Who was Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mother; And why might we care?

Roger F Malina

June 9 2024

I am part of a community of practice that, usually mistakenly, admires and remembers heroes. This community(s) of practice(s) seeks to create bridges between the arts, sciences, and technology. My father co-created the Leonardo journal to document and disseminate this work beginning in 1968. Leonardo Da Vinci is certainly an exemplar of this goal but hero worship is a contradiction in terms.

Almost no significant work is done by individuals by themselves, with some exceptions.

Many of us are influenced by our parents, including myself. We are influenced by friends and colleagues but most importantly collaborators.

Albert Einstein famously credited his best friend Michele Besso with many of Einsteins epochal ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Besso .

Thanks to Tak Tarbo, I have been informed about a controversy about who was the mother of Leonardo Da Vinci.

There is a huge literature on this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/leonardo-da-vinci-mother-slave-caucasus-italy-new-research-book-rcna74670

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/leonardo-da-vincis-mother-0015693

Some scholars suggested Leonardo’s mother was a peasant, others an orphan and some a slave hailing from the Middle East or North Africa.

Why does it matter ?

I live in Dallas, Texas, USA where there are many intellectual currents that connect to sexism, racism and other isms including

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/leonardo-da-vinci-gay-sexuality-b1831842.html

But the history of ideas and ingenuity don’t respect these ad hoc boundaries.

As an astrophysicist I am very informed on the historical development of astronomy as a science. One version is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_astronomy

Some origins of astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” Tigris and Euphrates, where the ancient kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia were located. A form of writing known as cuneiform emerged among the Sumerians around 3500–3000 BC. Our knowledge of Sumerian astronomy is indirect, via the earliest Babylonian star catalogues dating from about 1200 BC. The fact that many star names appear in Sumerian suggests a continuity reaching into the Early Bronze Age.

But in high school in the U.K. the ancient sources of astrophysics were dismissed as mere ‘astrology’ and not to be taken seriously. We did admit where algebra originated though.

I do think we need to step back from the noise and wonder who was Leonardo Da Vinci’s organic mother.

Let’s be careful. Da Vinci didn’t meet his mother  face to face between the age of 2 and the age of 40, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t influence him.

Da Vinci’s fingerprints have been extensively documented from his documents and the things he touched. Consultation with experts documents that he was likely of “mixed race” with a mixture of European and middle eastern. Tak Tarbo documents this.

I recently took the Harvard Implicit Bias test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html and discovered that when I think quickly I am ‘racist’, This is ironic since my grandparents, on one side, were from central Europe and likely brown-skinned, as was my father.

But my mother’s ancestors were from the north of England, likely of Viking blood, and certainly my mother was white.

Why does color of skin or or matter. Lets figure out the big picture from a distance.

Tak Tarbo, in addition to the finger print evidence, has other lines of inquiry that seem to confirm that Davinci was of mixed race European and middle eastern.

For instance, it is possible that the Mona Lisa reflects some of his mother’s facial features ( as well as maybe also his own). Tak Tarbo expands on this.

I personally have advocated the many advantages of ‘hybridity’ rather than purity. Yes, we need experts who know more and more about less and less. (heart surgeons) And some, editors, who know less and less about more and more. But we need billions of hybrids that combine knowledge systems and practices.

I cannot prove this but…

So I do think it matters that we understand that it is likely that Da Vinci’s mother was of middle eastern origin, and this affected his thinking, emotions and ideation and his abilility to be creative and ingenuous ( not a genius).

So lets redesign education to encourage people like Leonardo da Vinci to flourish.

In a complex system, causality is almost never A causes B. Interesting phenomena “emerge’ from a complex system as a result of many interactions including one’s actual parentage.

I am in discussion with Tak Tarbo to continue to elaborate this narrative. Watch this space. Some of what I have said is likely not 100% correct. Knowledge is quantum mechanical.