The illustrious Renaissance artist and symbol of Italian painting was not only Italian, a prominent academic said on Tuesday. While so far the mother of Leonardo da Vinci, author of the Mona Lisawas presented as the daughter of a Tuscan peasant, Carlo Vecce, a Renaissance specialist and professor at the University of Naples, concluded from his research in the archives of the city of Florence that it had a well-known history. more tormented bordering on the romantic.
“She was a woman who was abducted from her country of origin in the Caucasus mountains, sold and resold several times in Constantinople and then in Venice, and she finally arrived in Florence where she met a young notary, Pierre de Vinci,” he explained in an interview with AFP. “Their son is called Léonard”, says with a smile the one who was inspired by this extraordinary journey to write a novel recounting the odyssey of this hitherto unknown woman, entitled “Catherine’s smile – The mother of Leonardo da Vinci”.
Historical documents
The discoveries of this academic, who has been tracking down everything related to Leonardo for years, shed new light on this archetype of the universal genius born in 1452 who crisscrossed Italy throughout his life and ended up dying in France, at Amboise, in 1519 at the court of François 1er. This theory also promises to make noise in the small world of specialists of the Italian Renaissance, who will not fail to examine it with a magnifying glass.
But Carlo Vecce bases his assertions on a whole series of historical documents that he has patiently collected from the archives. “The most important is a document written by Pierre da Vinci in person, Leonardo’s father: it is the act of emancipation of Catherine”, a notarial act which allows the latter to “recover her freedom and her dignity of being human”.
Impact on his works
This precious document dating from 1452 was presented Tuesday during a press conference at the headquarters of the Florentine publishing house Giunti in front of an audience of international media. Professor Vecce does not fail to point out that it is “therefore the man who loved Catherine when she was still a slave and who had a child with her who helped her find freedom”.
For Carlo Vecce, the tribulations of his slave and “migrant” mother obviously had an impact on the work of the brilliant Leonardo, to whom Catherine left “an important legacy and above all the spirit of freedom” which “inspires all his work scientific and intellectual. Leonardo da Vinci is indeed one of the artists of his time called “polymaths”: he masters several disciplines such as sculpture, drawing, music and painting, which he places at the top of the arts, and of course the sciences. In the field of scientific research, “nothing can stop him”, comments Professor Vecce.