One Sunday morning in Florence, I awaken in an apartment I’ve rented on the Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia (the riverside street near the Old Mint) to the exultant sounds of drums and trumpets. I dash from one window to another, trying to locate the source—away from the Arno, it seems, toward Santa Croce. After quickly wriggling into a dress and sandals, I join excited groups of people rushing through the neighborhood.
From every direction musicians—competitors from all of Tuscany for a regional prize, a bystander informs me—are converging in the Piazza Santa Croce. As I scramble up the steps in front of the Franciscan basilica for a better view, the bands strut into formation behind their hometown banners. A sea of bright colors and high-flying flags surges before me, and my imagination carries me back in time to another thrilling spectacle that Florentines once beheld in this square.
On February 7, 1468, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici, grandson of Cosimo de’ Medici and a prince in all but title, hosted a giostra, a ceremonial joust in honor of both a recent military victory and his engagement to a Roman princess (who was not in attendance).
His father, Piero de’ Medici, dubbed “the Gouty” for the malady that would soon claim his life, and his mother took seats of honor in front of Santa Croce’s then unfinished brick facade. Lucrezia Donati, a young married beauty rumored to be their son’s ladylove, may have sat not far from my perch. According to French chivalric tradition, Lorenzo fastened her scarf to his lance.
On that long-ago morning, crowds squeezed onto benches set up along the piazza, while hundreds craned from the windows of the surrounding buildings. A thick layer of white sand covered the great rectangle, divided lengthwise with wooden rails so galloping horsemen could heave lances at each other at breakneck speed. In a splendid procession young men from the best families in town—scions of the Pazzi, Pitti, Vespucci, and Tornabuoni among them—cantered slowly into the piazza on horses festooned with a king’s ransom of precious stones, silk, velvet, and ermine, a display so brilliant that the radiance seemed to one observer “enough to block out the sun.”
With a roll of drums and blare of trumpets, a white charger entered, bearing the unmistakable figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici, supremely yet seductively ugly, in a white silk mantle bordered in scarlet and a black velvet cap encrusted with rubies, diamonds, and pearls. At the center of his shield gleamed the famous Medici diamond known as Il Libro (the Book), reportedly valued at the equivalent of a million dollars.
Above Lorenzo’s head fluttered a gorgeous “standard of white taffeta,” decorated—in a poet’s description—“with a sun above and a rainbow below and in the middle a lady standing in a meadow, wearing a robe . . . embroidered with gold and silver flowers,” with a bay tree (lauro in Italian, a pun on “Lorenzo”) in the background and a quote from Virgil inscribed in gold. This was the creation of the wizardly artists and artisans in the bottega of Medici favorite Andrea del Verrocchio.
The maestro’s most talented apprentice, the slim teenager named Leonardo, would almost certainly have stood amid the cheering throng.
The youth’s bucolic life in Vinci must have seemed long ago and far away. From the moment that Florence’s massive iron-studded gates creaked open at dawn, Leonardo would have been swept into its rollicking street life. Heralds on horseback blew a treble blast on their trumpets before announcing banishments, fines, and other official decrees. Minstrels sang. Criers called out for wet nurses and day laborers. Couriers on horseback rushed to deliver satchels of urgent documents. Flocks of priests, bishops, monks, and friars flapped their way from churches to monasteries. Peasants trundled carts of just-picked cabbages or bleating pigs.
Traders hauled leather from Córdoba, armor and steel blades from Spain, spices from the East, saffron from Majorca, wheat from Sardinia and Sicily, salt from Ibiza, oranges and dates from Catalonia, everything and anything to feed the desires and fill the bellies of the city’s 50,000 residents. Animals—dogs, goats, pigs, geese, the occasional recalcitrant donkey—roamed everywhere.
In 1469, Lorenzo de’ Medici—statesman, scholar, athlete, swordsman, writer, musician, poet, collector—succeeded his father at the city’s helm. In the Camelot years of his reign, Florentines, giddy with their own good fortune, reveled in the glorious moment. Besotted with beauty, they elevated everything—a shoe’s turned-up toe, a sleeve’s jewel-bright lining, a dagger’s hand-carved sheath—into a work of art.
Life was short, just thirty-five to forty years on average, but fully savored. In the seize-the-day spirit of his time, Lorenzo raised revelry almost to the point of art with torchlit parades, processions, festivals, “lion-hunts” in the Piazza della Signoria, and lightning-fast horse races from one city gate to another.
“Who would be happy, let him be,” Lorenzo urged in his best-known canticle.
Leonardo da Vinci, young, handsome, and extravagantly talented, had every reason to comply.
Even before the Florentines sensed the immensity of his genius, the boy from Vinci dazzled everyone he met with his remarkable good looks. Tall and wiry, with long golden locks, dawn-blue eyes, and fair skin, the young Leonardo, as the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari puts it, “displayed great physical beauty, which has never been sufficiently praised.” With an amiable personality that rivaled his appearance, he entertained friends by singing in an “exceptionally harmonious” voice and playing the lyre with skill.
As part of an informal group of Renaissance rap artists called poets alla burchia (which translates as “in a hurry, higgledy-piggledy”), Leonardo improvised verses in a ribald, satirical style called burchiellesco. He recorded jokes in his notebooks and wrote wry essays, including one on “Why Dogs Willingly [the Italian translates into “Gladly”] Sniff One Another’s Bottom.” (The reason: The smell lets them know whether the dog is being fed meat by a powerful and rich master.)
Only Leonardo’s relationship with his stern father, whom he referred to as “Ser Piero” throughout his life, seemed neither light nor easy. Although he could have gone through the legal process of changing Leonardo’s illegitimate status, Ser Piero never did so. A telling anecdote from Vasari’s Le Vite (as his The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors was known) suggests some strain between father and son.
When a peasant in Vinci asked Ser Piero to arrange for a painting on a small round shield he had fashioned, the notaio assigned the task to his son. Leonardo decided to concoct an image that would terrify anyone who encountered it. Delving into a pile of dead reptiles, lizards, snakes, bats, and other such creatures—a collection only an unsqueamish boy could assemble—he combined their limbs, Frankenstein style, to create a hideous hybrid, “a most horrible and frightening monster with poisonous breath that set the air on fire . . . emerging from a cleft in a dark rock, vomiting fire from its gaping jaws, its eyes blazing, and poisonous vapors emanating from its nostrils.”
Before allowing Ser Piero into the room, Leonardo positioned the shield on his easel and shaded the window so the light fell directly on the gruesome image. At first glance, his startled father thought he had encountered an actual beast and jumped back in fright.
“This work has served the purpose for which it was made,” Leonardo said, perhaps with a satisfied smile.
A shaken Ser Piero took the shield but never gave it to the peasant, whom he mollified with an inexpensive substitute. More pragmatic than paternal, he sold Leonardo’s creation to some merchants in Florence for 100 ducats. They, even wilier, charged the Duke of Milan three hundred for the piece.
Surrounded by the soaring works of Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, and so many other masters, young Leonardo breathed in the big ideas and grand visions that circulated in the air like cerebral oxygen. In Verrocchio’s bottega, he saw them emerge in tangible form.
The small-scale art factory turned out everything from paintings and statues to gilded baskets, wood chests, coats of arms, armor, candelabra, bells, headboards, and special commissions, such as a two-ton bronze globe hoisted, amid the fanfare of trumpets and choral chants, atop the cathedral dome. I get a sense of how such a workshop might have looked by peering into surviving structures in the artisans’ neighborhood around the church of Sant’ Ambrogio, many now occupied by laundromats and parking garages.
A cavernous room, noisy and dusty, smelling of paints and varnishes, would have opened onto the street. Apprentices clustered around easels, workbenches, turntables, grindstones, and kilns. Supplies were stacked on shelves, with sketches, plans, and models of works in progress perched in clear view. Chickens, whose eggs were mixed with dyes to make tempera paints, clucked underfoot.
Here, under the scrutiny of his thin-lipped and keen-eyed maestro, Leonardo learned the technical skills of an artist’s trade: how to make a pen from a goose quill, how to carve wood, draw figures, master perspective and proportion, hammer metal, grind stone, mold plaster, chisel marble, sculpt clay, select dyes, and meticulously prepare a wood panel for painting—as well as the fundamentals of chemistry, metallurgy, and engineering. Here he would also imbibe the spirit of a generation of innovators, the first to approach art from what we would call a scientific point of view. And here he would develop the habit of carrying a libriccino, a pocket-sized notebook not much bigger than a pack of cards, so that whatever his eyes observed, his fingers immediately translated into images.
At Verrocchio’s insistence, Leonardo would have worked for years with a metal-point stylus before picking up a paintbrush. When he did, his talent astounded even his teacher. According to Vasari, the luminous wide-eyed angel that Leonardo added to Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (now in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery) so surpassed anything from the painter’s own hand that he “never touched colors again, angered that a young boy understood them better than he did.”
Leonardo realized that this was the natural order of things. “He is a poor pupil,” he wrote, “who does not progress beyond his master.”
In 1472, Leonardo progressed, along with Sandro Botticelli and Perugino, to membership in the Compagnia di San Luca, the guild of artists named for the apostle believed to have painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary. Not long afterward, the twenty-year-old scrawled a rare expression of emotion on the back of a drawing of the Arno Valley: “Sono contento” (I am happy).
An official document describes Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini, who turned twenty-eight in 1472, simply as a vir nobilis (noble man). As such, he would have learned Latin, which he would use when serving from time to time as an arbiter in judicial proceedings, and at least enough mathematics for the transactions required for managing his holdings.
As was “the custom of gentlemen,” he had no other occupation. Like an estimated third of the members of Florentine elite families, Antonmaria collected rents and earnings from his rural estates, including a country house (casa signorile) in San Donato in Poggio, a small village about twenty miles south of Florence.
I could find no portraits of Antonmaria himself, but if he bore any family resemblance to the Francesco Gherardini painted by the Venetian artist Tintoretto in 1568, Lisa’s father would have looked every inch the aristocrat, with high cheekbones, a long nose, an arrogant mouth, neatly trimmed goatee, and an erect, broad-shouldered frame. As a cultured gentleman, he would have been expected to display “great artistry” in the three things the humanist Leon Battista Alberti considered paramount: “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking.”
These skills would have served Antonmaria well in securing his family’s best hope for financial security: an advantageous marriage. Fortunately for him, the ancient Gherardini pedigree—scorned during the era of the detested magnates—now qualified him as an eminently eligible suitor for an aspiring middle class eager to gild a plebeian family tree. The merchants and bankers who fancied themselves Florence’s new aristocrats coveted the one thing money could not buy: a noble lineage.
In 1465, at age twenty-one, Antonmaria wed Lisa di Giovanni Filippo de’ Carducci, from a solid, well-established Florentine family. She died in childbirth—a tragic and shockingly common occurrence. One in four Tuscan women—daughters and wives of the rich and the poor, the powerful and the pious—suffered this tragic fate. Parents lost the child whom they had watched over from birth; husbands, the mates with whom they had hoped to build a family and a future. But young widowers were expected and exhorted to move on and marry again.
In 1473, Antonmaria’s eye turned to one of “i più bei fiori” (the most beautiful flowers) of Florence, Caterina Rucellai. Centuries earlier the arrogant Gherardini magnates might have sneered at her ancestors as pretentious nuova gente (new people) flaunting their recently acquired riches with gaudy baubles and ostentatious homes. But by Antonmaria’s day, few families could boast a greater fortune or a grander house than the Rucellai.
I think of Antonmaria the first time I visit the imposing Rucellai palazzo on Via della Vigna Nuova to attend a book presentation—and not only because I spot the chic Gherardini shop (no relation to Lisa’s descendants) selling the brand’s high-end handbags across the street. As I climb to the piano nobile, or second floor, I wonder if he would have been as impressed as I by the magisterial staircase and immense carved coat-of-arms.
Wandering through vast, highly ornamented chambers, I chat with a fellow guest, who asks in Italian if I realize that the original architect was the renowned humanist Leon Battisti Alberti.
“No,” I reply.
Not only did he design the house, she informs me, but the Rucellai hired Alberti to create the dramatic geometric facade for their parish church of Santa Maria Novella. In what she clearly considered commoner crassness, they insisted that the Rucellai name be chiseled into the multicolored marble front in letters three feet high.
“Do you know how they made their money?” she inquires.
Again, I shake my head no. With a mischievous grin, she regales me with the tale of a Florentine merchant named Alamanno, who was returning from the Middle East in the early thirteenth century. One day while he “faceva pipì” (was making peepee), as she puts it, Alamanno noticed that a spray of urine altered the color of a particular lichen called uricella, which grew in the Canary Islands. The new shade was a remarkable red, deeper than scarlet, richer than purple, brighter than rose.
When Alamanno brought the plant home to Florence, his clever relatives devised a way to use the chemicals in urine to dye fabric—“all’oricello”—and produce a crimson that became the most exclusive and expensive of hues, the prized favorite of cardinals, kings, and the pope himself. Jealously guarding their secret and establishing a money-churning monopoly, the family became known as the “oricellai,” a name that morphed into Rucellai.
By the fifteenth century, the head of the family, Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai (1403–1481), ranked as the third-richest man in Florence and one of its greatest philanthropists, as proud of spending his money as of earning it.
“There are two principal things men do in this world,” he once declared. “One is procreating; the other is building.” The Rucellai, who spawned twenty-six households, did both extremely well. Giovanni also mastered the art of cultivating strategic marital alliances as deftly as Tuscans tended their orchards and vineyards. In 1466 he managed to heal a breach between the two families by marrying one of his many offspring into the Medici parentado (kinship network), the most exclusive in Florence.
For the wedding of his son Bernardo to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sister Nannina in 1466, Giovanni Rucellai built an elaborate pavilion (now home to a trendy shop on Via della Vigna Nuova). Under its gracious loggia, “the finest and most beautiful ever to grace a wedding banquet,” some five hundred guests danced and ate not one but two gargantuan feasts, a midday repast and an evening banquet—almost twenty dishes in all. The extravaganza, one of the most elaborate and expensive in a generation, violated almost every provision of the sumptuary laws, from the limits on guests to the number of courses that could be served. The bill came to a whopping 1,185 florins, but the investment paid off.
“Since I became the relation of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici [father of Nannina and Lorenzo],” Giovanni Rucellai wrote, “I have been honored, esteemed, and well-regarded.” He wasn’t the only one to benefit.
In 1473, Giovanni’s son Bernardo Rucellai requested a favor of his brother-in-law Lorenzo de’ Medici on behalf of a cousin. Mariotto di Piero Rucellai (1434–1520) was hoping for a seat as a prior on the governing Signoria “in order to improve the marriage prospects” of his daughters. Lorenzo made it happen.
Three weeks after his cousin Bernardo’s intercession, Mariotto began a two-month term of office as a prior. In the same year this highly regarded public servant, who would be appointed to numerous government posts throughout Tuscany, bestowed the hand of his daughter Caterina on one of the marital prospects he had hoped to attract. The suitor, Antonmaria Gherardini, would bring a touch of class to a dynasty that had parlayed a plant and pipì into a commercial empire.
Antonmaria could have anticipated many potential benefits from the match. With entry into the Rucellai parentado, doors might open, debts might be forgiven, lucrative appointments might be made. The wedding, although less spectacular than the Medici nuptials, would have feted the young couple with merry exuberance.
When Caterina soon became pregnant, the future glowed even brighter. Antonmaria and his extended family delighted in the welcome news. But their all-too-fleeting joy soon turned to sorrow. Caterina died in childbirth. The teenager, clad in sumptuous fashions every day on earth, entered the Great Sea of eternity in a plain white muslin gown. The law allowed no adornments—no silk, silver, or gold, not even some fancy ribbons.
The death of another young spouse may have devastated Antonmaria. “I am so oppressed by grief and pain for the most bitter and unforeseen fate of my most sweet wife,” one of his contemporaries wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici after a similar loss, “that I myself do not know where I am.” For the second time, Antonmaria sadly donned a mantello grande, a great mourning cloak that fell to the ground with a hood to cover the face.
As he stood among weeping relatives in the Rucellai Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Antonmaria Gherardini could never have anticipated how curiously the future would unfold. In two decades the extended Rucellai kin would again gather to mourn another of Mariotto’s daughters. Born two years after the death of Caterina Rucellai Gherardini, young Camilla Rucellai would die just as unexpectedly as the older sister she never knew, leaving behind an eighteen-month-old son and another grieving widower, Francesco del Giocondo.
In 1473, Lisa Gherardini’s future husband was behaving—and occasionally misbehaving—like any eight-year-old Florentine boy. Along with his two older brothers, Francesco del Giocondo would have raced through alleyways, swam and fished in the Arno, and pummeled other boys in bruising street games, including a precursor of soccer played, as one chronicler described it, “more with the fists than the feet.”
When a winter blizzard blanketed the city in white, Francesco and other Florentine lads clamored out of houses, schools, and workshops to carve snow lions—either in the shape of the living beasts once kept in a “lion-house” on the Via del Leone (Lion Street) or of the Commune’s emblematic Marzocco, a regal seated lion with one paw resting on a shield. Florentine troops carried a stone statue of the Marzocco with them into battle and often forced defeated foes to kiss its backside. At times the townspeople would set a crown on the statue’s head as a sign that freedom was the only king Florentine citizens would ever accept.
For merchants’ sons like Francesco and his brothers, learning to be good citizens of Florence meant learning to be good businessmen. A tutor probably taught the del Giocondo boys reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. At about age ten they went to a scuola d’abaco to learn to work the abacus, a prototype of the calculator, essential for currency exchanges and other financial transactions. The brothers acquired a deeper understanding of the trade from their father and uncles in the family shops—a commonplace experience in Florence, but shocking to outsiders.
“The highest citizens who govern the state go to their silk botteghe and work the silk for all to see,” marveled Marco Foscari, a visitor from Venice. “Their children are in the bottega all day, in their smocks, carrying sacks and baskets of silk.”
Even after finishing his own professional apprenticeship, Leonardo continued to work with Verrocchio. Around 1474 (a date, like so many in his career, still in dispute) the young artist began his first portrait—and his first masterpiece. Its subject, Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1457–1520), another donna vera of Florence, was born about twenty years before Lisa Gherardini into immense wealth and privilege. Her grandfather had served as general manager for the bank of his friend Cosimo de’ Medici. Her father, a humanist intellectual and art patron as well as a banker, reported a fortune second only to that of the Medici.
In the stately Benci palazzo, Ginevra and her six brothers received a superb education in literature, mathematics, music, Latin, and perhaps Greek. At ten, after her father’s death, Ginevra continued her studies as a boarding student at one of Florence’s exclusive convents, Le Murate (for the “walled-in ones”), renowned for its nuns’ exquisite embroidery and angelic singing.
At about age sixteen, Ginevra left the convent school to marry a cloth trader. Young humanists, including Lorenzo de’ Medici, wrote verses in praise of her beauty and wit. She also attracted a devotee whom she may or may not have welcomed: Bernardo Bembo, the married, middle-aged Venetian ambassador to Florence, who first beheld the young beauty at a Medici joust.
Despite a wife and son in Florence and a mistress and love child elsewhere, Bembo threw himself into a public courtship of Ginevra—a not uncommon and completely platonic Renaissance diversion. He, rather than Ginevra’s husband, may have hired Leonardo to capture her allure in a painting. (Many years later, some believe, a similarly smitten admirer of Lisa Gherardini—none other than the youngest son of Lorenzo de’ Medici—may have urged Leonardo to paint her portrait as a similar tribute.) Bembo also commissioned ten poems in Ginevra’s honor by members of the Medici literary circle.
Like only a few women of her day, “La Bencia” wrote poetry herself, but only one enigmatic fragment survives: “I beg for mercy, and I am a wild tiger.” Leonardo’s unsettling painting captures the tigress’s mystique: a proud and perfect head, heavy-lidded feline eyes, an icy and unflinching gaze, a brooding expression, skin smoothed into perfection by his own hand. Masses of the ringlets that would become his trademark twirl around her pale face, set against the background of a juniper tree—ginepro in Italian, a play on her name and perhaps her prickly character as well. On the portrait’s reverse, Leonardo painted a “device,” an emblem of laurel and palm enclosing a sprig of juniper—a poetic representation of Bembo entwined with Ginevra—and an inscription, VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT (She adorns her virtue with beauty).
When I think of Ginevra de’ Benci and Lisa Gherardini, the two Florentine women who grace Leonardo’s portraits, their differences strike me first. Although both married successful merchants, Ginevra’s husband hardly merits a mention in accounts of her life. Unlike Lisa, who would care for a stepson and give birth six times, Ginevra had no children—by choice, some suggest. A note from a gentleman complimenting her poetry chides Ginevra, who “from excessive haughtiness . . . refuses to present us mortals with descendants.”
The aloof, pale beauty may have suffered a chronic illness or a breakdown of some sort that compelled her to leave Florence. Lorenzo de’ Medici mentions her tears, sighs, and “blessed madness” and commends her for fleeing the city, “aflame with every vice.”
Years ago, when I first beheld Ginevra’s portrait, the only painting by Leonardo in the United States, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., I admired its style but not its subject. But as I learned more about Ginevra, I detected hints of an indomitable spirit, perhaps not unlike Margherita Datini’s, behind her frosty features. As feminist scholars observe, she may have represented a new, independent-minded breed of Renaissance woman.
After her husband’s death in 1505, Ginevra reportedly became a “tertiary,” or lay nun. When she died around 1520, she was “vested,” or dressed in a nun’s habit, a special privilege reserved for pious laywomen, and buried in Le Murate. I began to wonder if she and Lisa had more in common than I had assumed. Or could it be mere coincidence that the two young Florentines captured by Leonardo’s brush chose to spend eternity in nunneries?
However different their subjects, the paintings share unmistakable similarities. In both works, Leonardo breaks the rules of traditional portraiture. Rejecting the conventional profile pose used in earlier, stylized works, he presents both real women in a three-quarter view. Rather than looking demurely downward, they gaze directly at or almost through an observer. Although both undoubtedly owned fancier gowns and impressive jewels, they appear in plain, even somber, dress. In Ginevra’s portrait, Leonardo merges shades together in a suggestive technique called sfumato, literally “evaporated into smoke,” that he would perfect in the Mona Lisa. And he sets both women against a dreamlike landscape that suggests psychological as well as physical depths.
In 1475, at age forty-eight, Leonardo’s father, the twice-widowed Ser Piero da Vinci, married his third wife, seventeen-year-old Margherita Giulli. The following year Leonardo, after twenty-four years as an only child, acquired a half brother—and lost any possible claim to his father’s estate. Perhaps even more unsettling, psychologists suggest, might have been his sense of losing a favored place in Ser Piero’s life.
Within a few years the prospering notaio moved to a large palazzo on Via Ghibellina, near the home of Lisa Gherardini’s grandparents. Its rooms filled rapidly. Although he had not lived under his father’s roof for years, Leonardo may well have shaken his head in dismay at the arrival of baby after baby after baby after baby. Decades into the future he would find himself locked in a bitter legal battle with these step-siblings and others young enough to be his own grandchildren.
Leonardo’s first run-in with the law came in April of 1476. Florence’s vice squad—the detested Office of the Night and Conservers of the Morality of Monasteries—investigated an anonymous denunciation in one of the tamburi, the boxes originally set up to snare troublemaking magnates like the Gherardini. Along with three other young men (one related to Lorenzo de’ Medici), Leonardo was accused of having sex with a seventeen-year-old apprentice goldsmith named Iacopo Saltarelli, who, according to the complaint, “pursues many immoral activities and consents to satisfy those persons who request such sinful things from him.”
Sex between men was so common in Renaissance Florence that “Florenzer” had become German slang for a homosexual. The intensely masculine city displayed unabashed appreciation for male as well as female beauty, for the bulge of a muscular thigh in tights as much as the curve of an ivory bosom in a low-cut dress. Many artists and humanists were widely believed to be homosexual, as their works sometimes revealed. A Florentine contemplating young Michelangelo’s sculpture of an alluring Bacchus commented, “Buonarroti could not have sinned more with a chisel.”
Yet the Commune created a judicial magistracy—the Office of the Night, one of the few such criminal agencies in Europe—solely to pursue and prosecute sodomites. Every year from 1452 to 1502 anonymous accusers denounced an average of 400 men and boys; some 55 to 60 were convicted of sodomy. Punishments ranged from a fine for an initial arrest, to flogging through the streets, to death by burning for a fifth offense.
Leonardo and his friends may have been jailed briefly, although the only evidence is a sketch he made of “a device for unhinging a prison door from the inside—imagined while sitting amidst the stinking, vermin-ridden straw.” The court dismissed the charges against the young men two months later for lack of a witness, perhaps with some deft string-pulling by an embarrassed Ser Piero or the powerful Medici.
Was Leonardo gay? He never married or had children, surrounded himself with handsome young men, and doted on comely protégés, but we know little else. The artist veiled the intimate details of his life with a curtain of discretion so impenetrable that no historian or psychologist has ever pulled it open—although many have tried.
Early biographers presented the artist as asexual. “Leonardo would marry no mistress but painting,” one wrote, “nor beget any children but the works he performed.” Some quote Leonardo’s own words as evidence for his abstinence. “The act of copulation and the organs that serve therein are distinguished by such hideousness,” he observed, “that were it not for the charms of the faces, the ornaments of the participants, and the power of lust, humankind would cease.”
Perhaps the question shouldn’t be the nature of Leonardo’s sexual orientation but whether it made any difference in his works. When I ask the opinion of a gay art historian in the San Francisco Bay Area, he pauses before answering.
“It may have mattered with a painting like Mona Lisa,” he says slowly. “In Leonardo’s eyes, she wasn’t someone to be desired. He looked at her in a different way than other men. This may be one reason why he could see—and paint—Lisa Gherardini, not as an object or an ideal but as a fully realized human being.” It was a perspective on la donna vera that I had never considered.
As a human being, Leonardo, already stigmatized by his illegitimacy and lack of a classical education, may have felt stung by the sodomy accusation. Whether by choice or circumstance, he seems to have become increasingly isolated. In a cri de coeur from this time, Leonardo lamented, “I am without any friends.”
By the middle of the 1470s, Lorenzo de’ Medici had reason to reflect on another line from one of his canticles: “Of tomorrow, who can say?” The future seemed uncertain at best. The prince of pageantry had proved disastrously inept as a banker. With the loss of hundreds of thousands of florins in bad loans, several branches of the family bank were hemorrhaging money. Lorenzo sparred openly with Pope Sixtus IV, who canceled the Medici’s lucrative Vatican account.
In 1478 some disgruntled Florentines, led by the Pazzi, a rival banking clan, decided that the time was ripe for a coup. The Pope offered covert support—on the condition that no one be killed. Despite this caveat, Archbishop Francesco Salviati of Pisa, nursing a deep contempt for the Medici, helped hatch a brazen assassination plot.
Antonmaria Gherardini, far removed from Florence’s internecine politics, would have known nothing of such stratagems. Focused on family concerns, the widower had taken a third bride. Lucrezia del Caccia, from another well-established Chianti family with holdings near the Gherardini lands, was, at twenty-one, pushing the upper age of desirability. Despite his tragic marital history, thirty-two-year-old Antonmaria may have seemed her best—if not her last—chance to wed.
Settled with his wife in the little low-rent house on smelly Via Sguazza, Antonmaria never could have anticipated an impending cataclysm. In one of history’s minor unforeseeable consequences, the Pazzi conspiracy and the war it triggered would devastate his family’s finances and jeopardize the Gherardini’s future.
On the morning of April 26, 1478, in Florence’s immense Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Lorenzo de’ Medici took a place just to the right of the high altar for Sunday Mass. His brother Giuliano, who came in late, stood some twenty or thirty yards farther back. The dashing bachelor may have decided to sleep in after a night of carousing, but two of his pals—the banker Francesco de’ Pazzi, so tiny he was called Franceschino (little Frankie), and a ne’er-do-well gambler named Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli—thumped on his door and practically yanked him out of bed and into his clothes. As they scurried along the streets, Pazzi wrapped an arm around Giuliano to check for protective armor under his doublet. He wasn’t wearing any.
Just before the holiest moment in the sacred liturgy, a hand bell chimed to herald the elevation of the host. At this signal, as Lorenzo and Giuliano bowed their heads, four men pulled out their daggers.
“Die, traitor!” cried Bernardo, plunging his blade into Giuliano’s chest. Little Francesco de’ Pazzi began slashing at Giuliano in such a frenzy that he stabbed his own thigh. Two priests just behind Lorenzo lunged at him with their knives, but the agile athlete, only slightly grazed, spun away. Wrenching off his cloak, he swirled it over his arm to form a shield and drew his sword. His friends rushed toward Lorenzo, swept him into the sacristy, and barred the door.
“Popolo e libertà!” (For the people and liberty!) the Pazzi and their supporters yelled, expecting the confused congregation to rally to their rebellious cause. Instead, as Lorenzo showed his face, the Florentines shouted their support for the Medici with cries of “Palle! Palle!” (for the balls on the family coat-of-arms). Francesco de’ Pazzi fled to his uncle’s house, where a rabid crowd snatched and kicked him, then brought him, naked and bleeding, to the Palazzo Vecchio. There Archbishop Salviati, who had led a band of mercenaries to the town hall to confront the priors, was already in restraints.
When the great bell tolled, the mooing of La Vacca drew all of Florence’s men into the Piazza della Signoria. Ser Piero da Vinci would have rushed the few blocks from his home on Via Ghibellina. Leonardo may have arrived with some fellow artists. Antonmaria Gherardini would have taken more time to make his way across the Arno. As the square filled, an executioner slipped a noose over Francesco de’ Pazzi’s head, tied the other end to the strong metal transom dividing one of the windows, and hurled the pint-sized banker into the air.
Archbishop Salviati, still in his purple ecclesiastic robes, soon joined him. Eyewitnesses reported that, either in rage or a crazed attempt to save himself, the prelate bit into Pazzi’s naked body as it swung next to him. As the rope tightened, he kept his teeth clenched and died with a huge lump of flesh in his mouth. The artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, just three at the time, recalled his father hoisting him onto his shoulders for a better view of the dangling bodies.
A raging mob dragged other conspirators through the streets, slit their noses, and hacked off their hands and genitals. At one point 16 corpses hung from the Palazzo Vecchio windows; another 68 disemboweled bodies swelled and rotted in the piazza below. In all, 270 Florentines died. The patriarch of the Pazzi family was killed, thrust into a hole, dug up again, and then dumped in the Arno. Lorenzo confiscated the Pazzi property and exterminated the family name, forbidding anyone even to pronounce it.
Leonardo might have hoped to paint the large “pittura infamata” on the Bargello wall of the eight leading Pazzi conspirators, seven with nooses around their necks, and Bernardo, who managed to escape, dangling by his foot. Instead the prized commission—like so many others—went to the Medici favorite, Sandro Botticelli.
Pope Sixtus IV’s retribution for the execution of his archbishop was swift and merciless. Calling Lorenzo “a suckling of perdition,” he excommunicated him and the entire city of Florence and ordered the seizure of all Medici assets in Rome, including the family bank. Under the Pope’s edict, anyone anywhere who bought a bolt of Florentine cloth or even accepted or exchanged Florentine coins would become a moral leper. The bishops of Tuscany defiantly issued a decree of their own excommunicating the Pope.
Sixtus IV decided that it was time to topple the arrogant Medici once and for all. Since his Vatican forces were too small, he formed an alliance with King Ferdinand I of Naples, whose son Alfonso marched a combined army of papal and Neapolitan troops into Chianti, south of Florence. The invading troops set fire to fields of crops, plundered houses, and slaughtered livestock. As they trampled across the Gherardini estates, they sacked the mill and stole the harvest.
“For love of war,” Antonmaria Gherardini scrawled angrily on his tax statement, “I have no income. Our houses have been burned, our possessions smashed, and our workers and livestock lost.”
When his wife Lucrezia became pregnant later that year, Antonmaria would have had a new reason for worry. If the child survived and turned out to be a girl, he would face the stinging humiliation of not having enough money to set aside a dowry at her birth.
At first I didn’t understand the implications of such a default. Even if a girl couldn’t snare a husband, I figured that an “old maid” could surely remain at home. No, a friend from an old Florentine family explained to me. A spinster—zita, zitella, or zitellona in Italian—had no place in Renaissance society.
Unless a father could provide a dowry and “lead a daughter to honor”—a sacrosanct responsibility—a girl of the upper classes would descend into a social limbo. No groom would want her; no clan would welcome her. Her own family couldn’t keep her. The very existence of an unmarried daughter, even if she retreated to the upper floor of her father’s palazzo, would jeopardize her relatives’ honor and status. Among the “best people,” as a historian bluntly comments, families did not include females over the age of twenty who were not married.
“Maritate o monacate!” (Marry or become a nun!) Tuscans exhorted their daughters. Once convents had been reserved for the least desirable of girls—the ugly, infirm, deformed, or disabled, those a preacher derided as “the scum and vomit of society.” But by the late fifteenth century, nunneries had become dumping grounds for undowered virginal girls from respectable homes. Elite families were more likely to confine their daughters within convent walls than allow them to marry downward. As many as half of upper-class girls, by some estimates, ended up in the fifty or so local convents, with reputations ranging from spiritual to salacious.
However alluring his daughter’s face, however fetching her figure, Antonmaria Gherardini might have feared that without a dowry she would have to live out her days—as his own sister did—in eternal anonymity behind convent walls. He could not have been more mistaken about the fate awaiting his Lisa.