Lisa del Giocondo

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Lisa del Giocondo (June 15 1479 – July 15 1542, or c. 1551), born and also known as Lisa Gherardini and Lisa di Antonio Maria (Antonmaria) Gherardini, also known as Lisa, Lisa del Gioconda and Mona Lisa, was a member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany in Italy. Her name was given to Mona Lisa, her portrait commissioned by her husband and painted by Leonardo da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance.

Little is known about Lisa's life. Married as a teenager to a cloth and silk merchant who later became a local official, she was mother to five children and led what is thought to have been a comfortable and ordinary middle-class life. Lisa outlived her husband, who was about 20 years her senior.

Centuries after Lisa's death, Mona Lisa became the world's most famous painting and took on a life separate from Lisa, the woman. Speculation by scholars and hobbyists made the work of art a globally-recognized icon and an object of commercialization. During the early 21st century, a discovery made at a university library was powerful enough evidence to end speculation about the sitter's identity and reunited Lisa's portrait with her person.

Life and family

Lisa, whose second name was Camilla, was the daughter of Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini and Lisa di Giovanni Filippo de Carducci, who married in 1466 and lived on farm income. She had five brothers and sisters: Giovangualberto, Francesco, Ginevra, and Suor Camilla and Suor Alessandra who were Catholic nuns. The family lived in Florence, originally near Santa Trinita and later in rented space near Santo Spirito, most likely because they could not afford repairs to their former house when it was damaged. They also owned a small country home in St. Donato in the village of Poggio about south of the city.

On March 5, 1495, Lisa married Francesco di Bartolomeo di Zanobi del Giocondo (1460–1528, or b. March 19, 1465 or dec. c. 1539), a modestly successful cloth and silk merchant, becoming his second wife at age 15. Francesco's first wife, Camilla di Mariotto Rucellai whom he married in 1491 may have died in childbirth. Lisa's dowry was 170 florins and land near her family's country home, a sign that the Gherardini family was not wealthy at the time and reason to think she and her husband loved each other. Neither poor nor among the most well-to-do in Florence, the couple lived a middle-class life. Lisa's marriage may have increased her social status because her husband's family may have been richer than her own. Francesco is thought to have benefited because Gherardini is an "old name".

Lisa and Francesco had five children: Piero, Camilla, Andrea, Giocondo and Marietta, four of them between 1496 and 1507. Lisa also helped to raise Bartolomeo, who was the son of Francesco and Camilla. One of their daughters died in 1499 and was buried in the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella. Lisa's stepmother, Caterina di Mariotto Rucellai, and Francesco's first wife, both members of the prominent Rucellai family, were sisters. Lisa and her new family lived in shared accommodation until March 5, 1503, when Francesco was able to buy a house next door to his family's old home in the Via della Stufa. Leonardo is thought to have begun painting Lisa's portrait the same year.

Francesco became an official in Florence. He was elected to the Dodici Buonomini in 1499 and to the Signoria in 1512, where he was confirmed as a Priori in 1524. He may have had ties to Medici family political or business interests. In 1512 when the government of Florence feared the return of the Medici from exile, Francesco was imprisoned and fined 1,000 florins. He was released in September when the Medici returned.

In one account by an amateur scholar, Francesco died in the plague of 1528. Lisa fell ill and was taken by her daughter Marietta, a nun, to the convent of Sant'Orsola, where she died about four years later at the age of 63. In a scholarly account of their lives, Francesco lived to be 80 years old. He died in 1539, and Lisa may have lived until at least 1551, when she would have been 71 or 72.

Mona Lisa

Like other Florentines of their financial means, Francesco's family were art lovers and patrons. His son Bartolommeo asked Antonio di Donnino Mazzieri to paint a fresco at the family's burial site in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata di Firenze. Andrea del Sarto painted a Madonna for another member of his family. Francesco gave commissions to Leonardo for a portrait of his wife and to Domenico Puligo for a painting of Saint Francis of Assisi. He is thought to have commissioned Lisa's portrait to celebrate both Andrea's birth and the purchase of the family's home.

Mona Lisa fulfilled 15th- and early 16th-century requirements for portraying a woman of virtue. Lisa is portrayed as a faithful wife through gesture—her right hand rests over her left. Leonardo also presented Lisa as fashionable and successful, perhaps more well-off than she was. Her dark garments and black veil were Spanish-influenced high fashion; they are not a depiction of mourning for her first daughter, as some scholars have proposed. The portrait is strikingly large; its size is equal to that of commissions acquired by wealthier art patrons of the time. This extravagance has been explained as a sign of Francesco and Lisa's social aspiration.

Leonardo had no income during the spring of 1503, which may in part explain his interest in a private portrait. But later that year, he most likely had to delay his work on Mona Lisa when he received payment for starting the The Battle of Anghiari, which was a more valuable commission and one he was contracted to complete by February 1505. In 1506 Leonardo considered the portrait unfinished. He was not paid for the work and did not deliver it to his client. The artist's paintings traveled with him throughout his life, and he may have completed Mona Lisa many years later in France, in one estimation by 1516.

The painting's title dates to 1550. An acquaintance of at least some of Francesco's family, Giorgio Vasari wrote, "Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife" (Prese Lionardo a fare per Francesco del Giocondo il ritratto di mona Lisa sua moglie). The portrait's Italian (La Gioconda) and French (La Joconde) titles are Lisa's married name as well as nickname—in English, "jocund" or "the happy one".

Speculation assigned Lisa's name to at least four different paintings and her identity to at least ten different people. By the end of the 20th century, the painting was a global icon that had been used in more than 300 other paintings and in 2,000 advertisements that appeared at the rate of a new advertisement each week. In 2005, an expert at the University Library of Heidelberg discovered a margin note in the library's collection that established with certainty the traditional view that the sitter was Lisa.

Francis I purchased the Mona Lisa for 4,000 gold crowns to add it to the art collection at Château de Fontainebleau, most likely through the heirs of Leonardo's assistant Salai. The people of France have owned it since the French Revolution. Today about 6 million people visit Mona Lisa each year at the Louvre in Paris, where it is part of a French national collection.

Notes

Sources

Zöllner, Frank "Leonardo's Portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo". Gazette des Beaux-Arts 121 (S.): print 115–138. Retrieved on 2007-10-09.
Müntz, Eugène Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, Thinker and Man of Science. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, via Google Books scan of Harvard University copy.
Pallanti, Giuseppe Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo's Model.
Sassoon, Donald "Mona Lisa: the Best-Known Girl in the Whole Wide World". History Workshop Journal 2001 (51): Abstract. Retrieved on 2007-10-09.

Lisa del Giocondo

Life and family

Mona Lisa

Notes

Sources

Further reading