Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis(I) 

SPEAKER: Wang Juei-Ting

Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Art Studies, National Central University

TOPIC: The Vulture Dialectic: Freud’s Interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci

TIME: 16:00-18:00, Monday, 13 October, 2025

VENUE: 2009R, 2nd Floor, College of Liberal Art, National Sun Yat-sen University

“Writing in such detail as this about the kite seems to be my destiny, because in my first childhood memory it seemed to me that, while was in my cradle, kite came to me and opened my mouth with his tail and beat me with this tail many times inside my lips.” (Codex Atlanticus, F. 66v)

Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, through a synthesis of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts, funeral accounts and art works, formulated a reading of the artist grounded in the unconscious and symbolic transformation. In his interpretation of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (1503-1519), Freud identifies the bird-like form embedded in the Virgin’s blue robe as a latent symbolic trace, representing a return of Leonardo’s childhood memory. The absent father and maternal attachment are configured within the image through avian iconography and flight motifs, forming a mechanism of sublimation.

This lecture analyses this well-known debate in art history while also discussing the art and society of the Renaissance period in which Leonardo da Vinci lived and several cases in which Freud applied psychoanalysis to the study of art history.