For five centuries, the world has asked the same question: who is the woman behind the Mona Lisa’s smile?
In Leonardo da Vinci: The First Book of Secrets, Italian painter and art restorer Maurizio Pecorari proposes an answer no one has told before. The face may belong to Caterina, the mother who raised Leonardo, a woman whose origins, he argues, lie far from Tuscany, on the Caribbean island of Carriacou.
Clues written in Leonardo’s own hand
Leonardo loved puzzles. His notebooks are full of rebuses, mirror writing and wordplay. Pecorari reads these hidden words and anagrams as a trail of clues about the person Leonardo never named openly: his mother.
Following that trail, the book explores:
- Caterina’s journey and the route from Rimini to the New World
- Her death and her secret burial in Milan, near Santa Maria delle Grazie, home of The Last Supper
- The rebuses and anagrams left by Francesco Melzi, Leonardo’s closest pupil
- Michelangelo’s “anatomical theorems”: the heart, the womb and the brain hidden in his paintings
An artist reading an artist
Pecorari trained at the Brera Academy in Milan and took part in the restoration of the Baptistery of Parma and Correggio’s dome in the Church of San Giovanni. He reads Leonardo’s works with the eye of someone who has spent a lifetime inside frescoes and paintings, looking at details most viewers miss.
The result is a bold, illustrated investigation with 116 images, written to be read like a mystery. You don’t have to agree with every conclusion. But after reading it, you will never look at the Mona Lisa the same way again.
Get the book
📖 Leonardo da Vinci: The First Book of Secrets, by Maurizio Pecorari
Available as ebook and full-colour paperback.
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