Was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother a slave? An Italian professor thinks so

In a new novel, a dramatized account of her life, Renaissance scholar Carlo Vecce writes that Leonardo’s mother, Caterina, was originally from the Caucasus but was sold into slavery in Italy.

Entitled “The Smile of Caterina, Leonardo’s Mother”, the book was inspired by a discovery that Vecce – a professor at the University of Naples and an expert on the Old Master – made at the State Archives in Florence in 2019, when working on the 500th anniversary of the great death of polymath.

There he came across a previously unknown document, which he says is dated the fall of 1452 and signed by the man known to be the master’s father, which, he says, frees a slave named Caterina from her mistress, Monna Ginevra. The date, which was a few months after Leonardo was born, and the fact that Leonardo’s father signed it, struck Vacce as proof that this woman was Leonardo’s mother.

Two years earlier, according to the same document, Ginevra had hired out Caterina as wet nurse to a Florentine knight.

“I discovered the document about a slave named Caterina five years ago and it became an obsession for me,” Vecce, a professor of Italian literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” told CNN. “Then I searched and found the supporting documents. In the end I was able to find evidence for the most likely hypotheses. We can’t say it’s certain, we’re not looking for the absolute truth, we’re looking for the highest degree of truth , and this is the most obvious hypothesis.”

The document describes the freed slave as having been born in the Caucasus region of Central Asia and traded to Italy.

Vecce planned to continue his research in Moscow, where he was sure he could find even more documentation about the slave trade in Italy and Caterina’s life. But the Covid-19 pandemic put an end to his travel plans and instead, he said, he became “obsessed” with history.

“The more I progressed, the more the story made sense. The story of a slave who was kidnapped at 13 and freed at 25, the year after Leonardo was born. What should have been the most beautiful years of her life, was used as a slave,” he said.

“A Woman Who Lost Her Freedom”

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452 in Anchiano, a village near the Tuscan town of Vinci, about 40 km west of Florence. His full birth name was Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, meaning “Leonardo, son of Piero, of Vinci.”

His mother had been believed to be a local farmer named Caterina and his father a wealthy notary, according to official biographies of his life published on the 500th anniversary of his death in 2019.

Leonardo was born out of wedlock, and both parents married other people after his birth, but he spent his childhood on his father’s estate, where he was educated and treated as a legitimate son.

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There had been a suggestion in academic circles that Caterina had indeed been a slave, but there had never been any documentary evidence to support this theory – until now. Vecce said the slave trade is rarely talked about in Italy, which may have led to the delay in this discovery.

“Here in Europe, we know almost nothing about slavery in the Mediterranean. It was born in the Mediterranean at an extraordinary time, during the Renaissance,” he said.

Vecce said he wrote his book about Caterina as a historical novel because so little is known about her entire life that he could not write an academic account.

“I could only fill 20 pages if (I wrote) an academic book, so I wrote a historical novel. I was drawn to this form of writing. I felt liberated to tell the story this way,” he said.

Theory shares experts

Paolo Galluzzi, a historian of Leonardo’s scientific work and a member of the Lincei Academy of Sciences in Rome, told CNN that Vecce’s theory is “extremely plausible.”

“It’s based on documents and it’s not just imagination,” he said.

Although written as a novel, the story is inspired by “scientific research,” Galluzzi said, and is “by far the most compelling version so far” of Caterina’s backstory.

“We don’t have Leonardo’s or his mother’s or father’s DNA, which would obviously provide the only scientific evidence,” he said. “We rely on documents and the documents that he (Vecce) has relied on are quite convincing.”

However, not everyone agrees.

Martin Kemp, a leading Leonardo scholar and emeritus professor of art history at the University of Oxford, expressed more caution about Vecce’s theory.

In a statement sent to CNN, he described Vecce as a “good scholar” but added: “It is a surprise that he has published his documents in the context of a ‘fictionalized’ account.”

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He said: “There have been a number of claims that Leonardo’s mother was a slave. This fits the need to find something extraordinary and exotic in Leonardo’s background, and a link to slavery fits with current concerns.”

Kemp explained that Caterina was a common name for slaves who had converted to Christianity. He pointed out that Francesco del Giocondo, the man believed to have commissioned the Mona Lisa as a portrait of his wife, traded slaves and, according to historical records, traded two “Caterinas” in a year.

Kemp, who in 2017 published “Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting” with co-author Giuseppe Pallanti, presented an alternative view of Caterina.

“I still prefer a ‘country mother’ – Caterina di Meo – a more or less destitute orphan in Vinci, but this is not such a big story if he had a ‘slave mother’,” he said in his statement.

Regardless of the truth about her identity, Vecce believes that Leonardo’s life’s work reflects his relationship with his mother.

He said that Leonardo’s depictions of the Madonna figure were always based on a real woman, not religious iconography, and he believes that Caterina’s influence inspired his great success.

“The idea of ​​the mother remained in his heart all his life. Caterina was the only woman in his life all his life and he loved Caterina’s smile,” he said.

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