by Lisa Rochon
Numerous reliable sources, including the Renaissance writings of Giorgio Vasari and Agostino Vespucci, further confirmed by Italian researcher Giuseppe Pallanti and British scholar Martin Kemp, prove that Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo was the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait Mona Lisa. Her husband, Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, enlisted Leonardo da Vinci to paint her portrait in the early 1500s. As is meticulously detailed in Dianne Hales’s Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, Lisa was a Florentine and the mother of six children, though three had tragically died by the time she turned thirty-eight. She was destined to become celebrated around the world as Mona Lisa, but Lisa Gherardini died in obscurity in a Florentine convent. Her funeral was held not at her husband’s church, but at Santo Spirito in Oltrarno, her childhood neighborhood.
During the years when they both lived in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were commissioned to paint epic murals on the east wall of the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo della Signoria, now commonly known as the Palazzo Vecchio; its contemporary name is used throughout Tuscan Daughter so as not to confuse the reader. Although Governor Soderini and the Signoria Council of the Florentine Republic demanded that Leonardo complete The Battle of Anghiari, he never did. Charles II d’Amboise, governor of Milan and marshal of France, intervened, requesting Leonardo’s services in Milan, including a commission to design his suburban villa and garden. A drawing by Peter Paul Rubens reconstructs the central fight for the standard in The Battle of Anghiari. Michelangelo’s cartoon of the Battle of Cascina was never tapped onto the wall of the Great Council Hall. A painting by Bastiano da Sangallo is the most complete surviving copy.
A list in one of Leonardo’s notebooks itemizes all of the materials required and approved by the City of Florence to complete the monumental wall painting within the Great Council Hall: “260 pounds of wall plaster; 89 pounds eight ounces of Greek pitch for the painting; 343 pounds of Volterra plaster (sulphate of lime with size); 11 pounds 4 ounces of linseed oil; 20 pounds of Alexandrian white; 2 pounds 10 ounces of Venetian sponges.” Recent research published by Martin Kemp indicates that Leonardo’s central Fight for the Standard—the fight scene that was actually painted—would have measured 12.5 by 14 feet. Its soldiers would have been about 25 percent bigger than life-size.
In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo lived in Rome until his death in 1564, a few weeks shy of turning eighty-nine years old.
In 1519, at the age of sixty-seven, Leonardo died in the castle of Cloux, France, after serving for many years as peintre du roi for his patron, King Francis I. He left his painting of the Mona Lisa to his companion, Salaì, and it was purchased by the king. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was installed in the Louvre Museum.
In 2012, art researchers and scientists sponsored by the U.S. National Geographic Society began chipping away at a frescoed wall by the sixteenth-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari that covered Leonardo’s unfinished fresco in the Great Council Hall at Palazzo Vecchio. The project is currently known as the “Lost Leonardo.”
In 2019, an exhibition at the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence produced the transcripts of the distinguished committee convened to decide the location of Michelangelo’s David. Leonardo’s recommendation that the genitals of the colossus be covered and the giant sculpture tucked into a black niche of the loggia—“che stia nella loggia”—is part of the historic record.
Tuscan Daughter was carefully researched over many years, which meant reading primary sources, interviewing Renaissance experts and attending numerous exhibitions honoring the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. I also conducted several research trips to Florence, to live there, to study the masterworks at the Uffizi Gallery, the Accademia Gallery, Casa Buonarroti, Santo Spirito church, the San Marco monastery museum and the Laurentian Library, and to trek the hill-town paths of Settignano. I visited the Santissima Annunziata cloister (now the Italian Geographic Institute), where Leonardo had been invited to stay by the Servites, and saw the artist’s secret side entrance and the frescoed birds on the wall. Wall drawings and playful doodles in charcoal were often created by Michelangelo in his studios and at his family villa in Settignano, something New York Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Carmen Bambach has written about. To see original works by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci outside of Florence, I traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Louvre in Paris, Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, the National Gallery in London and the Royal Library at Windsor Castle in England.
Many of the characters in Tuscan Daughter are well known to the reader, though the nuances of their personalities and motivations were entirely my creation. The rest of the characters are my inventions, but readers may be surprised to learn that Machiavelli did, in fact, have a long liaison with a prostitute by the name of La Riccia. Months and years that are relevant and historically accurate are noted. Elsewhere, I have taken some liberty with the timeline. Any errors are entirely mine. The only thing I can rely on is my imagination.
I revised and expanded the novel during the COVID-19 crisis, when my four children returned home with their partners and a new baby. The world went quiet, wildlife crept out from the woods and ideas blossomed.
Acknowledgments and Selected Bibliography
For believing in this book, I offer my heartfelt thanks to HarperCollins and, especially, to my editor, Jennifer Lambert, for her outstanding insights and clarity. My agent, Hilary McMahon, a fearless, high-energy champion of authors, has always been on my side. For enlightening conversations on Mona Lisa, Leonardo and Michelangelo, I am indebted to the renowned art historian Martin Kemp, Oxford University Professor Emeritus and distinguished author. For welcoming me into their venerable institutions to discuss up close original works by Leonardo, I am grateful to Matthias Wivel, Curator of Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings at the National Gallery in London, and to Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle. My great thanks to University of Toronto Professor of History Nicholas Terpstra for his careful reading of the manuscript and for offering judicious comments as an Italian Renaissance expert while deferring to my creative license. Many thanks also to the sharp-eyed and astute copy editor Sue Sumeraj, and to marble sculptor Carl Taçon for his insights into the technique and physical impacts of marble sculpting, as well as to University of Toronto Professor Emeritus Olga Pugliese-Zorzi, former chair of the Department of Italian Studies, for enlightening me on appropriate use of Renaissance-era Italian. For helping to nuance the novel, I thank John Paoletti, Professor of Art History Emeritus, Wesleyan University; Jacalyn Duffin, medical historian and hematologist, Queen’s University; and Mark Jurdjevic, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at York University’s Glendon Campus. Thanks also to Italian tutor and translator Elena Vassena and to Alison Woolley for teaching me the art of fresco in Florence in 2019 and for reviewing some technical details of the wall paintings by Leonardo and Michelangelo. It’s one thing to write about fresco; it was another to mix sand and lime putty with my own hands.
I’m grateful to the readers, writers and editors who guided and encouraged me with generous insights along the way: Sarah MacLachlan, Allison McCabe, David Young, Jennifer Robson, Michael Ondaatje and Dianne Hales; to all of my loving family and to those who kindly agreed to read and comment on early drafts of the manuscript: Barbara Berson, Maria Scala, Douglas Lawrence, Janine Metcalfe, Sasha Rogers and her Summerhill book club; and to Rana Khan, Dale Mackey, Helen Hatzis, Monica Gutschi, Ginetta Peters, Carolyne Bayly, Paget Catania and all of the Beaches crew for offering sustaining companionship and laughter. Deep gratitude goes to my children Hannah, Dylan, Alexander and Geneviève, for reading, for insights and for invaluable plot guidance. To my husband, John Terry, thank you for your unrelenting optimism and wisdom, and for always being my mountain guide.
The follo
wing resources were crucial during the writing of this novel:
Clayton, Martin, and Ron Philo. Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man. London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2010.
Condivi, Ascanio. The Life of Michelangelo. London: Pallas Athene, 2006 (first published in 1553).
Crum, Roger J., and John T. Paoletti. Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
da Vinci, Leonardo. Notebooks. Selected by Irma A. Richter and edited with an introduction and notes by Thereza Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.
de Tolnay, Charles. The Youth of Michelangelo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943. (All six volumes of de Tolnay’s magnificent Michelangelo series were given to me by my husband for Christmas 2019, when I wanted to put my novel aside.)
Hales, Dianne. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Hartt, Frederick. David: By the Hand of Michelangelo; The Original Model Discovered. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.
Isaacson, Walter. Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
Jones, Jonathan. The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel that Defined the Renaissance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
Kemp, Martin. Leonardo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Kemp, Martin. Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
King, Ross. Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power. London: HarperPress, 2007.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. New York: Knopf, 2006 (first published in 1513).
McCabe, Joseph. New Light on Witchcraft. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1926.
McCarthy, Mary. The Stones of Florence. San Diego: Harcourt, 1963.
McIver, Katherine A. Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy: From Kitchen to Table. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy. New York: Doubleday, 1961.
Symonds, John Addington. The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti. New York: The Modern Library, 1928. (An original leather-bound edition left on my dock at the cottage by a neighbor.)
Trexler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists. London: Penguin Books, 1965 (first published in 1568).
About the Author
LISA ROCHON is an award-winning architecture critic, a cultural essayist and the author of Up North: Where Canada’s Architecture Meets the Land. A two-time winner of a National Newspaper Award for her Globe and Mail Cityspace column, she is also the recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s President’s Award for Architectural Journalism. Rochon traveled to Florence, Italy, many times to retrace the steps of Lisa Gherardini (Mona Lisa), Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as she researched this novel, and was also granted rare access to Leonardo’s original drawings at Windsor Castle. She is passionate about art, equitable public space, cities and ideas. Find out more at www.citylab.space.
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Copyright
Tuscan Daughter
Copyright © 2021 by Lisa Rochon.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photos: Shutterstock (Florence skyline),
Michael Nelson / Trevillion Images (woman)
Published by Harper Avenue, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST EDITION
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Epub Edition JULY 2021 ISBN: 978-1-4434-6352-2
Version 05282021
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-6351-5
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Tuscan daughter : a novel / Lisa Rochon.
Names: Rochon, Lisa, author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210154101 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210154136
ISBN 9781443463515 | (softcover) | ISBN 9781443463522 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8635.O295 T87 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
LSC/H 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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