“Vasari tells how ‘he made up a wax paste and, during his walks, he would model from it very delicate animals, hollow and filled with air; when he breathed into them, they would fly; when the air had escaped, they would fall to the ground. When the wine-grower from Belvedere found a very unusual lizard, Leonardo made wings for it out of skin of other lizards and filled these wings with mercury so that they waved and quivered whenever the lizard moved; he likewise made eyes, a beard, and horns for it in the same way, tamed it, put it in a box, and used their lizard to terrify friends.’”

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), in Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 9-25. Merleau-Ponty has here cited Sigmund Freud from Un souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci, 65. (English translation by A. A. Brill, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality (New York, 1947).