Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa because a Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, ordered a portrait of his wife Lisa around 1503. Leonardo never handed it over. He kept working on the panel for years and took it with him to France.
That is why Italians call the painting La Gioconda, after her married name, and why the French call it La Joconde.
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As far as anyone can tell, Francesco del Giocondo never got his wife's portrait. Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti, two historians who combed Florentine tax and church records for the family, conclude that Leonardo never delivered the painting. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the first great book on artists' lives in 1550, says Leonardo worked on it for four years and then left it unfinished.
The panel did not stay in Florence. In October 1517, fourteen years after Leonardo started it, a visitor found it in his rooms in France and wrote down the name of a different patron.
What did a clerk write in 1503?
He wrote that Leonardo was painting Lisa del Giocondo. The clerk was Agostino Vespucci, an official in the Florentine government, and he put the remark in the margin of a book, a Latin edition of Cicero printed in 1477. The note is dated October 1503.
Vespucci was praising Leonardo, comparing him to Apelles, the great painter of ancient Greece, and he named two of Leonardo's pictures as proof. In translation the note reads: "That is the way Leonardo da Vinci does it with all of his pictures, like, for example, with the countenance of Lisa del Giocondo and that of Anne, the mother of the Virgin."
The note then turns to Leonardo's next job. The council chamber was the new assembly hall of Florence, where Leonardo had agreed to paint a battle scene, and the gonfaloniere was the head of the city's government.
Vespucci wrote: "We will see how he is going to do it regarding the great council chamber, the thing which he has just come to terms about with the gonfaloniere."
The note lay unnoticed for five centuries. In 2005, Armin Schlechter, a librarian at Heidelberg University, found it while cataloguing the book. Until then the identification of the sitter rested on Vasari, who was eight years old when Leonardo died.
Why would a silk merchant go to Leonardo? Probably through a neighbor. Lisa Gherardini, the future Lisa del Giocondo, was born in Florence in 1479 and married Francesco in 1495, still a teenager. Her family lived across the road from Leonardo's father, the notary Ser Piero da Vinci. But Lisa's husband was not the only client waiting on Leonardo that year.
What You'll Discover
What kept Leonardo from finishing it.
What a visitor saw in 1517.
Who owned it after Leonardo.
What has vanished from her face.