Looking for Mona Lisa by Mary Hoffman

As I wrote in my Cabinet of Curiosities post a few days ago, I have been reading all I can find about the subject of the world's most famous painting, known as Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. Who was the sitter? A real woman or an idealised composite of all that Leonardo da Vinci found admirable in a woman?

The most common identification of her is as Lisa Gherardini, the Florentine wife of a silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, hence La Gioconda. Francesco got his surname from a great grandfather who was always jolly - or "jocund." The idea caught on because of Lisa's husband's surname and the implied reference to her smile.

But she is not the only candidate - other who have been put forward include Isabella d'Este, who was desperate for Leonardo to paint her portrait, Pacifica Brandino, who was the mistress of Lorenzo the Magnificent's youngest son Giuliano, Isabella Gualanda, who is the cousin of Ceclia Gallerani, better known as the Lady with an ermine in another portrait by Leonardo.

(I have incidentally always liked this painting best of all Leonardo's work and was thrilled to see it "in the flesh" at the National Gallery exhibition a few years ago.)

It was the rather unreliable Giorgo Vasari who gave the identification of the subject as Lisa del Giocondo in 1550. Lisa had died only eight years earlier and three of her children were certainly still alive then and living in Florence so he could have checked but perhaps that was not Vasari's way. He certainly didn't change his description of the portrait when he revised the book we now know as Lives of the Artists. But then he had never seen the painting and praised the depiction of the eyebrows, which we know are not present.

I thought this was the beginning and end of what we knew about Lisa Gherardini until I saw a television programme about the painting on BBC2 last December. It was mainly about a new high-tech way of scanning the painting, used by Pascal Cotte, with the permission of the Louvre, which institution - interestingly - did not put up a spokesperson to comment on his findings.

But what really caught my attention was Andrew Graham-Dixon interviewing an Italian specialist in a Florence in an area clearly recognisable as being in the Santa Croce district, where I have often stayed. This turned out to be Giuseppe Pallanti and I found he had also written a book, called in English Mona Lisa Revealed (Skira 2006).

Pallanti is the kind of meticulous researcher who spends his life looking at historic documents of the driest kind: deeds of sale of properties, the equivalent of tax returns, records of baptisms - that sort of thing. And from that he has found out plenty about Lisa Gherardini, where she was born, the houses she lived in, her marriage, her husband's life, her children and her probable burial place.

He continued his searches after publishing the book and they were passed on to an American journalist called Dianne Hales, whose own book, Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered (Simon & Schuster 2014) has publicised his further findings and added some of her own.

Mark Rylance as Leonardo in the 2003 TV mini-series

Leonardo of course looked exactly like this when he was painting his most famous portrait. If we follow Vasari, the picture was started in 1503. It certainly is the case that the young Raphael, in Florence the following year, sketched a female model in a remarkably similar pose. And in 2005, half a millennium after Leonardo was at work on the painting, a marginal note was found, dated October 1503, in a volume of Cicero, stating that Leonardo was at work on a painting of Lisa del Giocondo.

And, whether the painting was commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo or Giuliano de' Medici or someone else, they never possessed it. Leonardo took it with him when he left Italy for France in 1516, never to return.

I wrote about Leonardo's portrait of Lisa Gherardini in my novel David: the Unauthorised Autobiography. I showed Gabriele del Lauro, the fictional model for the giant statue, watching the artist at work in Francesco del Giocondo's house in the Via della Stufa:

' It was glorious. He had captured a quality in the sitter that would have been easy to overlook. Truthfully, she wasn't as lovely as Gandini the baker's wife, but she ha a restful presence - I can't explain it any other way - that had nothing to do with any of her features, nor yet her figure.

She was past her first youth and had borne several children but was not yet quite matronly. Yet she radiated tranquility.'

And now here I am writing about her again for a novel for Barrington Stoke, a short fiction for teenagers called simply, Smile.

This portrait of John the Baptist is thought to be modelled on Leonardo's apprentice and probably lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as "Salai" or "little devil." There is a marked resemblance between his features and those of Mona Lisa. Was this true in real life? I like to think so.

For all that they lived together for some thirty years, Salai was everything that Lisa Gherardini was not - gluttonous, amoral, promiscuous and not above stealing from his master and friend. Is it too fanciful to think that Leonardo saw in his Mona Lisa the model of a loyal and loving wife, who unaccountably looked like the venal young man he was so drawn to? That he saw in her an alternative life he might have lived, had he been a different man?

One of the many things we will never know and why writers are continually drawn back to the story of the painter, the mdel and the 500-year-old smile.

Writing Historical Fiction for Dyslexic Readers

by Caroline Lawrence

The Roman poet Virgil

In 2013 I was approached by Barrington Stoke, a publisher who specialises in fiction for dyslexic readers. They ask established writers to write books in their particular field of expertise for dyslexic and reluctant readers.  I was excited when they asked if I would be willing to write a book of around ten thousand words specifically geared to teenage boys.

I immediately thought of the Aeneid, one of my favourite works of Classical literature. Nobody does gory battle scenes better than Virgil. One of the best stand-alone stories from the Aeneid, with plenty of gore, is the story of the doomed night raid by Nisus and Euryalus. It’s visceral, exciting and almost cinematic (like much of Virgil) in its descriptions.

I wanted a killer first paragraph to hook reluctant teen readers. Inspired by the classic openings of two films, Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty, I opened my story with a narrator telling what it feels like to die.

I was young when they killed me. Just a teenager.

They say death on the battlefield wins you true glory.
         
They say when someone stabs you it doesn’t hurt.

They say it feels like a fist punching you. 

That you hardly even notice it in the excitement of the battle.
         
They are wrong.
         
You do notice when someone plunges a sword into your body. 
         
It doesn’t feel like a fist punching you. It feels like a heavy, iron, double-edged sword. The blade pierces your skin, parts your muscles, scrapes your bones and pops your organs.
         
It burns cold. Freezes hot. Then makes you want to puke.
         
It does not feel glorious.
         
It hurts like Hades.
         
Which is where I am bound.

When you write for Barrington Stoke there are two stages of editing. The first edit is for the story itself – structure, continuity and comprehensibility. The second edit aims to weed out words and phrases that might trip up dyslexic readers. Ruth, my main editor, warned me to avoid participle phrases and complicated sentences from the beginning as these would almost certainly be cut. I tried to keep the syntax as simple as possible and the vocabulary, too. As fans of Hemingway and Robert B. Parker know, you can tell a good story with simple words.

I had just finished the first draft of The Night Raid when I went to a boys’ prep school called Summer Fields in Oxford to do a week as writer in residence. This was my target audience: boys 8-12 years old. I didn’t have time to read long passages during my workshops, but I gave the manuscript to Sophie Palmer, one of the English teachers there. The great thing about Sophie is that she herself is dyslexic and knows all the problems other dyslexic readers might have. Sophie read the first couple of chapters to the boys in her class and they came back with some great comments. My favourite was one boy’s criticism, that it seemed too much like a movie!

Sophie also gave me a checklist of things boys like:
1. a hero they can relate to
2. adventure – straight into action
3. all goes wrong – failure – then all goes right
4. setting the scene
5. creating a sense of foreboding
6. when the reader knows something the main character doesn’t
7. twists and turns
8. a good title and front cover
9. humour
10. quick pace

I took on board some of her suggestions, especially those which entailed changing words the boys didn’t understand. 

I also showed an early draft to Llewelyn Morgan, a respected professor of Classics at Oxford and an expert in Virgil. He gave me the thumbs up and so did his son Tom, "aged 10 and a harsh critic".

Writing a version of Virgil with such strict constraints was strangely satisfying. I found my prose tauter and tighter. I found I could write historical fiction without using exotic words. Under my editor’s encouragement, I changed column to pillar, slaughtered to butchered and rations to food.

Unfamiliar words were simplified or explained. Callus became hard patches of skin. Palisade became spiked walls. Eternity became all time. 

The specialist-dyslexic editor, Mairi, also made some basic changes, like replacing adjectives with action verbs. Nodded happily became nodded and smiled. I said quickly became My next words came fast. And muttered sourly became muttered sour words, which I much prefer.
         

I don’t think my retelling has lost anything because of these constraints. In fact I think my writing has become clearer and more accessible. With the fabulous cover Barrington Stoke have produced I have an excellent chance of catching the attention of normally reluctant readers, especially teenage boys. If this target audience finds their interest sparked by a simply-told glimpse into Virgil’s great masterpiece then it will have been well worth the effort.

The Night Raid, Caroline Lawrence's first book for Barrington Stoke, was launched on Monday 12 May at Summer Fields School in Oxford. You can read a sneak peek HERE. And you can see her Twelve Tips When Writing for Dyslexic Readers on Barrington Stoke's Blog.