"This is the story of a country boy," Carlo Vecce begins his monumental Life of Leonardo (Alfaguara). A bastard boy, son of a Florentine notary, Ser Piero, and Caterina, a Circassian slave, one of the wildest peoples of the Caucasus, without writing, with their own myths and distant sagas. Two years ago, Vecce revolutionized Art History with a new discovery: the identity of Leonardo's mother, to whom he dedicated a novel, Caterina (Alfaguara), which immediately became a bestseller in Italy. And in his 680-page biography, he sheds new light on the man behind the artist, that wild child who did not go to school, who grew up among the hills and fields of Vinci with a mother who sang lullabies to him in an ancient language, unlike any other in Europe.
"Documenting Leonardo's origins may be the most important discovery of the last 500 years, even more than finding a new painting or attribution. Like the famous Salvator Mundi... Can it tell us more about Leonardo's images or imagination? No. But his origins, which had always been dark and mysterious, provide us with many keys to interpretation," explains Vecce, one of the greatest experts on Da Vinci. He refers to the world's most expensive painting, which was sold in 2017 for 450 million dollars at Christie's New York and has since been on the yacht Serene of Saudi Prince Mohamed bin Salman. However, the authorship of the Salvator Mundi remains questioned and several Louvre historians labeled it as a workshop piece.
"I have not seen the original painting and cannot judge it exactly, but I have the impression that it is not a completely original work. It must have been done in Leonardo's workshop, perhaps he intervened but it was completed by others. It's like the Mona Lisa of the Prado, which is a wonderful, beautiful work, and surely from a communicative point of view, it is better than the Mona Lisa in Paris. It has protective paintings and the last restoration is excellent: it allows us to see the original colors, how this painting was in Leonardo's workshop," says Vecce. A professor at the University of Naples (formerly at the Sorbonne in Paris or in Los Angeles), he has been analyzing and publishing various writings of Leonardo for decades, such as his Book of Painting or the Codex Arundel, alongside the canonical expert Carlo Pedretti -who passed away in 2018- and Paolo Galluzzi, former director of the Leonardian Library and responsible for the digitization of his archives.
"Leonardo is now a pop and mass icon, but he is known more for aspects that do not have much to do with the reality of his life. There is the myth of an enigmatic, dark Leonardo, this idea of the superhuman genius... It is a very popular image in the United States, think of The Da Vinci Code or Da Vinci's Demons. His last biographer was Walter Isaacson, who later wrote the biography of Elon Musk... [ironic inflection in his voice and a Mona Lisa-like smile] The goal of my book is to recover Leonardo's humanity beyond the American and Hollywood myth," highlights Vecce.
Unlike the biography he dedicated over 20 years ago, now the spotlight is on Caterina, the young woman who grew up freely among the springs and highlands of the Caucasus until she was abducted to be a slave in the flourishing -and tumultuous- Italy of the Renaissance. Like the tortures imagined by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale (all inspired by real events that occurred in different historical periods), in 15th-century Europe, slave women who gave birth had their babies taken away -who would grow up in an orphanage or hospice- so that they could breastfeed the children of nobles and aristocrats. That must have been the fate of the little Lionardo, an uncommon name at the time, evoking the strength of the lion and the ardor of fire, probably chosen by Caterina. Although his father, the notary Piero, did not recognize him as a legitimate son, he did intervene to secure Caterina's freedom -who was 25 at the time- and marry her to a local peasant. Always from a distance, Ser Piero helped Leonardo (who would not be his only illegitimate offspring): he got him into Andrea Verrocchio's workshop and mediated to get him commissions like the Mona Lisa. But it is the mother whom Leonardo venerates in his paintings of virgins, saints, and madonnas.
"Caterina was an immigrant, she suffered a lot: she passed through Constantinople, Venice, and Florence, she learned the language of the places where she was with great effort. She probably never spoke good old Italian and communicated with Leonardo mainly through the body, gestures, smile, and eyes. That is, in a very direct and carnal way," points out Vecce. His hypothesis, which changes the interpretation of Leonardo's work, is that behind the smile of the Mona Lisa, the protective sweetness of The Virgin of the Rocks, or the strength of Lady with an Ermine lies his mother, the memory of her gestures, the attempt to retain her image.
"In almost all of Leonardo's works, the dominant theme is women and, usually, they are mothers [at 24, the Mona Lisa already had five children]. I am convinced that Leonardo wanted to project the story of his own life and childhood onto these figures, those moments of happiness, the early years he lived with his mother and lost forever," Vecce claims. His mother is part of a certain lost paradise, a Vinci full of flowers and birds, from which Leonardo was torn at the age of 10 to go to Florence, after the death of his grandfather Antonio, who was raised as a sort of guardian.
If Caterina underlies her virgins and female portraits, Vecce sees in certain landscapes by Leonardo - which others have wanted to identify with Tuscany - a representation of an ideal and orientalized nature. "Sometimes people want to recognize real geographical details behind the Mona Lisa or Saint Anne. But it is impossible because they are fantastic and imaginary landscapes, especially in the Annunciation, Leonardo's first painting: we appreciate a very high mountain in the distance and, at the foot, a seascape that evokes a port with ships in the East." The Black Sea and the towering peaks of the Caucasus where his mother was born?
Another surprising note is Leonardo's oriental dream, who in the summer of 1498 wrote a letter to Sultan Bayezid II offering his services as an engineer, scientist, and architect, proposing the visionary idea of building a movable bridge over the Bosphorus to connect Asia with Europe. "It was too bold. Probably, the Sultan thought that the infidel called Leonardo was crazy or a fraudster," Vecce laughs. "This is an incredible episode in Leonardo's life, which would be hard to believe if we didn't have the letter, discovered about 70 years ago in the Archives of the Sultans of Istanbul," he adds.
What would have happened if the Sultan had requested Leonardo's services? How would history in general, and art history in particular, have changed? "Perhaps we would not have the Mona Lisa, or we would, but with a veil. History would be completely different if Leonardo had put his mind at the service of the Turks," Vecce responds. "What this episode teaches us is that Leonardo knew no boundaries, he was ready to leave Europe and abandon the Western world because he felt it was in crisis, always with constant wars between kings, princes, duchies... He sought new spaces of freedom. Here is another fundamental element of Leonardo's life and personality: freedom."
A freedom that led him to work for all-powerful patrons such as the Medici, the Borgias, the Sforza, and various religious orders. But when Leonardo was not comfortable in a place, he simply left, leaving multiple commissions unfinished and works incomplete, which he carried with him for many years, such as the Mona Lisa, Saint Anne, Saint John, or Leda, now lost. At the end of his life, when he arrived in France under the protection of King Francis I, who gave him the mansion of Clos Lucé, near the Royal Château of Amboise, Leonardo arranged them all on easels in his atelier. "They belong to his private and ideal world. His relationship with these works has become intimate, personal, almost like a dialogue with people, or ghosts, looking at him from the unfinished panels and to which he adds, slowly, day after day, infinitesimal details, nuances, veils of transparent paint," writes Vecce in his book, where nothing is undocumented.
"There is still much to discover about Leonardo! We forget that in libraries and archives there are millions of papers and documents. It is an unknown cultural heritage," he enthuses. And he cites Spain as an example: in Barcelona, some documents of the Da Vinci family are preserved (the grandfather Antonio lived next to Santa Maria del Mar during the construction of the cathedral), in the National Library of Madrid there are two original manuscripts by Leonardo, and the most unknown is in Valencia... "There we find the oldest image of the Mona Lisa, painted by a student before Leonardo finished the painting. And no one knows it!" says Vecce. Although today at the Louvre almost no one looks at the Gioconda ("they are taking selfies, turning their backs on her!," he laments), she continues to smile. Like Leonardo's mother.