(ORDO NEWS) — Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was abducted and enslaved as a teenager in the Caucasus and taken to Italy, according to a new analysis of nearly 600-year-old documents held at the Florence State Archives.
If they are accurate, this would mean that Leonardo da Vinci, considered one of the greatest artists and scientists of the Italian Renaissance, was only half Italian.
Carlo Vecce, document seeker and professor of Italian literature at L’Orientale University in Naples, used this discovery as the plot of a historical novel.
The book titled Il sorriso di Caterina: La madre di Leonardo (The smile of Caterina, Leonardo’s mother) contains virtually exact details of his research, Vecce explained.
“Leonardo’s mother was a Circassian slave. Taken from her home in the Caucasus Mountains, sold and resold several times in Constantinople, then in Venice, before finally arriving in Florence, where she met the young notary Piero da Vinci, who became the father of Leonardo,” Vecce said.
Da Vinci was an artist, architect, inventor, anatomist, engineer and scientist. He filled dozens of secret notebooks with scientific observations, inventions, and anatomical observations.
Along with detailed drawings of human anatomy, his notebooks include drawings of bicycles, helicopters, tanks, and planes.
Studying da Vinci’s family history is difficult because, until now, only his father’s lineage could be correctly traced. Others suggest that da Vinci’s mother was an orphan living in an abandoned farmhouse when she met Piero da Vinci.
But the only reliably known fact about the family of the famous polymath was that his parents were not married and he was born out of wedlock in the Tuscan town of Anchiano, in the family of a notary Piero da Vinci and a woman named Caterina.
Vecce discovered previously unknown documents while doing research at the State Archives of Florence. Among them is a Latin charter, signed by Piero and dated November 2, 1452, which freed Catherine from slavery.
A year earlier, in 1451, Caterina met Piero after a Florentine knight bought her to work as a wet nurse, Vecce said.
“The notary who freed Katerina was the same person who loved her when she was still a slave and from whom she had this child,” Vecce said.
“Vecce’s reconstruction is extremely convincing. Certainly this is the most convincing reconstruction formulated so far.
It is based on new original documents and makes a lot of sense,” said Paolo Galluzzi, historian of science and honorary president of the Galileo Museum in Florence.
But not all historians consider this theory to be real. For example, Martin Kemp, professor of art history at Oxford University, said that Katerina was a common name for slaves who were forcibly converted to Christianity, so the documents could refer to someone else.
Da Vinci’s mother, in his opinion, was a destitute orphan, which also explains the lack of detailed information about her.
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