The da Vinci were a well-established family: not noble, not especially rich, not given much to magnificence, but a family of good stock and standing. They lived that enviable signorial double-life of the Quattrocento – città e villa: business in the city, farming in the country. They cultivated Florentine contacts and favourable marriages as assiduously as they managed their vineyards and orchards. They channelled profits into property. One does not want to romanticize their lifestyle, which doubtless had its discomforts and difficulties, but it seems to have suited them, and those of them whose life spans we know lived to a good age.
They were a family of notaries, a profession which had risen in importance with the mercantile boom of the previous century. It was the notary who drew up the contracts, attested the deals, lodged and protested the bills of exchange. They were the makers and keepers of record, and their work shaded into other roles – the attorney, the accountant, the investment-broker – which oiled the wheels of commerce. In Florence the notaries’ guild, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, was the most esteemed of the seven major guilds, orarti maggiori. The earliest da Vinci on record, Ser Michele, was a notary; so was his son, Ser Guido. (The honorific ‘Ser’, loosely equivalent to the English ‘Sir’, was a prerogative of notaries and lawyers.) Ser Guido is recorded in a notarial act dated 1339: the first firm date in the family history. It was his old ‘notarial book’ which Antonio da Vinci used to record the family births, including that of Leonardo, who was Guido’s great-great-grandson. The most celebrated of the da Vinci notaries was Guido’s son, Ser Piero (whom I shall call Ser Piero the elder, to distinguish him from Leonardo’s father). He was a high-flyer in late-fourteenth-century Florence, the last years before the rise of the Medici. In 1361, a year after his notarial investiture, he was a Florentine envoy at the court of Sassoferrato; later he was notary to the Signoria, the governing body of the Florentine republic. His brother Giovanni was also a notary; he appears to have died in Spain in about 1406 – a da Vinci who travelled: atypical in that.6
For these generations of fourteenth-century da Vinci, Florence was their day-to-day home, the political and commercial capital where they had to be; Vinci was the home of their forefathers and their inherited properties, and the place they escaped to from the summer city heat. Vinci was not always a good place to be. It stood close to the western border of Florentine influence, and was harried fairly frequently by Florence’s enemies. In the 1320s the Lucchese strongman Castruccio Castracani (‘The Castrator of Dogs’) was camped below the walls for more than six years, and the town later received the unwelcome attentions of Sir John Hawkwood, the Essex-born condottiere, whose paramilitary army, the White Company, struck fear into the countryside. This was in 1364. Hawkwood – whose name was Italianized to Giovanni d’Acuto, thus becoming John Sharp – was then in the pay of Pisa, but in later years he was a staunch Florentine commander, and he is commemorated in the city’s cathedral, astride a white charger, in a mural portrait by Uccello which Leonardo certainly knew. It has been argued that Hawkwood was the model for the Knight in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – the ‘parfit gentil knyght’ being a heavily ironic portrait of a man who was actually a ruthless mercenary. Chaucer was himself in Florence in the early 1370s on a diplomatic mission. Ser Piero the elder, moving in a political ambit in these years, may have met both these redoubtable Englishmen. ‘War’ – in other words, beware – these ‘questmongers and notaries’, wrote Chaucer in ‘The Parson’s Tale’, reminding us that the profession was not always reputed honest.7
The son of Ser Piero the elder – apparently his only son – was a man of a very different stamp. This was Leonardo’s grandfather Antonio, of whom we have already heard: he who was glimpsed at a game of backgammon in Anchiano; he who punctiliously noted the family’s births and baptisms. Born in about 1372, he was probably apprenticed to his father, but he did not become a notary. As far as we know he chose to live exclusively in Vinci, cultivating what might be called the air of an early Renaissance country gent.
And it is in Antonio’s time, in the year 1427, that Florence’s first catasto was enacted, a new system of land-tax applied to all property-owners within the republic. It required them to declare the annual produce of their land, on which they were taxed at the rate of 1.5 per cent, and the members of their family, for whom they received an allowance of 200 florins each. These tax-deductible dependants were referred to simply as bocche, or mouths. The tax returns elicited by the catasto, now catalogued into a series of pungent bundles in the State Archive in Florence, provide a kind of Domes-day Book of Quattrocento Tuscany, in the pages of which the da Vinci family – and thousands of others, both richer and poorer – swim into clearer historical focus. Thus in the firstcatasto of 1427, when Antonio was in his mid-fifties, we find him married and with an infant son.8 His wife was Lucia, twenty years his junior, the daughter of yet another notary. Her family home, Toia di Bacchereto, was on the eastern flank of Mont’Albano, not far from Vinci; the family also produced ceramics, specializing in painted maiolica work that had a wide clientele. Antonio’s child – a ‘fanciullo’ of fourteen months – was named, after both his grandfathers, Piero. This was Leonardo’s father, born 19 April 1426. The following year Lucia bore another son, Giuliano, but he is not mentioned in subsequent tax returns and must have died in infancy. This loss was partly repaired in 1432, with the birth of a daughter, Violante.
At this time Antonio owned a farm at Costereccia, near Vinci, and some other smaller country properties: their annual produce amounted to 50 bushels of wheat, 5 bushels of millet, 26 barrels of wine, and 2 pitchers of oil. He also owned two plots of building-land in Vinci, one within the walls and one without. In 1427 the family were actually living not in one of their properties, but in a ‘little house in the country’, owned by a man who owed Antonio money. This was a convenient arrangement: the debt was repaid in rent-free accommodation, and Antonio was able to claim that he was technically ‘sanza casa’ (‘without a house’) – not surprisingly, these early Italian tax returns are full of the sound of people trying to sound poorer than they were. Six years later, in the catastoof 1433, he and his family are recorded as living in Vinci, in a ‘little house’ with ‘a bit of garden’9 – these diminutives are once again for the tax-man’s benefit.
Sketch-map by Leonardo showing one of the family’s properties near Vinci.
Antonio is an attractive character, and an important one in that he was the head of the family for most of Leonardo’s childhood. He was an educated man–to judge from his handwriting – who chose the life of a country squire over the stresses and rewards of a professional career in Florence. He sounds not unlike his younger contemporary the Florentine lawyer Bernardo Machiavelli, father of the famous author, who similarly turned his back on the rat-race for the quieter pleasures of the contado. Bernardo was a scholarly man: there is an account of him taking a copy of Livy’s History of Rome to the bookbinder’s, and leaving as a deposit ‘three flasks of vermilion wine and a flask of vinegar’ from his vineyard.10 He typifies a certain stratum of Tuscan intellectual life – the educated, book-loving countryman – and there may have been something of this in Antonio da Vinci. The choice of these men was one that embraced a certain hardship, or was perceived to do so. As Niccolò Machiavelli said of his childhood, in his usual tart way, ‘I learned to do without before I learned to enjoy.’11 Leonardo too would value a certain spareness and simplicity in his lifestyle, and this was a remnant of his country upbringing.
The family pendulum swung again, and Antonio’s first-born son, Piero, took to the world of ‘questmongers and notaries’ with relish. The dynamic Ser Piero the younger was a reincarnation of his grandfather and namesake, and would rise to similar positions of eminence in Florentine financial affairs. By 1446 he had left Vinci: Antonio’s catasto of that year does not include him among his dependants. He was probably invested as a notary in the following year, at the conventional age of twenty-one; the earliest legal document in his hand is from 1448. A couple of years later he was practising in Pistoia, perhaps living with his sister, Violante, now married and settled there. He also appears in Pisa, but soon he follows the well-trodden path to Florence and begins to establish his career there. His notarial insignia – a kind of trademark, not unlike a printer’s device – can be seen on a contract dated November 1458. It is hand-drawn, and shows a cloud with the letter P in it, and something issuing from the cloud which looks partly like a sword and partly like a stylized tree.12 The contract involves the Rucellai, one of Florence’s premier merchant-families, with whom Leonardo would later have some dealings.
One might call Piero a typical da Vinci – ambitious, urbane, not entirely warm-hearted – but that more contemplative, country-loving strain in the family make-up was continued in Antonio’s youngest son, Francesco, born in 1436. Like his father, Francesco had no notarial ambitions: a bit of speculative silk-farming was the nearest he got to the business world. Again like his father, he seems to have lived all his life in Vinci, looking after the family’s farms and vineyards. In his tax return in 1498 he wrote simply, ‘I am in the country without prospect of employment.’13 Francesco was just fifteen when Leonardo was born: a very young uncle, and a vital figure in Leonardo’s early development. It has been noted that in the first edition of the Lives Vasari erroneously describes Ser Piero da Vinci as Leonardo’s uncle. It is possible that this curious mistake (which is duly corrected in the later edition) reflects some half-understood tradition about Leonardo being closer to his uncle than to his father.14 It may well be true that Piero was an absent, busy and not very caring father. It is certainly true that he left nothing to Leonardo in his will: he had numerous legitimate children by then, but to leave him nothing is surely significant. Uncle Francesco, by contrast, died childless, and left his entire estate to Leonardo – an inheritance bitterly contested by Piero’s legitimate children.
This was the family that Leonardo was born into, a collection of averagely complex individuals whose particular quirks are mostly irrecoverable, but also expressive in a more schematic sense of those twin aspects of Renaissance social identity – città and villa, urban and pastoral, active and contemplative – whose relative merits were addressed by so many writers and indeed painters of the time, as they had been at least since the time of the Roman poet Horace. It is not hard to see these twin aspects reflected in Leonardo’s life and work. He lived most of his adult life in cities, partly but not entirely out of professional necessity; yet his potent love of the countryside, of its forms and atmospheres, is evident throughout his paintings and writings.
The da Vinci genes are to some extent highly mappable. We perceive the broad outlines of Leonardo’s family heritage; we grasp something of the social, cultural, financial, physical and even psychological milieu into which he was born. But this is, of course, only half of the genetic story. Of the other side – of his mother and her antecedents – we know next to nothing. In the story of Leonardo’s formative years she is an area of deep shadow, though, as with his paintings, one’s eye is drawn to those lustrous areas of darkness, as if they have some secret to impart.