Those living relatives included Oscar-nominated Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who is perhaps most famous for his 1968 film adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet."Īs the title of Kemp's book suggests, the publication also offers new details on the life of Lisa del Giocondo, the subject of Leonardo's most famous painting, the "Mona Lisa." Much more so than Leonardo's mother, Lisa del Giocondo has attracted wildly imaginative theories. ![]() Last year, Italian researchers used historic records to identify 35 living descendants of Leonardo -but only on his father's side. The book claims to be the first to shed light on Leonardo's maternal family tree. ![]() Kemp outlined his ideas about Caterina in the new book "Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting" (Oxford University Press, 2017), which he wrote with Giuseppe Pallanti, an economics teacher in Florence. Kemp established most of these links through property-tax records, and according to The Guardian, he also found that Ser Piero conducted a minor legal transaction for Caterina's husband, another connection linking the artists' parents. Freud claimed that the enigmatic smile in the 'Mona Lisa' must have reminded Leonardo of (you guessed it) his mother, which is why the painting captures both "the promise of unlimited tenderness and sinister threat." Sigmund Freud even weighed in with a psychoanalytical interpretation of Leonard's childhood. The gaps in knowledge among these details have led to a somewhat obsessive speculation about Caterina's identity. Scholars also knew that Ser Piero was not married to Leonardo's mother, and there was some indication that her name was Caterina. ![]() The identity of Leonardo da Vinci's mother has eluded historians for years, but now one scholar said he's found the woman behind the Renaissance man.Īfter digging through overlooked records in Italy, Martin Kemp, a leading Leonardo expert, claimed that the artist was born to Caterina di Meo Lippi, a 15-year-old orphan, on April 15, 1452.įrom existing documents, historians already knew that Leonardo was mostly raised by his father, a lawyer named Ser Piero da Vinci.
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