Florence teaches its women many things. How to sit still. How to lower their eyes. How to belong to the men who marry them. Lisa del Giocondo has learned them all. Until the day she sits for Leonardo da Vinci. At first it is only a portrait. A merchant's request. A polite arrangement between a husband eager to immortalize his wife and a painter already whispered about as a genius. She sits. He paints. Days become weeks. Weeks become years. Her husband begins to notice the delays. The city begins to whisper. Across Florence, another genius, another storm simmers quietly. Michelangelo. He watches as Leonardo's masterpiece refuses to be finished. A portrait that should have taken weeks consumes years. Why? Because something begins to happen in the quiet of that studio. Something Florence would never forgive.
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