Was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother a slave?

There is great excitement in Italy, which has spilled over into the British press: Carlo Vecce, a professor from Naples, has discovered documents in the archives of Florence that appear to indicate that Caterina, the mother of Leonardo da Vinci, was a baptised slave who had been brought all the way to Tuscany from the Black Sea. She was not, as has often been assumed, a local woman of modest origins.

Leonardo was born in April 1452, and a few months later a domestic slave of Leonardo’s father, also named Caterina, was given her freedom. The documents do not take up a great amount of space, so he has filled out the story with an imaginative romance about the life of Leonardo’s mother, only revealing the facts right at the end of a vigorous and imaginative 500 page novel cleverly entitled Caterina’s Smile (Mona Lisa’s husband also makes an appearance as a slave trader).