If I could freeze-frame one day in Lisa Gherardini’s life, it would be her twenty-fourth birthday, June 15, 1503. At this sweet moment in time she would have had every reason to smile. She had married into a secure and comfortable life. In the eight years since her wedding, she had embraced a stepson as her own and given birth to five children. Although she could hold Piera, swept away at age 2, only in her heart, she would have given thanks for her seven-year-old son, Piero, growing fast as summer wheat; Marietta and Camilla, her three- and four-year-old bambole (dolls); and Andrea, her darling baby boy. Her husband, Francesco del Giocondo, who had already gifted her with gowns and jewels, had purchased a new home for their growing family. And now this: an unexpected moment in the sun.
Leonardo da Vinci, most biographers agree, was working on his portrait of Lisa in 1503 (some believe he may have begun a year or two earlier), perhaps most intensely between his return from the Borgia campaign in the spring and a major new civic commission in the fall. Lisa might not have known the details of the arrangements; these were matters men negotiated. Regardless of the when and where of their first encounter, the manners of the day would have dictated what happened when a Florentine signora was formally presented to a distinguished elder, old enough (at age fifty-one) to be her father.
As a proper matron, Lisa would have extended her hand for Leonardo to raise almost but not quite to his lips. Even with her eyes cast demurely downward, she may have sensed the painter looking at her in a way no other man ever had, studying the contours of her face as if breaking her bones into bits and reassembling them in his mind. Leonardo’s voice, so melodious that a sentence could sound like a song, would have soothed any nervousness. Bemused by the unlikely intersection of their lives, Lisa may have unconsciously let her lips curve into the slightest of smiles. As she dared to glance upward, Leonardo would have caught his first impression of her eyes, those “mirrors of the soul.”
Something in the depths of Lisa’s eyes ensnared Leonardo, although no one knows exactly what. “Something inherent in his vision,” the art critic Sir Kenneth Clark observed. How else, he asked, could one explain the fact that “while he was refusing commissions from Popes, Kings, and Princesses he spent his utmost skill . . . painting the second wife of an obscure Florentine citizen?”
Maybe Lisa’s obscurity was part of her appeal. Rather than mollifying a vain monarch, Leonardo could bring to bear every technique he had honed, every theory he had developed, every insight he had acquired to capture una donna vera, a fully dimensional human being rather than someone’s pawn, property, or fantasy. And perhaps with his discerning eye Leonardo saw more than an ordinary young wife and mother caught up in the delights and distractions of small children, with a blustering husband and a big quarrelsome blended family.
“Give your figures an attitude that reveals the thoughts your characters have in mind,” Leonardo advised young painters. “Otherwise your work will not deserve praise.” Perhaps what intrigued Leonardo was Lisa’s “attitude,” her own personal variant of Gherardini-ness: a spirit large-hearted enough to love another’s child as her own; tender enough to tame a temperamental spouse; determined enough, as she would prove in the decades ahead, to make wrenching choices; and flinty enough to sustain her family through the dark years of upheaval that the future would bring. Beyond the girl Lisa once was, Leonardo might have glimpsed the essence of the woman she was still in the process of becoming.
Leonardo’s entire career had led him to this point—and this portrait. Through years of advanced mathematical calculations, he had worked out the perfect proportions for a human head. In experiments with optics, he had observed a pupil’s response to the play of light and shadow. By dissecting cadavers, he had isolated the muscles that curve a finger or draw the lips into a smile. All that sixteenth-century science could offer—as well as some pioneering insights others had yet to acquire—would sharpen his eye and guide his hand.
In the process of creating the Mona Lisa, Leonardo would revolutionize art in never-before-seen ways. Using the so-called golden ratio (which he had studied with the mathematician Pacioli), he would calculate the ideal distances between neck, eyes, forehead, nose, and lips. He would highlight Lisa’s supple hands like a magnificent work of nature and immerse objects in air and light—termed aerial or “atmospheric” perspective—so they appeared crisply defined in the foreground but less so in the distance. And he would position Lisa against a fantastical background in such a way that the coiling road, arched bridge, rocks, water, and mountains seem as much a part of her as she is part of them.
Like Prometheus, Leonardo would breathe life into his creation. Lisa would become una cosa viva (a living thing), almost human yet at the same time something more elusive: “poetry that is seen,” his ultimate goal.
In Milan, Leonardo had painted his portraits of Ludovico Sforza’s mistresses on walnut, a dense, hard wood. But in Florence, he stuck with the local artists’ preference: poplar. (Canvas had not yet become popular in Italy, except in Venice.) The thin-grained plank he selected, sawn lengthwise from the center of the trunk, was trimmed to about 30 inches high by 21 inches wide. To prevent warping, Leonardo painted on its “outer” rather than “inner” face. Instead of the standard primer of gesso, a mix of chalk, white pigment, and binding materials, he applied a dense undercoat with high levels of lead white (detected in modern chemical analysis).
From his favored apothecaries, Leonardo would have purchased precious dyes, such as cinnabar, red as dragon’s blood, and brilliant blue ultramarine from the exceedingly rare and costly lapis lazuli stone. As he preferred, he would mix the rich colors with oil, slower to dry than the eggs he had used for tempera paints in Verrocchio’s studio and more suited to the subtle shadings that he alone among Florentine painters had mastered.
At the very center of the composition, Leonardo would place Lisa’s heart, framed in the pyramid of her torso rising majestically from the base of her folded hands and seated hips to the crown of her head. As he did for his portraits of the self-proclaimed tigress Ginevra de’ Benci in Florence as well as for Il Moro’s mistresses in Milan, Leonardo chose a forward-facing three-quarter pose. Firmly grounding Lisa in a pozzetto (“little well”), a chair with a stiff back and curved arms, he instructed her to twist into a contrapposto pose, her right shoulder angled backward and her face turning in the opposite direction.
According to beneath-the-surface scans of the painting, Lisa may initially have grasped the chair arm with her left hand, as if about to push herself upward. Changing his mind, Leonardo brought both of her arms in front of her body, the left leaning on the chair, the right hand resting atop the left (a sign of virtue), her supple fingers gently fanning over her sleeve. This startlingly original position would create the illusion that Lisa’s hands are nearer the viewer than the rest of her body.
If I had been in Lisa Gherardini’s hand-sewn slippers, I might have donned my fanciest frock, perhaps a gown with a voided velvet bodice, styled from the finest fabrics in the del Giocondo shops. And I would have looped pearls, the most impressive gems, around my neck and slid a ring set with a sizable stone, maybe two, on my fingers. This would have been the image that a pretentious Florentine merchant would have wanted to project. But even if he did commission the portrait, Francesco del Giocondo seems to have had no say in his wife’s attire. At this stage in his career no one told Leonardo how or what to paint.
Although he dressed his Madonnas with what one scholar calls “fashion plate elegance,” Leonardo stripped Lisa of all embellishments: no beaded bodice, no brocaded overgown, no jewels, not even a wedding ring. I began to understand his motives only when I came across a comment in his notebooks about “peasant girls in the mountains, clad in their poor rags, bereft of all ornament, yet surpassing in beauty women covered with adornments.” Lisa, though no rural ragamuffin, didn’t need gaudy frasche (trimmings) to snare a viewer’s attention.
Leonardo presented the merchant’s wife as una donna vera in understated but refined garments appropriate to her role as a respectable, respected married lady. Her gamurra, dulled by time and layers of lacquer, would originally have been a lighter green, woven of the highest-quality silk. A skilled embroiderer would have crafted the intricate knotting and needlework around the neckline, cut just low enough to reveal a hint of the dip between her breasts. The velvet sleeves, now a coppery shade, drape in the “artful artlessness” of deep folds and seem somehow to glow from within.
Scouring Renaissance fashion histories, I learned that women often wore veils, light and sheer, more “to enhance than hide” their looks. Lisa’s transparent veil, almost invisible to the naked eye, floats from the top of her head over her shoulders. The lighter-than-air accessory may have come from a French hairstyle, “la foggia alla francese,” popular at the time or from the “Spanish look” popularized by the Borgia pope’s daughter, the fashionista Lucrezia Borgia.
Some commentators have categorized this as a guarnello, a gossamer gown particularly popular during and after pregnancy, but Lisa’s billowy garment lacks a hem and other characteristic touches. No one has definitively identified the piece of material rolled over Lisa’s left shoulder (also hard to detect without close examination)—perhaps a shawl, a scarf, an extension of the veil over her head, or a theatrical flourish Leonardo may have invented.
With his typical zest for silky ringlets, Leonardo twirled tendrils of angel-fine hair against Lisa’s pale neck. But while her hair may look as loose as a young girl’s, modern imaging techniques have revealed a more elaborate coif, with locks gathered gently at the back of her neck, perhaps in a bun or bonnet of sorts, and long curls undulating on either side of her face—a style seen in other portraits of the day. At some point, according to the under-the-surface scans, Lisa may have freed more strands to cascade softly onto her left shoulder.
Biographers suggest several possibilities for where Lisa might have posed for Leonardo. The artist could have begun his original sketch in his bottega at Santissima Annunziata, where he was living at the time. When he later moved to the Santa Maria Novella compound, Leonardo might have set up his three-legged easel there. Wherever he worked, Leonardo, obsessed with light, might have rigged up shades to filter the sun or, as he suggested in his advice to painters, taken advantage of cloudy or hazy days or the evocative glow of dusk.
Leonardo would have started by drawing his model with either chalk or pen on paper. Like other artists of the day, he could have completed a sketch in just a single sitting and transferred its outlines via pinpricks and chalk to a prepared wood panel. But in the earliest account of the portrait’s creation, Vasari describes a far more prolonged and complex process.
Leonardo, he recounts, hired performers “who played or sang, and continually jested, who would make [Lisa] remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to their portraits.” Many scholars deride this dramatic scenario, but Leonardo may have needed more than the usual amount of time with his model. The reason: He was attempting something that had never been done before.
“Leonardo wanted to portray the complex psychological life of a real person,” explains Monsignor Timothy Verdon, director of the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, who teaches a course on women in Renaissance art at Stanford University’s Florence program. “He may have wanted to see the play of different feelings and responses to different stimuli on her face. The emotions, the intelligence, the obvious wit that he captured are what makes Lisa’s face so alive and so fascinating to us.”
What about Lisa? What did she behold when she returned Leonardo’s penetrating stare? She would never have met anyone like him. Few people had. She doubtlessly knew the lofty reputation of the silver-maned painter who swept through the town in modish cloaks with boys as bewitching as angels in his wake. She would have appreciated the immense honor of the grand master’s prized attention to herself and her family. Like other Florentines, always proud of their grasp of cose dell’arte (things of art), she would have recognized the power of an artist of his stature to confer an eternity of fame on a model. But perhaps she would have dismissed this daunting possibility and thought of herself as simply a prosperous man’s wife posing for a portrait relatively few might ever view.
Sitting just so before Leonardo’s attentive gaze, Lisa may have sensed the qualities that made him appealing as a man as well as an artist: warmth, kindness, gentleness, a wisdom deeper than knowledge, a childlike playfulness that he would never outgrow. Perhaps, in the harmony that a shared focus breeds, the maestro and his muse forged such an intense connection that all else seemed to fall away in a moment suspended in time.
The notion of Lisa in a state of communion with a paternal figure makes me think of my own father. In his final years we would sometimes just sit together, not saying anything, looking up at a rambling cloud, sharing the same space and the same moment, wrapped in the warmth of feeling totally accepting and being totally accepted. The memory brings a bittersweet smile to my lips.
As Leonardo worked on Lisa’s portrait, another local artist was finishing his latest masterpiece. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), twenty-three years Leonardo’s junior, could not have been more different from the refined court painter. Affable Leonardo won over even casual acquaintances so effortlessly, Vasari writes, “that he stole everyone’s heart.” No one ever accused Michelangelo of such larceny.
A short child who never grew tall, Michelangelo was squat and bony, with a low brow set on a large head, coarse curly hair, big ears that jutted from the sides of his skull, and small, searing eyes. Unlike fastidious Leonardo, who washed his hands with rose water and “flower of lavender,” Michelangelo dressed in splattered tunics and often didn’t remove his dogskin underboots until they reached such a state of disrepair that strips of flesh came off with them. His fearsome temper matched his grizzled looks.
In 1503, the twenty-eight-year-old sculptor had been working for almost two years on a discarded marble slab more than 16 feet tall. A local artist attempting to carve a statue of a young David had bungled the work so badly that the huge stone, dubbed “Il Gigante” (the Giant), had seemed unusable. But Michelangelo’s gifted hands had brought the shepherd boy back to life.
On June 23, the eve of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist, the directors of the workshop of the Opera del Duomo (Cathedral Works) opened their gates and invited Florentines to a preview. If Lisa Gherardini and her husband were among the throng—as seems likely—they wouldn’t have known what to make of the astonishing statue. No one did. Unlike Leonardo’s figures, drawn in perfect proportion, David flaunted disproportion. The hands and feet were too large, the thighs too massive, the chest too muscled, the head overwhelming. Everything about Michelangelo’s marble teen titan seemed new and unnerving—including the intensity of his gaze.
I know one person who has looked directly into David’s piercing eyes: Contessa Simonetta Brandolini d’Adda, president of the board of the Friends of Florence, which funded the most recent cleaning of Michelangelo’s giant-killer. While the statue was encased in scaffolding, the petite American, transplanted to Florence decades ago, had the privilege of climbing up to look at David eye-to-eye.
“What did you see?” I ask.
“Determination,” she replies. Michelangelo embodied the very word.
Leonardo missed the debut. That June, Machiavelli summoned him to the front line of Florence’s war with Pisa, which then had access to the sea. For almost a decade, their landlocked city had been fighting to regain possession of the port. During the long winter evenings they had shared at Cesare Borgia’s fortress in Imola, Leonardo and Machiavelli may have envisioned a scheme for diverting the Arno, the river that runs through Tuscany, into canals that would give Florence sea access and force Pisa to surrender.
When a key fort above the Arno east of Pisa fell to the Florentine forces in June, Leonardo inspected the site and began to formulate a plan. In time, his calculations would lead to a bold attempt to change the river’s course. Of Leonardo’s many grandiose schemes, this strikes me as the most ambitious—and the most foolhardy.
Returning to Florence, Leonardo may have resumed work on Lisa’s portrait. By autumn he had made significant progress—a fact that remained unknown until a fortuitous discovery in 2005.
A manuscript expert named Armin Schlechter was cataloguing an early-sixteenth-century edition of Epistulae ad Familiares, the Latin letters of the Roman orator Cicero, written in the first century B.C. and a favorite tome of the humanists of Renaissance Florence. Flipping through its pages as he prepared an exhibit at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the sharp-eyed scholar spotted a note in the margin.
In the annotated pages’ text, Cicero had described how the renowned Greek painter Apelles rendered the head and shoulders of his subjects in extraordinary detail before continuing with the rest of a painting. Next to this paragraph a comment in erudite Latin stated that “Leonardus Vincius,” the Apelles of the day (the highest praise a Renaissance humanist could bestow on an artist), was using a similar approach for a new work, a portrait of “Lise del Giocondo” as well as for Anne, “mother of the Virgin,” in his still-uncompleted altarpiece. The marginalia included the date, October 1503, and a bit of speculation about Leonardo’s newest commission: “We will see how he is going to do it regarding the Great Hall of the Council.”
Most journalistic accounts identify the commentator as Agostino Vespucci, a cousin of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who was serving as a secretary for Second Chancellor Machiavelli. Not so, says Rab Hatfield, a retired professor of art history at Syracuse University in Florence and such a fastidious fact-finder that he’s been hailed as the “Sherlock Holmes of Renaissance art.” The respected researcher identifies the author of the note as the notaio Ser Agostino di Matteo da Terricciola, the book’s owner, whom Leonardo, apparently in a reference to Machiavelli’s valued assistant, called “my Vespucci.”
The serendipitous discovery electrified the academic world. For the first time, a verified historical document set a specific time frame—in and around 1503—for the Mona Lisa’s creation, refuting the contention, once widely held, that Leonardo painted the work at a much later date in Rome. Everything about the marginal note—the ink, the paper, the specificity of the observations—has held up to the closest scrutiny.
A letter from 1503 provides less authoritative confirmation of the timing of Lisa’s portrait. At some point in the summer or fall, Machiavelli must have visited Leonardo with his pal Luca Ugolino. If he came when Leonardo was sketching, Lisa Gherardini might have made the acquaintance of another Florentine whose name would become almost as famous as hers.
That autumn Machiavelli’s wife, Marietta, gave birth to their first son while her husband was in Rome on state business. “Congratulations!” Ugolino wrote in a note to his “very dear friend.” “Obviously Mistress Marietta did not deceive you, for he is your spitting image. Leonardo da Vinci would not have done a better portrait.”
The only portrait Ugolino might have seen on Leonardo’s easel was Lisa’s.
The long-unknown marginal note reveals not just when Leonardo began painting, but also how the portrait must have emerged: face-first. Lisa’s smile may have been one of the first of her features that Leonardo drew—and the last one that he touched.
Vasari, in his description of La Gioconda, first published in 1550, lauds Lisa’s “ghigno,” a word that translates as both “grin” and “mocking smile,” as “a wondrous thing, as lively as the smile of the living original . . . so sweet that while looking at it one thinks it rather divine than human.” So much has since been said that some experts have wearied of talking about Lisa’s lips—as I discover when I bring up her smile during an interview in a trattoria in the neighborhood where Leonardo trained as a teenager.
“Ask your husband!” Marco Cianchi, a professor of art history at the prestigious Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, thunders.
“But he’s a psychiatrist,” I respond, startled by the amiable Florentine’s uncharacteristic outburst.
“I know,” he says with an emphatic shake of his head, and I begin to understand.
Let therapists hatch theories about what thoughts might have danced behind Lisa Gherardini’s enigmatic gaze, what emotions tugged at those labile lips. Art historians know better.
As Cianchi explains, most Renaissance artists, whose attempts at grins ended up looking like grimaces, viewed the smile as an elusive Holy Grail, a consummate technical challenge. Leonardo himself spent years experimenting with similar expressions until, with the gentle slope of Lisa’s mouth, he elevated his skills to an incomparable new level.
“If you asked Leonardo what the smile meant, he would have said, ‘What are you talking about? Why are you asking? I was painting her face,’ ” says Cianchi.
My psychiatrist husband, for the record, can offer no insights. However, Sigmund Freud saw shadows of Leonardo’s childhood. Lisa’s expression, he asserted, “awakened something in him which had slumbered in his soul for a long time, in all probability an old memory.” Perhaps his mother, separated from him as a boy, “possessed that mysterious smile which he lost and which fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady.”
I run another psychological theory by my husband: What about a sort of transference—the redirection of emotions originally felt in childhood to a substitute? Rather than her smile reminding Leonardo of his mother, perhaps Lisa’s maternal warmth elicited loving feelings that Leonardo would have “transferred” to the painting. This may be why millions of people feel an almost visceral connection with the Mona Lisa that they cannot fully explain.
His response is a classic therapist’s: “What do you think?”
I have no grand theory, but the one I copied word for word in my notes comes from an emeritus professor at Oxford University, Martin Kemp, a preeminent Leonardo scholar. “No image,” he observed, “has ever been more particular in the way it engages us with a specific human presence.”
Consciously or not, Leonardo created an exquisite prototype of a Rorschach test, an image that each of us can “read” in a unique way. We see in Lisa what we want to see—mother, lover, daughter, fantasy, soother, seductress.
“What do you see when you look at the Mona Lisa?” my husband inquires.
“A real woman,” I reply.
“Like you,” he says.
I open my mouth to protest, but then I realize that this may indeed be why her smile enchants: the sense that Lisa is somehow like us. In that face, in those eyes, and especially in that smile, we see a reflection of secrets locked within our souls.
As Leonardo was sketching the smile that would spark centuries of speculation, workers were finishing construction of the Sala Grande del Consiglio, or Great Hall of the Council (now the Salone dei Cinquecento, or Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio. As it neared completion, Machiavelli may have presented the town priors with an inspired suggestion: Who better to decorate one of its bare walls than the venerable artist hailed as “Painting Incarnate”? In the fall of 1503, Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini, who had been appointed chief magistrate for life, and the Signoria asked Leonardo to “leave a memento” of his time in Florence in the form of a painting in the hall.
It was the commission of a lifetime: a grand mural in the most important civic building in the artistic epicenter of the Western world. Beyond all-but-assured glory, the sheer scope of the project—a painting some 15 to 20 feet high and perhaps as long as the entire wall—would have thrilled Leonardo.
On October 24, the artist took possession of the keys to the Sala del Papa (Hall of the Pope) in the compound at Santa Maria Novella, the lodgings once reserved for a visiting king or pope (reportedly somewhat run-down at the time), and began work on the immense cartone. No one doubted Leonardo’s genius, but as Gonfaloniere Soderini kept griping, the artist had a bad reputation for procrastination.
Leonardo, ideas exploding onto the pages of his notebooks, seemed eager to get to work. At least for the time being, Lisa’s elusive smile may have been set aside.
In January of 1504, Leonardo had to turn his attention to another artist’s work. At a public meeting, he and a blue-ribbon panel of fellow distinguished Florentines—among them Sandro Botticelli, Andrea della Robbia, and Filippino Lippi—debated the best location for Michelangelo’s bold new statue. Most tourists, myself included, cannot imagine the David (even if only a replica) anywhere else but on a pedestal in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. But if Leonardo had had his way, Michelangelo’s young shepherd would have been sequestered almost out of sight.
Some of the committee members, worried about exposing the “delicate and fragile” marble to the elements, suggested a spot in the covered loggia in the Piazza della Signoria. Echoing their concerns, Leonardo further advised against a “conspicuous and obtrusive” position under the central vault. A more obscure setting “on the parapet where they hang the tapestries on the side of the wall,” he suggested, would ensure that the distracting statue “not spoil the ceremonies of the officials.”
Michelangelo would have seethed. As the Republic’s leaders ultimately decided, his monument to the human spirit, a supreme incarnation of Florentine independence, deserved to stand “proudly in the blaze of the piazza,” directly in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.
One day around that time the world’s reigning painter and its reigning sculptor clashed face-to-face in Florence’s Piazza Santa Trinita. Some out-of-town visitors, disputing a passage in Dante, asked Leonardo’s opinion. Spying Michelangelo entering the square, the elder artist replied by calling out that the Florentine native might offer some insight.
Michelangelo took the comment as an insult. “Volendo mordere Leonardo” (wishing to “bite” Leonardo), as a chronicler of the time put it, he responded with a scathing reference to Leonardo’s aborted equestrian statue for Milan’s Duke Ludovico.
“Explain it yourself—you who designed a horse to cast in bronze, and couldn’t cast it, and abandoned it out of shame,” he snapped. “The stupid people of Milan [caponi, or fatheads, he called them] had faith in you?”
Michelangelo abruptly spun around—“turned his kidneys,” in an observer’s words—and stomped off, as Leonardo’s face reddened.
Florence’s petty bureaucrats also pushed Leonardo’s patience to the limit. One day, while collecting his monthly stipend, the clerk paid the usually unflappable artist in piles of quattrini (small change).
“I am not a penny painter,” Leonardo indignantly protested, pushing back the coins. When Gonfaloniere Soderini denounced him as insolent, the artist, with help from his friends, gathered a huge mound of quattrini, the equivalent of all the money he had been paid, and tried to return it. The priors ended up begging Leonardo to keep his wages and continue his work.
Leonardo had a bigger battle to contemplate: his painting of the defeat of Milan in 1440 at the Tuscan town of Anghiari for the Sala Grande. In one of the artist’s notebooks, Machiavelli’s secretary, Agostino Vespucci, recorded a blow-by-blow account of the confrontation between 40 cavalry squadrons and 2,000 foot soldiers, crowned by a miraculous appearance of St. Peter in the clouds.
Leonardo ignored the grandiose historical depiction. As we can see from his many preparatory drawings, he wanted to capture war’s bestial madness in anguished faces, snarling mouths, hacking weapons, and thrusting spears. At one focal point, soldiers strike and scream in a fierce struggle for a battle standard while half-wild horses, teeth bared and hooves raised, rear and plunge in a furious vortex amid clouds of dust and smoke.
“It would be impossible to express the inventiveness of Leonardo’s design,” writes Vasari. “Fury, hate, and rage are as visible in the men as in the horses.”
On May 4, 1504, the duly impressed priors issued a formal contract, reportedly negotiated by Machiavelli, for Leonardo to complete the mural by the following February, “no exception or excuse accepted.”
Leonardo might have banished all thoughts of mercurial Michelangelo from his busy mind—until the day the David rolled through town.
On May 14, workers smashed the arch over the gate to the Opera del Duomo workshop to remove the statue, which they had encased in a wooden frame, as the diarist Landucci describes it, “in an upright position and suspended so that it did not touch the ground with its feet.” More than forty men, using techniques dating back to the construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, turned fourteen greased rollers hand-to-hand to transport the 6-ton sculpture a distance of about a third of a mile.
“It went very slowly,” Landucci reports without comment—or exaggeration—as he records its four-day journey. Florentines, always the keenest of spectators, watched the snail’s-pace procession with awe and apprehension. Artisans left their lathes and workbenches. Cobblers put down their hammers. Tailors gaped with needle and thread in hand. Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo might have told their wide-eyed youngsters—particularly eleven-year-old Bartolomeo and eight-year-old Piero—that they were witnessing a historic sight.
Michelangelo’s acclaimed David transformed the artist into both a celebrity and, with the receipt of a handsome commission, a rich young man. Not yet thirty, he would soon accumulate more money in his account at Santa Maria Nuova than Leonardo did in his lifetime.
What did Leonardo, who had spent sixteen years laboring on his giant horse in Milan, think of the colossus that Michelangelo had created in little more than two years? In the corner of a page in a notebook from that time, we find a pen-and-ink sketch of a figure very similar to the David. Some historians see it as an homage; others as “a graphic critique.”
As for sculpting itself, Leonardo dismissed the process as dirty, dusty, exhausting labor, “a most mechanical exercise often accompanied by great sweat, compounded with dust and turning to mud,” certainly unfit for gentlemen. Discoursing on the superiority of painting, he conjured up a contrasting scene of an artist, “at perfect ease . . . [who] adorns himself with the clothes he fancies . . . often accompanied by music or by the reading of various beautiful works”—perhaps an apt description of himself painting the portrait of Lisa Gherardini.
On July 9, 1504, came the news no child—not even a mature man in his fifties—is ever fully prepared to hear: Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, had died.
“He left ten sons and two daughters,” Leonardo wrote with an oddly matter-of-fact lack of emotion. While he included himself in this total, Leonardo’s father calculated differently. In his will, Ser Piero bequeathed his estate to his nine legitimate sons and two daughters, with no mention of his firstborn. In death, as in life, Ser Piero never officially acknowledged his bastard child.
Florence’s foremost families, members of the religious orders Ser Piero represented, and his vast network of connections gathered in the church of Badia Fiorentina to mourn a venerable pillar of the community who had devoted more than half a century to its service. The gaggle of Leonardo’s stepsiblings and his shrill fourth stepmother would have clustered close to the altar. Leonardo remained off to the side, seemingly lost in thought.
Francesco del Giocondo, who had worked with Ser Piero for years, would have offered Leonardo condolences, as would Lisa, perhaps the most sympathetic face of all.
After much bluster about not-to-be-missed deadlines, in the summer of 1504, Gonfaloniere Soderini interrupted Leonardo’s work on The Battle of Anghiari. Desperate to end the long and costly Pisan war, he revived the proposal that Machiavelli may have presented to him: the diversion of the lower Arno River to cut the port of Pisa off from the sea.
The engineer in Leonardo, as avid as his inner artist, enthusiastically rose to the challenge. Filling page after page of his notebooks with maps and charts of the terrain, he developed a plan for a channel a mile long, 30 feet deep, and 80 feet wide at its mouth. In late August 1504, the Signoria gave the order for 2,000 men with shovels to start moving a million tons of earth. As costs and complications mounted, they all but choked on every coin.
The on-site crew, despite Leonardo’s objections, departed from the original plan by digging two canals instead of one. In October a cloudburst filled the newly dug ditches, and the water flowed backward faster than the Florentines could dig. The walls collapsed, flooding the plain and destroying homes, farms, and fields.
The Arno project ended as an ignominious and expensive fiasco. Dozens of workers died from infection or accidents; huge amounts of money and resources were squandered. The blame fell on the project’s initiators. Soderini, although guaranteed job tenure, lost considerable political support. Machiavelli reportedly fell ill from shame and grief and took—or was ordered to take—leave from his post. Leonardo, still valued as a military engineer, was dispatched to Piombino to consult on its fortifications.
In Florence, Gonfaloniere Soderini, perhaps staring at the bare walls of the Sala Grande, hatched a plan that strikes me as cunningly Machiavellian. By cosmic good fortune, his city could lay claim to two artistic supernovas of unmatched brilliance. Rather than having Leonardo alone contribute a major work (if he ever managed to complete anything), what if a civic competition of sorts—practically a Florentine blood sport—pitted the world’s premier painter against its premier sculptor?
The bad blood between the two—“sdegno grandissimo” (greatest disdain), as Vasari put it—could only fuel their creative fires and goad them into speedy completion of the project. And what chamber could be more suited to showcasing the oversize talents of these titans than the vast new Sala Grande del Consiglio? The priors formally commissioned Michelangelo’s mural as a companion piece to Leonardo’s, but everyone recognized the head-to-head duel for what it was: a “battle of the battles” between the fifty-two-year-old grand master and the twenty-nine-year-old giant-slayer.
In the autumn of 1504, Michelangelo assembled scaffolding, paper, paints, and other supplies in the Sala dei Tintori (Hall of the Dyers), a large room once used to unwind bolts of cloth in the old wool-dyers’ hospital. No one was permitted or invited to enter.
Depicting the Battle of Cascina, a victory over Pisa in 1364, Michelangelo focused on the moment when the Florentine captain, seeing his troops swimming in the Arno to escape the summer heat, sounds a false alarm that brings the soldiers running from the river to prepare for battle. In Michelangelo’s depiction of war as a noble, manly exploit, heroic warriors (who just happen to be naked) scramble to pull themselves out of the water, climb onto land, and dash for dusty clothes and sun-scorched armor. Together his complex and graceful figures—standing, kneeling, crouching, leaning forward—represent, as one art historian put it, an apotheosis of “the godlike character of the male body.”
Working in a nonstop frenzy for about four months, Michelangelo submitted the preliminary drawing for his mural on the last day of October 1504. On his return to Florence from Piombino in December, Leonardo made no public comment on Michelangelo’s work. However, his notebooks contain a brief criticism of drawings of exaggeratedly muscular torsos that make the human figure look like “un sacco di noci” (a sack of walnuts).
Michelangelo never even touched a brush to the wall of the Sala Grande. After sprinting to catch up with Leonardo, his progress slowed and then stopped. The following spring he would leave for Rome, where Pope Julius II had summoned him to design his tomb.
As word of the clash of the giants spread, artists from botteghe throughout Italy flocked to Florence. Michelangelo shrugged them off with his usual surliness, but Leonardo, reveling in the role of dean of the local artists, welcomed the new admirers. The painter we know as Raphael (1483–1520) was so impressed by the esteemed maestro’s consummate skill that he swore to forget everything he had learned and imitate him.
The twenty-year-old from Urbino, who won over his colleagues—as Leonardo had—with charm and physical beauty, provides us with a sort of progress report on the portrait of Lisa Gherardini. A small pen-and-brown-ink sketch (now in the Louvre), believed to have been done around 1504, depicts a big-eyed girl in Leonardo’s innovative three-quarter pose, with her head tilted slightly forward and hands loosely crossed, set against a flat landscape framed by columns.
In 1506, Raphael produced another copycat composition: the wedding portrait of Maddalena Strozzi Doni, the sister of one of Francesco del Giocondo’s business associates, Marcello Strozzi (a work now in the Pitti Palace). Lisa and Maddalena—contemporaries, almost certain acquaintances, possible friends—share the same trendy look, with high foreheads, plucked brows, and long hair escaping from a bonnet of sorts at the back of their necks.
Maddalena, a recent bride dolled up in a showy dress of rich blue and red with an ostentatious nuptial pendant and three rings on her fingers, sits in the same three-quarter pose as Lisa. Yet when I compare reproductions of the two works side by side, Lisa, despite her muted attire, seems infinitely more enticing—visual poetry compared to the eternally prosaic Maddalena.
In February 1505, the Signoria arranged for the delivery of stacks of sheets of sturdy paper and hundreds of pounds of flour for glue to the Palazzo Vecchio. Carpenters assembled an ingenious scaffolding apparatus designed by Leonardo so he could easily work at different heights. Paperhangers glued the sheets together into a single immense cartone, and assistants transferred the design to the wall with pinpricks. Experimenting with different binding agents and pigments, Leonardo came upon a formula, reportedly from ancient Rome, for a compound that produced hues more intense than any he had ever seen.
On June 6, Leonardo recorded in his notebook that he “began to paint in the palace.” Things immediately went wrong.
“I was just picking up my brush when the weather took a turn for the worse. . . . The cartone began to come apart. The container of water broke, spilling water. Suddenly the weather grew worse still, and the rain bucketed down until evening, turning day into night.”
Despite the bad omens, Leonardo persevered, trying to hasten the absorption of the colors with heat from a coal fire on iron braziers. This approach worked for the lower wall, but one evening a large section near the top remained damp. As some biographers imagine the scene, wet colors began to drip down the wall, dirtying and disfiguring the portions that had already dried. Leonardo may have ordered wood thrown on the fire so that the flames would reach higher. In near-panic his assistants might have flung everything they could find—perhaps even boards and benches—onto the blaze. As the heat intensified, the paints may have streamed inexorably downward like lava from a volcano. Leonardo could only watch helplessly.
The extent of the damage is unknown, as is its cause. Chroniclers have blamed the poor quality of the undercoating, the unproven technique, the makeup of the oils mixed with the pigments. Payments for various materials continued through October, but then Leonardo seems to have abandoned the project.
Copies by his contemporaries indicate that the artist had completed only the knot of men and horses fighting for the military standard. Although some write that he quit “out of dissatisfaction,” the word strikes me as a gross understatement for his disappointment. Leonardo may simply not have had the heart to clean off the remnants of his first attempt and start again.
The “battle of the battles” ended without a clear victor but nonetheless proved an artistic triumph. For generations of painters, Michelangelo’s preliminary sketch and Leonardo’s fragment, copied and circulated throughout Europe, served as la scuola del mondo, “the school of the world,” inspiring art’s next big leaps forward.
During one of my stays in Florence, I learn of a tangible link between Leonardo’s huge, violent, tempestuous battle scene and its opposite in every possible way: the small, sedate portrait of Lisa Gherardini. For more than three decades Maurizio Seracini, an Italian bioengineer who heads the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture, and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, searched for remnants of the “lost battle,” now masked by a massive mural by Giorgio Vasari, in the Sala Grande del Consiglio. In 2012, Seracini’s research team, using tiny surgical probes, extracted samples from a hidden wall just millimeters behind the Vasari painting. Laboratory analysis identified one pigment as identical to a black glaze used in the Mona Lisa.
One day I stood in front of the scaffolding Seracini’s researchers had assembled in the hall and reflected on the masterpiece that might have been. Even in the midst of the artistic battle of his life, I wondered: Was Lisa always on Leonardo’s mind?
An English translation of The Lives of the Artists describes Leonardo as “toiling” over Lisa’s portrait for four years, but Vasari used the more evocative Italian word, penare, which also can mean “to strive, to labor, to take pains”—fitting verbs when describing the artist’s meticulous technique. For each square yard that Michelangelo covered in painting the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Leonardo, in just as much time, painted only about a square inch. The painter “permitted no arbitrary, random stroke of the brush,” Goethe observed. “Everything had to be both natural and rational.”
Leonardo may have felt no compunction to hurry. Perhaps his feelings about this seemingly straightforward assignment changed over time. Perhaps the portrait became his chance to showcase the mastery he had honed over his entire career. Building ever so delicately upon the bright white base with his extremely fine silk brushes, Leonardo dabbed layer upon almost evanescent layer so the previous one shone through, creating the fumo, or smoke, of shadows.
His very, very thin glazes conceal as well as reveal, creating chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark, that heightens the drama and impact of the work. According to a computer-generated relief map of the portrait, the shaded areas around Lisa’s mouth and eyes have the thickest layers of paint, yet so gentle is Leonardo’s touch that even close examination cannot detect a single stroke on the surface of the panel.
Almost daily for more than two years I have contemplated a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with increasing appreciation as well as affection. The details mesmerize me: Lisa turning gently as if inviting conversation. Her warm brown eyes glistening, one pupil ever so slightly more dilated, a split second behind the other in adjusting to a change in light. Her blood pulsing just beneath the translucent skin of her neck. Leonardo’s sfumature (subtle shadings) blurring into an uncertain look at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her lips rising but stopping on the very cusp of an asymmetrical smile.
The face of una donna vera stirs before my eyes. Centuries before the invention of the camera, Leonardo captured the immediacy of a photograph in a portrait of life itself.
In 1506 a court summoned Leonardo to Milan to complete a long-disputed commission. This ruling freed the artist from what might have come to feel like indentured servitude to the Signoria, although the reprieve was meant to be temporary. At the insistence of Gonfaloniere Soderini, Leonardo signed a notarized promise to return within ninety days or face a 150-florin fine.
Yet even though he may have been eager to leave Florence, Leonardo was not finished with Lisa. After so many years of work, the portrait still remained, at least in his eyes, “imperfetto” (incomplete and imperfect). Even after thousands upon thousands of brushstrokes, he had not yet realized his vision.
Was Lisa disappointed? Was her husband Francesco, if he had indeed commissioned the painting, upset that he couldn’t claim possession?
With his inimitable charm Leonardo may have reassured them that he wasn’t leaving permanently. He would come back to Florence. After all, he had sworn to return. While the court dithered in Milan, he might have time enough to finish the portrait. They would have to be patient, to wait and see.
Francesco del Giocondo knew that he could do nothing to compel the artist to do anything he chose not to do. The Servite friars at Santissima Annunziata would have sympathized. They were still waiting for their altarpiece.