Who was Mona Lisa
Garden display at Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise
After more than five hundred years surely everything there is to be known about the most famous painting in the world is known? Isn’t it? No.
To begin with no-one knows where Lisa sat for her portrait except that it was in Florence. Was it in her own home? How many times did she sit?
According to Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo’s first biographer, Leonardo paid entertainers to amuse her while she sat. Was it so that he could capture her smile? Or, rather, her soul behind her smile? If so he succeeded and then some. It’s unforgettable.
Did Lisa sit for Leonardo in his studio? If so, where was his studio?
No-one knows.
In 1499 when Louis XII of France took Milan, Leonardo went home to Florence. Although he left eighteen years previously having never finished Adoration of the Magi for the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto and didn’t even begin a promised altar painting for the Palazzo della Signoria, he returned a hero.
Professor Martin Kemp, a world authority on Leonardo, says in his book Mona Lisa; The People and the Painting that when Leonardo arrived in Florence, the monks of the Holy Annunciation monastery invited him to stay in one of their guest rooms.
They knew his father very well. He had been their lawyer for over thirty years. Besides, they wanted Leonardo to paint some altar panels for them.
They were to be disappointed. He spent his time in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova dissecting corpses to find out how the body works.
The monastery wasn’t a closed Order, it was a huge multi-use complex. Did Leonardo have a studio there?
Leonardo’s father was also the lawyer for Lisa’s husband, Francesco del Giocondo. He was often at the monastery supervising the building of his family vault when Leonardo was living there. When he said he wanted his wife’s portrait painted, Leonardo’s father very probably introduced them.
Leonardo moved out of the monastery in 1501.
He made a start on Lisa’s portrait in 1503.
Also in 1503 Leonardo was commissioned to paint a mural for the council hall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. He worked on it for three years before abandoning it
He lived in Florence on and off until 1508. Where did he live?
Why did Leonardo paint Lisa without her wedding ring?
Why did he not deliver the portrait? He had no difficulty delivering his portrait of Ginevra de Benci, another Florentine lady, or the portraits of Ludovico Sforza’s mistresses Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli.
In 1504 the twenty year old Raphael, who lived in Florence, visited Leonardo’s studio, saw the portrait and sketched it.
Did Lisa see her portrait in his studio? Was she upset when Leonardo left Florence and took her portrait with him?
In 1517 a visitor to Leonardo’s home in Château Clos Lucé, Amboise saw Lisa’s portrait and asked him who the sitter was. He said she was a Florentine lady. True. But why did he not say it was Lisa?
Why did he also say it was commissioned by Giuliano de Medici and not Lisa’s husband?
Why is there no acknowledgement of Lisa in Florence? At the time of writing, there is no statue, no plaques on the houses she lived in, nor on the convent where she died and is buried.
So. What do we know for sure?
The sitter was the twenty-four year old Lisa Gherardini from Florence.
Her portrait was commissioned by her husband Francesco del Giocondo.
This is the only portrait by Leonardo whose authorship has never been questioned.
Leonardo didn’t give it a title. Nor did anyone else.
Vasari, who worked and died in Florence was a painter, a good painter. A pupil of Andrea del Sarto*, he knew the del Giocondo extended family. He was with Andrea when one commissioned a painting of the Virgin Mary. He was a close friend of Lisa’s son Piero which is how he knew about the portrait. According to Professor Kemp Vasari might have met Lisa herself. Vasari was in Florence until 1538. Lisa didn’t die until 1542. In any case there were many members of Lisa and Francesco’s extended family who could have told him the story.
Until fairly recently art historians, some of them eminent, dismissed Vasari as a gossip who repeated anecdotes he heard from a friend of a friend and so forth. Today, they have returned to him. It was the vastly under-rated Vasari who first wrote about the re-birth (a rinascita) of painting in Florence, ‘renaissance’ in French.
What else do we know?
The portrait should be re-named Monna Lisa.
In Italy, monna – short for ma donna – my lady – is the polite form of address for a married woman. Mona in modern Italian is a vulgar insult.
In Italy the painting is known as La Gioconda, the feminine of Giocondo.
Lisa was born in a rented, dilapidated, converted wool shop in via Maggio, Florence 15 June 15, 1479 the first of seven children. Her father, Antonmaria Gherardini, was about forty, her mother Lucrezia was twenty-eight.
Antommaria inherited farms in Chianti and a house near Florence where Lisa spent summers with her family. The farms produced wheat, wine and olive oil.
Lisa’s father was property rich, cash poor. The family moved out of the house because Lisa’s father could not afford to pay for the repairs.
He rented another house near the lawyer, Signor Piero da Vinci, father of the rather more famous Leonardo.
When Lisa was fifteen she married Francesco del Giocondo, a rich, successful, thirty-year old Florentine silk merchant. Piero da Vinci was a regular client.
Lisa’s father had no money for her dowry so reluctantly gave Francesco valuable farm land in Chianti.
Francesco owned a beautiful house in the hills overlooking Florence and a house in town. Lisa lived in the lap of luxury with servants.
Among the artists living nearby was Botticelli, Raphael, the della Robbia brothers, Lippi, Perugino, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto and, of course, Leonardo.
Lisa had six children but two died young. It was the custom of Florentine husbands to give their wives jewels on the birth of each child. Her two sons followed in their father’s footsteps, her two daughters became nuns.
In 1503, Francesco, who loved his wife, commissioned his client’s son Leonardo da Vinci to paint her portrait. She was twenty-four. Leonardo was fifty.
Leonardo chose to paint her in unremarkable clothes presumably so that the viewer concentrates on his art and is not distracted by the expensive clothes and valuable jewels Lisa usually wore.
Francesco died age seventy-two. Lisa died age sixty, four years later in the convent where her daughter was a nun. For some unknown reason she was not buried in Francesco’s family vault.
It’s often written that the first anyone outside Florence knew about the portrait of Lisa Gherardini was when Vasari published Lives of the Artists in 1550. Not so. Amboise saw it in 1516 when Leonardo arrived from Italy and unpacked it in his new home, Château Clos Lucé. Francis I instructed his court painters to go to Leonardo’s studio for art lessons. So many of the general public flocked to see Leonardo and his paintings, visits had to be limited to Open Days.
The most remarkable fact about Monna Lisa Gherardini is that her portrait was painted by a very remarkable man.
* Worked in Amboise at the French Court of Francis I
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art). Photography by Mark.
