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Leonardo da Vinci's personality appears to be fully as enigmatic and “romantic” as his Mona Lisa's smile. Judging from the number and variety of treatises, he proved to be a challenge, equally strong, to the historian, art critic, the novelist, and psychological investigator.
We, too, were lured by this challenge, and this, despite the fact, or perhaps precisely because of it, that our “non artistic” approach to creative work, (47, 48) compels us to dispense with historical data for our key statements and reduces the essential sources of our investigation to the few finished and undamaged paintings, which are undisputably Leonardo's
To paraphrase Freud, (6) “If such an undertaking … does not yield definite results, then the blame for it is not to be laid to the faulty or inadequate method of a non-artistic evaluation of creative activity, but to the vague and fragmentary material … it is therefore only the authors who forced the ‘creative therapy method’ to furnish expert opinions on such insufficient material, who are responsible for the failure.”