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ITALIAN HISTORY

New research claims Italy’s Leonardo da Vinci was son of a slave

Leonardo da Vinci, the painter of the Mona Lisa and a symbol of the Renaissance, was only half-Italian, his mother a slave from the Caucasus, new research revealed on Tuesday.

Da Vinci’s mother had long been thought a Tuscan peasant, but University of Naples professor Carlo Vecce, a specialist in the Old Master, believes the truth is more complicated.

“Leonardo’s mother was a Circassian slave… taken from her home in the Caucasus Mountains, sold and resold several times in Constantinople, then Venice, before arriving in Florence,” he told AFP at the launch of a new book.

In the Italian city, she met young notary Piero da Vinci “and their son was called Leonardo”.

The findings of Vecce, who has spent decades studying da Vinci and curating his works, are based on Florence city archives.

Any new discovery about da Vinci is hotly contested by the small world of experts who study him, but Vecce insists the evidence is there.

Among the documents he found is one written by da Vinci’s father himself, a legal document of emancipation for Caterina, “to recover her freedom and recover her human dignity”.

‘Spirit of freedom’

This document is dated 1452, and was presented on Tuesday at a press conference at the headquarters of publishing house Giunti in Florence.

It was written by “the man who loved Caterina when she was still a slave, who gave her this child named Leonardo and (was) also the person who helped to free her”, Vecce said.

His assertion offers a radical change of perspective on da Vinci, who was believed to have been the product of an affair between Piero da Vinci and a different woman, young Tuscan peasant Caterina di Meo Lippi.

Also see https://www.informnny.com/news/italian-novelist-leonardos-da-vincis...

This is fun!

Here’s his current mother.

Caterina di Meo Buti del Vacca

Tamás Flinn Caldwell-Gilbert did you see this? I’m especially interested in what historians think.

Also tagging Livio Scremin & Yigal Burstein

It’s not actually a new theory.

https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Abkhazia/The-Italian-marit...

Mostly female slaves from the Black Sea region and the Western Caucasus ended up as servants in wealthy urban households; after a decade or so depending on the circumstances, slaves were then frequently liberated. Children born to slaves and their masters were presumably not a rarity, and distinct evidence has remained about some of them. For example, Carlo di Cosimo de’ Medici was the son of the famous Cosimo de’ Medici and Maddalena, a Circassian slave he bought in Venice. It has been argued that even Leonardo da Vinci - notoriously born out of wedlock - may have been given birth by a Circassian or Abkhazian slave (a local woman from a peasant family is the more established alternative).

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_di_Meo_Lippi

hmmmm... it certainly is interesting!

I bought his book, but unfortunately, it seems the book is a work of fiction, so it's really not useful. Vecce promises that he is working on a scholarly article coming out soon on his theory, so I guess we will have to wait for that to be published.

For some reason it seems to make more sense than the “Tuscan peasant” mother theory, I wonder why I react that way.

Here is his presentation on his findings:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Gvp7tVxiE