One of the greatest geniuses in the history of Italy, before Italy even got that name, was the son of a Slavic slave. A supposed princess was captured and sold to a transalpine family, with whom a Florentine notary had a son named Leonardo. The novel, Caterina’s Smile (Giunti, 2023), presented this Tuesday in Florence, is based on a long documentary and archaeological study and leaves little doubt about the origins of the great genius. A story that broadens the horizons of the history of an Italy currently embroiled in debates of identity and culture much more obtuse than the genesis of its culture. Leonardo da Vinci was only half Italian. And his mother, in today’s political terms, was an immigrant from the East who was prostituted and treated like a slave.
The book, presented this Tuesday with great fanfare “enclosed with all sorts of embargoes” and written by the Italian historian Carlo Vecce on the basis of the discovery of a document in the archives of Florence (northern Italy), could represent a turning point in research Leonardo. An artist around whom there have been some gaps, but whenever he returns to the present he does so as a bestseller.
The fundamental revelation, already suspected for at least 15 years but not confirmed with this accuracy, indicates that the Renaissance genius was born in 1452 as the result of an extramarital affair between a wealthy Florentine notary of the Republic, Piero, and Caterina, a peasant girl from a humble background, about whom practically nothing was known and who could neither read nor write in the language of the country to which she came.
Carlo Vecce, author of the book “The smile of Caterina, Leonardo’s mother.” MARCO BERTORELLO (AFP)
Vecce, a former collaborator of the great expert on Leonardo Carlo Pedretti, explained at the presentation of the book that he had discovered a document in the Florence State Archives that would confirm Caterina’s slave origins. It is about the “certificate of liberation” of her last lover, a certain Monna Ginevra, whom she had acquired two years earlier as a wet nurse from a Florentine gentleman. The document, dated November 2, 1452 (six months after Leonardo’s birth), is written “in the handwriting” of the notary Piero da Vinci, the man by whom she had previously conceived, the father of the future genius.
The story that the novel tells is also built around the journey that Caterina took to get to Florence. It is believed that Catherine, the daughter of Prince Yacob, who ruled one of the kingdoms over the highlands of the North Caucasus, lived at the gates of the Don on the Sea of Azov. And that morning in July, she was kidnapped by a group of Tatars. She was then sold to human traffickers, reduced to slave status and sold.
Vecce explains that slavery was also a system in the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, particularly for Venetian and Genoese merchants who traded in people. In Florence, the historian claims, the market demanded mostly young women destined to serve as nurses, caretakers, concubines, or sex slaves. Caterina was allegedly “recruited” by Donato di Filippo di Salvestroc Nati, an ancient Florentine adventurer and husband of Monna Ginevra, “who owned slaves in the Middle East and Black Sea region.”
Vecce states that Caterina was a Circassian (North Caucasus region) daughter of Jacob and that she was uprooted from her homeland on the shores of the Sea of Azov when she was a child and posted to Italy. Documentation collected by the book’s author claims that the lives of Leonardo, his parents, and his mother’s supposed “owners” were forever linked.
Monna Ginevra’s husband died in 1466, but shortly before that he had invested his money in the construction of a family tomb in the monastery of San Bartolomé de Monteoliveto. The notarial deed of this work appears again signed by Piero da Vinci. It was Leonardo who bequeathed one of his early works, The Annunciation (1472-1475), to the sacristy of this abbey. This painting is currently in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. “It’s no coincidence,” claims the historian.
In addition, the author points out that in Milan, behind San Ambrosio, during the construction work for the new seat of the Catholic University, the chapel of the Immaculate Conception, that of the Virgin of the Rocks, reappears. The discovery of possible human remains suggests, says Vecce, that Caterina’s could also be found there.
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