Chapter One Leonardo Learning leonardo da vinci was born in 1452 in the hilly Tuscan country?side near the village of Vinci, some twenty miles west of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a twenty-six-year-old notary, who during Leonardo's childhood remained for the most part in Florence, pursuing a successful career. All that is known for certain of Leonardo's mother, Caterina, is that she was a twenty-five-year-old peasant girl, who may have been the daughter of a local woodcutter. Few facts are known about Leonardo's early years and we have to rely upon occasional, often enigmatic, remarks made years later in his notebooks. A prime example is the comment made by Leonardo whilst he was writing on the flight of birds, in this case observing the flight of the fork-tailed kite, a bird that often flew over Vinci from the slopes of nearby Mount Albano: Writing in such detail about the kite seems to be my destiny, since in the first memory of my childhood it seemed to me that whilst I was lying in my cradle a kite flew down and brushed open my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail on the inside of my lips. Out of this suggestive fragment Freud would construct an entire psychological history for Leonardo, leading from the trauma of separ?ation from his mother, and his consequent ambivalent feelings towards her, to his homosexuality and his reluctance to finish projects upon which he embarked. Unfortunately the German translation used by Freud mistakenly rendered the Italian word for kite (nebbio) as "vulture," lending an altogether more lurid tone to this memory. Despite this error, Freud's claim that Leonardo's memory of the tail probing his lips was a masked image of his mother's nipple, when he was suckling her breast, seems plausible enough. And there is little doubt that Leonardo did suffer a trauma on separation from his mother. Years later he would write down a series of riddles, amongst which there is a recurrent theme of violent separation of a mother and her child. A typical example reads: "Many children will be torn from the arms of their mother with pitiless blows and be thrown to the ground to be mutilated." The answer to the riddle is in fact "Nuts, and olives and acorns," but the power of the prior image is suggestive. In 1456, when Leonardo was four, Tuscany was devastated by a great storm, possibly a tornado. Years later he could still vividly recall: I have witnessed movements of air so furious that they have borne away, mixed up within them, the largest trees of the forest and the whole roofs of great palaces, and I have seen the same fury bore a hole with its whirling force, digging out a gravel pit, and carrying off gravel, sand and water more than half a mile through the air. Several years after this, the River Arno would overflow its banks, causing severe floods throughout the Val d'Arno. The power of these two natural disasters that Leonardo experienced in his youth would long remain in his memory, the latter initiating a fearful fascination with deluges and floods that would last throughout his life. Leonardo was brought up in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, where he seems to have become particularly attached to Antonio's youngest son, Francesco, who despite being Leonardo's uncle was just fifteen years older than he. Unlike Leonardo's ambitious father, Francesco had remained behind in the country, where he busied himself looking after the da Vinci farmland and vineyards. We can imagine the impressionable young Leonardo dogging the footsteps of his uncle as he oversaw the laborers on the estate. Francesco was almost certainly the first of the several powerful figures to whom Leonardo would be drawn throughout his life. Significantly, all these figures would be young men: initially older than Leonardo, later young Excerpted from The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped by Paul Strathern All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
