An Italian author researching a work of historical fiction about the life of Leonardo DeVinci uncovered a document suggesting that Leonardo’s mother, Caterina – whose background and biography have long been points of scholarly contention – may have been an enslaved person brought to Italy from the North Caucasus region of Central Asia, which makes today part of southern Russia.
Looking for his novel Caterina’s SorcererOr Catherine’s smile, Carlo Vecce, professor at the Oriental University of Naples and historian of Leonardo, has unearthed a key document within the State Archives in Florence. Written by Leonardo’s father Piero da Vinci and dated November 1452 – six months after Leonardo’s birth – the document records the emancipation of an enslaved Circassian woman named Caterina, whom Vecce believes was Leonardo’s mother.
“When I saw this document, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Vecce said. BNC News. “I never gave much credence to the theory that she was an alien slave. So I spent months trying to prove that the Caterina in this deed was not the mother of Leonardo, but in the end all the documents I found pointed in this direction, and I realized the obvious.
“At the time, many slaves were called Caterina, but this was the only act of freeing a slave named Caterina [that Piero da Vinci] wrote throughout his long career,” the author continued. “Furthermore, the document is full of small errors and omissions, a sign that he may have been nervous when he wrote it, because impregnating someone else’s slave was a crime. ” This revelation would also mean that Leonardo was, by blood, only half Italian.
There are certain agreed facts about the situation surrounding Leonardo’s birth – his father, Piero da Vinci, was a wealthy notary; he was born in 1452; his mother’s name was Caterina; and his parents were single. (If her parents had been married at the time of her birth, Leonardo probably would have had to become a notary as well.) Other theories about Caterina’s life include that she might have been enslaved chinese woman or one orphan teenager who lived on a local farm. Piero da Vinci eventually married a woman from Florence, and he arranged for Caterina, once a slave, to marry a local farmer, with whom she had four more children.
“Carlo Vecce is an excellent scholar. Her ‘fictitious’ narrative needs the feel of a slave mother,” British art historian and Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp said in an interview with NBC. Kemp’s Book 2017, Mona Lisa: people and painting, first posed the idea that Caterina had been a local orphan. “I always favor our ‘rural’ mother, who is a better fit, especially as the future wife of a local ‘farmer’,” he said, adding that “none of the stories are demonstrably proven “.
In an interview with The New York Times, Kemp also noted that the idea that Caterina had been enslaved was indeed “a conceivable pattern”, adding that the public’s fascination with Leonardo’s personal life makes sense, as his biography remains largely shrouded despite the Renaissance artist wrote “thousands and thousands” of pages on countless subjects throughout his life. Paolo Galluzzi, Leonardo expert and former director of the Galileo Museum in Florence, also said THE Time that Vecce’s assertion is “a hypothesis” intended to “stimulate debate”, but that the research itself seems solid.
Vecce also noted that although her new novel is a work of historical fiction, an academic paper based on her findings is forthcoming.
