The woman in the Mona Lisa is almost certainly Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. A note written in Florence in October 1503 and found in a Heidelberg library says Leonardo was then painting a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. The other candidates, from a duchess of Milan to Leonardo himself, have no such document behind them.
Her married name is also the painting's Italian title. La Gioconda plays on del Giocondo, and on the Italian word for cheerful.
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Lisa's name came late, and from a shaky source. For centuries the only thing that tied her to the portrait was Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, printed in Florence in 1550, decades after the work was painted.
Vasari described the face in great detail. He wrote of rosy, tender nostrils, of a pulse that could be seen beating, and of eyebrows with every hair rising from the flesh. The Mona Lisa has no visible eyebrows. And the painting hung in France, where Vasari never went.
So the name rested on a man describing a face he had never seen, and no one could say how much of it he invented. For more than four centuries, that was all anyone had.
What does the Heidelberg note actually say?
In 2005, Armin Schlechter was cataloguing early printed books at the University of Heidelberg when he found handwriting in the margin of a 1477 edition of Cicero. The note was dated October 1503. The writer was Agostino Vespucci, a Florentine official.
Vespucci compared Leonardo to Apelles, the painter of ancient Greece whom every educated Florentine knew by reputation. Then he said what Leonardo was working on at that moment: a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.
Until then, the identification rested on Vasari alone, and Vasari was known for his anecdotes. The university announced the find in January 2008. Vespucci wrote in Florence, around the time the portrait was begun, with no stake in the answer. I find it the strongest evidence the question has ever had.
Vasari's eyebrows remain a separate puzzle, since the Mona Lisa shows none. In 2007, the French engineer Pascal Cotte said his scans showed traces of a left brow wiped out by an old restoration. Some art historians doubt it. The note settled who sat for Leonardo, but not why the portrait never went home to her family.
What You'll Discover
Why her husband never got it.
Whose portrait a visitor saw in 1517.
Who else people say she is.
Where she is buried.