The Kite Story

  In the Codex Atlanticus Leonardo makes notes on the flight of birds - in particular the kite - accompanied by small drawings.  In the midst of these notes he makes the following comment:
  "This writing distinctly about the kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with it's tail, and struck me several times with it's tail inside my lips."

  This story has generated a great deal of speculation.  Among the ideas are the following:
  1) That the story is one deliberately invented by Leonardo and that it was a topos (a theme commonly found in literature) which he had adopted to put himself in the company of other great men who were said to have had similar experiences.  For example bees settled on Plato's lips when he was an infant and ants filled Midas's mouth with grain while he slept.
  2) That the memory is the translation of a childhood trauma.

  Should the second theory be correct the question is what kind of trauma could have given rise to this false memory.  It could have been to do with breast feeding perhaps reflecting memories of being taken from his mother after the nursing period.  Others point to the phallic nature of the tail and to Leonardo's obsession with flight.  Was flight a symbol for a child's limited understanding of sex - something desirable but impossible for a child, the flight itself controlled by a phallic tail?  Or is flight the realisation of a desire for transendence, escape from the earthly and the physical?

  Whatever the origins of the kite story it may have been the source for Leonardo's traumatophobia.  Traumatophobia is the fear of trauma and can lead to the sufferer wanting to become the traumatizer and thereby undo the painful events of his childhood.  There are various stories about Leonardo inflicting minor traumas on others by creating shocking objects and events as per the following.

Leonardo the Trickster

  Vasari records various stories about Leonardo's desire to shock and astonish.

  While in Rome he transformed a lizard into a dragonlike creature by attaching wings, horns and a beard which he kept in a box.  He would open the box in front of friends to frighten them.

  He would show guests a sheeps intestines which could fit in the palm of his hand.  He then inflated the entrails with a bellows until it filled the room forcing the guests into corners of the room.

  The most famous of these stories, and probably the most apocryphal, is a tale from Leonardo's childhood.  A farmer of Ser Piero brought to him a wooden shield he had made and asked him to have it painted in Florence.  Ser Piero gave the shield to his son who improved it's shape and surface.  He then collected lizards, snakes, butterflies, grasshoppers and bats.  Using these as inspiration he painted a fearsome monster, a composite of various features of the animals he had collected.  The monster was depicted as emerging from a dark opening in a rock, belching fumes and fire.  When Ser Piero came to collect the shield he arranged it such that the light fell on it with the rest of the room in darkness.  When Ser Piero entered the room he recoiled in horror at the image on the shield but Leonardo said "This work has served its purpose; take it away, then, as it has produced the effect intended."