Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in the village of Vinci, in Tuscany. He spent his working life moving through the courts and cities of Renaissance Italy — Florence, Milan, Venice, Rome — always in demand as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and theorist, never entirely settled. His biography is a record of exceptional ability matched with the practical difficulties of patronage: the need to find and maintain relationships with rulers and wealthy individuals who could support his work, combined with his own tendencies to leave projects incomplete and to pursue projects across too many domains simultaneously.
By the time he began work on the painting that would become the Mona Lisa, around 1503, he was fifty-one years old, based primarily in Florence after the fall of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The commission — if it was a commission — has been plausibly associated with Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine silk merchant, who may have wanted a portrait of his wife Lisa Gherardini to mark the birth of their second son or the completion of their new home. The specific documentary evidence for this identification is thin: a 1550 account by Giorgio Vasari, writing more than thirty years after Leonardo’s death, identifies the sitter as “Monna Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo,” and a 2005 discovery of a marginal note by a Florentine official named Agostino Vespucci, apparently confirming that Leonardo was working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo around 1503, provides contemporaneous support for the identification. No commission document, payment record, or delivery receipt has survived.