Leonardo and His Two “Fathers”:  The Artist through the Lens of His Lost Works
italiano

Louis A. Waldman
Professor of History of Art at the University of Texas
Assistant Director for Programs at Villa I Tatti – The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies

Saturday 18 April 2009, 10.30am
Vinci, Biblioteca Leonardiana

Recent scholars have unearthed much new material about Caterina who gave birth to ser Piero da Vinci’s illegitimate child, Leonardo, on 15 April 1452. We know also of his four matrigne, Albiera (†1464), Francesca (†1473), Margherita (†1486) and Lucrezia (†post 1520): it is a well-known fact that Leonardo da Vinci had many mothers. Less familiar, however, is the story of Leonardo’s two “fathers”.

Leonardo’s own writings reveal his affection for the brother of his biological father, that is, Francesco da Vinci (†1507). It was Francesco who raised him as a youth in Vinci, while ser Piero lived in Florence, and it was Francesco - and not his real father - who provided a legacy for him in his will. Vasari’s mistake in the first edition of the Lives, where he called ser Piero the affectionate uncle he was raised by, suggests that ser Francesco functioned for Leonardo very much in loco parentis.  An unpublished inventory of ser Piero’s home, drawn up on in 1504, sheds important new light on Leonardo’s relationship with both his “fathers” and on his lost works. Along with several small sculptures the text mentions “1a testa cioè el ritracto di Francesco”, which we can almost certainly interpret as a reference to a (now lost) portrait by Leonardo of his uncle.

Perhaps it is not too daring, to revive a hypothesis - mentioned in a desultory way by a small number of writers but rarely given much weight - that a reflection of Leonardo’s lost portrait of his “second father” has come down to us in the famous Turin “Self Portrait”, probably dating from the 1490s. Scholars have often pointed out its physiognomic similarity to contemporary portraits of Leonardo. Yet the sitter in the Turin sheet appears too old to be Leonardo at the time he drew it. The confirmation that a painted “ritracto di Francesco” once existed suggests a neat solution to this paradox, albeit one that remains speculative. Other new documents presented here offer new hypotheses about other lost works: the first, a possible architectural commission by Leonardo in the 1470s, and the second, one of the cartoons for the Sant’Anna Metterza (1501/15 ca.).

(The lecture will be given in Italian)