An Italian historian seeking to debunk rumors of a “foreign” background has instead discovered documentation indicating that famed artist Leonardo da Vinci was actually a Jew.
According to an article reprinted on the Aish.com website from Tablet Magazine, da Vinci’s mother – Caterina – was a Circassian Jew born somewhere in the Caucasus.
Caterina was apparently “abducted as a teenager and sold as a sex slave several times in Russia, Constantinople, and Venice before finally being freed in Florence at age 15,” according to the report, which quotes the book written by historian Carlo Vecce, “Il sorriso di Caterina, la madre di Leonardo.”
The historian, one of the top specialists on da Vinci, told Aish journalist Marc Weitzmann that he “simply found it impossible to believe that the mother of the greatest Italian genius would be a non-Italian slave.”
However, he added, “Now, not only do I believe it, but the most probable hypothesis, given what I found, is that Caterina was Jewish.”
What he found while doing research for his book was a document that turned up during the reconstruction of da Vinci’s library that made the artist’s Jewish roots clear.
The document, dated November 2, 1452 – seven months after the artist was born – was an emancipation act signed by Leonardo’s father, Piero da Vinci, in his professional capacity regarding “the daughter of a certain Jacob, originating from the Caucasian mountains.”
Piero da Vinci was the business attorney for the rich merchant’s wife who owned Catarina as a slave, and who lived in Florence.
Da Vinci senior was “no stranger to the Jews … His main customers were among the Jewish community of Florence,” Vecce said.
The professor added that he believes Caterina bequeathed some of her “wild Circassian spirit” to her son, whose ability to think freely and creatively as an engineer as well as an artist resulted in his eventual centuries-long worldwide fame.
