Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

where the whole family still lived together in 1457, Leonardo spent his first years and had his first intellectual experiences. This rural estate of his grandfather always remained home to him; it later passed to him through inheritance from Francesco, his father's younger brother. "In the earliest memory of my childhood," he says, "it seems to me as if a kite original: "Hühnergeier." While the author uses a term for a hawk or vulture, Leonardo's famous dream refers to the 'nibbio' or kite. came down to me, opened my mouth with its tail, and struck many times with said tail between my lips"; he remarks half-jokingly, half-seriously, in the symbolic manner of the late Middle Ages, that this was likely why it became his destiny to write with such clarity about the kite. In any case, the nature of his native spot made him an early observer of all birds and their flight, of the waters and their course, of the rocks and their origin; it revealed the landscape to him as a vehicle of the deepest atmospheric magic and taught him to paint it as a symbol of a state of soul original: "état d’âme." A French term referring to an emotional or spiritual state reflected in art..

Leonardo is the natural son of Ser Piero da Vinci and a peasant girl of "good blood," as the Anonymous Referring to the "Anonimo Gaddiano" or "Anonimo Magliabechiano," an unidentified 16th-century author of a manuscript containing biographies of artists. asserts and as we, in view of such a son, are gladly prepared to believe. As early as 1452, Piero married "according to his rank," and Caterina did the same soon after: thus the mother disappears entirely from the history of the son. He grew up in the family of his father; for except in the division of estates, people in those days were not too strict regarding legitimacy, and since Piero's first and second marriages remained childless, all the parents' affection could be centered on Leonardo. When in 1476 a son was finally born from a third marriage, Leonardo no longer required his father's care. —

From a land registry entry, we learn that Ser Piero had moved to Florence before 1469. He inhabited a house that stood on the site of the later Palazzo Gondi