Read this book and the world's most famous image will never look the
same again. For the world's greatest cultural icon still has secrets to
reveal--not the silly secrets that the "Leonardo loonies" continue to
advance, but previously unknown facts about the lives of Leonardo, his
father, Lisa Gherardini, the subject of the portrait, and her husband
Francesco del Giocondo. From this factual beginning we see how the
painting metamorphosed into a "universal picture" that became the prime
vehicle for Leonardo's prodigious knowledge of the human and natural
worlds.
We learn about the new money of the ambitious merchant who married into
the old gentry of Lisa's family. We discover Lisa's life as a wife and
mother, her association with sexual scandals, and her later life in a
convent. We meet, for the first time, the illegitimate Leonardo's real
mother and find out where he was really born. The tiny hill town of
Vinci is placed before us, with its widespread poverty. We find out
about the career and possessions of his father, a notable lawyer in
Florence.
The meaning of the portrait that resulted from these human circumstances
is vividly illuminated though Renaissance love poetry and verses
specifically dedicated to Leonardo. We come to understand how Leonardo's
sciences of optics, psychology, anatomy and geology are embraced in his
poetic science of art. Recent scientific examinations of the painting
disclose how it evolved to assume its present appearance in Leonardo's
experimental hands.
Above all, we cut though the suppositions and the myths to show that the
portrait is a product of real people in a real place at a real time.
This is the book that brings back a sense of reality into the creation
of the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. And the actual Mona Lisa, it
turns out, is even more astonishing and transcendent than the Mona
Lisa of legend.