Lisa Gherardini and her family welcomed the new century, not on the first of January, 1500, but on Florence’s traditional New Year’s Day of March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation. This holy day celebrates the angel Gabriel’s descent from heaven to announce to a teenage girl in Nazareth that God had chosen her to be the mother of His son. With Mary’s acceptance of divine will, the Holy Spirit “moved in her womb,” and nine months later Jesus Christ was born. Every year exultant Florentines swarmed into the piazza of La Nunziata, the nickname of the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata (Most Holy Annunciation), built by the Servites (Servants of Mary) in the thirteenth century, for an annual New Year’s festival.
In the early years of the sixteenth century, the lives of three men would converge in this beloved shrine: Francesco del Giocondo, thirty-five, who supplied altar linens and vestments and handled currency exchanges for the friars; Ser Piero da Vinci, seventy-three, who managed the richly endowed church’s complex financial and legal affairs; and Ser Piero’s son Leonardo, forty-eight, who arrived in Florence on April 24, 1500, with no job and no place to live, ready for a new beginning.
Ser Piero da Vinci and his son had never lost contact. “Dearly beloved Father,” Leonardo begins in the only surviving fragment of their correspondence, “I received the letter that you wrote me and that in the space of an instant gave me pleasure and sadness. I had the pleasure of learning that you are in good health and give thanks to God, and I was unhappy to hear of your trouble.”
We don’t know the nature of Ser Piero’s woes. At their palazzo on Via Ghibellina, the seemingly robust patriarch presided with his fourth wife over a boisterous brood of eleven youngsters—nine boys and two girls, ranging in age from twenty-four to barely two. The masterful puller-of-strings may well have had a hand in arranging accommodations at Santissima Annunziata for his acclaimed son, who was to paint a Madonna with St. Anne for the main altar. The Servites, anticipating the glory this would bestow on their church, rushed to order an elaborate frame of about 10 feet by 6 feet for what would be Leonardo’s largest panel painting.
The town where artists reigned like rock stars greeted Leonardo as a living legend. Few Florentines had seen the works he had created in Milan, but everyone had heard of their brilliance—and of Leonardo’s scientific and mathematical pursuits, which magnified his reputation as a universal genius. Even unfinished pieces, such as the giant model of Il Cavallo pierced by French arrows, embellished his mythic reputation, as did his arresting appearance. Artisans rushed to the doors of their workshops and women leaned out second-story windows to catch a glimpse of the tall man in rose-colored robes, his thick wavy hair now more silver than gold.
As Leonardo settled into Santissima Annunziata, the Servites would proudly have shown him their most precious possession: a “miraculous” portrait of the Virgin Mary. I heard its story from a chatty friar I met years ago when I was studying the history of Italian at the Società Dante Alighieri, a language school in a former cloister around the corner. Almost every day after class I would stop to light a candle before the shrine to the Madonna for my ailing mother.
An anonymous thirteenth-century artist began the painting, the friendly friar told me, but despite one botched attempt after another could not capture Mary’s exquisite face. Collapsing in exhaustion, he awoke to discover that someone—an angel, he had no doubt—had completed the portrait with a skill beyond any human hand.
Shrouded within an elaborate bronze tabernacle underwritten by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s father, Piero, the breathtaking work attracted pilgrims from all of Christendom. When unveiled and carried in procession through Florence’s streets for special celebrations, the painting inspired such awe that the faithful would fall to their knees before it. Even today hundreds of ex-votos (wax or metal symbols of gratitude for answered prayers) testify to the Madonna’s miraculous powers.
Finding it hard to imagine Leonardo, the Milanese dandy, taking up residence in a monastery, I return to Santissima Annunziata. A gaunt, tonsured friar with firefly eyes approaches me with an assortment of postcards, calendars, and medallions. I buy the lot for 10 euro and ask about Leonardo’s long-ago stay. Walking fast and talking faster, he sweeps me through the cavernous marbled nave to an inner courtyard, a green oasis of calm and quiet.
Catching his breath, the friar points vaguely in the direction of an adjacent structure now occupied by the Instituto Geografico Militare of Florence. There, he tells me in rapid-fire Italian, is the studio where Leonardo worked on the cartone, the actual-size preliminary drawing for the altarpiece that the Servites had commissioned. Just a few years ago workers demolishing a wall for an Institute renovation had come across a secret stairwell and some small rooms that have since been linked with Leonardo and his assistants.
“Guess what they found on the walls?” the friar asks with a rhetorical flourish.
Clueless, I shake my head.
“Uccelli!” (Birds!) he exclaims—drawings, perhaps by Leonardo himself (doubtful), of the very same sort of little birds flitting about the courtyard where we stand.
As we stroll under a graceful loggia, the friar’s crude sandals, mere slabs of wood fastened with leather straps, make me think of the hand-sewn buckled velvet shoes that Leonardo fancied. What had the humble friars and their eminent guest made of each other? The ascetic Servites wore rough robes tied around their waists with rope. The worldly courtier’s wardrobe included Catalan gowns in pink and dusty rose, a dark purple cape with big collar and velvet hood, a crimson satin overcoat, and two pink caps. How had the Milan cosmopolitan, long ensconced in a grand ducal palace with its ballroom for a workshop, adjusted to a monastic cubicle and a daily routine marked by bells and blessings?
We know little of Leonardo’s faith. Despite the beauty and profundity of his religious works, he never displayed any conventional devotion. He did, however, feel a sort of professional kinship with God, since, as he noted, painters also could create all things, from idyllic landscapes to mighty mountains to raging oceans. “The divine character of painting,” he wrote, “means that the mind of the painter is transformed into an image of the mind of God.”
The Church, on the other hand, provoked undisguised disdain. Leonardo criticized clerics “who produce many words, receive much wealth, and promise paradise,” and decried the selling of indulgences, liturgical pomp, and the cult of the saints. Art historians credit him with “uncrowning the Middle Ages” by not putting halos on his religious figures and portraying them as flesh-and-blood fallible humans rather than heavenly beings.
In Vasari’s depiction, Leonardo emerges as a self-taught, clear-eyed dispassionate scientist who relied on observation and reason and could not be “content with any kind of religion.” But perhaps to Leonardo in 1500, Santissima Annunziata seemed—as it did to me as I paused in its tranquil courtyard—a heaven-sent haven offering serenity and stability when he needed them most.
In 1502, during Leonardo’s residence at Santissima Annunziata, Francesco del Giocondo, one of the church’s regular suppliers, had a particular bone of contention to discuss with Ser Piero da Vinci, who represented the Servites. The friars were contesting one of his bills of exchange. Francesco, a man of business, and Ser Piero, a man of law, could have worked together at least once before, when the notaio got involved in another matter concerning the del Giocondo enterprises and the Servites.
The dispute over Francesco’s handling of a currency exchange was not his first. Always trying to skim an extra profit from a transaction, Francesco tended to tip the fluctuating exchange rates in his favor. But he and Ser Piero would not have resorted to legal proceedings. In an out-of-the-way corner in the sprawling Santissima Annunziata compound, they could have negotiated their way to a reasonable settlement. In typical Italian fashion, the two fathers also might have chatted of more pleasant matters, including their veritable tribe of children.
Francesco del Giocondo had happy news to share. After giving birth to Camilla, their third child, in 1499 and Marietta, their fourth, in 1500, his wife, Lisa, was pregnant again. Ser Piero, who for more than twenty years had lived just due passi (two steps) away from Lisa’s grandparents on Via Ghibellina, would have extended best wishes. He might have watched Lisa grow from a darling child skipping down the block to an adolescent girl of striking beauty to a young matron with toddlers of her own. Ser Piero may well have been the one who presented her husband to his celebrity son, perhaps as a potential patron.
Despite the warmth of his welcome in Florence, Leonardo seemed restless. Flitting from one pursuit to another, he began a small (now lost) painting called the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, offered advice on repairing the foundation of a church near Florence, and consulted on the construction of a campanile (bell tower) for San Miniato, as well as visiting Rome to study ancient works of art and architecture. He also acquired several pupils, two working on drawings or copies. “From time to time,” a contemporary reports, Leonardo “put a touch on them.”
There was no sign of progress on the altarpiece. “He kept them waiting a long time without even starting anything,” writes Vasari. In 1502, Leonardo finally had something to present to the friars: a cartone (preliminary drawing), since lost, so brilliant that it silenced any grumblings about the delay. According to the descriptions that have come down to us, the design was classic Leonardo, with a dramatic composition of Mary, her mother Anne, and the infant Jesus, their faces portrayed with a melting softness. The first public viewing—a one-man, one-painting show—ignited as much excitement as the opening night of a theatrical blockbuster.
“For two days,” Vasari recounts, “it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there as if to a great festival to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.” Florentines, Vasari reports, were “stupefied by its perfection.” Francesco del Giocondo would surely have been among them. We can’t be sure about the pregnant Lisa, who would give birth to her fifth child and second son, Andrea, on December 12, 1502.
Perhaps Leonardo’s impressive cartone sparked Francesco’s interest in acquiring a painting by the acclaimed artist. Vasari, in the earliest account of the origins of La Gioconda (literally “the Giocondo woman”), provides only this minimal description: “For Francesco del Giocondo, Leonardo undertook to paint a portrait of his wife, Mona Lisa.”
The arrangement would have made sense. Leonardo needed income. And the affluent merchant, who would commission other works from well-regarded painters in the future, would have been proud to acquire a work by the acclaimed artist. Some have speculated that Ser Piero, as he had done with other artists, might have commissioned his son to paint Lisa as a gift for Francesco del Giocondo, but no evidence supports this theory.
A historical document from the French curator Père (Father) Dan, who first catalogued the Mona Lisa as part of the royal art collection in the seventeenth century, suggests another possibility: that the portrait was Leonardo’s idea. According to the scholarly prelate, head of the monastery at the royal palace of Fontainebleau, Leonardo asked Francesco del Giocondo, a “close friend,” for permission to paint his wife.
Whoever instigated the project and whatever the nature of the agreement, the conversation may well have taken place at Santissima Annunziata. However, no works were ever completed there. Leonardo never finished the altarpiece for the Servites—or any other painting.
When the persistent Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, badgered Fra Pietro da Novellara, her contact in Florence, to press the artist to accept a commission to paint any subject he chose, at any price he set, she was informed that “the existence of Leonardo [is] so unstable and uncertain that one might say he lives from day to day.” His fascination with mathematics, mechanics, and science had intensified into an all-consuming obsession. Fra Pietro described the genius as so deeply immersed in postulates, axioms, and theorems that he seemed to have grown “impaziente sino al pennello” (impatient even with the brush).
Perhaps he was indeed just plain sick of painting, but I think Leonardo also may have wanted to try something a modern middle-aged man might consider: reinvent himself. This may be why he took on one of the most unlikely assignments of his career—a stint as military engineer for the notorious Cesare Borgia.
The two may have first met in Milan in 1499, when Cesare Borgia rode in triumph with the French king Louis XII into the conquered city. There he could have beheld Leonardo’s masterpieces, including his imposing model for Il Cavallo, his matchless Last Supper, and his designs for fortresses and weaponry. For his part, Leonardo would undoubtedly have heard of the Borgia pope’s son Cesare and his reputation as “a bloodthirsty barbarian” who once had the tongue of a Roman satirist who insulted him cut out and nailed to his severed hand.
Tall, with massive shoulders tapering to a wasp waist, the warrior prince merged a sophisticated intellect with a sociopath’s penchant for unspeakable violence. Appointed a cardinal as a teenager, he renounced his crimson robes at age twenty-two to replace his murdered brother as gonfaloniere and captain-general of the Papal States. (He remained the prime suspect in the assassination.)
For help in winning a papal annulment of his first marriage, King Louis XII bestowed upon Cesare one of his royal cousins as a bride, a small army, an income, and the title Duke of Valentinois. At twenty-seven, Il Valentino, as the Italians called him, set out to conquer central Italy in the name of his father, Pope Alexander VI. His motto: Aut Caesar aut nihil (Either Cesare or nothing).
As the diarist Landucci reports, all of Florence followed reports of Cesare’s campaign against the Renaissance’s feistiest female ruler: Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), the Duchess of Forlì. Leonardo may have met this niece of his former patron Duke Ludovico Sforza in Milan. He certainly would have heard tales of her exploits. Once, fending off enemies from castle ramparts, the auburn-locked beauty had dared the soldiers holding her children hostage to go ahead and kill them. Lifting her skirt, she shouted, “See, I have the equipment to make more.”
In her final heroic battle, the “tigre” (tigress) of Forlì, wielding a sword and fighting side by side with her men, managed to hold Cesare’s forces at bay for several weeks. In January of 1500, Cesare prevailed and took the virago duchess captive. After reportedly brutalizing Caterina as his private prisoner, he dispatched her to the foul dungeons of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo.
“If I were to write the story of my life,” she confided to a monk after her release in 1501, “I would shock the world.” Some have argued, on the basis of similarities with a portrait of Caterina painted by Lorenzo di Credi, a colleague of Leonardo’s, in 1487, that she was also the model for the Mona Lisa. The fabled tigress would certainly have been a fascinating subject, but there is no convincing evidence that Leonardo ever painted her.
At his first meeting with Cesare Borgia in 1502, in a candlelit chamber in the ducal palace of Urbino, his latest conquest, Leonardo coolly appraised the man once hailed as the most handsome in Europe. Three red chalk sketches capture his first impressions of his new patron: a jowly face, coarsened features, heavy-lidded eyes. A thick beard covered the pustules caused by syphilis, the “French disease” that had spread through the peninsula after Charles VIII’s invasion. By day Cesare took to wearing a black mask.
It’s not clear exactly how Leonardo ended up in Cesare’s employ. Perhaps the Florentine Republic volunteered his services as a token of goodwill to a predatory tyrant who posed a constant threat to its security. Perhaps Il Valentino simply demanded the expertise of the man he considered the most brilliant engineer of his day.
Leonardo would not have needed much persuasion. Although he had never set foot on a battlefield, war had fascinated him since youth. The self-taught engineer had filled pages in his notebooks with sketches of ingenious fortifications and killing machines. To Leonardo, indifferent to his patrons’ political agendas, the assignment represented an opportunity—one he’d hoped to have under Milan’s Duke Ludovico—to put his designs for military machinery to a real-life test.
The packing list that the fifty-year-old Leonardo composed in the summer of 1502 makes me think of the high-spirited boy from Vinci. Among the must-take items for his next adventure: boots and extra soles for them, a compass, a sword belt, a leather jerkin, a light hat, a “swimming belt,” a book of white paper for drawing, some charcoal, and a single concession to time’s passing—a frame for holding spectacles, the first reference to the vision problems that would plague him in old age.
The morning after their meeting in Urbino, Cesare Borgia disappeared.
“Where is Valentino?” Leonardo asked in his notebook.
The dark prince had absconded to Asti to meet with King Louis XII of France, leaving a letter, a passport of sorts, that opened all doors to “our most excellent and most dearly beloved friend, the architect and general engineer Leonardo da Vinci . . . commissioned to inspect the buildings and fortresses of our states.” In a sartorial tribute, Cesare presented him with one of his capes, long and green, cut “in the French style.”
Wrapped in this smart cloak, Leonardo threw himself into his assignment with the vigor of a man half his age. Rising with the dawn, he rode through Cesare’s newly occupied territory. At each thick, castellated fortress wall, he held up his quadrant to measure its height and peered through his thick-rimmed round spectacles to record his observations more precisely. The meticulous engineer paced out the length of moats and inner courtyards and checked with his compass the direction of nearby towns. Every now and then he paused to make a quick sketch in a palm-sized notebook hanging from his belt.
In October 1502, the priors of Florence’s ruling Signoria, anxious for news, dispatched their most adept diplomat to Borgia headquarters in Imola: thirty-three-year-old Niccolò Machiavelli, a small-boned man with short chestnut hair, a pert nose, and a smirk he couldn’t quite disguise. Like many, I had thought of Machiavelli solely as a writer whose name served as a byword for political cunning. But for fourteen years, the devoted civil servant held various diplomatic and administrative roles in his hometown, including Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic.
Machiavelli, the political mastermind, and Leonardo, the polymath genius, holed up for the winter truce in Imola’s ducal palace. I imagine the two cervelloni (“big brains” or intellectuals) passing long evenings before a blazing fire, glasses of vin santo in their hands, talking late into the night about all manner of things. Leonardo, his eyes weary after a day of working on an intricate map of Imola, would have appreciated Machiavelli’s sharp eye and even sharper tongue.
Perhaps the satirist regaled Leonardo with some of his oft-told barzellette (amusing stories). In one a newly rich man in Lucca invites a friend named Castruccio to dinner at his house, which he has just remodeled in the most ostentatious manner possible. During the meal Castruccio suddenly spits in his host’s face. Rather than apologize, he explains that he did not know where else to spit without damaging something valuable.
Inevitably, the conversation would have turned to Cesare Borgia, the leader who so fascinated Machiavelli that he would cast him as the cunning protagonist of his classic treatise The Prince. Although neither Leonardo nor Machiavelli rode to battle with Cesare’s forces, both men witnessed his gruesome handiwork.
In a particularly grisly episode, the townspeople in the nearby town of Cesena woke on a December morning to find Il Valentino’s cruel and much-hated Spanish “enforcer” Ramiro de Lorqua lying in the piazza in his finest brocade cloak, his kid-gloved hands at his side and his decapitated head stuck on a lance nearby. Beside him lay the blood-spattered blade and the butcher’s wooden wedge used to dismember him.
“All the people have been to see him,” Machiavelli wrote. “No one is sure of the reason for his death except that it pleased the Duke [Cesare], who by so doing demonstrated that he can make and unmake men as he wishes, according to their deserts.” A few days later Cesare lured some former rebels, including a close friend of Leonardo, into a local castle for a banquet and barricaded the doors. Some of the men were garroted in their seats; others, jailed and executed later.
Leonardo did not record any such scenes in words or images, but he did reflect on the brutality he had witnessed. “The most wicked act of all is to take the life of a man,” he wrote. “He who does not value [life] does not himself deserve to have it.”
Back in Florence, Francesco del Giocondo was getting his financial affairs in order. After the senior generation of the family of silkmakers had died off, Francesco and the other heirs decided to define and separate their respective portions—perhaps, Giuseppe Pallanti suggests, because they no longer trusted Francesco, who “was no angel and tended to overpower the others.” Two arbiters—one, Francesco’s father-in-law, Antonmaria Gherardini—recommended an equal division of the family assets.
With his inheritance defined, Francesco made financial arrangements for his own children. In the presence of several friars at the church of San Gallo, he signed papers prepared by his notaio to divide “omnia et singula bona mobilia et immobilia” (all of his movable and immovable goods) among his sons—Bartolomeo (from his first marriage), nine; Piero, seven; and the infant Andrea—and to set aside dowries for his daughters. A month later, in a deed signed on April 5, 1503, Francesco bought a house on Via della Stufa next to the del Giocondo family homestead.
When I peer inside the apartment building that stands in its probable location, I realize that all traces of the original design have long disappeared. And so I head to Palazzo Davanzati, now the Museo della Casa Fiorentina Antica (Museum of the Antique Florentine House), built in the mid-fourteenth century by a prosperous merchant. Unlike the renovated residences on Via della Stufa, the palazzo retains the feeling of a genuine home of Firenze com’era (Florence as it was).
I enter a ground-floor courtyard, similar to the one where the del Giocondo family would have stabled horses and stored supplies. Climbing a stone staircase to the second-floor residence, I step into spacious reception rooms with windows facing the street, a huge stone fireplace, and walls painted in warmly colored geometric patterns. Lisa’s new home might also have featured parqueted wood floors, imported Persian rugs, gold-framed mirrors, sculptured moldings, embellished ceilings, Venetian glassware, colorful ceramics, and a private bathroom under the stairwell, with a “close stool,” a chair with a chamber pot inside, and a basin with water drawn up from a well. Windows of leaded glass rather than glazed linen would have let in light and kept out cold.
The master bedroom, the heart of the house, would have contained the standard furnishings: a large wood-posted bed, with Lisa’s cassone at the foot and storage chests underneath; a guardaroba (wardrobe), and, in a corner set aside for prayer, a kneeler in front of a painting of the Madonna. Only one item in this room, I later learn, is out of place: an elaborate cradle.
Like other Florentine women of her station, Lisa would have had little need for one. As was the standard practice of the day, she would have handed her babies—Piero, Piera, Camilla, Marietta, and Andrea—over to a balia (wet nurse), usually a sturdy country lass with plenty of milk to spare. Modern scholars, citing the high infant mortality rate at the time, have criticized this practice as almost a form of maternal neglect.
Curious about any possible grounds for this assertion, I ask the opinion of Kristin Stasiowski, a Yale-educated Italian scholar, when we meet for lunch at a Florentine trattoria to discuss Renaissance family life. “Parents then were the same as parents are now,” she observes. “They wanted what was best for their children.” The countryside seemed a safer place than Florence, and robust country girls were assumed to produce higher-quality milk than the city’s delicate young mothers.
Prato’s balie won particularly high praise. The advice of Lisa’s kinswoman Margherita Datini, who often located local wet nurses for her husband’s Florentine associates, would still have held true in Lisa’s day: Try to find a woman who resembles the child’s mother a little, with good color, a strong neck, and breasts that aren’t overly large, so the baby won’t get “a flat nose” when pressed against them.
Because they didn’t nurse, the ladies of Florence’s upper classes returned more quickly to their marital beds and procreational duties—one reason they produced many more offspring than poorer women. Lisa was a prime example. In the first seven years of her marriage, she gave birth five times. Particularly after the birth of his second son, Francesco may have thought that a portrait would be a fitting tribute to the mother of his children—as well as the crowning glory of their new residence.
After eight months with the Borgia campaign, Leonardo made his way back to Florence. By March 4, 1503, he was withdrawing money from his account at Santa Maria Nuova—an indication that he never was paid for his stint as a military engineer. The experience with Cesare Borgia drained more than his savings. No longer did Leonardo take pride in designing impregnable fortresses and diabolical killing machines. Never again did he tout his skills related to military operations.
In August word came that the Borgia reign of terror had spiraled to a grotesque end. In the scorching summer heat, Pope Alexander VI and his son, Cesare, dined in a cardinal’s villa outside Rome. A week or so later both became feverishly, violently ill—possibly poisoned by wine meant for their host or stricken by a virulent form of malaria. The Pope died and “was buried in hell,” as a contemporary put it, his corpse so black and bloated that it was hardly recognizable as human.
Cesare slowly recovered but eventually fled Italy for Spain. He died, sword in hand, in an ambush in 1507 at the age of thirty-one. Three assailants, stealing his shining armor, well-cut cloak, and plush leather boots, tossed aside his butchered naked body, bleeding from more than two dozen wounds, a flat stone covering his genitals. Another of Leonardo’s patrons ended up losing everything, including his life.
Basta! Leonardo might have had enough. Enough death. Enough violence. Enough wickedness and wretchedness. Enough “pazzia bestialissima” (madness most bestial), as he had come to think of war. Leonardo’s bruising experiences with the Borgia campaign may have heightened his appreciation for the preciousness of human life—and rekindled his passion for art.
No longer “impatient even with the brush,” Leonardo was ready to paint again.