus, an Apollo,
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smile on his lips, and with his soft thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated
eyes." These pictures breathe a mysticism into the secret of which one dares not
penetrate; at most one can make the effort to construct the connection to
Leonardo's earlier productions. The figures are again androgynous but no longer
in the sense of the vulture phantasy, they are pretty boys of feminine
tenderness with feminine forms; they do not cast down their eyes but gaze
mysteriously triumphant, as if they knew of a great happy issue concerning which
one must remain quiet; the familiar fascinating smile leads us to infer that it
is a love secret. It is possible that in these forms Leonardo disavowed and
artistically conquered the unhappiness of his love life, in that he represented
the wish fulfillment of the boy infatuated with his mother in such blissful
union of the male and female nature.
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