Say Chinese: Da Vinci’s China girl?

Italian historian suggests Mona Lisa may have been a Chinese slave and possibly Leonardo da Vinci’s mother.

That Da Vinci, the celebrated Italian polymath, sculptor, painter and architect, could have been half-Chinese, sparked viral frenzy.

Angelo Paratico, a Hong Kong-based historian and novelist from Italy, told the South China Morning Post, “On the back of Mona Lisa, there is a Chinese landscape and even her face looks Chinese,” reported the Al-Arabiya News. Chinese web users expressed their surprise and amusement over the statement by posting memes and parodies of the painting by superimposing images of Chinese comedians and British actor-comedian Rowan Atkinson onto the iconic half-length portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci in 1517.

Many people seemed to be in disbelief over the news, as was evident in tweets on China’s version of Twitter, Sina Weibo. One post read, “I’m so sad that you thought I’m a foreigner!” with an image of a crying Mona Lisa holding two rolls of toilet paper and blowing her nose. “I’d rather be from wherever I am loved,” said another tweet on the micro-blogging website. The topic seemed to be trending on the website as it had been viewed more than four million times and, as a result, had more than a whopping 160,000 posts related to it.



Little information is available about Caterina, Da Vinci’s mother, or the real identity of the person who posed for the painting, which is on display at the Louvre museum in Paris. Paratico is currently in the process of finishing a book titled Leonardo da Vinci: a Chinese scholar lost in Renaissance Italy, which centralises the life of the painter extraordinaire.

Paratico has cited the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who had put forth the assumption in 1910 that the famous painting might have been inspired by Da Vinci’s mother. “One wealthy client of Da Vinci’s father had a slave called Caterina. After 1452, Da Vinci’s date of birth, she disappeared from the documents,” he said.

According to Paratico, there is nominal evidence that can trace Da Vinci’s lineage to the Chinese, stating that he was certain “up to a point” that Da Vinci’s mother was originally from the Orient. “To make her an oriental Chinese, we need to use a deductive method,” he remarked.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2014.

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