This is the closest I will ever come to a Renaissance banquet,” I think to myself on a soft September night as I enter the colossal courtyard of Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi.
Banners cascade from balconies. Ceremonial flags wave overhead. Torches and candles blaze. Wine flows freely. Stunning floral and fruit arrangements adorn long tables piled with platters of food, including whole roast suckling pigs with apples in their mouths. Throngs of Florentines glitter in beaded dresses, statement jewelry, and (of course) fabulous shoes.
The festivities mark the opening of a major exhibition of art and artifacts on the two forces that forged the Renaissance, Denaro e Bellezza (Money and Beauty), based on an oft-ignored fact: Money did more than talk in Florence; it bellowed the prestige of the patrons who underwrote great artworks. Without funding from the town’s merchants and bankers, the beauty created by its artists would never have existed.
“Eccolo!” (Here it is!) the man beside me exclaims as we inch our way up a stone staircase to the exhibit entrance. “The most beautiful thing ever created in Florence!”
Suspended within a gleaming sheet of glass, a nickel-sized gold florin shimmers in a perfectly positioned spotlight. For centuries the shiny coin, containing 3.5 grams of 24-carat gold (worth $135 to $150 at today’s exchange rates), reigned throughout the Western world.
In their hometown, florins could buy anything: a mule for 50, a slave for 60, a church altarpiece for 90, a gentleman’s cloak lined with the soft fur of squirrel bellies for 177, a great mansion for 30,000. Everything had a price—including a prospective husband.
“Chi to’ donna, vuol danari” goes an old Tuscan dialect saying. He who takes a wife wants money. As fathers in Antonmaria Gherardini’s time realized, grooms and their families were demanding more denaro (money in modern Italian) than ever. Dowry amounts escalated steadily from an average of 350 florins in 1350, to 1,000 florins in 1401, to 1,400 florins in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. An aristocratic family, anxious to avoid the disgrace of marrying below their rank, could end up paying upward of 2,000 florins (the equivalent, depending on exchange rates, of as much as $270,000 to $300,000).
Fathers were getting desperate. “Nothing in our civil life is more difficult than marrying off our daughters well,” historian Francesco Guicciardini groused. Even well-paid senior civil servants, lawyers, and university professors couldn’t afford the exorbitant sums, especially with more than one daughter at home.
The city that had practically invented banking came up with an ingenious solution: a savings fund, called the Monte delle Doti (literally, Dowry Mountain), in which citizens made an initial investment that grew substantially over time.
An Italian economist I meet at a group dinner explains to me how the system worked: A father deposited an amount, ranging at different times from 60 to 100 florins, when his daughter was five (the average age) or younger, with exceptions up to age ten. Florence, which used the fund for its debts and operating expenses, paid interest at variable rates, depending on how long the money remained in the account. A deposit of 100 florins, for instance, would yield a dowry of 500 florins over fifteen years or 250 florins over seven-and-a-half years.
“It sounds like an old-fashioned Christmas club,” I say, fondly recalling how as a young girl I had taken $20 to the bank in June and collected what seemed like a whopping sum to spend on presents six months later.
“Forse” (Maybe), replies the economist, looking both baffled and bemused by my comparison.
Florentine dowry financing, established in 1425, underwent extensive modifications over the years to allow for different contingencies. If a girl died, the Monte delle Doti repaid the deposit “one year and one day” after her death. If “spurning carnal wedlock,” she entered a convent to “join the celestial spouse in marriage” and vowed to be “perpetually cloistered,” the Monte turned over a much lower “monastic” dowry to the nunnery.
Nearly one-fifth of the heads of Florentine households invested in the dowry fund—two-thirds from upper-crust families such as the Tornabuoni and Strozzi. There is no record that Antonmaria Gherardini ever deposited a florin on Lisa’s behalf. Perhaps, with the return of peace to Chianti, he was confident that he could reverse his losses and extract cash from his country properties. Perhaps he feared that Florence, constantly waging costly wars, would default and not honor its commitments (which sometimes happened).
Personally, I blame Gherardini pride. The arrogant magnate clan that had resisted every pressure to behave like ordinary folk would have balked at partaking of commoners’ cash. For Antonmaria, refusing to invest may have seemed a matter, like so much else, of family honor. Nonetheless, he may have begun to worry as Lisa approached adolescence.
Affluent parents of preteens began sending discreet signals to the families of prospective suitors, often via an intermediary—either a sensale (professional matchmaker) or a mezzano (a relative of one of the families). Like other fathers, Antonmaria would have wanted to finalize a betrothal by the time Lisa reached fifteen or sixteen. Once an unmarried girl passed seventeen, she risked being written off as “a catastrophe.”
Love had nothing to do with this harsh reality. What mattered, as always in Florence, was denaro. Without enough money, Lisa’s future might depend on a currency more valuable but more volatile than florins: beauty.
Lisa Gherardini may or may not have been born beautiful. As a daughter of the Renaissance, she certainly learned how to become so. In a culture that reviled ugliness as a reflection of evil, sin, and social inferiority, a girl’s appearance was too important to leave to genetics or luck. Beauty, the visible expression of interior goodness, had to serve as a lure to attract a man to the deeper qualities hidden within a girl’s heart and mind.
The obsessive Florentines spelled out precise standards for ideal beauty in verses, essays, and treatises: A forehead smooth and serene, broader than it was high, with a good space between the eyes (large and full, preferably dark, the whites slightly blue). A face bright and clear, the chin round (ideally with “the glory of a dimple”), the mouth small, the lips red. A neck long and white. Hands plump and creamy. Breasts firm and round with rosy nipples. Torso slender and willowy.
A popular treatise listed thirty-three female “perfections,” including:
Three long: hair, hands, and legs.
Three short: teeth, ears, and breasts.
Three wide: forehead, chest, and hips.
Three narrow: waist, knees, and “where nature places all that is sweet.”
Three large (“but well proportioned”): height, arms, and thighs.
Three thin: eyebrows, fingers, lips.
Three round: neck, arms, and . . .
Three small: mouth, chin, and feet.
Three white: teeth, throat, and hands.
Three red: cheeks, lips, and nipples.
Three black: eyebrows, eyes, and “what you yourself should know.”
Did Lisa match up with these expectations? If not, her mother, godmothers, and aunts would have set about changing what could be changed, including the discreet use of trucco, the Italian word that doubles for “trick” and “makeup.” Elixirs of ground peach stones, bean flour, camphor, borax, or white lily bulbs ensured that a girl’s skin glowed a creamy white—the color of chastity, purity, delicacy, and the gleaming feminine moon. A bit of rouge would have enhanced the rosiness in her cheeks.
Then there was the matter of eyebrows, which underwent aggressive plucking, sometimes entirely and sometimes just enough to make two thin, wide-spaced arcs. Lisa Gherardini’s may be the most analyzed so-pracciglia in all of art history. None appear on her portrait, even though Vasari, in the first description of the painting, commented on Leonardo’s skill in portraying them. (A French researcher using an ultrahigh-resolution camera has detected a single brow hair, an indication that Lisa’s original eyebrows may have disappeared in an unfortunate cleaning in centuries past.) Her eyelashes remain a mystery. Women of Renaissance Florence, who considered lashes unaesthetic, either left them unadorned or plucked them out.
Lisa’s hair appears much darker than the Renaissance ideal of golden locks, laboriously achieved by a combination of bleaching agents and hours on sunny terraces, a broad-brimmed hat called a solana shading a girl’s delicate face. However, according to historians tracking style trends, as Florence’s economy soured and a fanatical monk began preaching against human “vanities” in the final decade of the fifteenth century, the more natural look that we see in Lisa’s portrait came into vogue.
Money bought beauty in wearable forms, and few peacocks have preened more gloriously than Renaissance Florentines. Both sexes swathed themselves in thick-piled velvet, brocades shot with silver tinsel, gold-filigreed scarves, and cloaks lined and trimmed in exotic and expensive ermine, lynx, or sable. On average, affluent families invested 40 percent of their resources in clothing. Men, as personal account books verify, spent as much as women on exquisitely tailored garments—the priciest dyed a deep crimson, which Florentines considered “the noblest color and the most important that we have.”
With business booming, the del Giocondo silkmakers enlarged their workshops, expanded their offerings to include finished products such as decorative tablecloths, opened more retail stores, and extended trade to Rome, the rest of Europe, and the land of the Grand Turk, the best market for the most opulent artisan silks. The Medici became clients of the del Giocondo, who in turn used the Medici banks, with sixteen branches from London to Constantinople, for financial transactions.
As the family enterprises grew, young Francesco del Giocondo leapfrogged over his older brothers to take the reins. Giuseppe Pallanti, who has devoted endless hours to sifting through the del Giocondo receipts, proxies, contracts, and other commercial records, categorizes him as “a typical Florentine businessman—intelligent, sharp, and enterprising.”
Francesco’s forceful handwriting testifies to his strong personality. A trail of judicial filings reveals a darker side. In one court proceeding, the Otto di Guardia, the officers in charge of public order, referred to Francesco del Giocondo as “an argumentative type”—almost certainly an understatement. Pallanti describes him as “bold, and confident, intolerant of rules and those who enforced them . . . [with] a business sense and lack of scruples that often bordered on illegality.”
In a city whose citizens prided themselves on being colti, benestanti e litigiosi (cultured, well-off, and quarrelsome), Francesco’s questionable business ethics and general tendentiousness in no way hampered his commercial success. Nor did they detract from his desirability as a potential husband. Despite his plebeian origins, the well-to-do young merchant could have paid suit to many of Florence’s most desirable maidens.
In 1491, Francesco, at age twenty-six, arranged a marriage with sixteen-year-old Camilla Rucellai, the daughter of one of the del Giocondo silk company’s long-standing customers. At first the choice didn’t strike me as remarkable. The families of Florence were as interwoven as the threads of their ornate fabrics, and I knew from my research on Antonmaria Gherardini’s marital history that the Rucellai were exceptionally prolific. Then I came upon the complete name of Francesco del Giocondo’s first wife: Camilla di Mariotto Rucellai.
Could she be related to the ill-fated Caterina di Mariotto Rucellai who had married Antonmaria Gherardini in 1473, almost two decades earlier?
In a nineteenth-century genealogy, I find a Rucellai family tree that includes Caterina Rucellai’s birth and her marriage to Antonmaria but nothing about Camilla. Online, I again dive into the digital archives of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze. There I find the official record of Camilla di Mariotto Rucellai’s baptism on April 9, 1475, two years after her older sister Caterina’s demise. At the time, their father, Mariotto, was forty-one. Five years later he reported fourteen bocche (dependents) living in his home, including Camilla and a newborn son younger than his latest grandchild.
The unexpected connection uniting the Rucellai, the Gherardini, and the del Giocondo intrigues me. The two men who played the most significant roles in Lisa Gherardini’s life—her father, Antonmaria Gherardini, and her husband, Francesco del Giocondo—had both married Rucellai sisters. In the overlapping social circles of Renaissance Florence, this may well have been coincidental, but it clears up a minor mystery for me.
The odds of an undowered girl like Lisa finding a husband in Florence’s overheated marriage market were almost nil. So, I kept asking, how did Antonmaria land a groom for a daughter who was essentially unmarriageable?
The answer could lie in the kinship bond that wove families together. Regardless of the fates that befell their wives, Antonmaria Gherardini and Francesco del Giocondo had married into the same parentado. And in a Florentine family tapestry, this counted for something.
In the spring of 1492, the year after Francesco del Giocondo’s marriage to Camilla Rucellai, dreadful omens chilled all of Florence. She-wolves howled at the moon. Strange lights flickered in the sky. Two of the city’s prized lions mauled each other to death in a fight in their cage. That same night lightning struck the lantern atop the cathedral dome and dislodged one of the marble balls supporting it. The ball crashed to the pavement below and smashed into pieces.
“In which direction did it fall?” asked Lorenzo de’ Medici, so debilitated by excruciating gout that he could no longer walk or even hold a pen.
“To the northwest,” he was told, toward his house.
“This means I shall die,” he said.
The illness had already ravaged Lorenzo’s body, “attacking not only the arteries and veins,” his friend the humanist Poliziano wrote, “but also his organs, his intestines, his bones, and even the marrow of his very bones.” His healers tried an exotic concoction of pulverized pearls and other precious stones, but Lorenzo entered death’s Great Sea on April 8, 1492. His doctor threw himself down a well in despair.
The succession to his oldest son, Piero, was so smooth and greeted with such great goodwill “on the part of people and princes,” reports historian Guicciardini, “that had Piero had even an ounce of wit and prudence, he could not have fallen.”
Fall he did—and sooner than anyone might ever have anticipated. The impetuous and violent-tempered youth, just twenty when Lorenzo de’ Medici died, quickly earned the nickname “Lo Sfortunato” (“the Unfortunate”). His father would not have been surprised.
With a leader’s dispassionate scrutiny, Il Magnifico had once appraised his three sons: Piero, who would succeed him, was stupid; Giovanni, who would become pope, smart; his youngest child, Giuliano, born the same year as Lisa Gherardini, sweet. A tutor described the baby of the family as “vivacious and fresh as a rose . . . kind and clean and bright as a mirror . . . merry, with those eyes lost in dreams.”
Did Giuliano and Lisa Gherardini know each other as children? The dreamy-eyed boy could have made her acquaintance as they curtsied and bowed through the town’s intertwined social spheres during his father’s reign. Their families were linked by marriages to Rucellai kinsmen: Giuliano’s aunt Nannina had wed Bernardo Rucellai; Lisa’s father, his cousin Caterina. Novelists, weaving tales more of fancy than fact, have conjured a friendship between Lisa Gherardini and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s daughters, who were close to her in age, and a secret adolescent romance with Giuliano.
Lisa would certainly have seen Lorenzo’s sons. The Medici brothers—sweet Giuliano, luckless Piero, and chubby Giovanni, appointed the youngest-ever cardinal in 1492 at age thirteen—regularly appeared at civic festivals and the grandiose processions of Il Magnifico’s final years. As she had been taught, Lisa would have cast down her eyes in their—or any male’s—presence, but she might have snatched quick glimpses at Giuliano, the striking lad who had inherited his father’s charismatic charm and his namesake uncle’s good looks.
Did he notice her? If Lisa was indeed bellissima, as Vasari described her, all the young men would have. Steeped in humanist romanticism, Renaissance swains loved loving fair maidens—if only from afar. Regardless of whether he and Lisa met as teenagers, Giuliano would later forge a tie both to Lisa’s husband, Francesco del Giocondo, and to Leonardo da Vinci.
As Il Magnifico’s era ended in 1492, another began. The Italian explorer Christopher Columbus discovered what he thought were islands off the coast of India and launched the Age of Exploration. The del Giocondo silkmakers also were looking to new horizons.
On October 26, 1492, Francesco, his older brothers, and two partners formed a new compagnia (partnership) “to deal in silk, both wholesale and retail, in Florence and Lyon and any other place they might wish.” In their document of incorporation, they invoked, with a typical Florentine eye to both piety and profit, “the immortal and omnipotent God, His glorious Mother, the Virgin Mary, and all the Saints so that their business affairs might enjoy a good start, better continuation, and excellent conclusion.”
Dividing operations between Florence and Lyon, the partners pledged “to work day and night for the good of the company.” Francesco kept his vow. Amid the click of abacus beads and the murmur of looms, the zealous merchant met with customers, supervised cloth production, checked accounts and payments, negotiated contracts, and monitored the progress of caravans and ships.
Francesco’s personal happiness soon paralleled his professional success. On February 24, 1493, his wife, Camilla, “brought to the light” a healthy son. The delighted couple named their baby boy Bartolomeo in honor of Francesco’s father, who had recently died. After a jubilant christening, the family would have hung tapestries on the walls, passed out confections to visitors, and celebrated for weeks.
Streams of well-wishers bustled along Via della Stufa bearing birth trays piled with presents. As was the tradition among Florence’s prominent families, Francesco and Camilla would have selected a unique fabric design and named it for their firstborn son for his exclusive use throughout his life.
Eighteen months later Camilla was gone. The nineteen-year-old died on July 24, 1494, perhaps of a miscarriage, perhaps of one of the age’s ubiquitous infectious diseases. Once again neither power nor privilege could protect a young wife. The funeral in the Rucellai Chapel at Santa Maria Novella drew a huge crowd that would have included the city’s most important families, business associates such as Ser Piero da Vinci, and the noble man who had also married and mourned a Rucellai bride, Antonmaria Gherardini.
The aftershocks of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death reverberated for years. The unthinkable was happening: The Medici banks were running out of money. On Lorenzo’s not-at-all-vigilant watch, millions of florins had been spent, lost, or loaned to monarchs unable or unwilling to repay them. As secret accounting books revealed, Lorenzo had diverted money from a family trust as well as from state funds. At the time of his death, many of the Medici accounts were in the red. The family owed the del Giocondo silkmakers some 4,000 florins, a hefty sum that Francesco resolutely set out to collect.
Money problems continued to plague Antonmaria Gherardini, who hopscotched from one shabby rental to another. In 1494 his in-laws, the prosperous del Caccia, arranged for their daughter’s growing family to move into the palazzo of a rich widower who lived alone around the corner from them on Via de’ Buonfanti (now Via de’ Pepi). Ser Piero da Vinci, who had remarried for the fourth time in 1485, lived steps away with his still-growing ménage.
As big sister of the Gherardini brood, fifteen-year-old Lisa would have tried her best to corral her boisterous little brothers and sisters. Nonetheless, the reluctant landlord, despite the high rent he collected, complained on his tax statement about the “great inconvenience” caused by the invasion of unwanted tenants.
Florence soon would face a much greater and graver invasion. Once again Europe’s monarchs were playing a dangerous game of thrones. When the Neapolitan king Ferdinand I died in 1494, his son Alfonso succeeded to the crown—one that the new French king, Charles VIII, was determined to snatch on the basis of a hereditary claim. King Alfonso reached out for support to Pope Alexander VI, the ruthless Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia, who had risen to St. Peter’s throne in 1492. Young Piero de’ Medici edged closer to their orbit.
From Castello Sforzesco in Milan, Ludovico Sforza watched this potentially threatening new alliance with a wary eye.
For the Duke’s court artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci, these were wonder years. Nothing seemed impossible. With supreme self-confidence, the ultimate Renaissance man was ready to tackle any project.
Planning his equestrian monument, Leonardo prowled through Milan’s stables in search of the noblest steeds and sketched their eyes, heads, hooves, and legs. In 1493, during the wedding festivities of the Duke’s niece to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, Leonardo unveiled an imposing clay model of the great horse, more than 20 feet high. The Duke requisitioned some 80 tons of bronze for the largest single-cast statue ever—a technical challenge so daunting that no other artist would even attempt it.
Leonardo, who oversaw a bustling bottega of apprentices and salaried artisans, had settled cozily into a refined court that shared his appreciation of physical beauty, stylish clothes, good manners, and fine horses. “Although without fortune,” Vasari notes, “he always had manservants and horses, which he loved dearly, as well as all sorts of animals.” So great was his affection for creatures great and small that Leonardo became a vegetarian—a rarity among the meat-relishing men of his day.
A brilliant impresario, Leonardo staged stunning musical productions—one featuring performers costumed as rotating planets—that delighted the Milan court. Duchess Beatrice d’Este, Ludovico’s wife, so enjoyed these entertainments that, as her secretary recorded, barely a month went by without “some idyll, comedy, tragedy, or other new spectacle,” all infused with Leonardo’s incomparable flair.
With almost manic energy, Leonardo continued his quest to penetrate the secrets of light, water, air, dreams, madness, even the nature and location of the soul. He calculated the ideal proportions for a human figure, based on the geometry of the ancient architect Vitruvius. With the spirit of the adventurous Vinci lad still racing through his blood, he dreamed of flying like an eagle and drew plans for gravity-defying “flying machines.” True to his mantra of saper vedere (knowing how to see), he filled notebooks with lists, diagrams, and pithy observations, set down without punctuation as his fingers flew across the pages.
The person whom Leonardo wrote more about than any other human being during these years in Milan was a ten-year-old named Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno who joined his household, presumably as a servant, in 1490. The mischievous scamp, whom he nicknamed Salaì or Salaino from a Tuscan word for “little devil,” stole money from Leonardo, silverpoint pens from his pupils, and a purse from a Sforza groom. At one dinner the naughty boy “ate for two, made mischief for four, broke three bottles, and knocked over the wine.”
A thief and a liar, obstinate and greedy—these were among the faults Leonardo catalogued in his notebook. Yet rather than chastise or dismiss the wayward lad, he doted on Salaì, dressing him in costly pink and rose tunics and buying him a bow and arrow and other toys and trinkets. Leonardo also couldn’t resist drawing the boy Vasari describes as having “ravishing grace and beauty, with a mass of curly hair which his master adored.”
A more mysterious figure entered Leonardo’s life at the time, a woman named Caterina. All that Leonardo writes of her is this record: “16 July Caterina came, 16 July 1493.” Some believe she was his mother, who would have been about age sixty-six. Others suggest that she may have been a housekeeper, a “maternal substitute,” who somehow, through her age or name or appearance, reminded Leonardo of his mother.
Perhaps Leonardo, financially secure at last, sent for his mother, probably widowed, and took satisfaction in providing her with comfort in her old age. About a year or so after her arrival, the notaio’s son meticulously recorded payments for Caterina’s funeral costs, including fees for pallbearers, gravediggers, four priests, and three pounds of wax for candles—an amount biographers have judged generous for an employer but paltry for a son.
Another mystery revolves around a painting called La Belle Ferronnière (the beautiful ironmonger’s wife), which Leonardo painted on a panel cut from the same tree used for Cecilia’s portrait. Art historians at first thought the model was a French king’s lover, who happened to be married to an ironworker. Later she was identified as Lucrezia Crivelli, a married lady-in-waiting to Duchess Beatrice of Milan, who became another of the Duke’s mistresses.
Some still question the attribution, despite such Leonardo hallmarks as the three-quarter pose and the intricately patterned and ribboned dress, a testament to the artist’s wondrous way with fabrics. But what captivated me when I saw the portrait in the Louvre was the sitter’s unflinching gaze. What was it about Leonardo and the ladies he chose to paint that brought out such intensity? Was it the way Leonardo looked at women or the way women looked at him?
An intense new voice began to echo through Florence in the final decade of the fifteenth century: the charismatic Dominican friar Fra (Brother) Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498). Gaunt and gangly, with sunken cheeks and an enormous hooked nose, the young Savonarola had studied with his esteemed grandfather, a physician to the d’Este court in Ferrara. Allegedly smitten with an illegitimate daughter of the Strozzi family who was living in exile in Ferrara, he was coldly rebuffed by the young woman. Even a Strozzi bastard, she scoffed, would never lower herself to wed a Savonarola.
Some say this rejection sparked the young man’s antipathy toward women, vile creatures tarted up in frills who put on airs and taunted men with their devil wiles. Savonarola began to see evil in everyone around him. When he slipped out of his family home to join the Dominican order, he wrote, “I can no longer bear the wickedness of the people of Italy.”
During his initial assignment as a “lecturer” in the 1480s in Florence, the ugly little friar showed no aptitude as a preacher. Stumbling, mumbling, stuttering, he delivered sermons so ineffectual that, as he admitted, they wouldn’t have “frightened a chicken.” Then the visions of the horrors awaiting the damned inflamed his mind, and he started to preach like a human firebrand. When Savonarola returned to Florence in 1490 as prior of San Marco, he unleashed horrifying harangues that envisioned in gruesome detail the apocalyptic fate awaiting a town awash in sodomy, usury, and decadence of every sort.
His timing was extraordinary. Encouraged by Milan’s Duke Ludovico, King Charles VIII of France decided to invade Italy in order to seize the throne of Naples. In the autumn of 1494 the French army crossed the Alps and marched south through the Italian peninsula. As town after town yielded without a fight, some 30,000 soldiers and mercenaries advanced on Florence.
Fear infected the city like a plague. It found its voice in Savonarola, who told his growing congregation that he had seen “a fiery cross hanging in the dark clouds above Florence.” God was unleashing his terrible sword to punish a city of sinners, including the purveyors of decadent luxury goods. To many his diatribes sounded like the vox Dei (voice of God) warning of the horrors that awaited Florence—perhaps at the hand of the invading king.
“Behold!” the friar cried when the French, with artillery more powerful than any ever seen in Italy, massacred the entire garrison at the Tuscan fortress of Fivizzano. “It is the Lord God who is leading on these armies.”
When the invaders set up camp in the hills outside Florence, young Piero de’ Medici, without consulting the priors, attempted the sort of diplomatic ploy only his father Lorenzo might have pulled off: He tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement. King Charles’s demands were outrageous—a huge cash payoff plus almost all the cities and lands, including three fortresses and the prize port of Pisa, that Florence had conquered over the last century.
Without a single shot being fired, Piero de’ Medici, whom the French mocked as “the Great Money Changer,” acquiesced. The priors were so infuriated by his humiliating concessions that they locked the gates of the Palazzo Vecchio and refused to meet with Piero.
La Vacca began to ring. When he reached the Piazza della Signoria, Francesco del Giocondo would have found a crowd shouting insults and throwing stones at Piero de’ Medici. His younger brother Giovanni, the boy cardinal, tried to rally the people with cries of “Palle!” (for the Medici’s symbolic balls), but the jeers grew louder. At nightfall Lorenzo de’ Medici’s three sons, along with Piero’s wife and two young children, fled the city with as many jewels and valuables as they could carry.
At word of their flight the priors decreed that the Medici be banished forever and confiscated their assets. From his home on nearby Via della Stufa, Francesco del Giocondo would have heard a mob break into the Medici palazzo, fling the family stone crests to the ground, and haul off a fortune in medallions, coins, manuscripts, tapestries, and priceless artifacts.
The next morning Florence’s citizens awoke to a new reality. In a shockingly sudden collapse, the Medici reign had ended. Savonarola declared Jesus Christ the Florentines’ new leader. Along with city officials, the friar met with French commanders to negotiate their entry into the city.
Charles VIII sent his lieutenants as an advance party to mark the choicest dwellings for his officers. (Machiavelli later quipped that the French monarch had conquered Italy “with a piece of chalk.”) The Medici palazzo would serve as the king’s headquarters. Anxious fathers like Antonmaria Gherardini quickly tucked their daughters into convents or remote rooms. Only men, boys, and old women ventured onto the deserted streets.
On November 17, 1494, Charles VIII, wearing gilt armor, a cloak of cloth-of-gold, and a crown, rode into Florence under a stunning embroidered canopy held over his head by four knights. The del Giocondo brothers would have watched glumly as his entire army—foot soldiers, archers, crossbowmen, cavalry, officers in helmets trimmed in thick plumes—marched through their streets.
“A truly beautiful sight,” Guicciardini records, “because of their great numbers, the appearance of the men and the beauty of the arms and the horses, with their rich coverings of cloth and gold brocade . . . but little enjoyed by the people, who were filled with fear and terror.”
Then King Charles dismounted from his enormous black warhorse, and the Florentines nearby had to resist the urge to snicker. The red-bearded, big-nosed, ugly little monarch—“more like a monster than a man,” Guicciardini reports—limped on feet so huge they were rumored to have a sixth toe. The French king’s bluster lost its clout during the eleven days of occupation. When the city magistrates offered him a lesser sum than Piero de’ Medici had promised, King Charles threatened to call his men to arms.
“If you sound your trumpets,” the Florentine statesman Piero Capponi responded in what became a civic rallying cry, “we will ring our bells!” Charles, wary of rousing the volatile citizens to arms, took what he was offered and marched south.
The Florentines watched the French depart on November 28 with a mix of humiliation, anger, and relief. Lisa Gherardini and other young girls emerged from their hiding places, but fathers like Antonmaria still had plenty of reason to fear for their daughters’ futures.
“The year 1494 was a most unhappy year for Italy,” writes Guicciardini, “and in truth was the beginning of our years of misery, because it opened a door to innumerable horrible calamities.” After decades of the prosperity and peace they saw as the just rewards of their intelligence and hard work, Florentines no longer felt in control of their destiny. In the leadership vacuum that followed Piero’s departure, the voice that rang out loudest was that of Savonarola.
I could almost hear the friar’s chilling words when I entered the final room of the Denaro e Bellezza exhibit in the Palazzo Strozzi in 2011 and stood in front of the nineteenth-century Bavarian artist Ludwig von Langenmantel’s painting of Savonarola “preaching against luxury” in a richly ornamented church.
Actual Florentines—Niccolò Macchiavelli, Sandro Botticelli, and Andrea della Robbia among the recognizable faces—appear in the congregation. Women in elaborate gowns and headdresses gather luxurious objects, such as fabrics and bowls, into a pile. But it is the preacher standing high atop a pedestal in a white robe, a black hood over his head and shoulders, who dominates the painting. His outstretched left arm, hand open, fingers extended, points diagonally and dramatically to the upper right, as if to a new place, a new world, a new day.
Francesco del Giocondo couldn’t wait for its arrival. As history raged around him, the impatient widower wanted a wife—and as quickly as possible. His professional and political status demanded no less, and his son, who would soon return from his wet nurse’s care, would need a mother.