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Arts & Communication

ARTICLE
Painter Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo from

Caffa in Crimea: Challenging the attribution of
selected documents

Susan A. Grundy*

Independent Researcher, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

Abstract

This article reinterprets four documents attributed to the artist Leonardo da Vinci.
These documents include a drawing considered to be a Tuscan landscape with an
inscribed date of August 5, 1473, a single double-sided page with drawings, writings,
and a tensioning crossbow design dated 1478, a drawing of a hanged man dated
1479, and a letter written in Turkish to the Sultan of Istanbul dated circa 1502. If the
Tuscan painter created these documents, he was pursuing an alternative career as a
scientist. However, the information is incomplete and inaccurate. First, the landscape
does not represent Tuscany. Instead, further research indicates that it is the depiction
of a fortress in Crimea that relates to significant events occurring in the Ottoman
arena between 1473 and 1475. Second, biographers have failed to show evidence
that the Tuscan painter had military connections, raising the issue of a non-affiliation
with any militia. Third, the sketch of a hanged man focuses an unexplained attention
on the victim’s Turkish style of dress. Finally, a letter sent to Istanbul around 1502
*Corresponding author: claimed Leonardo was Genoese. Taking note of these points, a cumulative reading
Susan A. Grundy
(dr.sgrundy@gmail.com) of the evidence shows that the man who crafted these documents originated from
Caffa, a Genoese colony on the Black Sea that the Ottomans captured in 1475.
Citation: Grundy SA. Painter
Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo Although this might sound speculative, further documents discussed in the final
from Caffa in Crimea: Challenging section indicate that Florence banished the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci around
the attribution of selected 1477 and that he later died in Bologna in 1499. Therefore, this Tuscan Leonardo could
documents. Arts & Communication.
2024;2(3):2642. not have written the Notebooks, and the man who died in France in 1519 could not
doi: 10.36922/ac.2642 have been him. The research adds a deeper understanding of Turkish influences in
the documents and highlights how information gathered outside Europe can better
Received: January 5, 2024
explain them. The findings urge Western art historians to expand their research and
Accepted: March 6, 2024 to reconsider other authors.
Published Online: July 17, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Author(s). Keywords: Italian Renaissance; Leonardo da Vinci; Landscape drawing 1473; Leonardo
This is an Open-Access article Eastern slave mother theory; Caffa; Ottoman Empire; The Notebooks; Horizontal art
distributed under the terms
of the Creative Commons history
AttributionNoncommercial License,
permitting all non-commercial use,
distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work
is properly cited. 1. Introduction
th
Publisher’s Note: AccScience This article reinterprets a cluster of documents from the end of the 15 century. Four are
Publishing remains neutral with attributed to the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci and are considered seminal to his
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional biography. These four documents include a landscape drawing with the enigmatic date
affiliations. August 5, 1473 (Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi 8P), a page with drawings

Volume 2 Issue 3 (2024) 1 doi: 10.36922/ac.2642