Leonardo Da Vinci's Early Years
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 Leonardo was born at Anchiano, a village near the little town of Vinci, in 1452. His father, Ser Piero, was to become a successful notary; his mother was a peasant named Caterina. As far as we know he was brought up in the country-side where he was born, and Pater, with his usual insight, has seen how life on a Tuscan farm, "watching the finds and glow worms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian vineyard", could colour the boy's imagination and give him his enduring preoccupation with organic life. Vasari expresses this truth in the familiar story of how Leonardo as a boy painted a dragon on the shield of one of his father's peasants, "and for this purpose carried into a room of his own lizards great and small, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grass-hoppers, bats and such like animals, out of which, variously put together, he formed a great ugly creature". The shield has disappeared--may never have existed, but we do not need its material presence to know the truth of Vasari's description, for in his enumeration of twisting creatures we recognise the forms which reappear in Leonardo's latest drawings. One other legend of Leonardo's youth must be remembered, his beauty. We have no contemporary description of him as a young man and no identifiable portrait, but in Vasari and all the early authors the accounts of his beauty are so emphatic that they must be based on a living tradition. He was beautiful, strong, graceful in all his actions, and so charming in conversation that he drew all men's spirits to him: of this his later life gives full confirmation. Vasari's account of his love and mastery of horses is also confirmed by numerous drawings; and the story of how he would buy birds in the market-place, take them in his hand and let them go, giving them their lost liberty, is part of a love of nature, visible in all his work.
To these early biographers he was himself a masterpiece of nature and seemed to be initiated into her processes. Even the almost magical powers with which he was credited in old age, they interpreted as part of his physical perfection. Naïve and incomplete as this interpretation is, it contains one small part of the truth worth adding to a complex whole. Another fragment, of an almost contrary kind, is to be found in one of Leonardo's own notebooks, and is practically the only record of his youth which they contain. It is a memory, or a symbolic dream, which still retains the disturbing quality of an emotional experience deeply secreted in the unconscious mind. "In the earliest memory of my childhood it seemed to me that as I lay in my cradle a kite came down to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail between my lips. This", he adds, "seems to be my fate." We are still too ignorant of psychology to interpret such a memory with any finality, but it is not surprising that Freud has taken this passage as the starting-point for a psychological study of Leonardo. His conclusions have been rejected with horror by the majority of Leonardo scholars, and no doubt the workings of a powerful and complex mind cannot be deduced from a single sentence nor explained by a rather one-sided system of psychology. Freud's study, though it contains some passages of fine intuition, is perhaps as oversimplified as that of Vasari. Yet it helps our conception of Leonardo's character by insisting that he was abnormal. We must remember this undercurrent when examining the surface of his early work. Later we shall not easily forget it.
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