Mona Lisa
Like other Florentines of their financial means, Francesco's family members were art lovers and patrons. His son Bartolommeo asked Antonio di Donnino Mazzieri to paint a fresco at the family's burial site in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata di Firenze. Andrea del Sarto painted a Madonna for another member of his family. Francesco gave commissions to Leonardo for a portrait of his wife and to Domenico Puligo for a painting of Saint Francis of Assisi. He is thought to have commissioned Lisa's portrait to celebrate both Andrea's birth and the purchase of the family's home.
Mona Lisa fulfilled 15th- and early 16th century requirements for portraying a woman of virtue. Lisa is portrayed as a faithful wife through gesture—her right hand rests over her left. Leonardo also presented Lisa as fashionable and successful, perhaps more well-off than she was. Her dark garments and black veil were Spanish-influenced high fashion; they are not a depiction of mourning for her first daughter, as some scholars have proposed. The portrait is strikingly large; its size is equal to that of commissions acquired by wealthier art patrons of the time. This extravagance has been explained as a sign of Francesco and Lisa's social aspiration.
Leonardo had no income during the spring of 1503, which may in part explain his interest in a private portrait. But later that year, he most likely had to delay his work on Mona Lisa when he received payment for starting The Battle of Anghiari, which was a more valuable commission and one he was contracted to complete by February 1505. In 1506 Leonardo considered the portrait unfinished. He was not paid for the work and did not deliver it to his client. The artist's paintings traveled with him throughout his life, and he may have completed Mona Lisa many years later in France, in one estimation by 1516.
The painting's title dates to 1550. An acquaintance of at least some of Francesco's family, Giorgio Vasari wrote, "Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife" (Italian: Prese Lionardo a fare per Francesco del Giocondo il ritratto di mona Lisa sua moglie.). The portrait's Italian (La Gioconda) and French (La Joconde) titles are Lisa's married name as well as nickname—in English, "jocund" or "the happy one".
Speculation assigned Lisa's name to at least four different paintings and her identity to at least ten different people. By the end of the 20th century, the painting was a global icon that had been used in more than 300 other paintings and in 2,000 advertisements, appearing at an average of one new advertisement each week.
In 2005, an expert at the University Library of Heidelberg discovered a margin note in the library's collection that established with certainty the traditional view that the sitter was Lisa. The note, written by Agostino Vespucci in 1503, states that Leonardo was working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. The Mona Lisa has been in custody of France since the 16th century, when it was acquired by King Francis I; however, after the French Revolution it came into the possession of the people. Today about 6 million people visit the painting each year at the Louvre in Paris, where it is part of a French national collection.
Read more about this topic: Lisa Del Giocondo