Sometimes one starts the path to a certain destination and halfway there is that all the routes lead in the opposite direction. That is what happened to Professor Carlo Vecce, a specialist in literature at the L’Orientale University of Naples.
Vecce, a renowned Italian expert, began to investigate the life of Leonardo da Vinci’s mother to refute a series of speculations that Caterina had been a slave. But the more she got into the story, the more she deviated from his initial idea.
“When the first papers came out, I began to study them to show that this Caterina who was a slave was not Leonardo’s mother,” Vecce said at a press conference on Tuesday. “But in the end all the evidence went in the other direction, especially the release document,” he added.
The text to which Carlo Vecce refers is a certificate of liberation from slavery signed by Leonardo’s father, the notary Piero da Vinci, which has been found in the State Archives of Florence. “The notary who freed Caterina was the same person who loved her when she was still a slave and with whom she had this son,” he added, referring to the versatile Renaissance artist.
According to the theory that Vecce explains in his new book, ‘Il Sorriso di Caterina’ (Caterina’s Smile), presented Tuesday, Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was kidnapped and taken to Italy from Circasia, a mountainous region in the north of the Caucasus, due to his ability to work with fabrics.
She would have arrived in Venice by boat and from there she traveled to Florence, where she worked in a house near the cathedral and was hired as a nanny until her release on November 2, 1452, when she had already been in a relationship with Piero da Vinci for more than a year. . Little Leonardo, for example, was born on April 15 of that same year.
The act found by Vecce records the release of an enslaved Circassian woman named Caterina by her owner. The evidence that the document refers specifically to Leonardo’s mother is bolstered, the Italian professor said, by other documents that trace a chain of ownership and familiarity with Caterina, all linked to Leonardo’s father.
The relationship between the biological parents of the author of La Gioconda was extramarital. Piero was married to a Florentine girl. The year after Leonardo’s birth, Piero himself arranged the marriage between Caterina and a farmer and kiln worker who lived on the outskirts of Vinci, a city about 60 kilometers from Florence.
This new theory clashes with another that was launched in 2017 by Martin Kemp, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford and Trinity College. According to Kemp, Leonardo’s mother was Caterina di Meo Lippi, a 15-year-old orphaned teenager. And there was even another hypothesis, defended by the researcher Angelo Paratico, who pointed out that Caterina was an oriental slave (an option that does not deviate too much from the idea raised by Vecce).
Kemp proposed that in 1451, on a farm less than two kilometers from Vinci, Caterina di Meo Lippi lived with her little brother Papo. They had both lost their parents and her grandmother had recently brought them to live in her house in the village of Mattoni. Poor, vulnerable and without prospects, she became pregnant by Piero da Vinci during one of her visits to her city from the ambitious young man who was building a highly successful career in Florence.
