After more than three decades immersing himself in Leonardo Da Vinci's manuscripts, Italian professor Carlo Vecce discovered among the State Archives of Florence the liberation certificate of a Circassian slave named Caterina who he believes was the mysterious mother of the Renaissance genius. Based on this discovery, and after a long four-year investigation, he published Caterina (Alfaguara), his first novel, which has been a best-seller in Italy.
Who was Caterina?
Caterina was a Circassian slave, originally from one of the peoples who lived in the mountains of the northern Caucasus. I discovered her release document in the State Archives of Florence, written by the notary Piero da Vinci, Leonardo's father, six months after her birth in Florence. This coincidence shocked me, because we knew nothing about Caterina, her mother. All the chronological elements, the context and the other names we know lead us to think that it is most likely that this girl, a slave, was really Leonardo's mother.
How did you get to Florence?
Its origins date back to one of the wildest peoples in the world, because at that time they were completely outside of Mediterranean civilization. These tribes did not know writing, currency or commerce, and they lived in a mythical dimension, worshiping the gods of the mountains and the sky. Her story was surely that of so many other girls from that part of the world, kidnapped by the Tatars and Turks and resold to Genoese, Venetian or Catalan merchants who took them to various slave markets in the Mediterranean. In Italy, young women like Caterina were mainly in demand to work as domestic servants or in textile workshops, where they were very skilled. In fact, the first document I found about her has to do with a luxury textile workshop in Venice. Her boss was an old Florentine businessman who had emigrated to Venice and it was he who took her to Florence, where she met the young notary Piero da Vinci. Probably the simplest thing of all happened: he fell in love with her, because the Circassian girls were very strong and beautiful, he got her pregnant and did the most important thing in his life, convince Caterina's masters to free her and marry her to a peasant. by Vinci. There she lived serenely for another forty years of her life, surrounded by other children, Leonardo's brothers.
But Leonardo's father never legitimized him as his son.
No, but it helped him. After ten years living with his mother, she put him in an artists' school in Florence with the great Verrocchio, but he had done the most important school before, with his mother, who could neither read nor write, but taught him the fundamental things, like the love of freedom or the love of animals or nature, where she saw something sacred.
What are the implications of this finding?
They are enormous, because it finally explains to us why these mysterious elements are in Leonardo's work, why he is so exceptional compared to other Renaissance artists such as Botticelli or Michelangelo. Only Leonardo has this immense love for nature, he is the only one who always portrays animals, the rest are more interested in man. Another dominant element in his painting is women, almost all of his paintings feature female figures, and almost all of them are mothers with children related to landscapes and the representation of nature.
Would Caterina also explain Leonardo's universal dimension?
It is another implication, because Leonardo's work has always recognized his ability to speak to everyone, not just Italians. It was a mystery and now we know it has an explanation. As an awake child, he was sure to ask his mother where he came from. In his manuscripts he often imagines himself traveling to the East, to Syria, to Egypt, to the Caucasus... and no one knew why. Furthermore, he found a letter to the Sultan of Constantinople in which he asked him to go to his service to build a bridge over the Bosphorus. Perhaps he later wanted to travel to the Caucasus to find his distant relatives.
Do you think we can see Caterina's face in some of her most famous paintings?
Not in the Mona Lisa, because it is not her physiognomy, but she could have her smile, which is the smile of hope after having known suffering, like that of Caterina after about thirteen years as a slave. But the most surprising is the figure found in The Last Supper next to Jesus, who, if you remember, was said to be Mary Magdalene in the Da Vinci Code. No, it is Caterina, idealized, with drooping eyes and separating herself from the figure of Christ, who is an ideal self-portrait by Leonardo. He began The Last Supper shortly after Caterina's death, because in the same notebook where he wrote it, pages later, you can see how he began to work on this painting. From the greatest pain of her life was also born her greatest masterpiece. She lived with him the last year of her life in Milan, he died in her arms and her son organized a queen's funeral for him, as the expense notes for her burial demonstrate.
Why have you published it in novel form? How much is truth and how much is fiction?
When I found the documents I tried to do it as an academic article but I couldn't do it. It is a story that moved me so emotionally that I felt too involved, as had never happened to me before in thirty years of working on Leonardo. So I started writing through all the characters Caterina encountered in her life, like a Venetian travel writer or a Ligurian pirate, knowing that much of it was true because she was in the documents. The example of Javier Cercas helped me a lot in this. The documents tell you some things but you need your imagination to put the fragments together, like archaeologists do. Only after finishing it did I publish the academic article with all of Caterina's documents, and I had to adapt Leonardo's biography.
Do you hope your discovery will open the door to other discoveries?
Yes, and not only that, but also so that the importance of women in the history of humanity can be understood, since one of the great difficulties in the study of the past is that the voices of women are not found.
