Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  man–to judge from his handwriting – who chose the life of a country squire over the stresses and rewards of a professional career in Florence. He sounds not unlike his younger contemporary the Florentine lawyer Bernardo Machiavelli, father of the famous author, who similarly turned his back on the rat-race for the quieter pleasures of the contado. Bernardo was a scholarly man: there is an account of him taking a copy of Livy’s History of Rome to the bookbinder’s, and leaving as a deposit ’three flasks of vermilion wine and a flask of vinegar’ from his vineyard.10 He typifies a certain stratum of Tuscan intellectual life – the educated, book-loving countryman – and there may have been something of this in Antonio da Vinci. The choice of these men was one that embraced a certain hardship, or was perceived to do so. As Niccolò Machiavelli said of his childhood, in his usual tart way, ‘I learned to do without before I learned to enjoy.’11 Leonardo too would value a certain spareness and simplicity in his lifestyle, and this was a remnant of his country upbringing.

  The family pendulum swung again, and Antonio’s first-born son, Piero, took to the world of ‘questmongers and notaries’ with relish. The dynamic Ser Piero the younger was a reincarnation of his grandfather and namesake, and would rise to similar positions of eminence in Florentine financial affairs. By 1446 he had left Vinci: Antonio’s catasto of that year does not include him among his dependants. He was probably invested as a notary in the following year, at the conventional age of twenty-one; the earliest legal document in his hand is from 1448. A couple of years later he was practising in Pistoia, perhaps living with his sister, Violante, now married and settled there. He also appears in Pisa, but soon he follows the well-trodden path to Florence and begins to establish his career there. His notarial insignia – a kind of trademark, not unlike a printer’s device – can be seen on a contract dated November 1458. It is hand-drawn, and shows a cloud with the letter P in it, and something issuing from the cloud which looks partly like a sword and partly like a stylized tree.12 The contract involves the Rucellai, one of Florence’s premier merchant-families, with whom Leonardo would later have some dealings.

  One might call Piero a typical da Vinci – ambitious, urbane, not entirely warm-hearted – but that more contemplative, country-loving strain in the family make-up was continued in Antonio’s youngest son, Francesco, born in 1436. Like his father, Francesco had no notarial ambitions: a bit of speculative silk-farming was the nearest he got to the business world. Again like his father, he seems to have lived all his life in Vinci, looking after the family’s farms and vineyards. In his tax return in 1498 he wrote simply, ‘I am in the country without prospect of employment.’13 Francesco was just fifteen when Leonardo was born: a very young uncle, and a vital figure in Leonardo’s early development. It has been noted that in the first edition of the Lives Vasari erroneously describes Ser Piero da Vinci as Leonardo’s uncle. It is possible that this curious mistake (which is duly corrected in the later edition) reflects some half-understood tradition about Leonardo being closer to his uncle than to his father.14 It may well be true that Piero was an absent, busy and not very caring father. It is certainly true that he left nothing to Leonardo in his will: he had numerous legitimate children by then, but to leave him nothing is surely significant. Uncle Francesco, by contrast, died childless, and left his entire estate to Leonardo – an inheritance bitterly contested by Piero’s legitimate children.

  This was the family that Leonardo was born into, a collection of averagely complex individuals whose particular quirks are mostly irrecoverable, but also expressive in a more schematic sense of those twin aspects of Renaissance social identity – città and villa, urban and pastoral, active and contemplative – whose relative merits were addressed by so many writers and indeed painters of the time, as they had been at least since the time of the Roman poet Horace. It is not hard to see these twin aspects reflected in Leonardo’s life and work. He lived most of his adult life in cities, partly but not entirely out of professional necessity; yet his potent love of the countryside, of its forms and atmospheres, is evident throughout his paintings and writings.

  The da Vinci genes are to some extent highly mappable. We perceive the broad outlines of Leonardo’s family heritage; we grasp something of the social, cultural, financial, physical and even psychological milieu into which he was born. But this is, of course, only half of the genetic story. Of the other side – of his mother and her antecedents – we know next to nothing. In the story of Leonardo’s formative years she is an area of deep shadow, though, as with his paintings, one’s eye is drawn to those lustrous areas of darkness, as if they have some secret to impart.

  CATERINA

  The heart does not beat nor the lung breathe while the child is in the womb, which is filled with water, for if it were to draw a breath it would be instantly drowned. But the breathing of the mother, and the beating of her heart, work in the life of the child.

  Anatomical MS C2, fol. 11r

  Spring arrives in Vinci; a young woman prepares for the birth of her first child. What we know of Leonardo’s mother at this point in early 1452 can be summed up very briefly. Her name was Caterina. She was about twenty-five years old. She was carrying the child of Ser Piero da Vinci, but he would not, or could not, marry her.

  Caterina is generally described as a ‘peasant girl’ (contadina) or a ‘serving-girl’ (servitore). In one version she is the daughter of a woodcutter in the Cerreto Guidi, then an extensive area of oak forest south-west of Vinci. These are only assumptions: the last is more embroidered, but is of no great antiquity. They are all versions of the basic assumption, which is that Caterina was a poor, lower-class girl, and that this was why Piero could not marry her. This may be right, but it is not the only possible reason for Piero’s rejection of her. Another, perhaps more pressing, is that he was already betrothed. He got married to a rich Florentine notary’s daughter called Albiera in 1452 – eight months at the most after Leonardo’s birth. His bride was sixteen years old. It is likely that the marriage, and the financial entailments that came with it, were planned in advance. The rejection of the pregnant Caterina may thus have been a matter of contract, in this notarial world of the da Vinci, as much as a matter of class. Early catasti have been combed for some sign of her and her family in Vinci, but no suitable Caterina has been found. (Her approximate birth-date of c. 1427 is known from a much later document.) Her apparent absence from the Vinci catasto has been thought to show the humbleness of her origins, though it could simply show that she came from somewhere else.

  That Caterina was a poor young woman without land or status is certainly plausible, but it is a curious fact that the only early biography of Leonardo to mention her says more or less exactly the opposite: ‘Era per madre nato di buon sangue’ – ‘He was born, through his mother, of good blood.’ The author of this comment is the Anonimo Gaddiano, writing sometime around 1540 – a good source, though not impeccable. He is also the earliest biographer to say that Leonardo was illegitimate.15 None of the other early sources – Billi, Giovio, Vasari, etc. – mentions this. (In the case of Vasari, who certainly knew the Gaddian manuscript, he must have chosen not to mention it.) The Anonimo may conceivably be right about Caterina’s ‘good blood’, though it may equally be an interpolation by him to counterpoise the slur of illegitimacy.

  Whatever her origins, it must surely be true that Leonardo was conceived out of passion: a love-child. Whether the passion was fleeting and carnal, or whether Piero ‘really loved’ Caterina but had to marry another, we cannot say. On a sheet of anatomical drawings dated to about 1507 Leonardo wrote, ‘The man who has intercourse aggressively and uneasily will produce children who are irritable and untrustworthy; but if the intercourse is done with great love and desire on both sides, then the child will be of great intellect, and witty, lively and lovable.’16 The idea is traditional

  – the bastard Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear says much the same – but perhaps Leonardo thought it had a particular relevance to his
own conception. If so, the irritable children produced of a loveless union may refer to his legitimate and much younger half-brothers, with whom he was engaged in a bitter lawsuit in the year he wrote this note.

  A year or so after Leonardo’s birth, perhaps sooner, Caterina was married – one is tempted to say married off – to a local man. He went by the name of Accattabriga or Accattabrighe, a nickname meaning literally ‘one who begs [accatta] a quarrel [briga]’, thus ‘Trouble-Seeker’ or ‘Mischief-Maker’.17 This may be a personal description, or it may denote that he had been a soldier, as a brother of his had been and as his son would be. Accattabriga was a popular nickname among mercenaries – a famous Florentine captain of the day, Jacopo da Castelfranco, was so-called. In this context it broadly means ‘Tough Guy’.

  Accattabriga is first named as Caterina’s husband by the ever informative Antonio da Vinci. In his 1457 tax return Antonio lists the five-year-old Leonardo among his dependants, and describes him as ‘Lionardo, son of the said Ser Piero, born illegitimate to him and Chaterina who is now the wife of Achattabriga’.18 Her husband’s full name was Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca. At the time of his marriage to Caterina he was about twenty-four years old – a couple of years younger than her – and was described as a fornaciaio, or furnace-worker. He was a lime-burner, working the local stone to produce lime for mortar, pottery and manure. His kiln was at Mercatale, on the Empoli road a few miles south of Vinci; he rented it from the monks of a Florentine monastery, San Pier Martire. The monastic records show that he rented it between 1449 and 1453, the probable year of his marriage, and that in 1469 it was rented by Ser Piero da Vinci, possibly on Accattabriga’s behalf. Today there is a small industrial estate at Mercatale, a rather down-at-heel place.

  For generations Accattabriga’s family, the Buti, had worked the land at Campo Zeppi, on a low rise above the Vincio river a short walk west of Vinci, in the parish of San Pantaleone. They owned their land, and were thus a cut above the tenant-farmers, but they lived close to subsistence, and in the catasti one sees the arc of the family fortunes moving downward throughout the fifteenth century. Here Caterina came to live with her husband, perhaps with a dowry paid by the da Vinci, and here she lived for many decades thereafter. That the infant Leonardo came with her is plausible but not certain. In the 1457 catasto he is listed as a member of the da Vinci household, but this has a fiscal element – he is worth 200 florins as a tax-deductible bocca – and may not reflect the practicalities of the situation. Probability, said Bishop Berkeley, is the great guide in life, and, though this is not always a good maxim for the biographer, I think probability tells us pretty forcibly that in his earliest years Leonardo spent much of his time at Campo Zeppi, in the care of his mother, and that this slightly ragged little settlement of houses set down along a ridge-top is as much the scene of his infancy as Vinci itself, or the more conventional but more tenuous Anchiano. Ser Piero’s life was in Florence, with his new wife, the notary’s daughter Albiera di Giovanni Amadori. She is Leonardo’s city stepmother as Accattabriga is his country stepfather. The emotional lines of his childhood are already complicated.

  Around 1454, when Leonardo was two, Caterina gave birth to a daughter. The child was christened Piera, which has caused unnecessary frissons. A lovelorn echo of Ser Piero? Probably not: the girl is named, conventionally enough, after Accattabriga’s mother, who appears in the tax records as ‘Monna Piera’.19 In 1457 a second daughter, Maria, was born. The family is caught in the snapshot of their catasto declaration of 15 October 1459: Accattabriga and ‘Monna Chaterina his wife’; Piera, aged five; and Maria, aged two. They are living at Campo Zeppi together with Accattabriga’s father, Piero; his stepmother, Antonia; his elder brother, Jacopo; his sister-in-law, Fiore; and his nieces and nephews, Lisa, Simone and the baby Michele. The house is valued at 10 florins, their land at 60 florins. The land, part cultivated and part waste ground, furnishes 5 bushels of grain a year, and their vineyard produces 4 barrels of wine. These figures place them on an economic level much lower than the da Vinci.

  There followed in quick succession three more children: Lisabetta, Francesco and Sandra. By 1463, the year of Sandra’s birth, Caterina had produced six children in eleven years, the five legitimate ones doubtless christened at the tiny parish church of San Pantaleone, across the river from Campo Zeppi, today dilapidated and not much used except by the pigeons who scratch and fidget on the roof of the colonnaded portico. Caterina’s only legitimate son, Francesco, born in 1461, did not prosper: he joined up as a soldier, and was killed at Pisa by a shot from a spingarda – a military catapult – at the age of about thirty.20

  We glimpse Accattabriga, perhaps living up to his nickname, on a late summer’s day in 1470. He is enjoying a day out at Massa Piscatoria, down in the padule, the marshlands stretching between Mont’ Albano and the Pisan hills to the west. It is a religious holiday – for the birth of the Virgin Mary, 8 September – but the village celebrations are marred by a fight or riot (tumulto is the word used) and Accattabriga is among those called as a witness at a judicial inquiry a couple of weeks later. His companion that day was one Giovanni Gangalandi, described as a frantoiano – an owner or worker of an olive-press – at Anchiano. Again we are reminded of the smallness of the Vinci world.

  Caterina’s marriage to Antonio Buti, a.k.a. Accattabriga, began as a marriage of convenience – the signorial convenience of the da Vinci, for whom she was a social embarrassment; the more pressing convenience of Caterina herself, a fallen and discarded woman, in a situation which led some to destitution. There was probably some financial inducement for Accattabriga to accept her, and perhaps the vaguer inducement of a family link with the posher da Vinci. Accattabriga continues to feature in the minor business dealings of the family. In 1472, in Vinci, he witnesses a land-contract for Piero and Francesco da Vinci; a few years later he is in Florence, witnessing a will notarized by Ser Piero. Francesco da Vinci in turn acted as a witness when, in August 1480, Accattabriga came to sell some land, a small plot called Caffaggio, abutting on to the church-lands of San Pantaleone; the purchasers were the Ridolfi family, who swallowed up much of the Buti land over the years. But if the marriage began as a convenience, an exercise in Vincian problem-solving, it was at least a long and fruitful one, and in the catasto of 1487 we find Accattabriga and Caterina still together, with four of their five children in residence (Maria either married and living elsewhere or possibly dead). ‘Monna Catterina’ is listed as sixty years old: the only documentary clue to her date of birth. The property at Campo Zeppi has been split up between Accattabriga and his brother; they are assessed on a ‘half-house’ worth 6 florins, and just over 5 staia of land.

  We know little of Leonardo’s stepfather, Accattabriga, a looming presence in the child’s early life – perhaps more so than his real father and grandfather. What we do know brings in a note of rural poverty, of manual work, of tough-guy violence – a glimpse, perhaps, of the milieu awaiting this illegitimate child if he does not make it his business to escape from it.

  Accattabriga died in about 1490, in his early sixties, after which there is one last adventure in Caterina’s life – but this belongs to a later chapter.

  ‘MY FIRST MEMORY…’

  Leonardo’s earliest memory was not ostensibly of his mother, or his father, or anyone else. It was of a bird. Many decades later, in his early fifties, he was writing some notes on the flight of birds – his famous perennial theme – and in particular on the flight-patterns of the fork-tailed red kite, Milvus vulgaris, when something triggered in his memory, and at the top of the sheet he wrote the following brief note:

  Writing like this so particularly about the kite seems to be my destiny, since the first memory of my childhood is that it seemed to me, when I was in my cradle, that a kite came to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.21

  It has long been debated whether this strange little vignette is truly a memory, a ricordazion
e as Leonardo calls it, or whether it is a fantasy. And, if it is a fantasy, there is further debate – at least down in the psychiatric wing of Leonardo studies – as to where it properly belongs in his life. Is it truly from childhood: an early dream or nightmare so vivid that it now seems an actual memory? Or is it an adult fantasy which has been ‘projected’ back on to his childhood, but which is actually more pertinent to the writer of the note – the middle-aged Leonardo of c. 1505 – than to the infant in his cradle?

  Kites were a common sight riding the updrafts of the Mont’Albano above Vinci. You can see one today if you are lucky. They are unmistakable – the long forked tail, the wide, elegantly cambered wing-span, the soft yet intense russet colouring through which, at the wing-ends and the tail-feathers, the light of the sky glows. The bird’s outline and wheeling flight are transferred in English to the man-made kind of kite, though in Italy this is called an eagle (aquilone). Kites are of all the raptors the most adapted to human society: they are scavengers and camp-followers. Their presence in Elizabethan London is attested by Shakespeare, and they can be seen today in towns and villages all over the Third World. Among British troops in India they were known as ‘shite hawks’. According to the British falconer Jemimah Parry-Jones, kites ‘take advantage of easy pickings whenever possible’, and are ‘renowned for their habit of stooping down and stealing food from plates’.22 As this last comment shows, it is entirely possible that there was an actual experience behind this memory of Leonardo’s. A hungry kite had ‘stooped’ or swooped down in search of some morsel, and had frightened the baby in his cradle. However, the strange and memorable part of the account – that the bird pushed its tail into his mouth, and struck or drummed his lips with it (percuotesse in Leonardo’s archaic spelling: the root idea is of percussion) – is much less likely to have happened, and is therefore a component of fantasy, an unconscious elaboration of the memory.