Mater semper certo est. But not for Leonardo da Vinci, of which until now we have known only the name of his father, a certain Ser Piero, a Florentine notary and cultural figure. Incredible discovery also sheds light the female branch of the artist’s family which, thanks to some manuscripts preserved in the Florentine archive, can be traced and identified in the image of a certain Catherine, the daughter of Prince Jacob, who ruled one of the kingdoms on the plateaus of the North Caucasus. The girl, who was only fifteen years old, was kidnapped, probably by the Tatars, and made a slave.
A full-blown documentary fiction, were it not for the disclosure of these unthinkable origins, would have been the documents found by the Renaissance philologist and historian Carlo Vecce, professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, who devoted his research to the figure of Leonardo. The fruits of these studies can be found in his book Katherine’s smile, something between a novel and a historical reconstruction, tracing the audacious events of this young woman, enslaved and forced to travel hundreds of kilometers with chains on her hands from the Caucasus Mountains to Russia, to Azov, the ancient Greek colony of Tana, at the mouth of the Don River, from where he was then transported across the Black Sea, in 1439 to Constantinople. From there, Catherine, always according to documents in the Archives, passed into the hands of Venetian merchants, who in the following year transferred her to the Venetian lagoon, and in 1442 she arrived in Florence for about 15 years, where she was a servant. and nurse in the household of a certain Ginevra d’Antonio Redditi, wife of Donato di Filippo di Salvestro Nati.
It was here that Caterina met Piero da Vinci, the notary, by whom she conceived her illegitimate son, born on 15 April 1452 in Anchiano, a small village in the municipality of Vinci. Professor Vecce revealed the act of liberation of Catherine “filia Jacobi eius schiava seu serva de partibus Circassie”, notarized on November 2, 1452, about six months after the birth of Leonardo, at the request of the owner of the slave. Another interesting discovery concerns the fact that Leonardo was the firstborn of Piero, and not of Caterina, since based on the “Reminiscence” of the humanist scholar Francesco di Matteo Castellani, it turns out that in 1450, at the age of 13, she had already been impregnated the result is actually a nurse.
That the artist’s mother was a woman of humble origin and that the child was born out of wedlock has long been known, but for the first time the scholar identifies the woman as this Catherine, a princess who was made a slave from abroad. Vecce suggests that the notary Piero made love to Caterina at the Palazzo Castellani, now the seat of the Museo Galileo, on the Florentine riverbank, and that Leonardo was conceived right there. AND Katerina’s smile, which gave the name to the novel, could be exactly the one that the artist painted on the face of his mysterious Mona Lisa.about which so much has been written. Ideas, hypotheses, conjectures. In anticipation of further discoveries that will add new elements, we are in a field of possibilities that deserve to be explored and known to their full potential.
Source: Elle