On a mid-June day in 1479, a midwife—called a levatrice for her “lifting” (levare) of a baby into the light—gently washed the newborn daughter of Antonmaria and Lucrezia Gherardini with warm white wine and swaddled her tightly in white linen. Only her pink rosebud face peeked out from her wrappings when her father took the priceless bundle in his arms. Like all Christian fathers in Florence, thirty-five-year-old Antonmaria faced a sacred duty: to whisk his newborn to the Battistero di San Giovanni (Baptistery of St. John) before dangers or devils could snatch her eternal soul.
The walk from dank Via Sguazza to the spiritual heart of Florence usually takes twenty to thirty minutes. I know. I’ve trekked it at different times and different seasons. But on this glorious day of days, Antonmaria’s was no ordinary stroll. In an age when birth swept mother and child perilously near death, Florentines welcomed each new life with unbridled exultation.
Dressed in gaily colored brocade gowns and cloaks, with banners fluttering in the air, a high-spirited crowd of amici, parenti, e vicini (friends, relatives, and neighbors) accompanied the town’s youngest citizens on the first journey of their brand-new lives. Only the exhausted mother remained at home in the care of an aptly named guardadonna (literally, “lady-watcher”).
Antonmaria Gherardini would have led his merry troupe past the humming looms of the giant wool houses on Via Maggio, along scruffy Borgo San Jacopo, nicknamed Borgo Pidiglioso (Louse Place), into the noisy crush of the markets and shops on the Ponte Vecchio. Housewives haggling over the price of tripe may have turned to smile. Butchers paused, razor-sharp blades in midair, to shout congratulations. Some well-wishers would have spontaneously joined the parade.
Crossing the Arno, Antonmaria could have glimpsed the stump of the Gherardini medieval fortress tower. On Por Santa Maria, then as now a main commercial street, he passed the textile shops of the del Giocondo brothers, where fourteen-year-old Francesco, the boy who would become his son-in-law, was learning the fundamentals of the family silk business.
Ahead loomed the domed cathedral, a great clay-bricked, white-ribbed hump of a mountain towering above the knot of city streets. Across from its unfinished facade stood the Baptistery of St. John, Florence’s oldest and holiest monument. Antonmaria Gherardini, like other Florentines of his time, would have believed that the Baptistery was an ancient temple of Mars converted to Christian use. Not so, I learn from local historians, although the ancient Romans may have buried their dead nearby.
To Florentine Catholics, who baptized all newborns here by law until well into the twentieth century, this blessed site celebrated life. Constructed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, its octagonal shape represented eight days: the six during which God created heaven and earth and all that inhabits them, the seventh when He rested, and the eighth, the eternal day that never ends.
As Florence prospered, the ancient rite of baptism had evolved into yet another opportunity for over-the-top ostentation. Status-craving citizens bought so many candles, designated so many godparents, and presented such extravagant gifts that the city fathers clamped down on every excess, including the number of courses to be served at the postbaptism banquet. Dismissing the laws as an attack on their right to assert family honor, indignant Florentines generally ignored the restrictions.
Antonmaria Gherardini’s newborn daughter, nestled in the arms of one of her godparents—probably two godmothers and a godfather, as the Church recommended for a girl—could not enter the Baptistery’s hallowed interior with an uncleansed soul. On the entrance steps a priest exhorted any unclean spirits to flee and the Holy Spirit to come in their stead. Her godparents, bound to her almost as closely as blood relatives, pronounced the infant’s second, or middle, name: Camilla.
The Gherardini party, modest compared to many, entered the vast open hall, an awe-inspiring testament to the splendor of God’s grace—and to Florence’s wealth. Overhead shimmered the celestial ceiling, painted in gold and then covered with glass mosaics to form a huge Italo-Byzantine image of Christ the King and Judge. To His left a hideous horned demon with serpents writhing out of its ears devoured sinners; to His right devout souls soared heavenward.
Also on display were a relic of Christ’s true cross, believed to be a gift from Charlemagne; gleaming silver candlesticks atop a silver altar; and Florence’s greatest military treasures, including the carroccio, the war chariot that accompanied its troops, and battle standards captured from enemies. In this civic church, Florence crowned poets, vested magistrates, blessed soldiers before battle, and honored troops returning from war.
At the octagonal marble font, the godparents of the youngest Gherardini renounced Satan and declared belief in God in the baby’s name. In the chill of the towering hall, the priest sprinkled holy water on the infant. With this blessing, her soul, otherwise doomed to what Dante described as “untormented gloom” in a limbo of endless sighs, entered the kingdom of God, perhaps the only residence Florentines of the time would choose over their city.
When the priest asked how the child would be called, her godparents intoned her first name, “Lisa,” a tribute to Antonmaria’s mother, who had died a few years before.
Although Lisa’s baptism has been well documented, I feel a compelling urge to see the actual record for myself.
“Don’t waste your time looking through baptismal ledgers in Florence,” an archivist advises. “You can find it online when you get back home.”
With some trepidation, on my return to California I take up the challenge, still daunting to me, of digging through Italian digital archives. As I position myself before my computer, my apprehension intensifies. With trembling fingers, I search for the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze. A few clicks bring me to the cathedral’s “risorse digitali” (digital resources) and its “registri battesimali” (baptismal registries). Zeroing in on the ledger for June of 1479, I hit the key to visualizzare the list—and hold my breath.
With an abracadabra swiftness, a page of names, written in the small, florid script I’d first encountered in the Archive of the State of Florence, materializes on my screen. Six lines below the bold heading of “Martedì Adi XV di Giugno 1479” (Tuesday the fifteenth day of June 1479), I spot the names Lisa & Camilla di Antonmaria Gherardini di San Pancrazio (an old Gherardini neighborhood in Florence).
Leaping out of my chair, I dance in excitement. More than 530 years later, at a distance of some 6,100 miles, in a country yet to be discovered at the time of her birth, I have found the original record of Lisa Gherardini’s entry into the world.
The donna vera had never seemed more real to me.
Lisa’s addition to the rolls of Florentine citizens may have been marked less formally. As new fathers had for centuries, Antonmaria Gherardini would have selected a bean—white for a girl rather than black for a boy—and dropped it into a designated receptacle, possibly at or near the Baptistery. Sometimes fathers didn’t bother to acknowledge the birth of a daughter. In this patriarchal society, families exulted more in the arrival of a son, who could continue the male line, take over the business or farm, and increase a clan’s prestige and wealth by acquiring a well-bred bride with a sizable dowry.
Yet as their letters and ricordanze reveal, many Florentine fathers adored their little girls. After two heart-wrenching losses of wives and babies, Antonmaria must have looked down on his newly baptized daughter and swelled with an emotion he had never before experienced. At least for the moment, relief and joy would have washed away worries about his finances and her future. The new babbo (daddy) might not even have been able to find words for what he felt.
“Who would believe, except by the experience of his own feelings, how great and intense is the love of a father toward his children?” asked the humanist Leon Battista Alberti in his classic treatise On the Family. “No love is more unshakeable, more constant, more complete, or more vast than the love which a father bears his children.”
Antonmaria’s household would have celebrated for weeks. The new mother, Lucrezia, would have held court in the bedroom. Some visitors may have tucked coins into baby Lisa’s swaddling clothes to bring her riches. Others could have brought a branch of coral or a dog’s tooth, believed to ward off evil, for her to wear on a little gold chain around her neck. As the women chatted and fussed over mother and child, the men—most dressed in the simple lucco, the long, well-cut robe of the old nobility—would have talked of darker things.
It had been a terrible year. Lorenzo de’ Medici’s war with Pope Sixtus IV and his Neapolitan allies was crippling the city’s commerce and draining its coffers. Branches of the major Florentine banks throughout Europe closed. The textile industry shuttered mills and warehouses. Supplies no longer streamed into the city.
Even the rich were suffering. The tycoon Giovanni Rucellai, who had declared 60,000 florins in taxable assets (mainly real estate) in 1473, just six years earlier, was plunging toward bankruptcy. The news from the countryside was even worse. The papal troops that had invaded Chianti like locusts were ransacking nearby estates. Antonmaria Gherardini’s wheat fields lay fallow, his livestock untended, his vines unpicked.
I catch up on the news of these day-to-day developments through an observant diarist named Luca Landucci (1436–1516). From his apothecary shop at the Canto de’ Tornaquinci, near the mansion of the Rucellai (to whom he paid rent for years), the sharp-eyed onlooker watched the comings and goings of his fellow citizens, jotted down their comments, and catalogued the events of the day in pithy notations that strike me as the Renaissance equivalent of tweets.
“Chianti was pillaged,” reads one entry from 1479. After a seven-month siege, Landucci reports, invading troops conquered Colle di Val d’Elsa near the Gherardini estates and laid waste to more of the neighboring lands. But then came reason for hope. In a daring move, Lorenzo de’ Medici traveled to Naples to negotiate face-to-face with King Ferdinand I, whose son Alfonso had led the invasion of Tuscany.
Several weeks later, “a herald arrived in Florence with an olive branch,” symbolizing that peace talks had begun. When Lorenzo returned home with an agreement, the city hailed him as a triumphant hero.
“There were great rejoicings with bonfires and ringing of bells,” Landucci records. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had been addressed along with the most elite Florentines as La Magnificenza Vostra (your Magnificence), became the one and only Il Magnifico (the Magnificent).
For Lorenzo, vengeance was even more gratifying than his diplomatic triumph. Through the long arm of the Medici enterprises, he set in motion a manhunt for Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, one of the Pazzi conspirators. On the fatal April morning in 1478, after stabbing Giuliano de’ Medici, the assassin had lunged toward Lorenzo but was intercepted by Francesco Nori, head of the Medici bank in Florence. Bernardo skewered the banker with a thrust to his stomach.
In the chaos and carnage that followed, Bernardo jumped on his horse and galloped as fast and as far as he could. Eventually, he made his way to Constantinople, where he was arrested by order of Lorenzo’s ally, the Sultan of the Grand Turk, and hauled back to Florence. On December 28, 1479, the executioner tied a noose around his neck and flung the traitor from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio.
We find a sketch of the limp body in Leonardo’s notebooks, along with these notes:
A tan-colored small cap.
A doublet of black serge.
A black jerkin with a lining.
A blue coat lined with fur of foxes’ breasts and the collar of the jerkin covered with black and red stippled velvet.
Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli;
black hose.
The young artist had grown from a beautiful boy into a bell’uomo, a stunning twenty-seven-year-old looking as if he’d stepped out of a fresco in his favored pink, rose, and purple robes, cut short to showcase his muscular legs even after fashion dictated longer lengths. An early biographer described him as “very attractive, well-proportioned, graceful, and good-looking,” with a “beautiful head of hair, curled and carefully combed in golden ringlets that fell to the middle of his chest.”
Leonardo’s father Ser Piero, widowed again, this time with four young sons and a daughter, may have orchestrated some lucrative commissions, including an altarpiece for the chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio, which Leonardo never completed. From the very beginning of his career, the artist acquired a reputation for not meeting deadlines or delivering promised works—although not for lack of ability or ambition.
In his notebook Leonardo copied these lines from Dante:
. . . he who uses up his life without achieving fame
Leaves no more vestige of himself on earth
Than smoke in the air
Or foam upon the water.
Leonardo was determined to become more than mere smoke or foam. “I wish to work miracles,” he once wrote. But his miraculously creative designs were often so complex and technically demanding that he never could complete them. “In his imagination,” the art historian Vasari explains, “he frequently formed enterprises so difficult and so subtle that they could not be entirely realized and worthily executed by human hands.”
Leonardo, who may still have felt a bit like a small-town boy gussied up in big-city finery, never won over the town’s highbrow humanist intellectuals. To them, he may have seemed a gifted but unschooled ignoramus, incapable even of conversing in Latin. Then Leonardo suffered what might have seemed to him a galling snub.
Pope Sixtus IV, reconciled with Lorenzo de’ Medici, requested a list of the best artists in Florence to work on the Vatican chapel that would be named “Sistine” for him. On Il Magnifico’s recommendation, Botticelli, Perugino, and a string of lesser painters packed their brushes and decamped to Rome for lucrative commissions. One man was conspicuously left behind: Leonardo da Vinci.
Il Magnifico sent the artist on a mission to Milan, a dangerous enemy during its centuries under the rule of the Visconti dukes. In 1450 a fierce warlord named Francesco Sforza, a family name derived from sforzare (to force), seized control of the city-state. Cosimo de’ Medici, Florence’s leader at the time, cultivated a mutually advantageous friendship.
By 1481, Francesco Sforza’s illegitimate son Ludovico (1452–1508) emerged as the victor in a hard-fought power struggle and became acting regent of Milan. As a tribute or token of friendship, Lorenzo de’ Medici commissioned Leonardo to create a special gift for the cosmopolitan ruler: a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head. The artist, who played the violinlike instrument “most divinely,” in Vasari’s words, delivered it personally.
Il Moro (the Moor), as burly, big-chinned Sforza was nicknamed, was impressed, but Leonardo was even more captivated by Milan, a prosperous big city of more than 80,000 residents that pulsed with energy and an invigorating spirit of intellectual innovation. Under Ludovico’s aegis, the duchy attracted a rich medley of scholars, scientists, architects, poets, artists, and musicians. In their admiring eyes, Leonardo possessed such an impressive wealth of talents that painting seemed just one.
When he applied for a ducal appointment, Leonardo didn’t present himself as just another dime-a-dozen artist. A hyperbolic résumé emphasized his expertise as a military engineer who could dig underground tunnels “without noise and following tortuous routes,” make “large bombards, mortars, and fire-throwing machines,” and create weapons of mass destruction that would “penetrate enemy ranks with their artillery and destroy the most powerful troops.”
Almost as an afterthought Leonardo mentioned his peacetime capabilities: “I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay; and in painting can do any kind of work.” He proposed completion of a stunning memorial to the Duke’s father, a gigantic bronze statue “that will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the lord your father of blessed memory and of the illustrious house of Sforza.”
Although he didn’t win an immediate position on the Sforza payroll, Leonardo, convinced that his destiny lay in Milan, left Florence around 1482. Lorenzo de’ Medici did nothing to stop him.
Lisa Gherardini turned three in 1482. Like other little girls of the upper classes, she would have learned to curtsy before she could count. Through a thousand reprimands and reminders, she would have mastered the knack of eating daintily with three fingers of the right hand and dabbing her lips with the edge of the long tablecloth.
Bathed in rose water and rubbed with scented oils, Lisa smelled like a flower and dressed like a miniature adult. Over a camicia (underblouse), she donned smaller cuts of her mother’s clothes—indicated by diminutive endings meaning “little”: a gamurrina (little at-home dress), cioppetta (little smock with wide sleeves), farsettino (little quilted vest), cintoletta (little belt), cappuccetto (little hood), and mantellino (little cape). If she was at all like my daughter, she may have delighted in twirling round and round so her full skirts billowed around her.
Soled calze (stockings) covered her legs, while cuffie, berrette, or cappellini (varieties of caps, bonnets, and little hats) protected her head. On her feet Lisa wore cloth or leather slippers (pianelle), although probably not a pair with heels, which were considered scandalous for a young girl; wooden-soled sandals; and boots. In the fall and winter, wooden clogs (zoccoli) protected her from muddy streets.
In her arms little Lisa would have cuddled her “bambino,” a terra-cotta figure of the infant Jesus dressed in velvet and brocade. Girls so treasured such “devotional toys,” as priests referred to them, that they tucked them into their wedding chests when they moved into a husband’s home.
Like other Florentine kids—called putti, a term adopted for cherubic infants in paintings or sculptures—Lisa would have played with balls, wooden horses, cymbals, artificial birds, gilded drums, “a thousand different kind of toys,” according to a priest who warned parents not to give children banks lest they foster avarice or dice lest they encourage gambling. Following clerical advice, Lisa’s mother would have brought her daughter to church, where she learned “to stand respectably and ornately” and to recite the Ave Maria and Pater Noster.
In 1483, at age four, Lisa became a big sister with the birth of her brother Giovangualberto, followed by Francesco, Ginevra, Noldo, Camilla, and Alessandra. Each arrival must have increased the pressure on Antonmaria Gherardini to squeeze more revenue from the six large properties he managed in Chianti, his own and several others rented from the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Their wheat, grape, and olive crops, together with earnings from livestock, provided his principal income—“hardly enough,” economist Giuseppe Pallanti observes, “to give him the dignified life” expected of the landed gentry.
Despite the financial strain, as a family with growing children, the Gherardini may not have been so different from other Florentines, including the richest of all. We get a charming inside peek at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s domestic life from a letter that seven-year-old Piero, his oldest son, wrote to his father in 1479 about his six siblings:
“Magnificent father mine,” he begins. “We are all well and studying. Giovanni is beginning to spell. By this letter you can judge where I am in writing. . . . Giuliano [an infant] laughs and thinks of nothing else. Lucrezia sews, sings, and reads; Maddalena knocks her head against the wall, but without doing herself any harm, Luisa begins to say a few little words, Contessina fills the house with her noise . . . nothing is wanting to us save your presence.”
In privileged households like that of the Medici, tutors taught sons and daughters grammar, math, logic, literature, and Latin, which humanists considered “the finishing touch to a girl’s charms.” Lisa’s education would have been more limited: reading (mainly psalters and inspirational books such as the Little Book of Our Lady), writing, simple arithmetic, poetry (to be recited by heart), singing, and mastering an instrument such as the lyre. Like girls of every class, she would have spent hours at needlework and embroidery, considered a display of skill and gentility—and a healthy substitute for the work the devil might otherwise find for idle hands.
Florentine children like Lisa also learned certain self-evident truths, accepted by all beyond doubt or discussion: The sun revolved around the earth. Their home planet was shaped like a sphere, just as Dante described in his Divine Comedy. Males by their very nature were dry and warm; females, wet and cool. Girls and women were also unquestionably, intrinsically inferior—in body, mind, and morals—and therefore in lifelong need of male direction.
If Florence reared its sons to be as fierce and fearless as its mascot lions, its daughters were groomed to be as elegant as its other state symbol—the lily, the epitome of the attributes that the city most valued in a woman: grace, purity, and beauty.
Lisa would have been admonished to walk, not run, and to keep her back straight, head up, and eyes down. The growing girl would acquire ways of investing every gesture with feminine sweetness and of presenting herself in the most fetching possible way—lifting her robe slightly in front to show her dainty feet, for instance, and pulling her mantle open from time to time “as a peacock spreads its tail.” And she would have learned to dance—whether a solemn and stately pavane or an exuberant jig with leaps and jumps. On May Day, dressed in a pretty spring frock with a garland of flowers on her head, Lisa would have joined the city’s other maidens sashaying with leafy branches in Piazza Santa Trinita.
Lisa’s mother would have initiated her in all aspects of domestic life, including how to cook, clean, shop, keep accounts, haggle with vendors, and manage servants. As the big sister in a household that could afford little help, she undoubtedly did a full share of daily chores, such as dusting, waxing, sweeping, and lending a hand in the kitchen.
Along with having more responsibilities, Lisa might have enjoyed more freedom than the daughters of Florence’s elite, some so closely monitored that they rarely left their homes except for religious services. Only in summers on a family’s country estates, amid the rasp of cicadas and the flicker of fireflies, could girls romp freely through fields of sunflowers, sing around evening bonfires, and wish upon a falling star on August 10, the Feast of San Lorenzo.
As I stroll through Florence’s historic centro, I imagine young Lisa dwarfed by its rusticated walls and mammoth palazzo doors, high and wide enough for horse and carriage. Like other Florentines, she would have learned to tell time by church bells—so many and so loud that the town enforced a strict schedule for their ringing. As she ventured into the jostling crowds, Lisa might have wrinkled her nose at the urban scents of horse dung mixed with straw, seldom washed bodies, and stale blood from butchers’ shops.
Her mother may have cautioned Lisa to keep an eye overhead for slop-pots being hurled from upstairs windows onto city streets. (Citizens regularly demanded recompense for ruined clothing.) Everywhere she went, she would have overheard the voluble Florentines bantering, gossiping, swearing (practically a local art form), swapping battute spiritose (witty remarks), and airing complaints on the platform called the “harangue” site in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.
As Lisa walked past the foreboding Bargello on the way to her grandparents’ house on Via Ghibellina, she might have passed a felon in a huge two-pointed dunce cap, riding backwards on a donkey on his way to public mockery and whipping in the market square. Occasionally she would have spotted a more solemn procession of black-hooded friars chanting as they led a condemned soul along the Via dei Malcontenti (Street of the Wretched) to the gallows. Outside the Basilica of Santa Croce, she would have seen the hungry poor in grubby tunics lined up for steaming bowls of minestra (soup) and chunks of bread.
Florence’s nonstop revels—parties, festivals, plays, games, ceremonies, processions—dazzled its youngest residents. Lisa may have marveled at sword-swallowers, acrobats, dancing bears, storytellers, and traveling actors, who would beat an iron pot to signal a performance. At the miracle plays performed on holy days, she would have watched saucer-eyed as a heavenly angel in a snow-white gown glided from a church ceiling or a martyr’s hands were magically cut off and then refastened.
In 1488, when Lisa was nine, a Middle Eastern sultan sent Lorenzo de’ Medici a remarkable gift that everyone in town crowded to see: a giraffe—“very large, very beautiful and pleasing,” Luca Landucci reports. Unfortunately, the gangly animal caught its head in some stable rafters and died of a broken neck. When excavation for the Strozzi palazzo, the largest in Florence, began in 1489, ten-year-old Lisa and her siblings, like many of their friends, may have tossed medals, flowers, and coins into its foundations to become part of the history of an edifice so monumental that Landucci predicted it would last “for the better part of eternity.”
While Lisa Gherardini was still playing childhood games, Francesco del Giocondo would have traveled to Rome and Lyon, where the family operated branches, to learn the daunting complexities of international trade. As Florence’s mercantile masters of the universe could—and did—rightfully boast, only the best-trained minds could set, monitor, track, and adjust prices, tariffs, exchange rates, inventories, and trade routes. And only the most stalwart of spirits could weather the constant risks of, well, weather—along with pirates, packhorses, plagues, highway robbers, political upheavals, bank failures, shipwrecks, and disasters of every natural and unnatural variety.
“Whoever is not a merchant and has not investigated the world and seen foreign nations and returned with possessions to his native home,” Gregorio Dati wrote of his fellow Florentine businessmen, “is considered nothing.”
Francesco and his relatives definitely amounted to something. Almost eighty del Giocondo men would serve in Florence’s highest public offices (forty in the four decades from 1480 to 1520)— a privilege open to only an estimated 5 percent of the population. Francesco himself, like ten other relatives, would don a prior’s ceremonial gold chain and a splendid cloak tailored of the best crimson wool and move into the Palazzo Vecchio for the standard two-month term on the Signoria, the very pinnacle of power—not just once, but twice.
Such success could have been woven only in Florence, a town that pursued both profit and beauty like drugs.
Once, I asked a Florentine friend why her hometown, of all possible places, became the cradle of the Renaissance. Without a word, she carefully extracted a strand from a shawl tossed over her shoulders and held it before me.
“Il filo,” she declared. The thread.
Wool, the first fiber to enrich Florence, dominated the cloth market for centuries. Then the city swooned for seta (silk), worn by Chinese emperors a thousand years before Moses was born, light as a breeze, smooth as a petal, iridescent as sunshine, with a sheen that danced with every movement. Catholic missionaries may have smuggled the first silkworms into Italy in hollow canes in the twelfth century; others say a Chinese bride brought them in her trousseau. Florence’s prize weavers—many exiled from Lucca in various political paroxysms—transformed raw silk into tactile fantasies by working thousands of ultrathin fibers into intricately patterned taffeta, damask, brocade, and velvet.
Florentine silk, epitomizing the elegance and refinement of the city itself, became the most coveted Renaissance luxury, more expensive even than precious gems. With the courts and clerics of Europe and the sultans of the Middle East clamoring for fabric, the city’s silk business grew into a 400,000-florin ($60 million) enterprise.
Curious about what the del Giocondo silk shops might have looked like, I visit the Antico Setificio Fiorentino (Old Florentine Silk Mill), a combination showroom and factory set among flower gardens in the old cloth-making neighborhood south of the Arno. As I enter, the inebriating perfume of raw silk floods my nostrils. All around me, bolts of cloth ripple from ceiling to floor in rivers of reds, purples, and indigos. Their luscious names tantalize the tongue: pink sapphire (rosa di zaffrone), Apollo’s hair (capel d’ Apollo), throat of the dove (gorgia di piccione), peach blossom (fior di pesco).
Modern technology cannot replicate these handwoven cloths and colors, Sabine Pretsch, the Setificio’s director, tells me. Lifting a piece of silk with weft and warp threads of two different hues, she swirls it back and forth so it changes color as if by magic in light and shadow. I have to resist a sudden urge to touch, press, stroke, rub, crinkle.
The clients in the del Giocondo shop, Pretsch notes, would have favored ermesino, a heavy taffeta used today for draperies, and thick velvets (velluti), highlighted with curlicues of fine gold or silver foil, “voided” with a pattern showing through, or “figured” with a combination of cut and uncut pile against a satin or brocade background.
Despite its high price tag, more cloth was unquestionably more desirable. While servants and slaves dressed in skimpy, ill-fitting outfits, prosperous Florentines wrapped themselves in reams of richly worked silk. A lady’s gown, falling in deep folds with a small train behind, enveloped her in some 35 braccia (an arm’s length, about two feet)—at 5 florins or more per braccia—of plush fabric. Even a simple house dress required 8 braccia, enough for a modern ball gown.
Although most Renaissance garments have disintegrated over time, Florentine silks survive in the paintings of the artists who “dressed” Madonnas, saints, nobles, and well-to-do patrons in rich brocades and intricately worked velvets. “The value of the cloth,” Pretsch explains, “made the paintings more valuable.”
In the adjacent mill, where hand-operated looms click and clack as regularly as a heartbeat, she shows me a large still-functional cylindrical warping machine, based on a sketch by Leonardo, who filled page after page of his notebooks with knots, braids, and patterns. When I learn that the multitalented artist had designed fabrics, I can’t help speculating that during his years in Florence, Leonardo may have consulted with its artisan weavers, perhaps even those in the del Giocondo shops—an unlikely but not unthinkable possibility.
When Leonardo left Florence in 1482, his list of belongings did not contain a single book. Within a few months of his arrival in Milan, a magnet for erudite scholars from the great universities of northern Italy, he recorded five books in his possession. Eventually, he would amass a library of more than two hundred volumes, a substantial number for a professor, let alone someone who defiantly declared himself “un uomo senza lettere” (an unlettered man).
The insatiably inquisitive artist—“the most relentlessly curious man in history,” in the influential twentieth-century art critic Sir Kenneth Clark’s description—plunged into a universe of new fields: anatomy, architecture, astronomy, geography, geology, mathematics, medicine, natural history, optics. But Leonardo soon ran into what seemed an insurmountable barrier: his lack of a formal education, particularly his limited knowledge of Latin, the language of science and scholarship. And so he embarked on what one historian describes as an “obstinate attempt of cultural emancipation” to learn what he needed to know in order to learn more.
With a flinty determination that reminds me of Margherita Datini’s dogged quest to achieve literacy, the thirtysomething student laboriously copied vocaboli latini (Italian words derived from Latin) into his notebooks, filling page after page of the Codex Trivulzianus, his earliest manuscript, which he referred to as “my book of words.” Even as Leonardo neared age forty, he was still working at conjugations, copying “amo, amas, amat” as diligently as a schoolboy.
As usual, Leonardo was juggling many other tasks at the same time—painting, teaching, making maps, entering an architectural competition, designing stage sets, and winning the admiration and affection of the Sforza court. In time, Leonardo secured his dream appointment as court painter and “Ingeniarius Ducalis” (ducal engineer), a job that entailed everything from supervising shipping routes to tinkering with the hot water supply in a royal residence.
Leonardo and his ever-present entourage set up living quarters and a workshop in a wing of the Corte Vecchia, the old ducal palace next to the cathedral. Here he would create sets, floats, banners, and costumes; carry out scientific experiments; sketch his first flying machines; design a dome for the Milan cathedral; and begin work on a clay model of the huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s father, that would surpass in size all other such statues since antiquity.
Ludovico Sforza’s first request was simpler: a portrait of his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani.
Leonardo might never have met a woman quite like Cecilia in Florence. The daughter of an ambassador from Siena who died when she was seven, the bright little girl, along with her six brothers, received an outstanding education. At age ten she was pledged to the son of a prominent family. Although part of the dowry was paid and the couple was officially betrothed, the union was never consummated, and the arrangements eventually dissolved.
Cecilia, an accomplished poet, musician, and singer and a clever conversationalist who could deliver orations in Latin, caught the eye of Ludovico Sforza. With a wave of his royal hand, he set the teenager up in a bucolic love nest. Before long the girl, lauded as “bella come un fiore” (beautiful as a flower), relocated to a suite of rooms in the immense Castello Sforzesco. By 1489 the pregnant sixteen-year-old had ascended to “dominatrice della corte di Milano” (the woman who dominated the court of Milan).
In a not-at-all-minor complication, Duke Ludovico happened to be engaged to Beatrice d’Este, the daughter of an important ally, the Duke of Ferrara. When he repeatedly postponed his nuptials with the young woman he described as “piacevolina” (just a bit pleasing), a polite way of saying “plain,” the lords and ladies of the court blamed “quella sua innamorata” (that beloved of his).
Caught in the middle of this love triangle, Leonardo would have had to rely on his ample reserves of charm and discretion while painting Cecilia’s portrait at the same time that he was planning spectacular festivities for several weddings, including the Duke’s marriage to Beatrice in 1491.
As with his portrait of the self-proclaimed tigress Ginevra de’ Benci, Leonardo chose an unconventional three-quarter view, with Cecilia’s appraising eyes looking outside the frame of the picture as if her lover had just entered the room. Rather than appear demure or drab, she makes a bold fashion statement. Her gold frontlet, tied veil, black forehead band, and draped necklaces, art critics observe, suggest the restrained captive status of a concubine.
Unlike the antiseptic Ginevra, Cecilia sizzles with an erotic charge. With her right hand, in a curiously suggestive gesture, Cecilia strokes a sleek ermine (white weasel), a symbol of Il Moro, whose many titles included the honorary Order of the Ermine, and a play on the Greek word for ermine, similar to her name. The animal cradled in Cecilia’s arms also captures the essence of the man to whom she is bound, sexually and socially—a predator with a vigilant eye and menacing claws splayed against her red sleeve.
Leonardo’s almost photographic portrayal of an animated moment in this woman’s life represented something radically new among painters of the time. Milan’s court poets praised “the genius and the hand of Leonardo” for so adeptly capturing “beautiful Cecilia, whose lovely eye / Makes the sunlight seem dark shadow.”
To me, Cecilia’s story casts a different sort of light on Lisa Gherardini’s life. In Italian city-states with kings, dukes, and princes, women (granted, an uncommon few) could inherit or acquire power and influence either directly or through their fathers and consorts. Not so in the macho Florentine republic. The city of artistic geniuses, great merchants, and brilliant humanists ranked, as a historian observes, “among the more unlucky places in Western Europe to be born female.”
Florentine women, second-class citizens in their hometown, could not buy property, vote, hold office, attend university, study medicine or law, join a guild, run a business, or live independently. They could not even set foot in the halls of government or justice. Women called as witnesses or charged with crimes had to present their testimony at the entrance door.
From birth to death, the fate of a fiorentina like Lisa Gherardini depended on men: first her father, whose primary duty was to find a mate who would most benefit the family’s circumstances, and then her husband, whose primary duty was to produce heirs. Eve’s daughters—“walking wombs” typecast as virgins, wives, mothers, or crones—never escaped the dark shadow of her original sin.
Even poets and philosophers who savored feminine wit and intelligence believed that women’s place was unquestionably subservient to men. The humanist Marsilio Ficino, an inveterate romancer, relished female charms but dismissed women as “chamber pots,” meant “to be pissed in and thrown away.”
Scholars, looking back on history from a modern perspective, paint a bleak picture of life for daughters of the Italian Renaissance. Girls, devalued as products of “inferior” conceptions, were abandoned and left at foundling hospitals more often than boys, unmentioned on many tax forms and census documents, weaned sooner and more abruptly (often to save money), and fed less in times of famine.
Poverty shackled many female lives. Malnourished, illiterate, dressed in tattered dresses and thin cloaks, poor women toiled in houses, at looms, or in the fields alongside their men. Many bred early and died young. If their families fell on hard times, they could quickly plunge into servitude or prostitution.
Middle-class women, with less backbreaking burdens, were confined to the microcosm of their families, dedicating all their energies to homes, husbands, and children. Wealthier girls were practically kept under lock and key to safeguard their chastity, married off very young as pawns in their fathers’ ambitious strategies, or relegated to convents so they would not be a social embarrassment or an economic drain. Most upper-class women married men almost twice their age; almost a quarter became widows.
“Did women have a Renaissance?” historian Joan Kelly-Gadol asked in a classic essay in 1977. No, she concluded, arguing that, if anything, they lost power—legal, social, moral, sexual, physical. In the decades since this provocative essay, scholars have arrived at a somewhat more positive perspective. Even if little changed in their social condition, “something changed in women’s sense of themselves.”
What about Lisa’s sense of herself? How might she have felt about growing up female in a world made by and for males? At the suggestion of a mutual friend, I pose the question to Angela Bianchini, an esteemed author, literary critic, and grande dame of contemporary Italian literature.
In her book-crammed apartment in Rome, the nonagenarian and I discuss one of her nonfiction works, Alessandra e Lucrezia: Destini Femminili nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Alessandra and Lucrezia: Feminine Destinies in Florence in the 1400s), an account of two remarkable Renaissance women: Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, best known for the hundreds of letters she wrote to her exiled sons, and Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici, an admired poet and astute political observer, as well as the mother of Lorenzo de’ Medici. (Her father-in-law, Cosimo de’ Medici, called Lucrezia “the only man in the family.”) As wives, mothers (Alessandra of eight children; Lucrezia of six), and widows, both wielded an unusual amount of influence in Florence, but neither ever overstepped the boundaries of her sex.
“Non erano femministe” (They were not feminists), Bianchini says thoughtfully. “Non volevano cambiare il mondo” (They didn’t want to change the world). Renaissance women felt no urge to try. Florentines of both sexes saw themselves and everyone else as having an immutable place in the social hierarchy. Words like feminism, women’s rights, or equality would have had no meaning to them. Born female, Lisa Gherardini would no more have yearned to trade lives with her brothers than with the fish in the Arno.
From a feminist perspective, Bianchini acknowledges, the women of Renaissance Florence can seem no more than “slaves or anonymous objects.” But this view ignores their singularity, their individuality, and the unspoken but significant influence they had on their times. The women of Lisa’s time, she emphasizes, were very much creatures of the society in which they lived.
Although not liberated in our sense of the word, Renaissance women were strong—and constituted the very center of the most important social institution of the time: the family. Wives and mothers not only held up half the sky; they functioned as the glue that held all aspects of Florentine society together. The impression they made on the men of their day remains indelible.
“When most people think of the Renaissance, what comes to mind?” Bianchini asks. Not the moguls, power brokers, and pontificating intellectuals who have long since slipped into obscurity. The images enshrined in our collective imagination are the female faces in the paintings and statues created by Florentine artists—none more recognizable than Lisa Gherardini’s.
“Guardi!” she exhorts me. Look!
And so I do. Following Bianchini’s counsel, I return to the Gherardini parish church of Santa Maria Novella and its splendid cappella maggiore (main chapel), funded by the wealthy Tornabuoni family. Adorning its walls are some of the most astounding visual chronicles of the fifteenth century, frescoes dedicated to scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494).
The son of a goldsmith nicknamed for the garlands (ghirlande) of rare beauty that he created for the town’s girls and women, young Ghirlandaio would sketch everyone who walked by his father’s bottega, deftly capturing each likeness in a few quick strokes. He grew into a prolific painter who never turned down a commission—because, he explained, he didn’t want anyone to leave his shop disappointed.
Ghirlandaio won his greatest renown for frescoes that seem like works of photojournalism in their detailed realism. The scenes, though biblical, are set in his contemporary Florence, which he bathes in golden light. (Ghirlandaio so loved his hometown that he complained of a longing he called “Duomo sickness” whenever he left it.)
In his panels, preening merchants and bejeweled patricians strut in velvet cloaks and elaborate hats. Their wives and daughters—women Lisa would have recognized in a glance—glide across the walls in floor-length gowns of intricately patterned brocades with gems adorning their heads, shoulders, necks, and fingers, every thread and trinket testifying to their honor, virtue, and dignity.
As Bianchini urged me, I look at the women’s faces: regal, proud, self-possessed, with what she terms a misteriosa interiorità (mysterious interiority) that we still find inquietante (unnerving). They are indeed no one’s victims, no passive creations of the male gaze, but rather part and partakers of, as she puts it, “la grandezza del secolo” (the greatness of the century)—a greatness they personify.
After completing his luminous fresco cycle in Santa Maria Novella, Ghirlandaio added an inscription: “In the year 1490, this most beautiful city, renowned for its abundance, power, and wealth, for its victories, for its arts, and its noble buildings, enjoyed great prosperity, health, and peace.”
None of the Florentines, male or female, who shared this self-satisfied pride in their city could have guessed that the bubble was about to burst. The Medici bank was teetering on the edge of collapse. In just a few years Florence would lose its magnificent Lorenzo, fall under the sway of a fanatical friar, surrender its forts without firing a shot, and open its gates to a foreign invader.
Lisa, in 1490 a lively eleven-year-old on the cusp of her future, could never have guessed how these political upheavals would buffet her life. Against all odds, she would marry—and, by the strictly commercial standards of the day, marry well—and quickly become a mother. More, young Lisa could never have imagined, not even in her wildest dreams, that, in one of the unique ways that daughters of the Renaissance created beauty, she would also inspire an immortal work of art.