Sigmund Freud 
Leonardo da Vinci 
A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence

‘Leonardo da Vinci’ is a 1910 essay by Sigmund Freud about the childhood of Leonardo da Vinci. It consists of a psychoanalytic study of Leonardo’s life based on his paintings.



This monograph on Leonardo da Vinci was the first of this kind written by Freud, and he had great reservations about it. There were precedents, however: Isidor Sadger had written several histories of artists with pathologies (Conrad-Ferdinand Meyer, Nikolas Lenau, Heinrich von Kleist). For years Freud had been interested in Leonardo da Vinci and identified with Leonardo’s passion for investigation and the nature of his research, which created a scandal at the time.