Page:Freud - Leonardo da Vinci, a psychosexual study of an infantile reminiscence.djvu/93

consuming sensuality. Müntz^[1] expresses himself in this manner: “One knows what indecipherable and fascinating enigma Monna Lisa Gioconda has been putting for nearly four centuries to the admirers who crowd around her. No artist (I borrow the expression of the delicate writer who hides himself under the pseudonym of Pierre de Corlay) has ever translated in this manner the very essence of femininity: the tenderness and coquetry, the modesty and quiet voluptuousness, the whole mystery of the heart which holds itself aloof, of a brain which reflects, and of a personality who watches itself and yields nothing from herself except radiance. . . .” The Italian Angelo Conti^[2] saw the picture in the Louvre illumined by a ray of the sun and expressed himself as follows: “The woman smiled with a royal calmness, her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, the entire heredity of the species, the will of seduction and ensnaring, the charm of the deceiver, the kindness which conceals a

1. l. c. p. 417.
2. A. Conti: Leonardo pittore, Conferenze Florentine, l. c. p. 93.