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Sigmund Freud's (1910) essay “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” the first attempt at “application” of a psychoanalytic approach to the visual arts, set off an explosion whose reverberations are still to be heard nine decades later. It generated two massive streams of literature, each in its own way a maelstrom of controversy: one, a spirited critical response to (and defense of) the work itself, the other
a flood of psychobiographical and psychoesthetic studies of works of art and their creators that continues unabated despite the negative responses of “traditional” art historians. Although the point has been made that Freud's motive in writing the piece was less to anatomize and explain Leonardo than to demonstrate the value of his nascent ideas about narcissism and homosexuality, “Leonardo” has been taken as the prototype both of what Freud called “pathography” and of “applied” psychoanalysis—that is, the use of psychoanalytic ideas outside the clinical situation.
Bradley Collins, himself an art historian, has undertaken to address both of these thorny issues in his study of the history of literary responses to Freud's essay. His book demonstrates both formidable, exhaustive art-historical scholarship and an impressive command of psychoanalytic concepts and their use (and abuse) in interdisciplinary research; Collins' extensive end-notes are as readable and enlightening as his text. Overall, he succeeds in underscoring both the potentialities and the perils in such work, and in exposing the achievements and the defects in Freud's pioneering treatise.
Collins begins with an exposition of the “Leonardo” essay itself, recounting the by-now-familiar Freudian themes: the effects of the artist's illegitimate birth and “abandonment” by his father; his subsequent removal to his now-married father's home and the consequent “loss” of his natural mother; the stimulation of his sexual curiosity and his “wish” to learn; the famous “vulture memory”; the defensiv