One day in Florence, a princess invites me to lunch.
I didn’t realize she was royalty—just a childhood friend of a friend who had given me the name and number of a “P/ssa” (which I wrongly assumed stood for professoressa) and insisted I call.
“Come today,” the cordial voice urges when I introduce myself. As the taxi pulls in front of the address on Via del Parione, the driver asks if I am planning to rent the place for a wedding or banquet. “They shoot movies here too,” he tells me.
I can see why. Staring up at the imposing Baroque facade of the Palazzo Corsini, I remind myself not to let my jaw fall open. When I exit the elevator onto the piano nobile, I feel that I have fallen back centuries in time.
Following my hostess, Principessa Giorgiana Corsini, an agelessly, effortlessly elegant fiorentina, through a series of ballroom-sized chambers, I gape at sky-high ceilings, silk-covered walls, faded velvet chairs, imposing paintings in gilded frames, and a concert hall where her choral group practices and performs. At the end of yet another grand salon, she pulls open heavy drapes triple her height to reveal a balcony overlooking a hidden oasis: a sweeping Renaissance garden with geometric patterns of shrubbery, manicured paths, stately oaks, and dozens of lemon trees in terra-cotta vases. The statues that adorn the main avenue stand upon graduated pedestals of different heights, adding another grace note to the intricate design.
I marvel at yet another way in which Florentines have long surrounded themselves with beauty. When I meet several generations of today’s Corsini—the dignified patriarch, two engaging daughters, a teenage grandson with a face from a Ghirlandaio fresco, and a winsome granddaughter, some living within the palazzo compound and others dropping by from country estates—I marvel at the family as well.
I should have realized that the many generations of Corsini and Gherardini would intertwine in some ways. Both clans originally came from the area around Poggibonsi in southern Tuscany, but the Corsini, with bankers, bishops, cardinals, a pope, and a saint adorning their family tree, long ago eclipsed the Gherardini.
During the decoration of the Baroque mansion in the seventeenth century, a Corsini count commissioned a painting by the artist Andrea Gherardini, perhaps a descendant of Lisa’s relatives. Less than a century ago, a Corsini relation was living at Vignamaggio, the bucolic former Gherardini estate in Chianti.
Listening as a half-dozen Corsini weave stories like so many fine silk threads into the tapestry of their past, I realize—not for the first time—that one can understand Italians only in the context of their families. I keep this in mind as I piece together the events of the years after Leonardo da Vinci left Florence in 1506, when family issues, disputes, sorrows, and scandals swirled around the painter, his model, and her husband.
Leonardo, mired for years in messy lawsuits, arbitrations, and negotiations, eventually managed to create a gratifying “family” life in the court of Milan’s French rulers. In Florence, Lisa Gherardini devoted herself to domestic duties, while Francesco del Giocondo blustered about town hounding creditors. All around them, foes and friends of the exiled Medici jockeyed for influence. Plots were hatched. Alliances shifted. Amid ever-shifting political currents, Florentines struggled to navigate through treacherous times. But one thing endured: la famiglia.
Lisa’s family life revolved around her children, her days a blur of cuddling, comforting, laughing, drying tears, fretting over coughs and fevers, giving and getting thousands of good-night kisses. By 1507, the oldest boys—Bartolomeo in his early teens and eleven-year-old Piero—had grown to strapping lads who were mastering the abacus and learning the intricacies of the silk trade from their father.
Tutors would teach eight-year-old Camilla and seven-year-old Marietta the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic along with music and dancing. Lisa, like other Florentine mothers, would have taken charge of almost everything else they needed to know. As Andrea, her youngest son, turned five, she might have begun teaching him the alphabet by forming letters out of “fruits, candies, and other childish foods,” as a humanist tutor advised.
No longer sharing a residence with her in-laws, Lisa had become the donna governa, or lady in charge, of a busy household. With a ring of keys dangling from her belt, she managed every detail—overseeing servants, planning meals, ordering supplies, supervising repairs and renovations, keeping a close inventory of silver, jewels, and other valuables, inspecting linens (washed in a solution of ashes and perfumed with quince apples), hemming dresses for her daughters and jerkins for her sons. Every season brought special tasks, whether preparing for summers in the country or organizing banquets for holiday celebrations.
Of course, Lisa couldn’t neglect her many social obligations, as historian Sara Matthews-Grieco of Syracuse University in Florence points out during our conversation about Renaissance women’s lives. She would have made frequent calls to women linked to her by blood or marriage and welcomed them into her home as well. As her husband prospered, his colleagues and clients would have asked her to serve as their children’s godmother—which would mean more birthdays and name days, christenings and weddings, feast days and festivals. And more giggles and gossip and girl time to brighten Lisa’s days, much like her kinswoman Margherita Datini’s merry band of femmine did in Prato.
In 1507, the year Lisa turned twenty-eight, she discovered that she was expecting another baby. This time, older and busier, she may have felt wearier than she remembered in her previous pregnancies. In December of 1507, she gave birth to a third son. Perhaps Giocondo, as he was named, was born too soon or too small. Perhaps he developed a stubborn fever or difficulty breathing. Francesco would have summoned a doctor. Anxious relatives would have offered fervent prayers. But little Giocondo del Giocondo lived only about a month. Once again Lisa and Francesco would have felt the stab of a parent’s greatest grief.
We don’t know if the sad news reached Leonardo in Milan.
Despite his pledge to return quickly to Florence, Leonardo da Vinci didn’t come back—not in the agreed-upon three months, not after the extension the Republic granted, not after the Florence ambassador protested and Gonfaloniere Soderini denounced Leonardo as a “debtor to us.” The artist, he ranted, had not “behaved as he should have done toward the Republic because he has taken a large sum of money and only made a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out.”
Leonardo, basking in more acclamation than Florence ever offered, showed no desire to leave Milan. The city’s French governor, Comte Charles d’Amboise, young, intelligent, and indulgent, reputedly “as fond of Venus as of Bacchus,” provided a generous stipend to the prized jewel of the court. The French king Louis XII himself expressed his “necessary need” of the artist. However much Soderini fumed, the Signoria had no choice but to agree to this “gracious request” from an invaluable ally.
To a remarkable extent, Leonardo, in his mid-fifties, managed to re-create the rich and rewarding life he had enjoyed under Duke Ludovico Sforza’s patronage. Revitalized, he tackled a full range of intriguing new projects. For the Comte’s proposed summer villa, he sketched porticos, loggias, and big airy rooms opening onto a fantastical Arabian Nights garden of sweet-smelling orange and lemon trees, a bower filled with songbirds, a small canal with flasks of wine cooling in the water, and the pièce de résistance: a little mill with sails like a windmill to “generate a breeze at any time during the summer.”
When King Louis XII visited Milan in June 1507, Leonardo choreographed a stupendous welcome, with soaring arches of greenery, banners of Christ and the saints, a triumphal chariot, masques, dances, and fireworks—all more fantastic than any the city had ever seen. As a token of appreciation, the French king granted “our dear and well-beloved” Leonardo a lifelong income from the fees paid by users of a stretch of Milan’s canals.
In September, Leonardo learned that his uncle Francesco da Vinci, the genial companion of his youth, had died and named him his sole heir. About this time the youth who would become Leonardo’s main heir and guardian of his flame entered his life: Francesco Melzi. This bellissimo fanciullo, a most beautiful, almond-eyed boy of about fourteen or fifteen, may have first joined Leonardo’s household as a pupil. Soon he became personal secretary to the official “Painter and Engineer-in-Ordinaire” (the title of a salaried employee) to the French government. Melzi’s neat italic hand would appear throughout Leonardo’s notebooks and papers for the rest of the painter’s life.
Well born, well educated, and well behaved, Melzi strikes me as the opposite of Leonardo’s longtime favorite, Salaì, then about age twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Perhaps inevitably, personalities clashed and tempers flared. In a notebook from this time, Leonardo scrawled that he wanted to make peace with Salaì. “No more war,” he entreated. “I give in.”
A different feud pulled Leonardo back to Florence sometime around September 1507. His stepsiblings, led by their brother Ser Giuliano, who had become a notaio like their father, were challenging their uncle Francesco’s will. Leonardo fought for what was rightfully his. His fratellastri (half brothers), he charged in sharply worded letters, had always wished “the utmost evil to [their uncle] Francesco during his lifetime” and treated Leonardo himself “not as a brother but as a complete stranger.” The case would drag on for months before finally being resolved in Leonardo’s favor.
Both the French governor of Milan and the French monarch sent urgent missives to the Signoria asking the priors to expedite the matter as swiftly as possible. Leonardo tried pulling another string by writing to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, brother of the Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, still chafing for a painting.
In Florence, the avuncular artist—beard graying, eyesight failing, shoulders stooping—took up residence with a group of younger guests in the palazzo of the wealthy mathematician and linguist Piero di Braccio Martelli. As a typical diversion, the lively crew amused themselves by improvising still lifes, portraits, and landscapes with the components of their nightly dinners—chickens, sausage, cheese, roast meat, and other edibles.
Martelli’s residence stood within blocks of the del Giocondo home. Leonardo would, at the very least, have heard of the death of Lisa’s infant son. Did he write a note or pay a condolence call? Might he have encountered Lisa on the street as she walked with her little girls? We get only one tantalizing clue.
Night after night, Leonardo, a pioneering anatomist, descended into the morgue of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, a dreadful place filled, as he recorded, with “dead men, dismembered and flayed and terrible to behold.” His sketches from the time include a sheet with a cross-sectional view of a woman’s uterus in early pregnancy, drawings of male and female genitalia, and a study of a cow’s placenta and uterus with a small fetus in it.
On the verso, the rougher opposite side, are studies of the mouth and its muscles, including a pair of lips that seem almost to have floated from the face of the Mona Lisa. Maybe, just maybe, Leonardo had seen this haunting smile once more.
In 1510 tensions that had simmered for decades in the del Giocondo workshops erupted, and Francesco’s brothers and cousins ousted him from at least one family compagnia. I do not imagine he went quietly.
Selling his shares, Francesco formed a new partnership with his sons, the teenage Bartolomeo and Piero. He also shrewdly began to diversify his holdings. Like his great-grandfather Iacopo the barrelmaker, Francesco invested in real estate, selling off some low-yielding farms, enlarging the family properties in Chianti, and acquiring land in the countryside around Pisa. Perhaps at Lisa’s urging, he took over management of her father Antonmaria Gherardini’s estates and recouped some of their losses.
Both Francesco and his eldest son, Bartolomeo, ran into trouble with the law in 1510. In May, the Otto di Guardia, charged with keeping order in the Commune, confiscated a large quantity of wheat in the farmland around Florence. For no seeming reason other than assuming he could get away with it, Francesco sent an agent to claim it.
The infuriated rightful owner of the wheat filed charges with the Otto di Guardia. In official documents, he attacked Francesco as an extremely confrontational man “warped by sin” and suspected of usury by practically every office in town. Even some of his relatives, the complaint noted, had distanced themselves from their “corrupt and unreliable” kinsman. Francesco, no stranger to conflict, might have shrugged off the diatribe.
This would not have been true of sixteen-year-old Bartolomeo, who was accused of sodomy, a charge that would have been devastating for the youth and disturbing for his stepmother and the rest of the family. According to a tamburazione (anonymous denunciation), Bartolomeo engaged in illicit activities with a certain Piero, who, according to the vice squad, “often allowed himself to be embraced like a whore.”
There are no records of sentencing, and the charges probably were dropped. Beyond the public embarrassment, Bartolomeo’s life continued on course. He would eventually marry, start a family, and carry on his father’s business.
However upset Francesco would have been by his son’s troubles, he might have been more preoccupied with the shifting political climate. Florentines were tiring of their tax-levying leaders. Rumors from Rome hinted of the possible return of the town’s former ruling dynasty: the Medici.
Lorenzo Il Magnifico’s successor and oldest son, Piero de’ Medici, had drowned in 1503 crossing a river with French troops around Naples, but his younger brothers, Giovanni and Giuliano, never abandoned their hopes of reclaiming Florence as their city. Giovanni, the chubby boy appointed a cardinal at age thirteen, had ballooned into a massive man with extremely myopic eyes bulging in a fat red face, a snub nose, and a perpetually gaping mouth. His gigantic abdomen balanced on a pair of legs described as “ludicrously short and spindly.” But the Medici cardinal’s affable personality and generous disposition made up for his physical shortcomings.
In his years in exile Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici had established a power base in Rome, where his utter lack of faith in God or the Church in no way interfered with his ecclesiastical duties—nor did his clerical vows restrain his seemingly insatiable appetite for earthly pleasures of every sort. Cultured and capable, he ingratiated himself with the reigning pope, Julius II, and began using his political leverage to lobby for a pardon from Florence for himself and his brother Giuliano.
As the political landscape shifted, Francesco del Giocondo may have allied himself with the clandestine group of Medici supporters in Florence. Then, in December of 1510, a plot to assassinate Gonfaloniere Soderini was uncovered. The alleged ringleader escaped; his father was exiled. Many blamed pro-Medici agitators for instigating the rebellion. Francesco would have had to tread carefully to avoid suspicion.
On April 22, 1511, the Signoria tackled a troubling civil and family matter: “the reprehensible habit, introduced here not long since, of giving large and excessive dowries.” The situation had indeed gotten out of hand, with dowries soaring as high as 3,000 florins. An increasing number of families either had to marry a daughter beneath their station or consign her to a religious life. To prevent further “inconvenience and injury,” a new law set a maximum of 1,600 florins on the dowries of every “daughter of a Florentine citizen.”
This issue struck home in just about every household, including those of the Gherardini and del Giocondo. With no dowries, no suitors, and no acceptable place in society, two of Lisa’s sisters had had no choice but to enter a convent. Joining their aunt (Antonmaria’s sister), they took vows as Suor Camilla and Suor Alessandra (their birth names) in the Convent of San Domenico di Cafaggio (later known as San Domenico del Maglio), located in the open countryside between the church of Santissima Annunziata and the city walls. Its roster of nuns came mainly from families with noble bloodlines but less-than-notable means.
Francesco del Giocondo, a foresighted father, had set aside funds for a dowry for his oldest daughter, Camilla—1,000 florins for marriage, 200 florins for entry to a nunnery. Given his professional and political standing, along with Lisa’s Gherardini pedigree, the girl should have attracted a reputable suitor. But in 1511, instead of negotiating a marriage alliance, Lisa and Francesco placed the twelve-year-old in the same Dominican convent as her aunts and great-aunt.
We do not know the reasons why. Perhaps Francesco could not arrange an advantageous union. Perhaps the market had closed him out. But the decision strikes me as more Lisa’s than Francesco’s. While his sons claimed his priority, Francesco would have trusted their mother to choose what was best for his daughters.
Struggling to comprehend Lisa’s motivations, I walk to the former chiostro (cloister) of San Domenico, now the Centro Militare di Medicina Legale. No longer set in rural isolation, the compound sits on a quiet side street that seems distant from the grit and gridlock of modern Florence. A two-story stuccoed structure frames a walled courtyard sweet with birdsong and blossoms. Cats sun themselves on the grass. Butterflies flitter among the flowers. Standing in a shaded loggia, I could sense the unchanging rhythm of bygone days and imagine the black, sacred stillness of moonless nights.
On this once-hallowed ground, the Catholic in me could understand the magnetic tug of a tranquil life of prayer and contemplation. And the mother in me could understand how, in a world of unseen and unforeseeable dangers, I would want my daughter safe within these walls. Yet I kept thinking of the experiences beyond the cloister that Camilla would never have known—the caress of a husband, the miracle of a newborn baby, the embrace of a sleepy child.
Perhaps Lisa focused on another possibility. Once fatta monaca (made a nun), Camilla might attain profound spiritual fulfillment and a sense of peace and purpose transcending mere mortal concerns.
What did Camilla want? It didn’t matter. Although the Church decreed that vows be made of a girl’s own free will, the question of consent had lost all significance by the early sixteenth century. Parents were urged to bring daughters destined for a religious life to a convent as early as possible so the girls would never be exposed to the temptations of secular society.
“Before even venturing into the world,” a chronicler wrote, “young girls entered the sepulchers where they would die.” Most “took the veil” between the ages of nine and eleven and pronounced their final vows at twelve or thirteen.
Lisa’s oldest daughter would never dress in an exquisite gown and ride in an exultant procession through the streets of Florence. Instead, Lisa would have braided Camilla’s hair one last time and wrapped her in a plain gray wool cloak with a linen scarf around her head. By tradition, a girl’s male relatives—her father and older brothers, in Camilla’s case—quietly escorted her to her last earthly destination.
A wicker basket carried Camilla’s dote monastica (monastic dowry): some basic house gowns, linings for chilly weather, washable undergarments, head scarves, aprons, handkerchiefs, slippers, shoes, towels, gloves, perhaps an ivory spoon for her personal use at the communal tables. Francesco would have supplied fabrics for the tonaca (habit) that Camilla would sew herself—plain wool of modest quality, in black and neutral colors, along with white linen for a wimple (a nun’s headdress).
Once she pledged lifelong chastity, poverty, and obedience, Lisa’s daughter would live in an unending cycle of daily devotion. From dawn until late into the night, she would pray—above all, for the city of Florence, which considered the intercession of its nuns “more powerful than two thousand horses.” She would chant psalms and sing hymns. She would read inspirational texts. She would memorize Scripture. She would meditate on our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection. She would tend the vegetables in the convent garden. She would sew simple unadorned gray wool smocks for winter and coarse linen shifts for summer. She would embroider vestments for clerics, altar linens for the church, and handkerchiefs for her family.
Her mother would have been thinking of Camilla every day and visiting the convent whenever possible—if only to glimpse her daughter through an altar grille at Mass. Whatever her motives for placing Camilla in San Domenico, Lisa would soon have reason to second-guess her decision.
In 1511, history once again upended Leonardo’s life. Two opposing monarchs—Charles V, the “most Catholic” king of Spain, faced off on Italian soil against the “most Christian” King Louis XII of France. Joining the fray were the Venetian Republic, Germany, and Switzerland, with Pope Julius II tacking among them. When this “Holy League” of enemies forced the French forces to retreat from Milan, Massimiliano Sforza, son of the late Duke Ludovico, prepared to reclaim his father’s city.
In December, Leonardo and his assistants again packed whatever they could carry. The revered fifty-nine-year-old artist may not have feared for his life, but he knew that Milan would offer no future. A favorite of the despised French occupiers, however venerable, could expect no commissions, no benevolent patronage, no guaranteed income stream.
But where could Leonardo and his retinue go? Not back to Florence, with its petty bureaucrats and bitter stepbrothers. Not to Rome, where Michelangelo, barricaded within the Sistine Chapel, was creating a heavenly ceiling. Not to Venice, where Titian was gaining praise and patrons in the richest city-state in Italy.
The family of Leonardo’s protégé Melzi welcomed the artist and his assistants to their country house, a handsome villa perched above a wide curve of the Adda River some twenty miles from Milan. Here the artist passed his days in the limbo of exile. He walked in the hills. He dissected animals and studied the workings of their hearts. He wrote and sketched. He analyzed the turbulent river currents. And he turned sixty.
A well-known sketch in Leonardo’s notebooks from 1512 shows an aged and bearded man in profile, weary and contemplative, sitting on a rock with his hand resting on a walking stick. Some argue that this is a self-portrait, but the figure seems much older. The art critic Sir Kenneth Clark described the sketch as a “self-caricature,” Leonardo’s rueful depiction of himself as decrepit and disenchanted.
His pupils provide other images of the aging artist. In a red chalk profile dated around 1512 and attributed to Melzi, the sitter, generally presumed to be Leonardo at or almost sixty, remains strikingly handsome, features chiseled, mustache neatly combed, wavy hair tumbling onto his shoulders, beard bushy. It is the face of a sage, sculpted by the past but focused on the future.
On April 20, 1512, as Florence slept peacefully under a night sky spangled with stars, Giusto, the brawny young manager of the Convent of San Domenico’s country properties, led three friends, one the brother of the Cardinal of Pavia, through the dark lanes to the nunnery. In silence, they scrambled up a ladder that Giusto had hidden nearby. On the second floor, four novices, hearts pounding and eyes gleaming, waited. One of the women adorned like a bride in exquisite gold ruffs was Lisa’s younger sister, Suor Camilla, clearly not lacking in her forefathers’ daring Gherardini spirit.
The men stayed with the women for three or four hours, unaware of an observer in the shadows. “They touched the breasts of the said nuns,” the watcher reported in an anonymous denunciation placed in one of the municipal tamburi, “and handled . . . other things, for the sake of not detailing the obscenities committed.”
The Florentine vice squad arrested Giusto and his three companions, who were sentenced and fined at a brief tribunal. The nuns, acquitted of any civil wrongdoing, faced the wrath of God and—even more terrifying—their Mother Superior.
We do not know their punishment. Prayers of penance, of course. A loss of privileges and dispensations. Perhaps rations of little more than gruel or bread and water. Silence so they could reflect on their transgressions. The most menial of chores. Isolation from others, including visits from their families. Suor Camilla might not have been allowed even the consoling company of her sister and her niece.
As Lisa Gherardini ventured into Florence’s gossipy streets, she would have felt the curious stares and sensed the whispers in the air. She may have ached for the dishonor that her sixty-eight-year-old father, Antonmaria Gherardini, would have felt like a scourge. And Lisa may have worried about the stain her sister had brought on her own husband and children. But if she shed any tears—of anger or recrimination or sadness—she would have done so in private.
I think back to Lisa’s distant cousin Margherita Datini, who faced the humiliation of two children sired by her husband with a servant and a slave. The betrayed wife had to dig deep to her noble core so she could walk among her neighbors in Prato with her head high. In Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, I see a woman equally unflinching.
Soon a far greater threat overshadowed the scandal. In the summer of 1512, the fighting between French troops and the Spanish mercenaries of Pope Julius II spread into Tuscany. When Florence remained loyal to France rather than pledging allegiance to him, Pope Julius II vowed to crush the recalcitrant republic and restore the family of his prized advisor, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, to power.
By August 2, 1512, rumors flew that Spanish troops, bankrolled in part by the cardinal, were marching on Florence. Panic swept the countryside. So many peasants thronged to enter the city gates that rows of carts and mules stretched for more than a mile. Within its mighty walls, the Commune cracked down on Medici sympathizers. Among those arrested in the last days of August was Francesco del Giocondo.
On August 29, the battle-hardened Spanish soldiers attacked nearby Prato. Florence sent some 3,000 of its militia to aid in its defense, but the volunteers, as the diarist Landucci reports, “all became timid as mice and could not hold out for a single day.” The invaders raped, pillaged, and killed, slaughtering as many as 6,000 men, women, and children. Bodies were flung into ditches; severed limbs clogged the town wells. The bloodbath would go down as one of the most savage in history, “an appalling spectacle of horrors,” as Machiavelli later described it.
News of the sack caused “great perturbation in the minds of men”—none more so than Gonfaloniere Soderini. When Medici supporters stormed the Palazzo Vecchio and demanded his resignation, he reportedly burst into tears and threatened to take his own life. Machiavelli arranged for a safe-conduct out of town but later denounced Soderini’s behavior as so cowardly that at his death hell would deny him entrance and banish him to “the limbo of babies.”
Florence, fearful that it might face the same fate as Prato, agreed to pay a hefty ransom of 60,000 florins and to reinstate the Medici. With less than a whimper, the Republic that had so proudly waved the banner of the red lily ceased to exist.
As September dawned in 1512, a thin man with lank dark hair and the family’s signature nose slipped into the city he and his brothers had fled eighteen years before. At age thirty-three, Giuliano de’ Medici, already weakened by tuberculosis, had shaved the beard he had grown in exile, a symbol of aristocratic birth disdained by citizens of the Florentine Republic.
Dressed in the traditional plain long Tuscan lucco, he headed not to the Medici palazzo on Via Largo, but to the home of a family friend. With every gesture of modesty and courtesy, Giuliano relayed a message: The sons of Lorenzo Il Magnifico had returned, not as rulers, but as private citizens.
This changed two weeks later, when his thirty-seven-year-old big brother Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici arrived from Prato with 1,500 soldiers and a retinue befitting a prince of a realm rather than a religion. On September 16, Giuliano de’ Medici, backed by his brother’s troops, seized control of the Palazzo Vecchio in a transaction as bloodless and efficient as a currency exchange at a Medici bank.
“The piazza was full of armed men,” Landucci reports, “and all the streets and outlets from it were barred with men at arms crying ‘Palle!’ continually.” La Vacca rang, summoning Florence’s citizens. A decree was read from the ringhiera, the raised platform in the Piazza della Signoria, dissolving the Great Council. The assemblage voted for a new governing body (the “55 of 1512”) made up of faithful Medici supporters handpicked by Cardinal Giovanni and Giuliano de’ Medici. The ranks of the new political elite, which numbered some five hundred men by October 13, included Francesco del Giocondo, released from his brief detention as a political prisoner, and his first cousin Paolo, named to a “scrutiny council” charged with elections and appointments for all public offices in Florence for the next year.
I learned about Francesco del Giocondo’s political involvement from a scholar who unearthed its historical documentation in an unlikely place: a convent archive. Josephine Rogers Mariotti, an American who earned an art history doctorate from the Università degli Studi di Firenze and is director of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest’s Florence program, had been researching two paintings commissioned for Florence’s Monastero di Sant’Orsola.
Culling through the convent’s records, Mariotti struck archival gold: an oversize leather-bound volume itemizing the expenses of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, one of the convent’s patrons, beginning on September 16, 1512, the day that he and his brother regained control over their hometown. Dedicated to the omnipotent God; the glorious Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus; Saints Peter, Paul, and John the Baptist; Cosimo and Damian, the Medici patrons; and “tutta la celestiale corte del paradiso” (all the celestial court of paradise), the ledger provides a firsthand account of the second coming of the Medici into Florence.
From the moment of their return, the Medici brothers set out to win over the Florentines the way their father had: with bread and circuses and parades through the streets. As Giovanni’s ledger attests, they bought wine by the dozens—in one case, hundreds—of barrels and hired trumpeters, musicians, and dancers from Pistoia, Arezzo, and other towns for exuberant celebrations of the city’s “deliverance.”
Nor was any expense spared in repairing and renovating the sacked Medici palazzo. The first priority was plumbing, with repairs to the wells and septic tanks. Then a small army of craftsmen—painters, sculptors, woodworkers, bricklayers, glassmakers, goldsmiths, drapers, upholsterers, and the best embroiderer of the age—set to work. A special commission charged with repossession of the family property threatened with the gallows anyone who didn’t immediately return stolen Medici goods. “Many things were recovered,” Landucci reported with his usual laconic pithiness.
The new rulers of fashion-fixated Florence required a new wardrobe. Stylish Giuliano, called “Il Magnifico” like his father, ordered black hose on September 16, the very day the brothers assumed power. Soon he was buying braccia (arm-length) after braccia—about twenty for a single robe—of the black velvet he favored for cloaks and mantles for himself and his retinue. “I Giocondi setaiuoli” (the del Giocondo silkmakers), as the account book records, started filling Medici orders on September 18.
Francesco del Giocondo became more than a supplier. On October 30, 1512, along with a select group of financial backers, he contributed 500 florins—the standard donation—to a total sum of 30,000 florins lent to the Monte, the fund that functioned as the city treasury. Many of his fellow donors came from the Medici parentado, including his former father-in-law, the long-lived and prolific Mariotto Rucellai. The following spring Francesco del Giocondo, wearing a ceremonial gold chain and crimson robe, would serve a two-month term in the highest of offices as a prior of the Signoria.
The great-grandson of the merry barrelmaker Iacopo had hitched his wagon to the brightest stars in Florence’s political firmament.