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Dianne Hales - Mona Lisa A Life Discovered

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Dianne Hales Mona Lisa A Life Discovered

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Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered
Everybody knows her smile, but no one knows her story: Meet the flesh-and-blood woman who became one of the most famous artistic subjects of all timeMona Lisa.
A genius immortalized her. A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek to view her portrait in the Louvre.Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story.
Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a book of discoveryabout the worlds most recognized face, most revered artist, and most praised and parodied painting.
Who was she, this ordinary woman who rose to such extraordinary fame? Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model? What became of her? And why does her smile enchant us still?
Lisa Gherardini (1479-1542) was a quintessential woman of her times, caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public scandals.
Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florenceand of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, with larger-than-legend figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli.
Dianne Hales, author of La Bella Lingua, became obsessed with finding the real Mona Lisa on repeated trips to Florence.
In Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, she takes readers with her to meet Lisas descendants uncover her familys long and colorful history and explore the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife, and a mother.
In the process, we can participate in Lisas daily rituals understand her personal relationships and see, hear, smell, and taste her Florence. Hales brings to life a time poised between the medieval and the modern, a vibrant city bursting into fullest bloom, and a culture that redefined the possibilities of manand of woman.

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A LSO BY D IANNE H ALES


La Bella Lingua

The Mind / Mood Pill Book (with Robert E. Hales, M.D.)

Just Like a Woman

Caring for the Mind (with Robert E. Hales, M.D.)

Intensive Caring (with Timothy Johnson, M.D.)

Depression; Pregnancy; The Family

(three volumes in The Encyclopedia of Health )

How to Sleep Like a Baby

Think Thin, Be Thin (with Doris Helmering)

The U.S. Army Total Fitness Program (with Robert E. Hales, M.D.)

New Hope for Problem Pregnancies (with Robert K. Creasy, M.D.)

Fitness After 50 (with Herbert A. deVries, Ph.D.)

The Complete Book of Sleep

An Invitation to Health (16 editions)

An Invitation to Health, Brief (8 editions)

An Invitation to Personal Change (with Kenneth W. Christian, Ph.D.)

Mona Lisa A Life Discovered - image 1

Mona Lisa A Life Discovered - image 2

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2014 by Dianne Hales

We thank the Bridgeman Art Library International for permission to use the Carta del Catena, 1490 from the Museo de Firenze Comera.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2014

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at

1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Christopher Lin

Jacket images: Florence Italian School/ Getty Imges;

Mona Lisa, c.15036 (oil on panel), Vinci, Leonardo da (14521519) / Louvre, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hales, Dianne M.

Mona Lisa : a life discovered / Dianne Hales.

pagescm

1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 14521519. Mona Lisa. 2. Del Giocondo, Lisa Gherardini, 14791542. 3. Artists modelsItalyFlorenceBiography. 4. Florence (Italy)History14211737. I. Title.

ND623.L5A7 2014

759.5dc23

[B]2013042086

ISBN 978-1-4516-5896-5

ISBN 978-1-4516-5898-9 (ebook)

To Bob and Julia, who remind me every day that love is the greatest art

Where art and history meet, a story emerges.

GERT JAN VAN DER SMAN, LORENZO AND GIOVANNA

CONTENTS
AUTHORS NOTE

This book rests on the premise that the woman in the Mona Lisa is indeed the person identified in its earliest description: Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo.

The first time that I heard her namemany years after I first beheld Leonardos portrait in the LouvreI repeated the syllables out loud to listen to their sound: LEE-sah Ghair-ar-DEE-nee. Almost immediately the journalistic synapses in my brain sparked, and I felt a surge of curiosity about the woman everyone recognizes but hardly anyone knows.

On the trail of her story, I gathered facts wherever I could find them. I sought the help of authoritative experts in an array of fields, from art to history to sociology to womens studies. I delved into archives and read through a veritable library of scholarly articles and texts. And I relied on a reporters most timeless and trustworthy tool: shoe leather. In the course of extended visits over several years, I walked the streets and neighborhoods of Mona Lisas Florence, explored its museums and monuments, and came to knowand loveits skies and seasons.

Facts, I discovered on my journeys, grow fragile with time, especially when laced with the lore of Leonardo. Experts disagree about dates and documents. Aficionados endlessly debate almost everything. Self-styled detectives scurry after clues. Theories flourish and fade. Yet what we do know with any certainty about Leonardo reveals little about his world.

Great mengeniuses, leaders, saintsare poor mirrors because they rise too far above the common level, the historian Barbara Tuchman once observed. It is the smaller men, who belong more completely to the climate of their times, who can tell us most.

The real woman named Lisa Gherardinismall by historys measurelived amid rapid change, political strife, meteoric creativity, and economic booms and busts. At a new dawn for Western civilization, hers may have seemed an ordinary private existence, but at a distance of more than five centuries, its details create an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, at once foreign and familiar.

Customs change, one of my wise consultants reminds me. Human nature does not. This book describes the customsthe clothing, the homes, the rituals, the routinesof Lisa Gherardinis life, but I also relate to her as a woman, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a matriarch, a fully dimensional human being not unlike her twenty-first-century counterparts. This is territory that skirts the realm of the probable and the possible, and I have tried to make the borders clear whenever I cross from confirmed fact to informed imagination.

Picture 3

A few additional notes: The symbol above, used to introduce parts of the book, is the giglio rosso, the red lily that has served as the heraldic emblem of Florence since the Middle Ages. Spelling remained arbitrary through centuries of Italians evolution. On the advice of linguistic scholars, I use modern Italian in the text, although I have kept the original spelling of names like Iacopo (Jacopo in contemporary Italian). I also identify places, such as the Palazzo Vecchio and Bargello, as they are called today rather than by older names.

Dates in histories of Florence, which began its new year on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, rather than January 1, are often confusing. I have relied on historical consensus whenever possible. A timeline appears ) provides additional background information, including a gallery of photos.

Most of Leonardos works, like many other Renaissance paintings, are unsigned, unnamed, and undated. Perhaps the only point about the Mona Lisa on which everyone agrees is that no one other than Leonardo could have created this masterpiece. And, I believe, no one other than the real Lisa Gherardini could have inspired it.

MONA LISA FAMILY TREE
S OURCE Based on research including recent unpublished findings by Giuseppe - photo 4

S OURCE: Based on research, including recent unpublished findings, by Giuseppe Pallanti, author of La Vera Identit della Gioconda . Milan: Skira Editore, 2006.

Chapter 1 Una Donna Vera A Real Woman A genius immortalized her A French - photo 5
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