Leonardo Da Vinci. A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance Italy

The book "Leonardo Da Vinci. A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance Italy", Lascar Publishing, Angelo Paratico, has been finally released. The news of the thesis it contained went viral around the world in December 2014 causing a storm on the media, with all the major newspapers publishing articles. Not only newspapers and magazines but Angelo had been interviewed by BBC, CNN, Russian, Italian and Spanish television. A French documentary based on different interpretations of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo will also feature Angelo's ideas, and it will be released in July 2015. Here is a short presentation of his book: The life of Leonardo Da Vinci remains an enigma to this day, in spite of documents surfacing from ancient archives and the thousands of pages of his personal notebooks. He was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, Tuscany, out of wedlock and unwanted, the result of a casual sexual encounter between Ser Piero di Antonio Da Vinci - a successful notary of the Florentine Republic - and, almost certainly, a domestic Chinese slave named Caterina. Subsequently Ser Piero acted as a matchmaker and arranged for Caterina to wed one of his handymen: Antonio di Pietro del Vaccha d'Andrea Buti, nicknamed Accattabriga meaning quarreller and bully. New documents found recently in Florentine archives oblige us to question the positive image we have of Ser Piero Da Vinci. He appears to be a crook with few scruples, who abandoned his son, Leonardo, leaving him exposed to sexual abuse. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Leonardo spent his youth close to his mother and adoptive father in their house at Campo Zeppi, on the outskirts of Vinci, rather than in Florence, where his aloof father was pursuing a legal career. The investigation into who his mother was is the central theme of the book. It concludes that Caterina might have been a Chinese domestic slave, a woman who could have transmitted part of her culture to her son.