Sigmund Freud once described his essay on Leonardo da Vinci as the most beautiful thing he ever wrote. In Leonardo da Vinci, of course, he had as his subject not just an ordinary Italian painter, but the prototype of the universal genius, the "Renaissance man," the creator of some of the most beautiful, familiar, yet mysterious paintings of all time. Today, almost a century after its publication in 1910, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood remains a masterpiece of what Freud called "pathography" - the effort to understand the life and works of a celebrated cultural figure through the investigation of his or her crucial psychological conflicts. A master of German prose style, Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize by the City of Frankfurt in 1930 for the literary quality of his voluminous writings on the workings of the human mind.