Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep…
Nat King Cole, ‘Mona Lisa’ (lyrics by Jay
Livingstone and Ray Evans, 1949)
And what of the paintbrush, of which he had been so heartily sick, so impaziente, a couple of years previously? Was he painting again? It seems he was. In the summer of 1503, when he was not traipsing round the base-camps and excavation-sites of the Pisa campaign, when he was not computing the sluice-rates and shovel-hours needed to bring his cunning stratagem to pass, Leonardo was almost certainly at work on the picture that can justly be called – as it is in the subtitle of a recent book on the subject – ‘the world’s most famous painting’.76
‘For Francesco del Giocondo Leonardo undertook to paint a portrait of his wife, Mona Lisa; he worked on it for four years and left it unfinished.’ Thus briskly Giorgio Vasari begins his account of the Mona Lisa. It is the fullest contemporary account of the painting, and the only one to offer a name for the sitter – whether correctly or not is much debated. The painting is called the Mona Lisa on the basis of Vasari’s identification, though as a title this was not much used before the nineteenth century. In Italy the painting is always known as La Gioconda (and in France as La Joconde). This seems also to refer to Lisa del Giocondo, but as giocondo is also an adjective, meaning jocund, it functions as a purely descriptive title: The Jocund [or Playful] Woman, The Joker Lady – perhaps even The Tease. Such a pun would be characteristic of the time, and of Leonardo, but those who disbelieve Vasari’s identification say the title works perfectly well without any reference to Mrs Giocondo.77
After his informative first sentence, Vasari devotes a paragraph to praise of the painting’s brilliantly lifelike qualities. Some of this is inaccurate, or at least off-key, because he had never actually seen the picture: it was, as he notes, ‘now in the possession of King François of France at Fontainebleau’.78 He lavishes particular praise on the sitter’s eyebrows – ‘completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another’ – whereas the Mona Lisa is notably eyebrow-less, and no trace of any previous eyebrows has been found beneath the paint surface. He concludes the passage with a little anecdotal coda: ‘While he was painting her he employed singers and musicians and always had jesters to keep her merry and to chase away that melancholy which painters usually gave to portraits; and so in this picture by Leonardo there is a smile [ghigno] so pleasing that one seems to see something more divine than human.’ This is nice, and chimes in with some of Leonardo’s comments in the Trattato about the painter working in a refined atmosphere, but again it strikes one as off-key. Where, in the actual Mona Lisa, is the evidence of this merriment? There is the smile, or the ghost of one, but not the broad grin which is the usual meaning of ghigno (from which ‘grin’ comes). As he often does, Vasari is over-egging a second-hand account to make it sound richer. His description is often criticized because of its visual inaccuracy, though of course we have even less idea what the Mona Lisa looked like when Leonardo painted it. Its currently crepuscular appearance is the result of several centuries of protective varnish, tinged yellowish by oxidation. As early as 1625 a viewer complained of the picture being ‘so damaged by a certain varnish that one cannot make it out very well’.79 This is another aspect of the picture’s obscurity – what the pro-restoration lobby would call its illegibility. She wears this veil of lacquer, with its thousands of tiny lesions or craquelures, and it will be a brave restorer who dares remove the veil to see what lies beneath.
Vasari does not actually give a date for the painting – dates are not his strong suit – but within the narrative of the Life he places it squarely in this second Florentine period, somewhere between the St Anne cartoon of 1501 and the Battle of Anghiari fresco of 1503–6. Given that Leonardo was painting very little in 1501, as we gather from Fra Pietro Novellara, and that he was in the service of the Borgia for much of 1502, this is generally interpreted to mean that he began work on the Mona Lisa sometime after his return to Florence in 1503. This is the date favoured by the Louvre, where its 500th birthday was celebrated in autumn 2003. It may also be the date favoured by a casual joke of Machiavelli’s friend Luca Ugolini, who wrote to Niccolò on 11 November 1503 congratulating him on the birth of his first son – ‘My very dear friend. Congratulations! Obviously Mistress Marietta did not deceive you, for he is your spitting image. Leonardo da Vinci would not have done a better portrait.’ Perhaps Ugolini was thinking of theMona Lisa, already taking shape in Leonardo’s studio in November 1503, when he said this.80
I have noted over the last few chapters what seem to be anticipatory frissons of the Mona Lisa – the hands and bust of Isabella d’Este, the loggia of the Tovaglia villa, the bridge at Buriano, the landscape of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder. Some of these are debatable, though the first and the last are demonstrable parallels in works of 1500–1502. That unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este, always just beyond our field of vision, is especially insistent – seen by Lorenzo Guznago in Venice in 1500; referred to by Isabella’s agents in Florence in 1501–2 (‘he will immediately undertake the portrait and send it’… ‘he has already begun work on that which Your Ladyship wanted’), this lost work seems a kind of missing link between the extant drawing of Isabella and theMona Lisa, a notional phase between the rigid full profile of the former and the nuanced, faintly skewed full face of the latter. A red-chalk drawing at Windsor, often described as a study for the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, might also be seen as a halfway stage on this arc of movement from the d’Este profile to the Gioconda gaze.81 We know that this is how Leonardo worked, returning to images and ideas, circling round them, redefining them. Paintings evolve, metamorphose from one shape to another, like the pagan gods of the classical world. According to Vasari, Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for four years. This would make the date of composition c. 1503–7, its curtailment broadly coinciding with Leonardo’s departure from Florence in early 1508. From around that time is a sheet of anatomical drawings containing nine studies of mouths and lips, with accompanying notes about the physiology of those ‘muscles called lips’.82 One of these studies, quite distinct from the others in its light, poetic tone, shows a mouth smiling – it is almost exactly the smile of the Mona Lisa (Plate 19).
Vasari’s account of the painting is not ideal, but he is the only contemporary writer to give a name and a date to the portrait. Is he right? Increasingly it seems likely that he is. There are a great many alternative theories about who is portrayed in the painting, most of them proposed within the last hundred years. (André Coppier’s 1914 article ‘La “Joconde” est-elle le portrait de Mona Lisa?’ began the hunt.) I have been round the block, metaphorically speaking, with these contenders, and none of them has stood up to much inquiry. The alternative candidates – Isabella Gualanda, Pacifica Brandano, Costanza d’Avalos, Caterina Sforza et al. – are rather like the authors evoked to solve the Shakespeare ‘authorship controversy’. Their proponents seek to solve a mystery, but one must first ask: is there really any mystery to solve?
Vasari’s ‘Mona Lisa’ certainly existed.83 She was Lisa di Antonmaria Gherardini, born on 15 June 1479. Her father was a respectable but not spectacularly wealthy Florentine; the family had a town-house near Santa Trinità and a small estate in San Donato in Poggio, near Greve, where she was probably born. She married Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo in March 1495, at the age of fifteen; he was a well-to-do businessman with interests in the silk and cloth trades, thirty-five years old, already twice widowed, and with an infant son, Bartolomeo. There is a family connection behind the marriage: Lisa’s stepmother, Camilla, was the sister of Giocondo’s first wife; Lisa would have been a child when Giocondo first knew her. By 1503, the presumed date for the portrait, she had borne Giocondo two sons, Piero and Andrea, and a daughter who had died in infancy. This loss is sometimes said to be a reason for the fine black veil that covers the Mona Lisa’s hair, but this is unlikely: the baby had died four years earlier, in the summer of 1499. More probably the veil and the sombre-coloured dress are a fashion-statement: the ‘Spanish’ look, as worn by Lucrezia Borgia at her wedding with Alfonso d’Este in 1502, was all the rage. Francesco del Giocondo was in the garment-business: he knew all about the fashions. And so did the portraitist who, in Vasari’s unexcited phrase, ‘undertook to paint’ the picture.
Giocondo was precisely the sort of client that Florentine artists sought – ‘civis et mercator florentinus’, as he is described in his marriage contract: citizen and merchant of Florence. He was the holder (on four separate occasions) of civic office, and among his business associates was Marcello Strozzi, whose sister Maddalena Doni was painted in Mona Lisa style by Raphael.84 Another connection was with the Rucellai family: his first wife was a Rucellai, as was Lisa’s stepmother. He was later linked with the Servites of the Annunziata, where he endowed a family chapel and commissioned for it an altarpiece of his patron saint, St Francis; this dates from the 1520s, but may reflect an earlier connection with the Annunziata. Giocondo’s interest in art (or art-dealing) is also suggested by a post-mortem inventory of a small-time painter and sculptor, one Maestro Valerio, who died owing Giocondo money: Giocondo recouped the debt by taking the entire stock of Valerio’s paintings, cartoons and sculptures.85
On 5 April 1503 Francesco del Giocondo completed the purchase of a house on Via della Stufa – a new home for him and Lisa and the three boys; the youngest, Andrea, was five months old, and was perhaps the reason for the move. A new home with walls to fill – what more natural than to fill one of them, as well-to-do home-owners did, with a portrait of your comely, desirable, fashionably dressed young wife: young but already, at the age of twenty-three, softened and broadened by motherhood.
Three scraps of documentation exist for the painting prior to Vasari’s account. Do they support or contradict him?
The first known mention of the painting is by Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, whose diary records their visit to Leonardo’s studio in France in 1517.86 There the ageing maestro showed them three paintings. Two of these are readily identifiable from Beatis’s descriptions as the St John the Baptist and the Virgin and Child with St Anne, both now in the Louvre; the third is almost certainly the Mona Lisa. It is described by Beatis (and, it is implied, by Leonardo himself) as the portrait of ‘a certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation [instantia] of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici’. The first part sounds like Lisa del Giocondo, who was certainly a Florentine lady, but the second part is more problematic. Giuliano was the third and youngest son of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Leonardo’s known relationship with him belongs to the years 1513–15, and to Rome rather than Florence.
For some this seems to offer an entirely different account of the painting from Vasari’s, making it a late work (which the stylistic evidence would seem to confirm, and which the other two paintings shown to the visitors certainly were). This in turn has led to other candidates for the famous face. There is Giuliano’s mistress, a young widow from Urbino named Pacifica Brandano, who bore him a child in 1511 – the funereal black veil which covers the Mona Lisa’s hair might allude to her widowhood. And there is the beautiful and witty Isabella Gualanda, a Neapolitan who was in Rome at the right sort of time for Giuliano to be smitten by her, and who turns out to be a cousin of Cecilia Gallerani, whose portrait Leonardo had painted in Milan in the late 1480s.87 Either of these women might plausibly have been painted at Giuliano’s ‘instigation’, and the resulting portrait might have remained in Leonardo’s hands when Giuliano became a married man, as he did in early 1515. However, neither of them was from Florence, which is required by Beatis’s diary-entry. In fact Beatis’s description of the painting seems to rule out the possibility that La Gualanda was portrayed in it. She was a famous Neapolitan beauty; it is likely that Luigi of Aragon and Beatis – themselves from Naples – would know what she looked like, and this likelihood is increased by the fact that Beatis mentions her, and her beauty, elsewhere in the diary.88 If the portrait Leonardo showed them really was of her, Beatis would surely have said so; he certainly would not have described her as ‘a certain Florentine lady’. These trails tend to double back on themselves, and the cases for the rival claimants start to look pretty thin.
It is generally held that Beatis scotches Vasari’s identification of Lisa del Giocondo because she could not possibly have been a paramour of Giuliano de’ Medici’s: she was a respectably married woman, not a courtesan, and anyway Giuliano was in exile from Florence between 1494 and 1512. This noli me tangere argument seems to me questionable. Giuliano de’ Medici and Lisa Gherardini were exact contemporaries, born in 1479. It is quite likely that they met, because their families were linked by intermarriage – Giuliano’s aunt Nannina was married to Bernardo Rucellai, whose niece Camilla was married to Lisa’s father: thus Lisa’s young stepmother was Giuliano’s cousin. It is therefore tenable that Giuliano and Lisa knew one another. They were fifteen years old in November 1494, when Giuliano fled the city with his family. A few months after this bouleversement, Lisa married the middle-aged widower Francesco del Giocondo, also known to her through her stepmother, Camilla.
If this were a novel or film-script I would stretch the evidence and say that there was a tendresse between Giuliano and Lisa: that they were teenage sweethearts separated by political misfortune. This ‘star-crossed lover’ scenario would have a sequel. In 1500 Giuliano de’ Medici was in Venice. It would be natural for him to pay a call on his famous compatriot Leonardo da Vinci, who arrived in the city in February 1500; and if he did so he would probably have seen in Leonardo’s studio – as Lorenzo Guznago did on 17 March – that unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este which is a ghostly precursor of the pose and style, the ‘look’, of the Mona Lisa. In April Leonardo set off for Florence. Was it then that Giuliano de’ Medici ‘instigated’ him to paint this portrait of a ‘certain Florentine lady’ whom he remembered as a beautiful girl, though now – he hears – married with children?
This is inadmissible, but serves to show that Leonardo’s only known comment about the painting, as recorded by Antonio de Beatis in 1517, is not per se a disproof of Vasari’s identification, as it is usually said to be. That Giuliano and Lisa were acquainted as teenagers is circumstantially probable; that there was a romance between them which the portrait in some way evokes or commemorates (much as the portrait of Ginevra evokes her affair with Bernardo Bembo) is unprovable but not incredible. This need not displace the more prosaic likelihood that her husband commissioned the portrait (as Vasari says he did): rather it deepens the emotional register of the picture, infuses it with nostalgia and melancholy and collusion – a hinted memory of those Florentine love-games of the old Medici days.
Another early document was found in the Milanese archives in the early 1990s.89 It is an inventory of Salai’s estate, drawn up after his sudden death in March 1524, in which are listed a number of paintings in his possession. Some of them have titles corresponding to known works by Leonardo. The high values assigned to them suggest that they were thought of as originals rather than copies. Whether they really were is another matter: Salai was a prolific and proficient copyist of the master’s work. Among these is ‘a painting called La Joconda’, priced at 505 lire.90 This has been thought to strengthen Vasari’s case, since it shows that the painting was known as the Gioconda some years before his identification of its subject as Lisa del Giocondo.
A third document is usually passed over in silence because it is brief and erroneous, but I believe it has a bearing. In the Anonimo Gaddiano’s biography of Leonardo occurs the following statement: ‘Ritrasse dal naturale Piero Francesco del Giocondo.’ The usual interpretation of this is that the Anonimo is saying, in error, that Leonardo painted a portrait from life of Lisa’s husband. In fact, as Frank Zöllner points out, the Anonimo is not saying that at all – Lisa’s husband was Francesco; Piero di Francesco was herson.91 This is even less likely, given that Piero was only eight when Leonardo left Florence in 1508. I suspect that the true error is one of copying. The Anonimo’s manuscript is sometimes careless or fragmentary; there are omissions and insertions – for instance, the line immediately below the Giocondo notation reads, ‘Dipinse a [blank] una testa di [Medusa crossed out] Megara.’ I believe the correct reading of the Giocondo sentence is similarly fragmentary. It is not ‘Ritrasse dal naturale Piero Francesco del Giocondo’, but ‘Ritrasse dal naturale per Francesco del Giocondo …’, where the omission marks represent a discontinued sentence: ‘For Francesco del Giocondo he painted a portrait from life of…’ Compare this to Vasari’s opening, where the sentence is completed: ‘Prese Leonardo a fare per Francesco del Giocondo il ritratto di Mona Lisa su moglie.’ If this is right, Vasari seems to be correctly using an original source that the Anonimo had in some way garbled.
The upshot of these fragments of evidence is that Vasari’s account of the painting’s genesis is probably right: it is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, commissioned by her husband in about 1503, when she was in her early twenties. To some it seems unsatisfactorily prosaic that the world’s most famous painting should depict an obscure Florentine housewife (the rival claimants are all more glamorous and aristocratic), but to me this kernel of ordinariness seems to add to the poetry. This is, at any rate, how the painting began. Vasari also says Leonardo ‘left it unfinished’, which presumably means it was unfinished when he left Florence in 1508. It was still in his possession nine years later, when Antonio de Beatis saw it, and it may well have evolved during this interim. This painting was a long-term companion, a continuous presence in a series of studios, the maestro alighting on it as occasion served, to retouch and rethink, to see in it things he had not seen before. In that long meditation the portrait is imbued with those subtle tonalities, those nuances of meaning one feels but can never quite define. The passage of time is written across the Mona Lisa: the evening light that falls on her face, the aeons of geological time in the mountain-forms behind her, and of course that almost-smile which is perpetually an instant away from becoming an actual smile: a future moment which will never arrive.
In another sense, as a cultural object, the painting had a long future ahead of it. Its axiomatic famousness is essentially a modern phenomenon. Early commentators enthused, but they did not seem to consider the painting particularly extraordinary or unique. The elevation of the Mona Lisa to iconic status happened in the mid nineteenth century; it was born out of northern Europe’s fascination with the Italian Renaissance in general, and Leonardo in particular, and it was given a particular Gallic, or indeed Parisian, twist by the presence of the painting in the Louvre. Her image became bound up with the morbid Romantic fantasy of the femme fatale: that idea of an ensnaring, exotic belle dame sans merci which so exercised the male imagination at that time.
An important figure in the Gioconda’s elevation to fatal status was the novelist, art-critic and hashish-smoker Théophile Gautier. For him she was ‘this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously’; her ‘divinely ironic’ gaze intimates ‘unknown pleasures’; she ‘seems to pose a yet unsolved riddle to the admiring centuries’; and so on. In a telling aside during one of his rhapsodies, he remarks, ‘She makes you feel like a schoolboy before a duchess.’92 Another who quaked in her presence was the historian and Renaissance-enthusiast Jules Michelet. Looking at her, he wrote, ‘you are fascinated and troubled as if by a strange magnetism’; she ‘attracts me, revolts me, consumes me; I go to her in spite of myself, as the bird to the snake’. Similarly, in the Goncourt brothers’ journal for 1860, a famous beauty of the day is described as ‘like a sixteenth-century courtesan’ who wears ‘the smile full of night of the Gioconda’.93 Thus the Mona Lisa was co-opted into a chorus-line of dangerous beauties alongside such luminaries as Zola’s Nana, Wedekind’s Lulu, and Baudelaire’s Creole belle Jeanne Duval.
The famous description of the painting by the Victorian aesthete Walter Pater, first published in 1869, was certainly influenced by this extended bout of Gallic swooning. Yeats later paid Pater’s flagrantly purple prose the compliment of chopping it up into free verse, in which form it sits more happily:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire,
She has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her…94
Oscar Wilde comments perceptively on this seductive Pateresque blarney, ‘The picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.’95 But the idea of the Mona Lisa’s ‘secret’ continued to reverberate. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), Lucy Honeychurch’s sojourn in Tuscany gives her a touch of the Gioconda mystery – ‘He detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things she will not tell us.’96
Others reacted more sceptically, as in Somerset Maugham’s novel Christmas Holiday (1939), where a quartet of art-lovers ‘gazed at the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman’. Iconoclastic young critics like Roberto Longhi poured scorn on the painting, and even Bernard Berenson – though hardly daring to question ‘a shaman so potent’ as Pater – confessed to his covert dislike of this revered work: ‘She had simply become an incubus.’ When T. S. Eliot called Hamlet ‘the Mona Lisa of literature’ he meant it in a negative sense: that the play was no longer seen for what it was, but had become, like the painting, a receptacle for subjective interpretations and second-rate theories.97
The other life-changing event in the career of the Mona Lisa was her abduction from the Louvre on the morning of Monday 21 August 1911.98 The thief was a thirty-year-old Italian painter-decorator and petty criminal, Vincenzo Perugia. Born in the village of Dumenza, near Lake Como, he had been in Paris since 1908, one of thousands of Italian immigrants in the city – the macaroni, as the French dubbed them. He had worked briefly at the Louvre, which was why he was able to get into the building unchallenged – and out again, carrying the Mona Lisa stuffed under his workman’s smock. A police hunt ensued, but despite his criminal record, and despite his having left a large thumb-print on the frame, Perugia’s name never came up. Among those suspected of involvement were Picasso and Apollinaire; the latter was imprisoned briefly, and wrote a poem about it. Perugia kept the painting in his lodgings, hidden under a stove, for more than two years. Then, in late November 1913, he sent a letter to an antique-dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, offering to ‘return’ the Mona Lisa to Italy. He demanded 500,000 lire. The letter was signed ‘Leonardo Vincenzo’. On 12 December, Perugia arrived in Florence, by train, with the Mona Lisa in a wooden trunk, ‘a sort of seaman’s locker’; he checked into a low-rent hotel, the Albergo Tripoli-Italia on Via Panzani (still in business, though now called – what else? – the Hotel La Gioconda). Here, in the presence of Alfredo Geri and Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi, Perugia opened the trunk, revealing some old shoes and woollen underclothes; then – as Geri relates – ‘after taking out these not very appetizing objects [he] lifted up the false bottom of the trunk, under which we saw the picture… We were filled with a strong emotion. Vincenzo looked at us with a kind of fixed stare, smiling complacently, as if he had painted it himself.’99 He was arrested later that day. Efforts were made to turn Perugia into a cultural hero, but at his trial he proved a disappointment. He said he had first intended to steal Mantegna’s Mars and Venus, but had decided on the Mona Lisa instead because it was smaller. He was imprisoned for twelve months; he died in 1947.
The theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa were the clinching of her international celebrity. Both unleashed a swarm of newspaper features, commemorative postcards, cartoons, ballads, cabaret-revues and comic silent films. These are the heralds of the painting’s modern existence as global pop-icon. Marcel Duchamp’s defaced Gioconda of 1919, saucily entitled L.H.O.O.Q (i.e. ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, or ‘She’s hot in the arse’) is the most famous of the send-ups, though it is pre-dated by more than twenty years by the pipe-smoking Mona Lisa drawn by the illustrator Sapeck (Eugene Battaile). And so the way was open for Warhol’s multiple Gioconda (Thirty are Better than One); for Terry Gilliam’s animated Gioconda in the Monty Python title sequence; for William Gibson’s ‘sprawl novel’ Mona Lisa Overdrive; for the classic citations in Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’, Nat King Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Vision of Johanna’; for the joint-smoking poster and the novelty mouse-pad. Personally I suspect that I first became aware of theMona Lisa through the Jimmy Clanton hit of 1962, which began:
She’s Venus in blue jeans,
Mona Lisa with a pony tail…
I’m not sure the ponytail would suit her, but the song’s wonderful bubble-gum blandness illustrates well enough the fate that has befallen this mysterious and beautiful painting.