Abstract: (Leonardo da Vinci, Circassian slave, illegitimate son, interior crises, dysgraphic) This paper draws on three texts I recently translated, two by the great Leonardo scholar and academic Carlo Vecce (an interview he gave in Romania in November 2024 and his splendid novel Surâsul Caterinei, mama lui Leonardo da Vinci, Humanitas Fiction, 2024), and the ongoing translation of Leonardo’s treatise Libro di pittura. The dramas of his early years all arose from the profound crises of a dysfunctional family: the boy was the illegitimate son of the notary Piero da Vinci and his mother, a former Circassian slave from the Caucasus, whom his father, given the harsh social and legal conventions of the fifteenth century, was forbidden to marry. An emotional and sexual crisis, created by a father who not only forbade him from seeing his mother, but also kicked him out of the house, after the young Leonardo’s sodomy trial in 1476. A financial crisis, given that Piero excluded him from his will. A linguistic crisis, visibly dyslexic and dysgraphical in his writings. A crisis released by his nomadic life between Florence, Milan, Rome and eventually Amboise. So many internal crises that saw a homo sanza lettere, as he estimated himself, struggling with loneliness, incomprehension, restlessness and the inability to bring his works and inventions to completion, but which sublimated made him the undeniable genius of the Italian Renaissance.