Lisa Gherardini

A daughter of the minor Florentine nobility

Lisa Gherardini was born on 15 June 1479, one of seven children of Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini and Lucrezia del Caccia. The Gherardini were an old but declining Tuscan noble family, listed in Florentine tax registers as owning a small country property in Chianti and a house near Sant'Ambrogio in the city. Antonmaria's finances were straitened enough that Lisa's dowry — 170 florins and a small farm at San Silvestro — was modest for a Florentine bride of her class.

She grew up in the last years of Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence, into a family more famous for its lineage than its money. Two of her brothers eventually joined the priesthood; her sisters married into equivalent minor houses. Her own marriage, arranged when she was fifteen, was a piece of practical family administration: her husband was older, mercantile, and richer than her father.

Francesco del Giocondo

On 5 March 1495 Lisa married Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo, a silk merchant nineteen years her senior. Francesco was a widower with a young son from his first marriage; his first two wives had died in childbirth, and his household needed a woman to run it. He was well established in the Florentine wool and silk trade, held minor civic offices, and lived on Via della Stufa in the San Lorenzo quarter of the city.

Lisa and Francesco had at least five children together — Piero (born 1496), Camilla (1499), Andrea (1502), Giocondo (1507), and Marietta (1510) — alongside Bartolomeo, Francesco's son from his previous marriage. Camilla and Marietta both entered the Sant'Orsola convent as nuns; Piero and Andrea followed their father into commerce. Lisa's household through these years was large, plague-shadowed (Camilla died of plague in 1509 as a novice at Sant'Orsola), and financially comfortable rather than wealthy.

The commission and the sitting

In or around 1503, Leonardo da Vinci — back in Florence after the fall of Ludovico Sforza's Milan and taking commissions from a limited local clientele — began work on Lisa's portrait. Two independent contemporary records identify her by name. In October 1503, Agostino Vespucci — a Florentine chancery clerk and cousin of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci — wrote a marginal note in his own copy of Cicero's Epistulae ad familiares comparing Leonardo's method to that of the ancient Greek painter Apelles, and adding that Leonardo was 'at present working on the head of Lisa del Giocondo.' Giorgio Vasari, writing his Lives of the Artists in 1550, gave the same identification.

The portrait Leonardo produced took the young Florentine wife of a silk merchant far beyond her commissioned function. She turns slightly toward the viewer in a shallow loggia over a landscape of atmospheric geological improbability, her hands folded, her expression settled and unreadable, her dress plain by contemporary standards. Leonardo kept the panel with him when he left Florence, worked on it in Milan, and carried it into France in 1516 with two other paintings. He was still refining it at his death at Amboise in 1519. Francesco and Lisa never received the finished picture.

• Mona Lisa

  The Louvre panel — the sfumato technique, the 1503 Vespucci identification, the 1911 theft, and the Salle des États today.

Widowhood, Sant'Orsola, and burial

Francesco died in 1538, having named Lisa in his will as principal guardian of his estate. Two of the couple's daughters, Camilla (before she died of plague) and later Marietta, had entered the Sant'Orsola convent as nuns. Lisa herself retired to the convent after Francesco's death, living out her last four years there among her daughter and other Florentine widows.

She died on 15 July 1542, aged sixty-three, and was buried in the convent grounds. Sant'Orsola was suppressed under Napoleon in 1810 and its buildings later used as a barracks and then a police archive. Between 2011 and 2013 an Italian research team led by the art historian Silvano Vinceti excavated what may have been her tomb; skeletal remains identified as a possible match were exhumed. The identification has been contested and cannot be considered confirmed.

The name behind the picture

The title Mona Lisa is a shortening of Monna Lisa — Monna being an archaic Italian courtesy title for a married woman, contracted from Madonna, and Lisa her first name. In Italy the painting is more commonly called La Gioconda, from her married surname Giocondo (which also happens to mean 'joyful,' a coincidence the sixteenth century enjoyed). Neither title corresponds to what she was called during her lifetime — she signed and was addressed as Lisa di Antonmaria Gherardini until 1495, and as Lisa del Giocondo after.