Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci - Softcover

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Mike Lankford's Becoming Leonardo was selected by the Wall Street Journal as a 2017 Book of the Year. He is also the author of Life in Double Time: Confessions of an American Drummer, selected best music book of the year by eight major newspapers including the Chicago Tribune. He lives in Bend, Oregon.

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Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci

1352 The Black Death kills 60 percent of the population in Italy. The Little Ice Age continues across Europe, causing widespread famine.

1452 Leonardo is born.

1452 The Second Great Fire of Amsterdam destroys three quarters of the city.

1452 Painter and mosaicist David Ghirlandaio born (d. 1525).

1453 Eruption of Kuwae in the Pacific.

1453 Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Turks.

1453 Hundred Years’ War ends.

1454 Gutenberg prints his first Bible.

1455 Sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti dies in Florence (b. 1378).

1455 Sculptor Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene installed at Florence Cathedral.

1456 Hurricane sweeps Vinci, Tuscany.

1458 Pitti Palace in Florence begun.

1460 Portuguese explorer Pêro de Sintra reaches Sierra Leone.

1461 Sarajevo founded by the Ottomans.

1462 Vlad III, also known as Dracula, attempts to assassinate Mehmed II.

1465 Massive flooding in central and southern China.

1466 Donatello dies in Florence (b. 1386).

1467 The polyalphabetic cipher invented by Leon Battista Alberti.

Ages 0–15

MOST OF HIM is lost to us, of course. The timbre of the voice, the thoughts visible in his eyes, the physical gestures when happy or sad, the way he walked, his smell, his hands, the habitual grimace his friends knew all too well but no one bothered to record—all that is lost. When he was young there was no reason to write any of it down, and when he was old he became too hard to describe, too strange. What to do with Leonardo?

It’s helpful in terms of myth building to have fewer facts rather than more. Were Leonardo born today we’d have hospital records, blood types of both parents, genealogies going back to Charlemagne, not to mention the views of his neighbors there in the tiny tourist town of Vinci. Fortunately, for the sake of romance and myth, we have none of that but for a single scrawled entry in a family ledger by his grandfather Antonio: “1452. There was born to me a grandson, the son of Ser Piero my son, on the 15th day of April, a Saturday, at the 3rd hour of the night. He bears the name Lionardo.”

Swaddled and lying there in the straw-stuffed cradle, a couple of early spring flies buzzing his face (one perhaps landing on his lip and beating its wings) that little red baby started life with one large problem: He was, by the rules and customs of the day, illegitimate. Outside the law. His parents were not married. They apparently were not even properly introduced. Traditionally it was thought his mother was a local girl who let the neighboring notary—Ser Piero—get too close in a dark place. New evidence suggests that Leonardo’s mother Caterina may have been a house slave brought to Italy from elsewhere. Which means, it might have been rape.

Because of the plague and such massive death, Florence—the city-state that ruled Vinci, the tiny village beside Mount Albano where Leonardo was born and which gave him his name—had permitted the importation of slaves, provided they were infidels and converted immediately to Christianity and took Christian names, most often young women from Turkey and North Africa. Caterina was a popular name and it so happened that a wealthy client of Ser Piero’s named Vanni di Niccolo owned a slave named Caterina. Niccolo died in 1451 and as executor of his estate Ser Piero would’ve had to deal with his property, including Caterina. The next year a Caterina appeared in Vinci, pregnant by Ser Piero. Nothing is known of her past.

Which would mean little or nothing but for the evidence of Leonardo’s fingerprints on a few of his paintings, fingerprints that reveal the same dermatoglyphic structure—that is, the same pattern of loops and whorls—as people of Middle Eastern origin.

If true, it could mean Leonardo grew up not just a bastard son living with a weak claim on family, but of mixed race as well. Not obviously so, as it was not remarked on by Vasari or anyone else, but it would’ve been part of his own identity and well-known while growing up in the village. It meant he was two things, not one. And perhaps later this was even a part of his “mysteriousness,” something ill-defined about him, something he hid.

And if so, then it suggests two more possibilities. One, that if Caterina had a hand in raising him or saw him frequently, and told him stories, both to entertain him and make him proud, then what kind of stories might those be? Fantastic? Heroic? Self-justifying? Stories from her home country? Or perhaps stories she made up? An important question. What kind of cross-cultural tall tales was the little kid hearing? There was at the time a cult of the Magi which had wisdom coming from the east.

And two, notice that as an adult his sense of fashion seemed rather more Turkish than Italian: the long hair and beard curled, the purple cloak, the rings and such. He rather resembled an Ottoman Pasha out for a stroll. This was a deliberate adult identity that may well have started as youthful fantasy and wishful thinking. Caterina may be the key to understanding Leonardo’s unique identity in later years, but in truth we have nothing but a few fingerprints and a couple of indirect references to guide us. Much later, in 1503 when he was fifty-one, he made an effort to move to Constantinople, writing to the Sultan Bayezid II and offering his services, all while praising Allah.

THE ADULT IS formed in childhood, and Leonardo’s childhood is a factual blank. What were his shaping forces? It’s generally thought that he was raised by his grandparents and uncle Francesco in Vinci, assisted perhaps by Caterina just down the road in Campo Zeppi, while his father built his notary business in Florence, roughly thirty miles away and on the other side of Monte Albano.

Leonardo as an adult certainly seemed a willful person (to say the least) who expected to get his own way, so how might an eighty-year-old grandfather have influenced that? Likewise, an uncle only sixteen years older than Leonardo himself? The suggestion is of a clever boy doted on by his grandparents and uncle while his less-engaged father is away.

One also imagines a childhood free to roam the countryside and eat bugs and drink from the streams. No doubt five-year-olds perished quickly in those days, and no doubt a curious boy would get into trouble rather more often than not. But the rocks Leonardo fell off of and the streams that nearly drown him and the mule that threw him twenty feet into the weeds—none of those hypothetical events seemed to have harmed him much, or left visible scars.

But how could we know? Scarring was common in the age before antiseptics. So common that it would not be remarked on unless it was a defining feature of some kind, or prompted a nickname perhaps. Back then the whole of humanity was covered with scrapes and scars. It was evidence of being alive. Yet Leonardo was described by Vasari and others as attractive and well-coiffed, so the inevitable accidents of childhood left no mark that can be seen from this distance.

The village of Vinci is located on a high hill, above the valley but still beneath Monte Albano. It is pock-marked with hundreds of gullies and low places where, lying down, a boy can see nothing but the sky above. Visually it’s a place of contrasts, but what dominates the surrounding area is not even visible from Vinci, and that’s the city of Florence on the other side of Monte Albano. It cannot be over-stressed what the presence of a city nearby means to a child growing up isolated in the...