Madonna Litta ( 1491-95)
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One of the paintings shown at the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: painter at the court of Milan currently running at the National Gallery London is Madonna Litta
It is a picture of Madonna nursing the infant Jesus.
There is a peculiar analysis made by Sigmund Freud about Leonardo da Vinci and his alleged homosexuallity. He claims that Leonardo's father was absent and the boy, Leonardo, was entirely under feminine influence (p.99). According to Freud the 'child's love for his mother cannot continue to develop consciously any further; it succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love [...] For the boys whom he now loves as he grows up are aftel all only substitutes figures and revivals as himself in childhood - boys who he loves in the way his mother loved him when he was a child...(p.100)
Rosebud is the online research diary of Anna No Picture: master Arts and Sciences, Artistic Research 2012
Literature
Freud, S. (1910). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XI. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works (J. Strachey, Trans.). London: The Hogarth Press.
