The new theory will surely unleash controversy among Italian Renaissance specialists, who will study the documentation with a magnifying glass.
Leonardo da Vinci, the famous author of La Gioconda and symbol of the Renaissance, would only be half Italian, according to a leading academic, because the mother of the genius was a slave from the Caucasus.
According to research by Professor Carlo Vecce, a Renaissance specialist and professor at the University of Naples, the multifaceted artist’s story is much more tormented than previously thought.
Born in 1452, Leonardo was the fruit of an illegitimate relationship between a wealthy notary from the Florentine Republic and Caterina, presented until now as a peasant girl of humble origins about whom little was known.
“It was a woman who had been kidnapped in her country of origin, in the mountains of the Caucasus, sold several times in Constantinople and then in Venice, who finally arrived in Florence, where she met the young notary Pierre da Vinci,” Vecce explained in an interview.
“She named her son Leonardo”, he says with satisfaction when summarizing the extraordinary journey made to recount the odyssey of that woman, a Circassian slave and unknown until now, in the book entitled “Catherine’s Smile – Leonardo da Vinci’s mother” .
The discoveries of the academic, who has spent years tracing everything related to Leonardo, shed a new light on the archetype of universal genius, who was a painter, architect, paleontologist, botanist, writer, sculptor, philosopher, engineer, inventor, musician, poet and urbanist.
The new theory will surely unleash controversy among Italian Renaissance specialists, who will study the documentation with a magnifying glass.
Carlo Vecce bases his claims on a series of historical documents that he has patiently collected from numerous archives.
«The most important is a document written by Pierre da Vinci himself, Leonardo’s father. It is about the act in which he proclaimed the emancipation of Catalina », a notarial act that allowed her « to recover her freedom and her dignity as a human being ».