Vanished Smile by Scotti R. A

Author:Scotti, R. A. [Scotti, R. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, History, Mystery, Crime
ISBN: 9780307271549
Amazon: 0307271544
Goodreads: 7002746
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2009-04-07T07:00:00+00:00

While Leonardo ventured off to Milan, Lisa Gherardini stayed close to home. She must have been pretty and precocious, because just before her sixteenth birthday, she vaulted up the social ladder, marrying Francesco del Giocondo, a thirty-five-year-old widower with an infant son. To seal the marriage contract, her father gave Francesco a farm that he owned on a ridge of hills in Poggio between Florence and Siena, and one hundred seventy gold florins.

Francesco was quite a catch, especially for a girl with such a modest dowry. (Francesco's four sisters each had a dowry of one thousand florins.) His first wife, Camilla Rucellai, had belonged to a leading Florentine family, and Francesco was described in the marriage contract as civis et mercator, a citizen and merchant. By 1503, when Lisa probably met Leonardo for the first time, the Giocondos were living in a fashionable new house on Via della Stufa with their growing family—Bartolomeo, Piero, and the baby Andréa. A daughter Camilla, named for Bartolomeo's mother, the first Signora Giocondo, had died four years before.

Leonardo's circumstances were not as easy. In 1499 the French had wrested Milan from the Sforzas. Leonardo remained to complete his fresco of the Last Supper, then he returned to Florence. At the Sforza court, he had been the star attraction for almost twenty years. When he returned to Florence, he faced both professional contenders and political confusion.

Leonardo had left the city as a young man in the glory days of Lorenzo the Magnificent, when the Renaissance was in full flower. Now he was almost fifty. Lorenzo was dead, his disappointing sons had been run out of town, and the Renaissance was migrating south. By 1503, artists were flocking to Rome to work for the formidable new pope and patron, Julius II, and younger artists were challenging Leonardo's preeminence. Michelangelo Buonarroti, just turning thirty, was completing a colossal David, and the even younger Raphael Sanzio, a precocious talent, was absorbing the art of his elders, eager to outshine them. No longer the unchallenged master, his finances strained, Leonardo da Vinci was looking for work.

His father, Ser Piero, by then an eminent notary and well connected, probably wrangled a commission for his cash-poor son. Ser Piero had recently settled a financial dispute for a wealthy silk merchant, and sometime during that unsettled decade, Leonardo began a portrait of the merchant's wife, Lisa.

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