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Freud’s lecture given on December 1, 1909, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on Leonardo da Vinci is examined. This lecture is a forerunner of his later article Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (Freud, 1910b). An attempt is made to emphasize the inconsistency between Freud’s hypotheses and the historical data by then at his disposal. Avoiding entering Freud’s vulture slip that many scholars have pointed out and Freud never acknowledged, concerns are expressed about Freud’s required documentation in the field of art history and about the method he employed for the portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci’s personality. It seems that Freud willingly avoided historical data choosing almost entirely to rely on applied psychoanalysis widely employing his own phantasies in attempting to overcome the paucity of knowledge on Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood. Freud himself later acknowledged that his 1910 paper was partly a fictional story along the lines of Mereskovskij’s 1895 book on Leonardo. A crucial inconsistency of this lecture, that will not be amended in his paper of 1910, relates to the fact that Freud changed into a phantasy what Leonardo had reported as a childhood memory. Many scholars have taken for granted this shift so that they talked about Leonardo’s “phantasy” or “dream”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]