Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [3]
A few months after his son was born, Piero married someone else—a fifteen-year-old girl. In all, Leonardo was going to have four stepmothers to deal with, plus at least fifteen half brothers and sisters.
So he was born an outsider. Even as a baby he had no clear home. No one knows where he spent his first few years. He probably lived with Caterina for at least a year and a half so that she could nurse him. A few years later, she married and moved to another village. Without Leonardo. After this, every time he saw her, on religious holidays, she would be nursing a new baby—she had five more children.
When he was four, a powerful storm bombarded the area around Vinci, with flooding, fierce winds, and immense destruction. “Against the fury [of water], no man can prevail,” Leonardo later wrote. “An act of God” was how most people explained such a storm, but Leonardo came to think otherwise. He developed a lifelong interest in storms and water, which he saw as natural forces. For the rest of his life, he was obsessed with the study of water—how it behaved, and especially how it might be controlled.
By age five Leonardo was living with his grand-parents. His grandmother was sixty-four, his grandfather almost eighty-five. Truly ancient!
From what is known, Leonardo’s sounds like the loneliest of childhoods. Children in the 1400s were not coddled or entertained. They were thought of as miniature adults. The only one to show interest in Leonardo was his uncle, Francesco. Sixteen years older than his nephew, he farmed the family’s land. He coaxed it into producing olives, wheat, and grapes.
Francesco was a bit of a scientist-farmer, brim ming with practical knowledge, always experimenting with different crops. Leonardo spent many hours helping his uncle with farm chores and taking long walks in the hills. The boy observed all creatures with equal fascination, even the lizards and worms in the vineyard. He learned the names of plants and herbs and all about variations in weather. Francesco loved nature and seemed to pass this on to his nephew.
The area around Vinci is one of the most gorgeous spots in the world—both then and now. Streams and waterfalls intersect fairy-tale forests and faraway mountains with castles perched on top. Fields of glowing wheat melt into groves of silvery olive trees. Rolling hills in every shade of green, all dotted with the red-tiled roofs of farmhouses, are bathed in misty light that shimmers and glows.
There are stories that young Leonardo carried a drawing pad with him at all times—that he drew constantly and sculpted models out of clay. Most people had little access to pencils or expensive paper, but he had them in his house because of the family’s business. It was said that he collected everything—flowers, leaves, pieces of wood, animals.
The natural world was Leonardo’s first laboratory. In the hills around Vinci, he spent hours observing—the movement of birds’ wings in flight, how a frog’s legs allowed it to leap so far, water running in a river—which in turn led to a greater understanding of the forces of nature and to a fascination with sciences like biology, botany, and geology.
His formal schooling was minimal. His grandpar ents might have hired private teachers or had him taught by the parish priest. He learned basic math using Roman numerals and an abacus, and how to read and write in Italian, the everyday tongue of the people. It didn’t occur to anyone to teach him Latin, the international language of scholars.
Leonardo was four when a major breakthrough in communication occurred. For the first time, a book was printed, following Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in 1456. The first printed book in Europe was, of course, a Bible. And soon, books—all kinds of books—were easily available.
Did Leonardo have any books as a child? None of his own,