Some Notes on Leonardo da Vinci and Slavery

(Picture: NASA/MODIS)

(15.3.2023) There are two links that connect Leonardo da Vinci with the subject of slavery: a) the fact that slavery did exist in the Italian Renaissance, in the city of Florence and in the milieu of Leonardo’s father; and b) the hypothesis that Leonardo’s mother, whose name was Caterina, actually was a slave or had been a slave, brought to Florence from the Caucasus region, which would make Leonardo da Vinci a man with a hybrid cultural identity. This hypothesis, in 2023, is not exactly new, but newly discussed these days, and we are contributing here some notes on this newly arising debate.

1) Slavery and the Italian Renaissance

I doubt that the fact that slavery did exist in the Italian Renaissance is widely known. And perhaps it is of use to know that Leonardo da Vinci’s father seems to have written and signed a document that freed a slave named Caterina. If people – and even art historians – are used to discuss the Italian Renaissance in terms of ›do you like the art of Florence better than the art of Venice?‹, it seems to be a necessary correction: a shock of reality that there was a Renaissance, which was different from the trivialized and sanitized version that largely focusses on art, aesthetics, splendour and trivialities. And also was different from what we or from what the Renasisance itself did understand as humanism (or was it the study of antiquity that stimulated slavery?).
As far as I can see (my archive goes back to the year of 2002 in this matter), the idea that Leonardo’s mother was a slave was first presented by Alessandro Vezzosi in 2002. Now we have 2023, 21 years have passed, and slavery is a subject that is certainly more intensely debated (in the context of Postcolonialism) than it was then, but the hypothesis is not exactly new, and one does wonder why it does take 21 years to dig out some documents that, not even today, actually do clarify the matter.
The state of things today is that people have hypotheses: Martin Kemp has his hypothesis, as to who Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was, Alessandro Vezzosi had his (and occasionally clashed with Kemp, as the latter’s memoirs reveal), and now Carlo Vecce has his. And someone must be wrong here, since the hypotheses do exclude each other.
I am not surprised that Vecce chose the genre of the historical novel to present his finds. Why not? Novels and films, dealing with history, can reach audiences, can make historical subjects interesting, and can stimulate an interest in historical matters that might motivate people to look for more informations, if they care also about what we actually know and what we don’t know. What irritates me, in the context of Leonardo studies is rather, that, constantly, hypotheses are presented as being facts.

2) Hypotheses Being Presented as Facts

Martin Kemps tends to present his hypotheses as facts (also regarding his hypothesis as to who Leonardo’s mother was; see his memoirs, p. 18: »Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a penniless orphan called Caterina di Meo Lippi and a notary from the small Tuscan hill-town of Vinci.«), but also other scholars seem to do that. And this is simply a flaw of scholarship. It is unprofessional, and it does reveal that certain people do wish to define things and to monopolize Leonardo studies. If we are now hearing via the media that Martin Kemp does still prefer his own hypothesis, one has to point to his memoirs of 2018 again, since in the context of this book Kemp does not only present his hypothesis as a fact, but he has to concede that his idea (presented in the book he did with an Italian researcher on the Mona Lisa in 2017) had already been questioned by an Italian scholar, Elisabetta Ulivi (p. 78). This does not mean that the truth has already been found, but we can observe here scholarship in the making. And perhaps one should present hypotheses only after long and careful reflection anyway, and perhaps one should generally avoid to present hypotheses as truths. The hypothesis that Leonardo’s mother was a slave was a hypothesis in 2002, and in 2023 it is still a hypothesis, whose implications, certainly, do matter, even, presently, only hypothetically.

3) Would Hybrid Cultural Identity Matter or Not?

Personally I find the claim that it would not matter, as to our understanding of Leonardo da Vinci as an artist, engineer and scientist, if his mother had been a Circassian slave or not, slightly ridiculous. Perhaps it would not matter as to the questions Martin Kemp is asking, but if it would turn out to be a fact that Leonardo had a hybrid cultural identity, this fact would change our understanding of Leonardo in a lot of areas, because we would have to impute that Leonardo did handle topics such as for example the commission to paint an Adoration of the Magi as someone with a hybrid cultural identity, even if such identity did not show, and certainly he would have portrayed the wife of a slave owner with a slightly different feeling, if he had been a product of the slave trade himself (and even if his inner emotions would not have shown either in this case).
Beyond that, one has to make a difference between Leonardo as a symbol (of Western culture, the West, Italy, the Renaissance or whatever you like) and Leonardo as a historical figure. On the symbolical level Leonardo da Vinci has often been presented as someone with a hybrid identity (see my 2010 book for that; a book in which I had also commented on the slave hypothesis, as it presented itself then).
In my book (largely ignored by the mainstream of Leonardo studies, a mainstream without any visible intellectual ambition) I have focussed on both sides of the medal, on cultural imaginations concerning Leonardo, but also on what we actually do know – about Leonardo da Vinci and his relations to the worlds of the Orient. His ›travels to the East‹ he did in his mind, and such travels are historical facts as well (that would come into focus in new ways, if the historical Leonardo had had a hybrid cultural identity).
It seems that the subject of hybridity will come into focus on the symbolical level again (where it already does exist in many variations), and also on the historical level, and perhaps one will begin to search for hybridity in areas one has never researched for hybridity at all (and if Martin Kemp has never cared for such areas, one is simply free to ignore his approaches and to look for new ones). Nobody has a monopoly on Leonardo, certainly not single scholars, regions, countries or civilizations, even if single scholars etc. do think that they have. And this is exactly the heart of the matter. Because also Leonardo, as a historical figure, is (re-)contructed according to basic ideas of cultural identity. And if it would turn out that Leonardo had had a hybrid cultural identity (I don’t think that this is presently being established), this would also mean that some people were very wrong in the past, and that much writing on Leonardo would be outdated and irrelevant, since a basic understanding for Leonardo and his cultural identity had been simply lacking in this part of Leonardo literature. This, in my view, is also the deeper reason, why certain scholars cling to their hypotheses, because, in the end, it may show, that our image of Leonardo had to be revised, and some of the monuments Leonardo scholars have been busy to erect for themselves in the past would simply be obsolete.

PS: The idea that Leonardo’s mother was a Chinese slave is a mere fancy. No problem if scholars or journalists handle it as that, but as soon as scholars or journalists take this idea seriously on a level of historical recontruction, one does have an indication that these scholars or journalists have no discernment and hence no expertise in Leonardo studies at all.

Further Reading:
Dietrich Seybold, Leonardo da Vinci im Orient. Geschichte eines europäischen Mythos, Cologne etc. 2010

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