This is probably the buzz that has been rising the most for 48 hours and it concerns the identity of the mother of the famous polymath genius and emblem of the Quattrocento, the Italian 15th century succeeding the Middle Ages, Leonardo da Vinci.
We have good reason to think that Marco Polo was a mythomaniac who never set foot in China, now we have just as much reason to think that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was not only not Italian but that it had to come from the Caucasus and more precisely from Circassia, a region bordering the Black Sea and which extends roughly speaking from the Sea of Azov to Georgia. The beauty of Circassian women was legendary in Europe at least in the time of Voltaire and Lord Byron who spoke of them as highly prized slaves in the harems of the Ottoman Empire.
This is also the status that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother must have had, a slave, even a sexual object, resold from Byzantium to Venice, then finally to Florence.
One can only be initially skeptical about this theory which has been the subject of a novel by the person who proposes it, one of the great Italian specialists of Leonardo da Vinci, Carlo Veccealso a Renaissance scholar and professor at the University of Naples.
As he says himself in an article by journalist Antonio Sanfrancesco from Il Libraio.it from the Il Libraio.it site, from which we have taken some information, Vecce was also incredulous at the hypothesis already more or less already put forward before him that Caterina, Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, was a slave from the confines of the Black Sea and was not to be identified with a young Tuscan peasant girl named Caterina di Meo Lippi.
Caterina, a Jewish slave from the Caucasus?
Vecce wanted to demonstrate that this theory was false and involuntarily, he has just provided evidence to this effect which made him change his mind. As several articles from AFP to GEO also tell, everything changed with the discovery in the Florence archives of a document that we owe to Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, then notary of families of Florentine notables. .
As Antonio Sanfrancesco explains, it is an act of emancipation for a woman ” identified as “filia Jacobi eius schiava seu serva de partibus Circassia”daughter of a certain Jacob and originally from the northern Caucasus plateau where the Circassian population lives “. However, as the journalist also explains, the act is dated November 2, 1452, six months after Leonardo’s birth on April 15, and does mention a Caterina (incidentally, the name Jacob suggests, in particular to Mountain Jews).
The smile of Caterina — Leonardo’s mother, is the name of the novel also exposing the thesis of the origin of Leonardo da Vinci’s mother presented on Tuesday March 14 in the historic headquarters of the publishing house at Villa La Loggia in Florence before the tour which will also pass through Milan and Paris. To obtain a fairly accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. The Italian subtitles should then appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Choose “French”. © QuotidianoNazionale
So we can’t help thinking that Ser Piero wanted to free his son’s mother. Of course, as another great Leonardo specialist explains in the video above, Paolo Galluzzi, we will probably never know exactly what is going on because this would require DNA testing, although he concedes that his colleague’s thesis is rather convincing.
Perhaps the most astonishing part of this story is not so much the origin of Leonardo’s mother as an indisputable fact that is certainly unknown to many. The first reaction that one can indeed have when learning this theory is that it is about a “great foutage of gu…”, slaves in Florence, in Europe, in full Quattrocento? Let’s go!
The sad truth is that this was well known to historians and attested to for a long time…
A conference on Wednesday March 15, 2023. To obtain a fairly accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. The Italian subtitles should then appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Choose “French”. © Museo Galileo