1503
Leonardo Begins the Mona Lisa
In a rented studio in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci began layering translucent glazes onto a poplar panel, painting the wife of a silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. He would carry the unfinished portrait for the rest of his life, obsessively refining a smile no one has ever quite explained.
Julius II Takes the Keys
The formidable Giuliano della Rovere, nicknamed il Papa Terribile, swept into the papal chair after a lightning conclave. A warrior pope who preferred armor to vestments, he would personally besiege cities, bankroll Michelangelo, and commission Bramante to tear down and rebuild Saint Peter's. His patronage of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante made his pontificate one of the most artistically productive in history.
Spanish Rout the French at Garigliano
Gonzalo de Cordoba, the Great Captain, ambushed a French army along the frozen Garigliano River and drove them into the water. His disciplined formations of pikemen and arquebusiers presaged a new way of war. Naples would remain Spanish for two centuries. Gonzalo's innovative formations of pikemen and arquebusiers established the template for the Spanish tercio that dominated battlefields for a century.
Casa de Contratacion Founded
Queen Isabella founded the Casa de Contratacion in Seville to regulate Spanish trade with the Americas. Every ship, cargo, and sailor had to pass through its bureaucracy. The institution would accumulate the greatest store of cartographic information in sixteenth-century Europe, jealously guarded from foreign spies and rivals. Its requirement that all returning ships pass through Seville made that city sixteenth-century Europe's richest and busiest port.
Leonardo Dissects a Hundred-Year-Old Man
In a Florence hospital, Leonardo da Vinci performed an autopsy on an old man who had died peacefully and discovered that his arteries were thickened and narrow. Leonardo's red-chalk drawings, four centuries before modern medicine, sketched the first anatomical account of atherosclerosis in history. His comparison with a child's organs constituted the first systematic study of age-related anatomical changes in medical history.