If one or both of the young parents hoped for the resolution of their predicament in favor of passion over society, this was soon dashed. About eight months after his son’s birth, Ser Piero married Albieri. By way of compensation, the da Vinci family also found Caterina a husband, a man by the moniker of Accattabriga, which literally meant “troublemaker” but was a popular nickname also meaning “tough guy,” particularly among soldiers and mercenaries of the time. Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca may have been a soldier, but by the time he married Caterina, one year after Leonardo was born, he was a lime burner, a dirty and dangerous job involving the heating of chalk or seashells for the purposes of making mortar. He was two years younger than his wife, and it is likely his betrothal came with some financial inducement provided by the da Vincis to compensate for the shame Ser Piero had brought on Caterina.
Until Leonardo was eight months old, he was the only child of two unmarried parents. Then in the space of four months, he acquired two stepparents. His relations with both sets seem to have been good. When he was two years old, he received his first half-sibling when his mother gave birth to a girl, Piera. By the time he was eleven years old, he had five half-siblings on his mother’s side. It took twelve years for Albieri to become pregnant, but tragically, both she and her firstborn died in childbirth.
UNTIL HE WAS EIGHT MONTHS OLD, LEONARDO WAS THE ONLY CHILD OF TWO UNMARRIED PARENTS. THEN IN THE SPACE OF FOUR MONTHS HE ACQUIRED TWO STEPPARENTS.
MIDDLE CLASS LIMITS
By the time of Leonardo’s birth, Ser Piero lived mainly away from Vinci. His career took him first to Pistoia, then to Pisa, then finally to Florence, where he hung out his shingle and began to climb the ladder of Florentine society, not the least by further marriages within the guild of notaries. His contact with Leonardo was erratic. Although Leonardo saw his mother and stepfather more regularly, he didn’t live with them either.
With brothers and sisters arriving almost on an annual basis, and less money to go around, Caterina was probably too busy to pay too much attention to her firstborn. Instead, Leonardo went to live with his paternal grandfather and uncle Francesco, two of the more rusticated members of the clan, who avoided the clamor of the city, preferring the life of country gentlemen in Vinci, and gave the young genius a home. Leonardo is recorded as a member of their house in tax documents dating back to 1457, when he was five years old.
Ser Piero’s second marriage, concluded a year after he became a widower, was to another fifteen-year-old daughter of a fellow notary, Francesca Ser Giuliano Lanfredini. Although the marriage helped consolidate his wealth, it did little to expand his family. Francesca died before she had the chance to produce a child.
This “Carta della Catena” shows a panorama of Florence, circa 1490. Leonardo served his apprenticeship here, and it was also where his father’s career as an influential notary was played out. The ‘Carta della Catena’ showing a panorama of Florence, 1490 (detail), Italian School, (15th century) / Museo de Firenze Com’era, Florence, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library International
LEONARDO WAS BORN INTO THE TUSCAN MIDDLE CLASS, WHERE THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR BASTARDS WERE FEWER THAN IN OTHER SOCIAL CIRCLES. BEING A BASTARD, LEONARDO WAS PREVENTED FROM ENTERING THE UNIVERSITIES AS WELL AS HIS FATHER’S GUILD.
The failure of Ser Piero to produce a legitimate heir over the course of Leonardo’s childhood no doubt kept Ser Piero more interested in his illegitimate offspring than he otherwise might have been. Leonardo was fortunate to be born in an era where illegitimacy carried only a moderate stigma. This was no more apparent than in the highest echelons of the Catholic Church, where the vow of chastity was worn very lightly indeed. Two of Spanish Pope Alexander VI’s (1492–1503) illegitimate children were the controversial brother and sister, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, around whom rumors of murder, incest, and lewdness swirled. Some popes themselves were bastards. Leonardo’s fellow Tuscan, Pope Clement VII, who reigned as pope from 1523 to 1534, was the bastard son of Giuliano de’ Medici and was raised by his uncle, Florentine ruler and patron of the arts Lorenzo the Magnificent.
However, Leonardo was born into the Tuscan middle class, where the opportunities for bastards were fewer than in other social circles. Occupying the social strata between poverty and wealth, and eager to assert the moral foundations for their developing social status, the emerging bourgeoisie of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were somewhat more stringent in patrolling the boundaries of propriety. Being a bastard, Leonardo was prevented from entering the universities, as well as his father’s guild.
DISINHERITED
Ser Piero, on the cusp of his half century, subsequently married another child bride in 1475, seventeen-year-old Margherita di Guglielmo, who came with a large dowry. This time Ser Piero was in luck, and little more than a year after the wedding a son named Antonio arrived, to be followed by Giuliano in 1479.
For Leonardo, this was something of a blow because with the birth of Antonio, he was effectively deprived of his inheritance. His importance to his father was dramatically lessened. The timing could not have been worse. In 1476, the same year Antonio was born, Leonardo became the subject of scandal when he was accused of engaging in sodomy. One of the tactics the Medici, the powerful family who dominated Florence for much of the Italian renaissance, used to keep Florence under their control was to encourage citizens to inform on each other. People were able to make accusations against others by anonymously dropping written allegations of improper behavior into boxes, which were referred to, not necessarily that accurately, as buchi vella verita, meaning “holes of truth.”
Homosexuality was so widespread in Florence that the German word for homosexual at the time was Florenzer. However, it remained illegal and thus accusations of such behavior were prime territory for blackmail and grudges. In 1476, an accusation reached the Office of the Night, whose function was to investigate homosexuality, that Leonardo, a tailor, a goldsmith, and a relative of Lorenzo de’ Medici, had been sleeping with a male prostitute. After several months of hearings, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. The truth of the accusation remains unknown.
Leonardo probably was homosexual, but was unlikely to have practiced it often. One entry in his notebooks observes that “the art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.”
Ser Piero’s response to the situation was to distance himself from his illegitimate son. It’s easy to imagine the conservative notary—his life devoted to the accumulation of wealth and status, and thus acutely sensitive to shame and scandal—turning against his own offspring because of his homosexuality. With the birth of his half-brother Antonio, Leonardo, still a young man and yet to acquire the social insulation afforded by his reputation as a genius, was disinherited by his father.
Ser Piero had another son by Margherita. Soon after she died, he married his fourth wife, Lucrezia di Guglielmo Cortigiani, who came without much of a dowry but gifted her husband with seven sons and two daughters in fairly quick succession. When Ser Piero died in 1504, Leonardo was the only one of his twelve children to get nothing.
FROM NATURAL CHILD TO CHILD OF NATURE
It would be a mistake to assume that being a bastard was all bad for Leonardo. The lack of parental love was compensated by the freedom it gave him, especially from the expectations of his father. It also allowed his superior mind to develop independently of the more prosaic ambitions of his parents.
Another name for a bastard is a “natural son,” and in the case of Leonardo this has a particular resonance. Although he enjoyed the affection of his grandfather Antonio and uncle Francesco, they were busy running the family’s farm; young Leonardo, who received only elementary level formal schooling, was largely left to his own devices. His time was spent wandering through the countryside around Vinci, observing and drawing the landscape and the animals and plants
that existed in it. It was a beautiful landscape, hilly and dotted with small farms. There were grapes and olive groves that sat above the houses on terraces that climbed the hills. Above the olive groves, the land was thickly wooded with a variety of trees, including pine and chestnuts.
If Leonardo had been legitimate, he would have been compelled to undertake the classical education that made it possible for him to follow in his father’s footsteps. A lack of formal education was instrumental in the development of Leonardo’s philosophical system. Instead of trusting received wisdom, Leonardo believed in the primacy of knowledge that was acquired from nature via the eye. Throughout his life, he would remain skeptical of people who bolstered their views by quoting the experts who had gone before them, as was the tradition in a classical education. He believed it was knowledge gained from direct experience that counted.
“No one should ever imitate the style of another because he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature with regard to art,” he wrote in his notebooks. Leonardo often used familial metaphors to express the primacy of nature, expressing both the extent to which the insecurity of his familial predicament bothered him throughout his life and how nature functioned as the cure.
An anatomical sketch from Leonardo’s notebooks. The artist was on a quest to understand all kinds of nature, including that of the human form.
TWO GENIUSES: THE GENIAL AND THE GROUCH
Even if his talent had prevailed, it would likely have come at great personal cost. A comparison can be made to Michelangelo, who was legitimate. His family was impoverished minor aristocracy and his father worked as a magistrate.
IF LEONARDO HAD BEEN A LEGITIMATE FIRSTBORN SON, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ENORMOUS PRESSURE ON HIM TO BECOME A NOTARY RATHER THAN AN ARTIST, AND HIS GENIUS MIGHT HAVE BEEN LOST TO THE COOKING OF THE BOOKS.
To change the family’s fortunes, Michelangelo’s father gave him and his brothers a classical education and hoped to place his sons in the lucrative silk or wool merchant guilds. When Michelangelo showed a preference for drawing, his father beat him. Ultimately his talent prevailed, but the battle with his father cost him greatly; for the rest of his life Michelangelo would be known for his furious temper, his obsessive will, and his inability to get any real joy from his creations.
Leonardo, on the other hand, was known as a genial if absentminded spirit, a perfectionist who nonetheless enjoyed the world. Although troubled by the indifference of his father, he received sufficient male affection from his grandfather and uncle. Being a bastard meant that Leonardo didn’t have to fight his father to prove his talent. The self-imputed respectability of the notary’s guild was such that bastards couldn’t be admitted. When Leonardo expressed his inclination to become an artist, his father helped him get an apprenticeship with a member of a lower, less exclusive guild, the painter Andrea del Verrochio in Florence. Most likely this happened at the same time as Leonardo’s grandfather Antonio died, leaving Ser Piero head of the family and responsible for his son, bastard or not.
BASTARD FANTASIES
When looking at the lives of artists and thinkers, it is the shape of their imaginations rather than their actions that gives us an understanding of their brilliance. Leonardo was famous for not finishing many of the commissions he received. He would often stare for hours at his paintings, attempting to work out how best to replicate nature using oil paints and canvas.
In many ways, nature functioned as a surrogate parent for Leonardo. Where his father was a troubled and fleeting presence in his life, and his mother affectionate but harried by the needs of her younger children, nature was a constant source of wonder and satisfaction for him. Later, it would be the founding principle for his pursuit of art and invention. The artistic tension embodied in Leonardo’s perfectionism came from trying to be as close to nature as he possibly could.
The evidence for this surrogate parenthood is circumstantial but collectively convincing. The love he developed for nature during the gamboling freedom of his childhood remained with him throughout his life. As an animal lover, he became a vegetarian. At other times, he would walk through the markets of the towns where he lived, buying birds in cages that were bound for the dinner table and then setting them free. Watching them make their escape, he may well have dreamed of being able to do the same himself.
Leonardo’s paintings, some of the first to replace the medium of tempera with oil paints, were remarkable for their natural realism. Through his pioneering of sfumato—a technique where layers of translucent color are painted over each other to create perceptions of depth and volume—he was the first painter to capture the Tuscan landscape as it is filtered by Tuscany’s peculiar light. His desire to get as close as possible to nature informed many of his intellectual and artistic activities, such as the dissection of human cadavers to further his understanding of human anatomy.
Leonardo, who never had a long-term romantic partner, replaced the urge for love with the urge to learn as much as possible about the physical natural world. The effects of this were present in Leonardo’s fantasy life, too. In his fifties, Leonardo famously recounted what he believed was his first memory. He was lying in his crib when a kite bird landed on his face and fluttered its tail around inside his mouth. In Sigmund Freud’s book on Leonardo, A Childhood Memory of Leonardo Da Vinci, which is largely based on this particular dream, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, wrote of how this memory was probably a fantasy interpreted by Leonardo as a memory. Freud’s interpretation was that Leonardo had substituted the tail feathers of the bird for his mother’s breast.
This alleged portrait of Leonardo, showing him with piercing eyes and a long beard, was discovered in 2009. The painter is unknown, as is the date that the image was created.
For Freud, the fantasy of the bird also had a phallic connotation. His interpretation was that the relationship between mother and child was threatened by the possible reappearance of the father.
Another possible interpretation of the “memory,” which at the very least harbors an ambivalent attitude toward his mother’s breast, is that Leonardo, in displacing his mother for the bird, is asserting himself as a child not of parents but of nature. Leonardo recorded this “memory” in 1505. At the same time he was deeply engaged in experiments to achieve flight. His notebooks of the period contain the statement “the big bird will take its first flight above the back of the Great Cecero, filling the universe with amazement, filling all the chronicles with its fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.”
Leonardo was talking here about his proposed trial flight of his flying machine from Mount Cecero, north of Florence. Perhaps by flying the “big bird,” Leonardo hoped to bring glory to the nest where either the bird or its creator was born. It is possible that part of this might have been to transcend the stigma of his illegitimacy. In July of the year before, Ser Piero had died, leaving him nothing. It was a final act of filial rejection. His father’s attitude to Leonardo’s work was one of admiration tempered with willed indifference and some jealousy at his son’s abilities. Paradoxically, Leonardo, who spent his life with kings and dukes at courts throughout Europe, had vaulted his father’s middle class status. Yet throughout his life, Leonardo struggled to gain the love of a parent whose affection came in occasional droplets. Ironically, Ser Piero may well have felt outclassed by his talented bastard of a son.
While Leonardo was still an apprentice, Ser Piero came and visited his son with a wooden shield he had offered to get painted for a friend. Leonardo decided that a shield should be a frightening thing. He collected parts of a variety of animals and used them to create a hybrid dragon, which he then painted onto the shield. Having sent word to his father that the shield would soon be ready, Leonardo placed it in a shadowy corner of the room for maximum effect. When Ser Piero entered the studio and saw it he was frightened. When he regained his composure, however, he was impressed enough to buy another shield. But he did not keep the shield for himself as a proud father migh
t. Instead, he sold it to an art dealer for a tidy sum.
One of Leonardo’s designs for an ornithopter. The possibility of human flight was one of the overriding if ultimately unsuccessful obsessions of his inventive spirit. One of Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for an Ornithopter, copy of a diagram from Manuscript B, 1488-89 (pen & ink on paper) (b/w photo), Vinci, Leonardo da (1452-1519) (after) / Bibliotheque de l’Institut de France, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library International
If Leonardo hoped to find compensation in becoming the first man to fly for the irretrievability of his father’s love brought about by the finality of Ser Piero’s death, he would be disappointed. When he hauled his bird (which in some ways resembled today’s hang gliders) to the top of Mount Cecero, harnessed himself in, and launched himself off the mountain into the atmosphere, the result was unspectacular. Leonardo crashed.
Leonardo da Vinci—painter, engineer, inventor, philosopher—was the embodiment of the Renaissance Man. His sublime paintings such as Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and his brilliant ideas and inventions (including advances in the understanding of human anatomy, flying machines, and a submarine), cemented his reputation as one of the smartest, most enigmatic, and original thinkers in history. It is unlikely his achievements would have been so spectacular if he weren’t trying to overcome the stigma caused by being a bastard.
CHAPTER 3
FRANCISCO PIZARRO
A BRUTAL BASTARD
1475–1541
THE PRODUCT OF AN OFFICER’S DALLIANCE WITH A PEASANT GIRL, FRANCISCO PIZARRO OVERCAME A POOR CHILDHOOD AND ILLITERACY TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST FEARSOME AND SUCCESSFUL SPANISH CONQUISTADORS. HE CONQUERED THE INCA EMPIRE CENTERED IN MODERN—DAY PERU, ONLY TO BE UNDONE BY THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS GREED AND INABILITY TO READ.
Great Bastards of History Page 3