Aubrey's lights
Sir : I am sorry to harp on a vulture, but Luciana Cianci's defence of Freud (Letters, 7 March) will not quite do.
Nibbio, specifically, means kite. It may be generically used of a wide class of raptors, in- cluding the little buzzard vulture. But the bird Freud detected in Leonardo's Madonna and Child with St Anne was a large bald vulture, called avvoltoio in Italian. It is not native to Tuscany. The infant Leonardo could not have fantasised about it because, in his cradle at Vinci, he could never have seen one. Freud's reading of Leonardo's notebooks was done in German translation; in the edition he used, nibbio came out as Geier, a generic term for large raptors like the bald vulture. Hence the confusion. It may be that Freud's intuitive powers ascribed traits to Leonardo which that mysterious man in fact had. But not because of the vulture.
I remain puzzled by Ross H. Dabney's effu- sion (Letters, 21 February) about my review of Scnd on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver (7 February). No word in that article tried to justify rape as an act, insurrectionary or not. Nor, as it hap- pens, am I American, English 9r an academic; if Mr Dabney wants to use argumenta ad hominem at so poor a level of efficiency, let him guess again. Of course, to recognise that a situation is urgent is not to 'borrow' its urgency or to indulge in 'vicarious revolt'--except, per- haps, in Maryland?—and I would find Mr Dab- ney's vision of a world in which only blacks can protest against racism exquisitely funny if it were not already sinister. If Mr Dabney doubts that xenophobia and penis-envy are prominent features of the racist mind, he should .try talk- ing, as I have, to American, English and African segregationalists. Incidentally, penis-envy is by no means 'the wrong phrase' for what I mean; it is exactly the right one, as the white man's myth of the black's superior virility and larger equipment testifies.
Robert Hughes 51 Hanover Gate Mansions, Regent's Park, London NW!
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