‘Caterina Came …’

In the summer of 1493 a woman called Caterina arrived at the Corte Vecchia. She was still there early the following year, when she is mentioned in the household accounts. Then, probably in 1495, come the expenses of her funeral, also recorded by Leonardo.⁶⁸We don’t know who she was, but it is hard to resist the possibility that she was his mother, who in 1493 would have been in her mid-sixties, and since about 1490 a widow.

Leonardo records her arrival as follows:

On the 16th day of July.

Caterina came on the 16th day

Of July 1493.

One notes immediately the tic of repetition which is also found in the memorandum of his father’s death a decade later. In the latter case it was interpreted by Freud as the psychological mechanism he calls ‘perseveration’, where deep emotions are sublimated or diverted into fussy repetitive action and ‘indifferent detail’. ‘The psychoanalyst’, he writes, apropos Leonardo’s note on his father’s death, ‘has learned long ago that such cases of forgetting or repetition are significant, and that it is the “distraction” which allows impulses that are otherwise hidden to be revealed.’ This ‘perseveration’ is thus kin to the more famous ‘Freudian slip’, in which linguistic errors reveal a suppressed text.⁶⁹

The account of Caterina’s funeral is precisely a bland piece of accountancy. Here again one might discern that diversionary focus on ‘indifferent detail’:

This is not an extravagant funeral. The costs amount to a little over 6 lire – he would spend four times that amount on a fancy silver cloak for Salai in 1497. The quantity of wax for tapers is 3 pounds; for his own funeral he would stipulate 40 pounds (10 pounds of wax ‘in thick tapers’ to be placed in each of four churches).

We cannot be certain that ‘Caterina’ was his mother, but if she wasn’t who was she? Elsewhere in the notebooks those who come into his household to stay or live with him are all male: assistants, apprentices, servants. It was legally impossible for Caterina to have been an apprentice, and unlikely that she was a skilled assistant of some sort. The only plausible interpretation would be that she was a servant: a cook and housekeeper, let us say – much like the Mathurine or Maturina who later served him in France. These are the alternatives: that the Caterina of the Milanese notebooks was an otherwise unknown woman who served as his housekeeper for a couple of years or that she was his widowed mother, reunited with him in her last years, accommodated amid the trappings of his success, comforted by him on her deathbed in 1495, at the age of about sixty-eight. Either is intrinsically possible: one must make or refuse the leap of faith. Some have thought that the modesty of the funeral argues against her being his mother. But Caterina was essentially, in style and manner, a Tuscan contadina, and what one guesses of her character does not lead us to think she would wish to pretend otherwise. She is lined by the tough years of work on the little farm at Campo Zeppi. These exequies, simply but properly done, would be right for her.

Looking through the pocket-book Forster III, in which he recorded the arrival of Caterina, one finds Leonardo in philosophical mood. Among the brief maxims and musings which he jots down in its pages are these:

Wisdom is the daughter of experience…

This is the supreme folly of man – that he stints himself now so he will not have to stint later, and his life flies away before he can enjoy the good things he has laboured so much to acquire…

In some animals Nature seems a cruel stepmother rather than a mother; and in others not a stepmother but a tender mother…

Necessity is mistress and governess of nature…

The mirror vaunts itself when it has within it the reflection of a queen, but when she is gone the mirror is base once more…

The plant complains about the old dry stick placed beside it, and the old brambles which surround it. But the one makes it grow straight, and the other protects it from bad company.⁷⁰

Also in use during the years 1493–4 were the three pocket-books now bound together as Paris MS H, in which are similar gnomic utterances:

Do not be a liar about the past…

All hurts leave a pain in the memory except for the greatest hurt of all, which is death, which kills the memory along with the life.⁷¹

Such pensées are scattered through his manuscripts, but this is a particular concentration of them. They belong to the time when the mysterious Caterina was living with him at the Corte Vecchia. Their imagery (mother, stepmother, governess, queen) and their themes of memory, transience and death add strength to the notion that this Caterina was indeed his mother. They reflect, with characteristic brusqueness, this autumnal reunion and the feelings which it brings to the surface.