The Private Life of Mona Lisa – Pierre La Mure

Description

Condition: Dust jacket in good condition; only minor tears on spine ends. Book in Excellent condition, tightly bound.

From the cover: “One day in 1480 a young, wealthy Florentine wool merchant entered a tax-collector’s office to declare his income. He described himself as Antonio Mario de Gherardini, son of Noldo, residing in Via Maggio in the district of Santo Spirito, father of a daughter named Lisa, aged one. This is the first historical reference to the child who was to become Madonna Lisa, and the subject of the most celebrated portrait ever painted.

Who was this woman, whose soft brown eyes and enigmatic smile have for centuries held all enquiries at bay? Why did this wealthy patrician girl marry at fifteen a twice-widowed silk merchant, Giocondo, more than double her age? Why, at twenty-four, with the consent of her husband, did she sit for a portrait he had not commissioned? How did Leonardo da Vinci, a stranger to Florence, who never sought portrait commissions and disliked painting so much that he left his greatest works unfinished, come to paint Madonna Lisa, and labour so long over one small panel ? Most puzzling of all, for whom was the portrait painted?

Following the thousand and one clues scattered in archives, writings and histories of the period, Pierre La Mure has painstakingly reconstructed in novel form the life of this woman whose existence is concentrated on a panel of poplar wood. He brings to life the whole turbulent period of Renaissance Italy as he follows the parallel lives of Mona Lisa and Leonardo against a background of the French invasion, the rise of the Sforzas in Milan, the temporary eclipse of the Medicis in Florence and the fiery monk Savonarola’s brief, meteoric career.

Extract from Kirkus Reviews  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/pierre-la-mure/the-private-life-of-mona-lisa/

Fictionalized biography is about the supposed model for the famous portrait but it has just as much to do with the flamboyant and far more interesting events and characters of late 15th-century Italy. According to an account, which La Mute quotes, set down in 1517 when Leonardo da Vinci was 65, a “”certain Florentine lady”” had been “”painted from life at the urgent request of the Magnificent Guiliano de Medici.””

From this La Mure reconstructs what we are to assume was the life of a typical upper-class society matron from her birth into a family of wool merchants, her connection with the Medicis, her hastily arranged marriage to a kindly older man (because of a youthful indiscretion with the patron of the portrait) to her untimely (but not unusual) death at 37.

How could her little ups and downs be anything but tedium itself, however, compared with the capably rendered bombast of Savonarola, the treachery of Cesare Borgia, the disastrous imbecilities of France’s Charles VIII and, of course, the eccentricities of the artist himself, whirling from one ingenious but unrealizable project to another. Except for the portrait. And that exasperating smile. La Mure’s excavations, admirable though they are, only further the enigma.