Mona Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo died on July 15, 1542. There are no commemorations—no tributes in her hometown, no lighting of candles in the churches where she worshiped, no flowers on her unmarked grave.
No place in Florence honors its long-forgotten daughter. Not rancid Via Sguazzo where Lisa Gherardini was born. Not nondescript Via della Stufa where she lived most of her adult life. And certainly not the urban eyesore that her final resting place, the Monastero di Sant’Orsola, has become.
On my most recent visit, the brutal ugliness of the dilapidated convent seems more oppressive than ever. I turn away from its grim walls and head across the Arno and up the steep hill to the cemetery of the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte. There, looking down on the city that Lisa Gherardini and Leonardo da Vinci had once called their own, I reflect on how each had died—one within its walls, one far from them.
Leonardo’s genius glowed to the very end of his life in 1519 at age 67 in France. For as long as they could, his fingers kept sketching; his eyes, observing; his agile brain, reflecting.
“Even though he accomplished more by words than deeds,” Giorgio Vasari, artist and art historian, wrote. “his name and fame will never be extinguished.” This has indeed proved true, but I wondered if the failures of his career—particularly the scores of unfinished works—haunted him.
“Dimmi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa,” Leonardo often scrawled in his notebooks. Tell me if anything was ever done. To his impossibly high standards, nothing ever was. Time, the “destroyer of all things,” would yield only to death, the “supreme evil.” He wrote poignantly of the soul’s fate: “It is with the greatest reluctance that it leaves the body, and I think that its sorrow and lamentations are not without cause.”
Nowhere did Leonardo voice any belief in an afterlife. Art alone would endure. Painting, he observed, could “preserve the transient beauty of mortals and endow it with a permanence greater than the works of nature, for these are the slaves of time”—as was he.
At the end of her days, Lisa Gherardini had no inkling of the immortality Leonardo had bequeathed on her portrait. But her regrets may have been few. With a life rooted in family and Florence, Lisa had watched youngsters grow, welcomed grandchildren, celebrated joys, mourned losses, and borne witness to history. As wife, mother and muse, she had basked in golden hours.
Ultimately her spiritual journey may have lifted her beyond the pomp and possessions that Renaissance Florentines so voraciously craved to a higher plane and a greater peace. At the hour of Lisa’s death, the Holy Mother Mary, whom she would have worshipped all of her life, may have blessed her with a gentle passage into what Florentine’s called “the Great Sea” of eternity.
When I think of Lisa’s final moments, another quote from Leonardo comes to mind, a line written during his happiest years in Milan: “Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.”
Dianne Hales is the author of MONA LISA: A Life Discovered and LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language.
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