Leonardo da Vinci: A Quick Read edition

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"Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood" is an essay by Sigmund Freud that explores the life of Leonardo da Vinci through a psychoanalytic lens. Freud analyzes Leonardo's paintings and interprets them as reflections of his childhood experiences. One of these experiences is a childhood fantasy in which Leonardo was attacked by a vulture as an infant. Freud suggests that this fantasy is based on Leonardo's memory of sucking his mother's nipple. He also connects the vulture to Egyptian hieroglyphs that represent the mother as a vulture. Another theory proposed by Freud is that Leonardo's fondness for depicting the Virgin Mary with Saint Anne in his artwork stems from his own experience of being raised by both his biological mother and his father's wife. Freud points out that in one of Leonardo's paintings, the outline of a vulture can be seen, linking it to the childhood fantasy involving the vulture in Leonardo's crib.