Sublime

After Cosimo de’ Medici took over the family bank in the 1430s, it became the largest in Europe. By managing the fortunes of the continent’s wealthy families, the Medici made themselves the wealthiest of them all. They were innovators in bookkeeping, including the use of debit-and-credit accounting that became one of the great spurs to progress dur

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While in Milan in 1507, Leonardo met a fourteen-year-old named Francesco Melzi (fig. 101). He was the son of a distinguished nobleman who was a captain in the Milanese militia and later a civil engineer who worked to reinforce the city’s fortifications, endeavors that fascinated Leonardo. The Melzis lived in the largest villa in the town of Vaprio,

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Leonardo was always on the lookout for powerful patrons, and in 1513, with Milan still controlled by his former patrons the Sforzas, a new one appeared in Rome. In March of that year, Giovanni de’ Medici was elected to become Pope Leo X. The son of Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici, the Florentine ruler who was a halfhearted patron to Leonardo a

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It was an inheritance dispute with his half-brothers rather than the exhortations of the Signoria or any desire to resume painting the Battle of Anghiari that brought Leonardo back to Florence temporarily in August 1507. After he failed to inherit anything from his father, his beloved uncle Francesco da Vinci, a gentle and unambitious country squir

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Lisa del Giocondo, who was born in 1479 into a minor branch of the distinguished Gherardini family, whose roots as landowners stretched from feudal times but whose money had not survived quite so long. At fifteen, she married into the wealthy but not quite so prominent Giocondo family, which had made its riches in the silk trade. Her father had to

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