Chapter 13
On my first trip to Florence many years ago, I climbed up to the ancient Basilica of San Miniato overlooking the town. Wandering through its cemetery, I was touched by the tombstones, some decorated with evocative statues of children and young maidens snatched by death. Beautiful faces, beautiful lives, all gone too soon.
Feeling melancholy as I descended the steep hill at twilight, I looked up to behold a crimson sunset above the città d’arte along the Arno. At that indelible moment, I came to understand something I couldn’t quite express. Only recently did I find the words to capture this insight in one of Leonardo’s notebooks: “Beauty in life perishes, not in art.”
Was the imperishable beauty he had created a comfort to Leonardo at the end of his life?
In Vasari’s vivid—perhaps overly so—account of Leonardo’s last days, the artist studies Catholic teachings, repents, confesses his sins, and receives communion. On May 2, 1519, when the French monarch Francis I enters his chamber, Leonardo summons the strength to raise himself up on his bed to explain “what his sickness was and what the symptoms were.” He then acknowledges “how much he had offended God by not working on his art as much as he should have.” As Leonardo shudders in a final spasm, King Francis cradles his head and comforts him.
Historians have long been skeptical of this hyperbolic tale, especially after the discovery of an official royal document that placed the king some distance from Amboise the very next day. To me Leonardo’s eleventh-hour conversion and cry of regret seem as dubious as the royal embrace.
In his will, Leonardo orchestrated his final exit: burial at the Church of Saint-Florentin in Amboise, his coffin borne by the chaplains of the church, followed by the prior, curates, friars, and sixty poor men (compensated for their time) carrying tapers, while ten great candles burned and prayers were said for his soul. Leonardo left no instructions for his burial or tombstone.
Florence didn’t receive word of the death until June 1, when his assistant Melzi notified Leonardo’s half brothers. “He was like the best of fathers to me,” he wrote. “As long as I have breath in my body I shall feel the sadness, for all time. He gave me every day the proofs of his most passionate and ardent affection.”
At the time she heard the news, Lisa Gherardini probably had no idea what had become of her portrait. But I wonder: Did she weep when she heard of Leonardo’s passing?
Perhaps Lisa was still shedding tears for the daughter she had lost the year before. God’s will be done, she might have said a thousand times. But what was God’s will for her youngest child, nineteen-year-old Marietta? We know that in 1519 the girl—past her prime as a bridal candidate—was living at the convent of Sant’ Orsola. A ledger entry for July 14 records a payment of 18 florins received on behalf of “the daughter of Monna Lisa del Giocondo,” perhaps to ensure some special comforts or privileges.
Ever since Camilla’s death, Lisa herself may have spent more time at Sant’Orsola, worshiping in its chapel, attending novenas, vigils, and Masses, and making generous donations. Such “matronage,” a common form of charity among Florence’s upper-class married women, seems the only legitimate activity in which ladies could engage outside their homes, an extension of the love and care they gave their own families.
With her children grown and her household more sedate, Lisa may also have dispensed alms to the poor and visited the sick—good works that reflected well on a husband’s civic reputation. But for Lisa, faith and charity may simply have offered a solace she could find nowhere else. The same might have proved true for her daughter.
In a solemn ceremony on October 20, 1521, Marietta del Giocondo, bride of Christ, donned a veil of white, accepted a ring of gold, and assumed the name Suor Ludovica. In formal vows during a lilting High Mass on Christmas Eve a year later, the twenty-two-year-old swore lifelong obedience, poverty, and chastity. Through all the days of her long life, she would pray in the chapel of Sant’Orsola before the paintings that her father had commissioned: one of her patron, San Ludovico; the other of his, San Francesco.
But that’s not all Suor Ludovica would have done. After singing morning psalms, she might have worked the looms with other sisters or plied an embroidery needle through a brocaded vestment. Endowed with her father’s business savvy, she became involved in managing convent properties; her name appears on several deeds in the Sant’Orsola archives.
The revelation of nuns’ pursuit of what sound like jobs, if not careers, took me by surprise. As I probed into the research—much of it relatively recent—on women in convents, I discovered that the only female historians, accountants, entrepreneurs, pharmacists, and administrators of Renaissance Florence wore religious habits. Some nuns—a minority, to be sure—wrote chronicles, plays, and scholarly treatises; painted and illuminated devotional works; made heavenly music; and wielded considerable influence on local politics and commerce.
I found myself toying with a hypothetical question: Which would I have preferred? Marriage to a much older man I didn’t know, whom I might or might not come to love? Sharing a home with live-in relatives? Decades of humdrum domesticity? The life-threatening prospects of pregnancy and birth? Given the choice—which Renaissance daughters were not—I might have seen advantages in taking the veil.
Lisa Gherardini, of course, is unlikely to have thought in such terms. But she would have taken comfort in the realization that her daughter Marietta, sheltered from the whims and wars of men, would live with dignity in a community of women in harmony with God’s will. Or so she prayed.
Lisa herself may have progressed on her own spiritual journey. Like many devout women of the time, she may have increasingly woven religious practices into her daily life: prayers before the Madonna in her bedroom; morning Mass; inspirational readings; evening vespers; a Rosary before bed. Piety, which had brought serenity to Margherita Datini, Lisa’s hot-blooded ancestress in Prato, might have soothed her soul as well.
In December 1521, at almost age forty-six, Leo X, the Medici Lion Pope, caught a chill while sitting by an open window on a cold winter night and died. So the Vatican announced, but many suspected poisoning by any of his numerous enemies. With the papal coffers drained by Leo’s riotous excesses, the cardinals chose his diametric opposite: an ascetic Flemish scholar who holed up in a corner of the papal apartments and ate little but gruel.
The brief reign of Pope Adrian VI, so priggish that he threatened to whitewash Michelangelo’s nude figures in the Sistine Chapel, ended within two years. The unpopular pontiff died of “kidney disease”—almost certainly a euphemism for poisoning, which had become an occupational hazard for the men who ascended to St. Peter’s throne.
Medici boosters like Francesco del Giocondo would have prayed for the selection of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), the illegitimate son of Lorenzo Il Magnifico’s slain brother, Giuliano. But the conclave of cardinals deadlocked. Only after almost two months in uncleaned rooms putrid with the stench of sweat and age, with no fresh air or natural light and limited rations of bread, wine, and water, did the princes of the church finally settle on Giulio, who took the name Pope Clement VII.
“Rather morose and disagreeable,” writes the historian Guicciardini, “reputed to be avaricious, by no means trustworthy, and naturally disinclined to do a kindness.” Under Clement VII, Florence became, in effect, a satellite of Rome. Two illegitimate teenage Medici cousins—Ippolito, Giuliano de’ Medici’s son by his mistress in Urbino, and Alessandro, said to be the Pope’s own bastard—took up residence in the family palazzo, with various officials charged with keeping the youths in check.
Francesco del Giocondo might have had a front-row seat on their high jinks. In 1525 the sixty-year-old once again assumed the long crimson robes, gold chain, and civic responsibilities of a prior and moved into the Palazzo Vecchio to serve his second two-month term on the Signoria. But he never stopped his relentless pursuit of profit. When a minor painter and sculptor named Maestro Valerio died owing him money, Francesco recouped the debt—and then some—by seizing possession of the artist’s entire stock of works. In the uncertain times, he invested in what his Tuscan great-grandfather had recognized as the only sure thing, real estate, and acquired more rural properties, including a former Strozzi estate.
Francesco’s father-in-law, Antonmaria Gherardini, died around this time. His will, processed in 1526, revealed that the Gherardini, always determined to keep up appearances for the sake of family honor, had long been living beyond their means. In the coming years they would have to sell off more than half of their country assets to cover their debts. Eventually, only the ancient homestead in Cortine remained in the family’s hands.
Lisa, ever the responsible big sister, would have worried about her impoverished siblings, especially after one of her brothers died, leaving a wife and children. Perhaps with some trepidation, she asked her husband if her relatives could move into the house next door on Via della Stufa. Francesco del Giocondo “knew it would not be a good arrangement,” Giuseppe Pallanti reports drily, but he agreed—“above all to please his wife.” He also may have slyly appropriated the widow’s dowry for his own use.
Leonardo da Vinci’s estate presented different problems. When an official court artist died, his works usually went to his patron. However, King Francis had granted Leonardo a special exemption allowing him to bequeath his possessions to whomever he chose. The artist left his notebooks and drawings to his assistant Melzi, a house and garden to his cherished Salaì, money to his stepbrothers, and gifts to various servants.
Several paintings, including the Mona Lisa, may have ended up with Salaì, who was killed in a violent altercation in Italy in 1524, just five years after his maestro’s death. A probate inventory, discovered in the Milan archives in the early 1990s, listed twelve paintings in Salaì’s possession, either Leonardo originals or excellent copies. A scribe initially identified one of two women’s portraits as “La Honda,” but then crossed this out and wrote “La Ioconda” (the Milanese spelling of La Gioconda)—another possible confirmation of “the Gioconda woman” as Leonardo’s model.
King Francis I, who had probably coveted the portrait from first sight, wanted “her” at any price. He paid a staggering sum: an estimated 12,000 francs, the equivalent of almost $10 million today.
The French monarch also invested heavily in another costly pursuit: war with his archenemy, Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, Austria, and a few lesser duchies, who on several occasions challenged the French king to one-on-one combat. For years the two young, pugnacious, and egotistical monarchs moved armies like pawns across the Italian chessboard. Pope Clement VII, paralyzed by ambivalence, made the volatile situation worse by repeatedly shifting allegiance.
Rome paid the ultimate price for his vacillation. In 1527, a mutinous army of more than 25,000 Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries fighting for Charles V, unpaid and underfed, marched on the Eternal City. Before dawn on May 6, Romans awoke to the clang of warning bells and the crackling of gunfire. Wave after wave of half-crazed soldiers swept over its outmatched defenders and slaughtered everyone in their path—man or woman, old or young, priest or peasant. By the end of the unparalleled orgy of lust, violence, and wanton destruction, as many as half the population had fled or been cast into the Great Sea.
“In truth,” the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote, “this was rather the fall of a world than of a city.”
Soon the same could be said of Florence. When news of the assault on Rome reached Florence, its citizens promptly escorted their young Medici leaders out of town. From their home on Via della Stufa, Francesco and Lisa del Giocondo could have heard the crowd’s shouts and the crash of stone as Medici palle were stripped from buildings and flung to the pavement. A historian tells me that not a single Medici stemma (family crest) survived.
Another casualty in a pitched battle in the heart of Florence was Michelangelo’s David. The Republican forces who had seized possession of the Palazzo Vecchio threw a bench from a window onto Medici loyalists attacking the building. It struck the town’s prized symbol of freedom and broke its arm. When the fighting subsided, the future art historian Vasari, a young apprentice at the time, darted out of the besieged palazzo to retrieve the pieces. (After keeping them safe for years, Vasari finally repaired the mutilated sculpture in 1543.)
With the Medici again ousted, the Florentine Republic was reborn. The defiant citizens, excommunicated by the Pope, elected Jesus Christ their Sovereign and posted a sign on the Palazzo Vecchio that read, “Jesus Christus, Rex Fiorentini Popoli S.P. Decreto electus” (Jesus Christ, King of the Florentine People, elected by Popular Decree). Scrawled on walls throughout town was the slogan “Poveri ma liberi!” (Poor but free!).
Francesco del Giocondo, who seemed always to have felt free to do as he pleased, never qualified as poor. As others sold off what they could in a panic, archival records show that in 1528 Francesco spent the whopping sum of almost 5,000 florins to enlarge his principal farm in Chianti. I asked several historians if he might have taken his family there to wait out the coming storm. No, they said, explaining that the countryside would soon become even more perilous than Florence itself.
Through memory books, I piece together what life might have been like for Lisa Gherardini during her hometown’s darkest hours. An Italian mother to her core, the family matriarch, who turned fifty in 1529, would have gathered children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, and nephews close and prepared for the worst. Stockpiling whatever supplies they could muster, her family would have planted vegetables on roofs and in courtyards. Eventually, they might have burned furniture, shutters, and doors as firewood to stay warm.
One of Lisa’s cousins, Andrea Gherardini, descended from her great-uncle Antonio (her grandfather Noldo’s brother), served as a captain in the citizens’ militia known as the Marzoccheschi (sons of the Marzocco) and trained the town’s youth to march and wage mock battles. In order to look older and more intimidating, the comely young Florentines grew beards and trimmed their shoulder-length locks. Like other citizens, Lisa and Francesco might have turned over gold necklaces and silver plates to melt into coins to buy arms for these defenders.
Above all, Florentines of all ages prayed, genuflecting twice a day by civic decree as the Angelus bells rang. Their preferred form of intercession was procession. As one diarist recorded, “the streets groaned under the weight” of daily parades of barefoot priors,vecchioni (old folks) limping slowly, and children dressed as angels—once accompanied by a gaggle of sheep, goats, and chickens smuggled through enemy lines. Historians looking back on these ritual parades describe them as the “death march of the Republic.”
Its demise came at the hands of the Medici pope. By the time Clement VII, disguised as a peddler, finally slipped out of Rome in December 1527, he had lost everything: money, influence, allies, and arms. But he swore never to give up the city his family had crowned with greatness, whatever devil he had to deal with—even his diabolical former enemy. In return for papal coronation as Holy Roman Emperor and other concessions, Charles V agreed to provide troops to reinstate the Medici in Florence. Within months a force of almost 40,000 massed on the hills surrounding the city.
“Get out your brocades, Florence!” the imperial troops taunted the town of textile makers. “We are coming to measure them with our pikestaffs.”
The soldiers underestimated the defiant Florentines’ grit—and their love of a grand symbolic gesture. On February 17, 1530, the del Giocondo family would have heard the trumpets blare for the town’s traditional calcio match. Through the narrow streets to the large Piazza Santa Croce tramped squads of young men, fully decked in the livery of the teams known as the Bianchi (Whites) and the Verdi (Greens). To underscore Florentine disdain for the enemy, musicians played their instruments on the roof of Santa Croce. As the game began, a cannonball whistled over their heads and landed on the other side of the church. No one was injured, and the match resumed amid even greater clamor. Although the final score was quickly forgotten, all of Florence exulted in this triumph of the spirit.
The city held out for six more harrowing months. The cost of wheat soared to four times its normal price. As food rations dwindled, Florentines, weakened by starvation, began dying of plague and other rampant infections. Their only lifeline came from a brave, tough commander named Francesco Ferrucci, who repeatedly wove through the enemy camps to bring supplies. In the summer of 1530, under cover of darkness, Ferrucci led a group of men into the Tuscan countryside to recruit a volunteer army. Enemy forces ambushed them in the mountains above Pistoia. Ferrucci fought until mortally wounded. As an enemy commander lunged at him with a dagger, he gasped, “You are killing a dead man.”
Something inside the Florentines died too. The city fathers estimated they had only about eight days of bread left for the starving population.
On August 12, 1530, Florentine delegates surrendered unconditionally. Despite assurances of clemency from the Pope, the invading troops murdered, pillaged, raped, and destroyed every vestige of the people’s rule. The leader of the antipapal forces was tortured and killed. Scores of leading citizens, including Lisa’s cousin Andrea Gherardini, were banished from Florence forever.
“Would that Florence had never existed!” Pope Clement VII was heard to exclaim. His wish almost came true. The city itself nearly drowned in a great sea of destruction.
Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo survived—testimony in itself to their resilience. According to tax documents from 1532, Francesco, sixty-seven, and Lisa, fifty-three, were living with their sons Bartolomeo and Piero, their wives, and several grandchildren on Via della Stufa. (There are no records of their son Andrea’s fate.) All were coming to grips with what we might call a “new normal.”
Florentine styles reflected the change. Emulating the young Marzoccheschi who had taken up arms during the siege, men of all ages, a diarist reports, “began to wear their hair short, everyone having formerly worn it long, onto their shoulders, without exception, and they now began to wear a beard.”
Pope Clement VII installed his illegitimate son, Alessandro (1511–1537), a capricious, frizzy-haired lout, as governor. On May 1, 1532, the arrogant youth dismantled the republican institutions, including the 250-year-old Signoria on which Francesco del Giocondo had twice served. The newly proclaimed duke forced all Florentine men to turn over their weapons. La Vacca, the great bell, was thrown from its tower to smash to pieces in the Piazza della Signoria. Its crash reverberated in the hearts of Florence’s citizens.
Despite the devastated economy, Francesco del Giocondo managed to hold on to a great deal of wealth. The white-haired hustler seems to have resumed his old practice of charging exorbitant exchange rates to religious orders. In 1536, at the age of seventy-one, he was hauled before an ecclesiastical court on a charge of usury.
Florence itself seemed to lose any moral compass. Duke Alessandro, the most sexually voracious of the Medici, preyed on Florentine wives, daughters, and nuns. His sordid reign ended with the betrayal of a companion-in-carousing, a distant cousin known as Lorenzino (little Lorenzo) for his small stature—later rechristened Lorenzaccio (nasty Lorenzo) for his evil acts.
When Alessandro’s roving eye fell on a beautiful married woman of impeccable virtue, Lorenzino promised to arrange a tryst on the eve of the Epiphany in January 1537. Arriving at the rendezvous, Duke Alessandro undressed, lay down in bed, and fell asleep—only to awake when Lorenzino and a hired assassin burst into the room. Struggling to break free from Lorenzino’s grip, Alessandro bit his cousin’s finger to the bone before the assassin finished the Duke off with a knife thrust to his throat. By the time Alessandro’s massacred body was discovered days later, the two assailants had escaped.
In the uproar that followed the assassination, the exiled Florentines seized the opportunity to try to reclaim power. A contingent of foot soldiers and knights marched toward the city but were vanquished by imperial forces. Among the leaders captured and hauled into prison was Lisa’s cousin. Andrea Gherardini would meet the same brutal end as the rebellious ancestors I had read about in the state archives: He was decapitato (beheaded).
The Palleschi, as the Medici supporters called themselves, chose an unknown as the next ruler: eighteen-year-old Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–1574), the son of a valiant mercenary known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere (John of the Black Bands), who had been killed a few years before. Under Cosimo’s reign the Medici monarchy was born. It would endure until the lineage died out in the 1860s.
“These were a different breed of Medici,” Florentine historian Fabrizio Ricciardelli remarks during a wide-ranging conversation in the Palazzo Spinelli, not far from Piazza Santa Croce.
“How?” I ask.
“If you go to the Vasari Corridor, you will understand,” he says cryptically.
I join an evocative evening tour of the raised passageway, built in 1565 by Vasari at the behest of Duke Cosimo to connect the state offices in the Palazzo Vecchio with his home in the Pitti Palace. Hundreds of paintings, many artists’ self-portraits, line the 10-foot-wide corridor, but I am drawn to the recessed windows, large and small, with their unique views of the river, the Ponte Vecchio, and the people milling below.
Peering from these vantage points, I understand Professor Ricciardelli’s point: Lorenzo Il Magnifico had strolled the streets and sung and danced alongside his fellow Florentines. Cosimo and his descendants preferred to walk above their heads and look down on them with an arrogance that reminds me of the Gherardini and the tower-building magnates of centuries past.
In 1537 an aging and ailing Francesco del Giocondo prepared his final will and testament. Like all such official documents, it was written by a notaio in Latin. When I read the Italian and English translations, I sense Francesco’s fondness for the woman who had shared his life. With great affection, he bequeaths to his “dilectam uxorem” (beloved wife) the farm that had served as her dowry and the clothes and jewels he had given her in their happiest moments, along with ample provisions for her remaining years. In addition to declaring his love, Francesco praises Lisa’s “free-born” spirit.
The del Giocondo patriarch charged his daughter Suor Ludovica with caring for her mother’s well-being and obliged her brothers to respect her choices. For Suor Ludovica, he arranged a monthly stipend to be paid directly to her so “the convent may not claim anything of it,” along with monastic habits and shirts, linen and wool sheets, and all the fine Rheims linen she might need for her crisp white wimples. He named his sons Bartolomeo and Piero as his heirs, set aside dowries for their daughters, and exhorted his children to avoid all disagreements and to work at finding union, peace, and fraternal love. His trusted notaio, a colleague, and seven others, including a greengrocer, served as witnesses.
Francesco del Giocondo died in 1538 at age seventy-three. Wearing heavy mourning cloaks and carrying candles, the family gathered in the Martyrs Chapel of Santissima Annunziata. The Servite monks, who knew Francesco well from his many years as their patron and supplier, assembled in full force to chant and pray. With incense wafting into the air, Lisa watched as the man who had shared her life for forty-three years was lowered into the crypt. Her husband’s last request was for a lamp—its oil paid for by his heirs—that would burn in perpetuity above his tomb.
As was customary, Lisa’s sons became her official protectors and providers. However, she exercised some of her newly acquired rights to assert control over the remaining years of her life. As was a widow’s prerogative, Lisa turned over the property and possessions she had inherited from her husband to their daughter Suor Ludovica. This, I learned from Renaissance histories, was not unusual. When women of means passed on their assets, they were more likely than men to make bequests to other women and to institutions such as convents.
In 1539, Lisa’s sons formally agreed that Bartolomeo would move out of the larger del Giocondo house on Via della Stufa, where their mother would remain with Piero and his family. Lisa had a different plan. In perhaps the only independent decision over her living arrangements that she ever made, the sixty-year-old relocated to the Monastero di Sant’Orsola, which took in widows for a fee of two florins a month. Perhaps, some speculate, Lisa became so frail or ill that she needed the nuns’ care. Perhaps she didn’t want to burden her son’s family (although then as now, children and grandchildren warmly welcomed a nonna, or grandmother).
I credit Lisa’s independent Gherardini spirit, which led her to end her days where she wanted—in a house of God, near her beloved daughter, sheltered from the cataclysms that had so often convulsed her city. She never left.
When Lisa Gherardini died at age sixty-three on July 15, 1542, the entire community of Sant’Orsola gathered at her funeral to mourn a cherished companion. At her request, she was buried, not in the del Giocondo crypt in Santissima Annunziata as her husband had directed, but at the convent.
Such arrangements also were not uncommon. “Privileged women, who perhaps alone in this society had the power to choose their place of burial, overwhelmingly preferred to lie in community with other women in churches or other ecclesiastical buildings,” historian Margaret King reports in Women of the Renaissance, “rather than to be buried with their husbands, their fathers, or other male members of their lineages.”
Why? In not joining a husband in the family crypt, King theorizes, a woman refuted “all the past decisions of the male line.” After a lifetime of being defined as a daughter, wife, and mother, a widow could finally assert her identity as an individual. A professor I know in Florence suggests another possible motive: Perhaps Renaissance women “had had enough of their husbands on earth.”
Did Lisa Gherardini feel this way? My sense is that her final choice had more to do with her personal feelings and wishes than with her irascible husband. From the moment of her birth, Lisa had lived in the company of females—a brigata of godmothers, aunts, cousins, in-laws, friends, neighbors. Together they laughed and sang, danced and prayed, wept and comforted one another. Not even death could break the loving female bonds that had surrounded and supported her all the days of her life.
Lisa Gherardini, never anticipating that her face would enchant millions of men for centuries to come, chose to rest for eternity among sisters.
Bartolomeo and Piero del Giocondo could not hold on to the “huge legacy,” as Giuseppe Pallanti characterizes it, that their father left them. Edged out by competitors in other countries, the silk merchants lost their best customers and fell behind on bills. As debts mounted, they started selling properties to pay creditors. Francesco’s oldest son, Bartolomeo, who died on December 2, 1561, passed on to his son, Guaspari, a sizable inheritance along with a business in crisis.
Unable to keep the company afloat, even after bringing in a new partner, Guaspari del Giocondo declared bankruptcy in November 1564. A judge summoned him for questioning in the court of the Stinche, a dismal prison off Via Ghibellina where debtors served time as punishment for their financial failures. In these grim surroundings he confirmed his list of creditors—the best-known craftsmen, merchants, and bankers in Florence. The judge ordered Guaspari to remain in the city as he considered the case.
“Indifferent to his financial difficulties and with a good dose of irresponsibility,” in Pallanti’s description, the young man proceeded to indulge in a favorite pastime: gambling, a diversion that made his bad situation worse. In just a few hours of playing cards with friends, Guaspari lost a considerable sum. Unable to come up with cash, he wrote an IOU that he could not fulfill. His debtor went to the court and asked to be added to the list of del Giocondo creditors. The furious judge confiscated Guaspari’s goods for auction and ordered announcements of the bankruptcy and public sale posted in the streets.
“The name of the del Giocondo family was on everyone’s lips for six months,” Pallanti reports. By the following April, Guaspari worked out an agreement to pay off two-thirds of the creditors so he could reclaim his goods and his freedom. But the stain on the family name lingered. Guaspari ended up working as a clerk for the friars at Santissima Annunziata, where he at least would have earned enough to keep his grandfather’s votive lamp aglow. Francesco del Giocondo could never have anticipated how quickly the funds for his memorial light would run out.
Darkness now shrouds the chapel where his earthly remains rest. Rust has corroded the grimy votive lamp dangling from the ceiling. The altarpiece has faded beyond recognition. I peer inside the private confessional where Lisa Gherardini might have knelt to seek absolution. When my hand brushes against its wood frame, paint flakes onto my fingers.
The only surviving mention of Francesco’s family name lies on a floor stone noting that the chapel, formerly of the “familiae iucundi” (“Giocondo family” in Latin), was transferred at some point to new owners with the name Anfortis. They too have evaporated into the past. All that remains is a spectral stillness that chills me even on a warm summer day.
Suor Ludovica, Lisa’s youngest daughter, outlived her siblings and died at the venerable age of seventy-nine on April 8, 1579. She too was buried in Sant’Orsola.
On my most recent visit, the brutal ugliness of the dilapidated convent seems more oppressive than ever. I turn away from its grim walls and head across the Arno and up the steep hill to the cemetery of San Miniato. There, looking down on the city that Lisa Gherardini and Leonardo had once called their own, I reflect on how each had died—one within its walls, one far from them.
Leonardo’s genius glowed to the very end. For as long as they could, his fingers kept sketching; his eyes, observing; his agile brain, reflecting. “Even though he accomplished more by words than deeds,” Vasari wrote, “his name and fame will never be extinguished.” This has indeed proved true, but I wondered if the failures of his career—the uncast equestrian monument, the peeling Last Supper, the botched Battle of Anghiari, the scores of unfinished works—haunted him.
“Dimmi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa,” Leonardo often scrawled in his notebooks. “Tell me if anything was ever done.” To his impossibly high standards, nothing ever was. Time, the “destroyer of all things,” would yield only to death, the “supreme evil.” Once he wrote poignantly of the soul’s fate: “It is with the greatest reluctance that it leaves the body, and I think that its sorrow and lamentations are not without cause.”
Nowhere did Leonardo voice any belief in an afterlife. Art alone would endure. Painting, he observed, could “preserve the transient beauty of mortals and endow it with a permanence greater than the works of nature, for these are the slaves of time”—as was he.
At the end of her days Lisa Gherardini had no inkling of the immortality Leonardo had bequeathed on her portrait. But her regrets may have been few. With a life rooted in family and Florence, Lisa had watched youngsters grow, welcomed grandchildren, celebrated joys, mourned losses, and borne witness to history. As wife, mother, and muse, she had basked in golden hours. Ultimately, her spiritual journey may have lifted her beyond the pomp and possessions that Renaissance Florentines so voraciously craved to a higher plane and a greater peace.
When I think of Lisa’s final moments, another quote from Leonardo comes to mind, a line written during his happiest years in Milan: “Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.” At the hour of Lisa’s death, the Holy Mother Mary, whom she would have worshipped all her life, may have blessed her with a gentle passage into the Great Sea of eternity.