Page:Freud - Leonardo da Vinci, a psychosexual study of an infantile reminiscence.djvu/24

ness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo presented an example of cool sexual rejection which one would not expect in an artist and a portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi^[1] cites the following sentence from Leonardo showing his frigidity: “The act of procreation and everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom and if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions.” His posthumous works which not only treat of the greatest scientific problems but also comprise the most guileless objects which to us do not seem worthy of so great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, witticisms, prophecies),^[2] are chaste to a degree—one might say abstinent—that in a work of belle lettres would excite wonder even to-day. They evade everything sexual so thoroughly, as if Eros alone who preserves everything living was no worthy material for the scientific

1. E. Solmi: Leonardo da Vinci. German Translation by Emmi Hirschberg. Berlin, 1908.
2. Marie Herzfeld: Leonardo da Vinci der Denker, Forscher und Poet. Second edition. Jena, 1906.