Today it is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Others have suggested the subject of the painting was a mistress of da Vinci, or even a self-portrait, with da Vinci imagining himself as a woman. It is known that Leonardo began the portrait in Florence in , continued work on it through , and then kept the painting until his death in Over the next three centuries the Mona Lisa passed through many hands, even hanging for a time in the bedroom of Napoleon , but since its home has been the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Mona Lisa was a real Florentine woman, born and raised in Florence under the name of Lisa Gherardini. Years ago I came to Switzerland to give a talk and, on an impulse, decided to take a train to Italy. Back in the United States, I began studying Italian. My husband and I began coming to Italy every year on vacation, and as we made Italian friends, I kept working harder to become fluent.
Through Italian friends and friends of friends, I became intrigued by the real woman immortalized by Leonardo in his Mona Lisa.
Over the course of several years I walked the streets in Florence where she lived, knelt in the chapel where she prayed, ventured into the long-abandoned convent where she died—and wrote Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered. What led you to go in another direction? What surprised you the most?
I returned often to the street where she gave birth to six children and to the church where she worshipped. I sadly beheld the dilapidated former convent where Mona Lisa died and was buried at age 63 in But the most surprising revelations concerned the lives of Renaissance women—from childhood to adolescence when most entered arranged marriages to their daily lives as wives and mothers. They not only held up half the sky but served as the glue that held all aspects of Florentine society together.
Perhaps with GoodTrust Memories there's now a whole new interpretation possible? One of the most valuable - and mysterious - paintings in the world. The painting is probably of the Italian noblewoman Lisa Gherardini , the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. Her sixth child, a boy named Giocondo, survived for only a month.
Her younger sister, forced into a nunnery for lack of a dowry, was accused of committing "obscenities" with local youths during a late-night rendezvous. Her daughter Camilla, who entered a convent at age twelve, died at nineteen. Lisa's truculent husband twice faced charges of usury, was briefly jailed as a Medici sympathizer but ultimately rose to high political posts after the once-mighty dynasty reclaimed power.
Before dying at age 73, Francesco arranged for his "noble-spirited" wife to live with their son Piero. Instead, Lisa took up residence in Sant'Orsola, the convent where her youngest daughter Marietta had taken vows. Defying her husband's instructions, Lisa chose, upon her death at age 63 in , to rest for eternity among nuns rather than in the family crypt.
Forensic sleuths are attempting to identify her remains among several skeletons recently excavated from the convent ruins.
Louis XIV moved "her" to Versailles. Napoleon, besotted by "Madame Lisa," kept her in his bedroom at the Tuilleries. After two centuries of display at the Louvre, the Mona Lisa continues to inspire poems, plays, songs and endless copies and caricatures. Leonardo's masterpiece did more than revolutionize art with breakthroughs in perspective, proportion and optics. Through his distinctive sfumature subtle shadings created by feather-light brush strokes , Leonardo breathed life into his portrait of Lisa Gherardini.
In her eyes and especially in her smile, we see and sense the soul of a real woman.
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