The Shadow Drawing by Francesca Fiorani

Author:Francesca Fiorani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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By that same October, the Mona Lisa, like Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, had also become famous.

And by early 1504, at the latest, the Mona Lisa had even become the fashionable new paradigm for Renaissance portraiture.

Raphael, who at twenty-one had arrived in Florence from his native Urbino, sketched Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as the work was in progress and immediately began using it as a model for his own portraits. He swiftly absorbed Leonardo’s work. Leonardo’s assistants painted exact copies of the Mona Lisa, and perhaps one of these copies did make it to the silk merchant who had commissioned the portrait in the first place.

The Mona Lisa was in fact the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a member of a rich and prestigious Florentine family—not as powerful and wealthy as the Medici or the Benci, but nonetheless prominent and well off. In 1495, at the age of sixteen, she married the widower Francesco del Giocondo, who was nineteen years older than she and a wealthy silk merchant with extensive business and political connections in Florence and across Italy. Lisa and Francesco had two daughters (one died in 1499) and, in 1502, their first son. Francesco likely commissioned his wife’s portrait to celebrate the successful birth of his heir and to adorn the new family home he bought in the Via della Stufa, not far from the Medici palace, in April 1503.

How did Francesco del Giocondo, who was a respected merchant but not a leading civic figure, convince Leonardo—who was by then a legendary artist who refused commissions from duchesses and royals—to paint his wife? The answer must involve personal relations between Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero; the del Giocondos; and the friars of Santissima Annunziata. Francesco and his family had close business relations with the Servite fathers and had obtained funerary rights to one of their chapels. Ser Piero served as the monastery’s notary for many years, and on more than one occasion acted as an intermediary between the Servite friars and the del Giocondo family. Leonardo and Francesco del Giocondo must have met in Santissima Annunziata, where one lived and the other went to pray in his family chapel.

The Mona Lisa was supposed to be a conventional portrait that conformed to well-established ideas about women, beauty, and female behavior. But, as was always the case with Leonardo, what started as conventional ended up being exceptional.

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