Chapter 15
Whenever I return to Florence, I yearn for a place where I might honor the memory of its best-known daughter. There is none. Not rancid Via Sguazza, where Lisa Gherardini was born. Not nondescript Via della Stufa, where she lived most of her adult life. And certainly not the urban eyesore that her final resting place, the Monastero di Sant’Orsola, has become.
The convent where Lisa Gherardini passed her final days did not survive Napoleon’s invasion and the deconsecration of thousands of religious institutions. Beginning in the 1800s, it underwent a series of transformations, from tobacco-processing plant to lecture hall for the University of Florence. In the 1980s, the city police department, planning to convert its structures into barracks, began excavations for a garage. Bulldozers pancaked several buildings, and land movers hauled bricks and stones, along with graves from a cemetery on the grounds, to a municipal landfill. When the city abandoned its plans for the site, Sant’Orsola deteriorated into a hulking, boarded-up, graffiti-smeared ruin.
In recent years, reporters from around the world have descended upon the abandoned convent in search of Lisa Gherardini—or rather, of her remains. A self-styled art detective named Silvano Vinceti, head of the official-sounding National Committee for the Promotion of Historic and Cultural Heritage, organized excavations of an underground crypt. In 2012, under the floodlights of dozens of international television crews, Vinceti dramatically announced the discovery of several skeletons stacked, as was the custom, one atop the other.
Do any of these bones belong to Lisa Gherardini? No one knows. Hundreds of women lived and died at Sant’Orsola over the centuries, and Lisa’s body may have been among those dumped in the local landfill rather than interred in the chapel crypt.
When I spend an autumn day with Vinceti, a skinny, bald, fast-talking former television announcer and producer, I ask what he thinks are the odds of identifying Lisa’s remains. “Forty percent,” he replies without explanation of how he arrived at this figure. I’d put them considerably lower.
Scientists have been working to carbon-date the badly disintegrated bones to calculate their age and identify which, if any, date back to the sixteenth century. To confirm that any remains are indeed Lisa Gherardini’s, they must extract DNA to match with a known blood relative.
The primary candidate is Lisa’s oldest biological son, Piero, who was buried in Santissima Annunziata in 1569. In 2013, researchers sponsored by Vinceti’s committee lowered themselves into the subterranean chamber and broadcast spooky images of crumbling skeletons on a stark stone shelf. Some may belong to the family that took possession of the crypt after the del Giocondo; others may date back to the ancestors Francesco had transferred from Santa Maria Novella.
If they are able to identify one skeleton as definitively that of Piero del Giocondo, scientists could then compare his DNA to any samples they obtain from Sant’Orsola. If they match, we would know which bones, if any, belong to Lisa Gherardini. Vinceti says he would then commission a computer-generated 3-D reconstruction of Mona Lisa’s face based on her centuries-old skull, which he predicts “will be clear enough to see what she really looked like” with a margin of error of about 5 percent.
Italian art historians scoff at the entire endeavor, especially the ghoulish bringing up of bodies. “Sgradevole, orrenda, e macabra! (Distasteful, horrible, and macabre!)” declared Antonio Paolucci, the esteemed director of the Vatican Museums.“Lasciate in pace La Gioconda!” (Leave Mona Lisa in peace!)
That’s not likely to happen.
Neither the dubiousness of his quest nor the disdain of his critics fazes Vinceti, a self-taught art expert with an uncanny knack for generating publicity. In 2010 he announced, with global fanfare, the discovery of the remains of the artist Caravaggio—a finding that was immediately disputed by experts.
In 2011, the amateur sleuth, who has never had access to the original Mona Lisa, claimed that a digital copy reveals the letters L (perhaps for Lisa, he suggests) and S (perhaps for Leonardo’s assistant Salaì) in the pupils of Lisa’s eyes and the number 72 in the background. The Louvre, which has examined the painting with every known imaging technique, declared categorically that “no inscriptions, letters, or numbers” exist. Vinceti’s rebuttal: The Louvre’s curators are too embarrassed to admit they have been “really blind.” (I too could discern nothing other than random scratches in the enlargements of digital copies of the painting that he showed me.)
In another claim, Vinceti declared that, as one newspaper put it, “Mona Lisa Was Really a Dude”—the alluring Salaì, who may have been Leonardo’s lover as well as the model for St. John the Baptist. Vinceti bases this assertion on the similarities in the smiles of the figures in the two paintings, the hidden numbers, and a tangle of theories involving Kabbalah, an ancient Hebrew mystical school of thought.
Struggling to follow Vinceti’s train of thought as well as his bullet-speed Italian, I have to force myself not to shake my head in incredulity. But theories of all sorts come with Leonardo territory.
Consider Lisa’s ubiquitous smile. Dentists have blamed aching or missing teeth for her tight-lipped grin—although no proper Renaissance lady would have parted her lips in a public display of good cheer. Doctors have diagnosed deafness (which supposedly caused Leonardo’s model to tip her head and smile expectantly), pregnancy (also blamed for Lisa’s “swollen” fingers), an enlarged thyroid, fat deposits caused by high cholesterol, and a type of facial paralysis called Bell’s palsy. The most scurrilous theory claims that Lisa smiled with closed lips because mercury, a treatment for venereal disease, had damaged her teeth.
More recently, neuroscientists have chimed in with their observations. Because of our optical wiring, one explains, we may be better able to see Lisa’s smile with a sideways glance than with a straight-on stare. Others claim that “random noise” in the path from retina to visual cortex influences whether or not we detect an upturned mouth. But is the expression on Lisa’s face a smile or a smirk? In a computerized analysis, “emotion recognition” software appraised Lisa’s smile as 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, about 2 percent angry, and less than 1 percent neutral.
“Neutral” would not apply in the smallest of degrees to the advocates of various “contenders for the seat on the loggia,” as an art historian categorizes the many Mona Lisa wannabes. It doesn’t matter if the proposed candidates happen to be too old, too young, too ugly, or too preposterous. Their proponents contend, in prose often punctuated with entire battalions of exclamation points, that they alone have uncovered the unmistakable, unshakable truth about Leonardo’s muse—in skull measurements, in embroidery knots, or in plots as intricate as The Da Vinci Code’s.
Yet the heated debates about the origins of Lisa’s smile and the true identity of the woman in Leonardo’s portrait pale in comparison with the controversy over whether more than one Mona Lisa exists.
Artists may have begun copying the Mona Lisa while Leonardo was still working on the painting. Some of the estimated sixty to seventy reproductions in existence are such exact clones that they have duped even learned authorities. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), the distinguished artist, collector, and first president of Great Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts, was so convinced of the authenticity of the Mona Lisa he received in exchange for one of his self-portraits that he argued that the Louvre painting was a fake.
One of the oldest known copies made its way to Madrid’s Prado Museum. At some point an artist painted the background black, perhaps to match other portraits displayed nearby. A few years ago a skillful restorer laboriously removed the dark coating to reveal bright colors, a richly detailed background, and a fetching young model (whose face bears no resemblance to the Mona Lisa’s). Studies with sophisticated imaging techniques reveal the same shifts in the model’s position that appear under the surface of the Louvre painting.
This Lisa, like several other copies, may bear more resemblance than the lady in the Louvre to the description provided by Giorgio Vasari in his biographical essay on Leonardo. In words that practically caress Lisa’s face, he praised eyes with “that luster and watery sheen which are always seen in life, and around them all those rosy and pearly tints, as well as the lashes” and eyebrows that “could not be more natural.” Her “beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, appear to be alive.” The mouth, “united by the red of its lips to the flesh-tints of the face, seems to be not colors but flesh.”
Some experts blame the discrepancy between Vasari’s description and the actual Mona Lisa on the dulling of the paints and varnishes over time or on the less-than-reliable eyewitnesses who described the masterpiece to him. Others suggest a different possibility, too provocative not to consider.
Leonardo, according to this scenario, may have painted another portrait of Lisa—not a complete work, but her face and parts of her figure, leaving assistants to finish the rest. At some point he may have presented this work to Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo. If so, this might have been the painting that Giorgio Vasari himself saw in Florence and described in minute detail.
The two–Mona Lisa theory has been around a long time. In 1584, in his Treatise on Painting, the Florentine artist and chronicler Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, a supposed acquaintance of Leonardo’s longtime secretary Melzi, wrote that “the two most beautiful and important portraits by Leonardo are the Mona Lisa and the Gioconda.”
We know that one of these works ended up in the Louvre. If the other one existed, where did it go?
Great Britain is one guess, although no one can supply the when, where, and how of its transport. In 1913, a certain Earl Brownlow in Somerset discreetly let it be known that he might be willing to part with a purported Leonardo that had long been in his family’s possession. Hugh Blaker (1873–1936), a dapper British painter and art dealer searching for years for the almost mythical “second” Mona Lisa, was eager to see it.
As soon as he beheld the portrait in the aristocrat’s stately home, Blaker later reported, he was sure it was a Leonardo. Heart pounding, he struggled to disguise his excitement as he negotiated its purchase “for a modest sum.” The art dealer brought the prized work to his home and studio in Isleworth, just outside London, where it became known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa.
“The Mona Lisa is perfectly beautiful . . .” Blaker wrote to his sister Jane. “I think there is big money in it. I am sure it was done in Leonardo’s studio before the Louvre picture was finished as the background is entirely different and two columns, of which the bases are just showing in the original (sic!), run up each side of the painting. . . . Therefore it is NOT A COPY as we understand the term. . . . It is indeed a capture.”
With war clouds gathering over Europe, Blaker shipped his newly acquired treasure to safety in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where it hung in the administrative offices. In 1922, John Eyre, Blaker’s father-in-law and a respected art collector, took the portrait to Italy for assessment by some of the leading Leonardo experts of the time.
“Che bella! Che bella! Che bella!” one enthused. “The best Mona Lisa I have seen except the Louvre,” said another. Most agreed that Leonardo may have painted the face and hair, while another artist or artists completed the throat, hands, and background. Despite these endorsements, all based on “connoisseurship,” or subjective appraisal, Eyre and his son-in-law never succeeded in establishing the portrait as a genuine Leonardo.
“I leave her intrinsic beauty and enigmatic smile to bewitch and puzzle her admirers,” Eyre wrote as “an old and ailing man.”
“Bewitch” she did. In 1936, a British art enthusiast, Henry F. Pulitzer, walked into the private Leicester Galleries in Isleworth, took one glance at the painting, and lost his heart. “This is the story of a great love which has not changed in thirty years since I first met the lady,” Pulitzer wrote in his book, Where Is the Mona Lisa?, self-published in 1966.
The Leonardo aficionado had seen every known work by the artist and assembled a vast library on every facet of his life. Like a pilgrim, Pulitzer returned frequently to the Louvre to spend hours in front of Leonardo’s great lady. But, he confessed, it “failed miserably to evoke in me the joy and deep satisfaction I had felt in front of the Mona Lisa in the Leicester Galleries.”
Pulitzer, through what he calls “a most improbable combination of circumstances,” managed to purchase the Isleworth Mona Lisa in the 1960s. A “Swiss syndicate” underwrote part of the investment. To come up with his share, Pulitzer had to sell his grand house in Kensington, all of its furnishings, and many of its paintings.
“To realize this dream,” he wrote, “no sacrifice was too much.”
Pulitzer hung the painting in his drawing room and, according to a long-term companion, “practically lived in that room, even had his meals there, just so he could be with his Mona Lisa.” Although the art world never overcame its skepticism, Pulitzer remained a believer to the end.
“I may not be here on earth when the final verdict is passed,” he wrote. “That is of no importance. . . . A great work of art continues eternally in giving joy and happiness to others who come after me.” But for decades after his death, no one could take any delight in Pulitzer’s adored lady, locked away in a bank vault in Switzerland.
Then along came a twenty-first-century version of Snow White’s prince. The privately funded Mona Lisa Foundation, which promotes research on the painting it has renamed the Earlier Version, set out to revive Pulitzer’s sleeping beauty, not with a kiss, but with cutting-edge technology that its directors hoped would prove what had so long seemed unprovable: that Leonardo had painted this portrait as well as the Louvre’s grande dame.
Over the course of several years, at a cost of an estimated $1 million, international experts evaluated the Mona Lisa’s “younger sister” with techniques similar to those that the Louvre portrait has undergone, including X-rays, multispectral digitization, and high-definition imagery. None of their findings, according to the Mona Lisa Foundation, could “disprove a Leonardo authorship . . . or lead one to doubt Leonardo’s hand.” Yet all but one of the experts stopped short of deeming the portrait a Leonardo.
The exception was John Asmus, an American art diagnostician at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied the Louvre portrait as well as the Earlier Version. Scaling the two portraits—the Foundation’s somewhat larger than the Louvre’s, with columns on either side—to size, he found similarities he considers too precise to be coincidental in their geometry (the underlying triangles, elliptical outlines, and proportions), their histograms (“fingerprints” of light and dark shading), and the frequency of brushstrokes, measured in pixels. Subsequent tests by other experts have confirmed the geometrical similarities and demonstrated that the canvas itself dates from the late 1400s.
Academicians remain unconvinced. “So much is wrong—the dress, the hair, the background landscape,” commented Martin Kemp, an emeritus professor at Oxford University and a leading Leonardo scholar. The artist rarely painted on canvas. The landscape lacks “atmospheric subtlety.” The head “does not capture the profound elusiveness of the original.” And the apparent age difference? “If her face appears younger,” said Kemp, “it is simply because the copyist painted it that way.”
Although the Earlier Version may be a copy—and the skeptics outnumber the believers, certainly in scholarly circles—I find her a charming one. The younger Lisa beams with a girlish glow, her face slimmer, her smile fuller, her eyes dancing with anticipation of the future gleaming before her. And she isn’t staying in the shadows. The Mona Lisa Foundation has launched a yearlong global tour, beginning in the Far East, to let “the people” judge for themselves.
The people, in the most literal of senses, have already spoken. “Their” Mona Lisa, unframed and unfettered, reigns supreme as the queen of kitsch, caricatured, cannibalized, morphed, manipulated, multiplied, and mocked in countless spoofs. She has appeared in sunglasses, hair curlers, a burka, a kimono, a sari, a nose ring, Mickey Mouse ears, black boots, a Santa hat, a see-through blouse, and in nothing at all. The intrepid beauty has straddled a motorcycle and a mule, flashed her underwear, skateboarded, skied, smoked a joint, and engaged in a kinky array of X-rated activities.
What is it about this painting, more so than any other, that makes people want to transform it into something sensational, shocking, surreal, or just plain silly? I first mulled this question years ago when I was staying at the Hotel Monna Lisa on Borgo Pinti, a former fourteenth-century convent in central Florence. Every morning I would sip a cappuccino in a salon decorated with variations on the portrait: Mona Lisa smoking, Mona Lisa topless, Mona Lisa blond, Mona Lisa in Cubist form, Mona Lisa with Frank Zappa’s bearded face.
The Monas just keep coming. An exhibit at the Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco in 2013 featured a roundup of recent spinoffs, including Cona Lisa (Lisa as a Conehead), Mona Llama (all animal from the neck up), Mona Kahlo Frida Lisa (complete with unibrow), Mona Pagliaccio (in clown face), and Unicorn Mona (with a little horn right in the middle of her forehead).
Illustrators never seem to tire of “Monalizing” famous faces, from Mao Tse-tung (La Joconde Rouge) to Hillary Clinton (and Monica Lewinsky) to President Barack Obama. But artists aren’t the only ones who can’t keep their hands off the Renaissance lady. She has shown up in Ray Bradbury’s science fiction, Bob Dylan’s lyrics, movies like Mona Lisa Smile (with Julia Roberts’s megawatt grin), the Looney Tunes Louvre Come Back to Me, and a Simpsons episode featuring “Moanin’ Lisa.” “I feel like the frame that gets to hold the Mona Lisa,” croons country singer Brad Paisley in a recent ballad. “And I don’t care if that’s all I ever do.”
Hucksters have harnessed Leonardo’s lady to sell toothpaste (“Mona Lisa discovers Rembrandt!”), deodorant (a brand called Old Masters), condoms (Gioconda Liquid Latex), cigars in Holland, rum in Martinique, matches in Argentina, milk in California (from a cow named Moo-na Lisa), and mouse pads, caps, candy, sugar bowls, magnets, drawer pulls, shower curtains, throw pillows, and coloring books just about everywhere. Not long ago an ad for a new “vaginal replenishment” product popped up on my computer screen. Its name: Mona Lisa.
In 2013, NASA, in its first test of a laser system for interplanetary communication, selected Mona Lisa’s image to transmit to the moon. Why not? She’s been everywhere and done everything else. Admirers have reproduced her face in toast, yarn, pasta, LEGOs, jelly beans, jewels, coffee cups, spools, and just about every other conceivable medium.
An iconic image, not a real woman, inspires the many forms of Mona Lisa mania. We can blame—or credit—Leonardo for its insane popularity. The painting is just that good, beyond all superlatives. But others also catapulted this particular work of genius to global notoriety: the king who brought its creator to France, the monarchs who enshrined the portrait in their bedrooms, the Romantics who raved about it, the painters who copied it, the thief who stole it, the legions who have manipulated it, the millions who have visited it.
Yet none of these would have come into play if not for una donna vera named Lisa Gherardini. Finally, her hometown is paying tribute to her existence.
MONNA LISA RITORNA A FIRENZE! (Mona Lisa is returning to Florence!) proclaimed a poster I spotted on my last visit, declaring June 15, her birthday, as “Monna Lisa Day.” A celebration in her old neighborhood in the Oltrarno included a cerimonia simbolica(symbolic ceremony) at her birthplace on Via Sguazza, an exhibition of works by local artists inspired by l’enigmatica musa (the enigmatic muse), a tasting of aphrodisiac wines, and a live concert. The party continued the following day with reggae dancing in nearby Piazza della Passera.
“It’s about time,” I thought, considering that Florence had all but forgotten Lisa Gherardini for five centuries. Yet she never really left. Whenever I’ve visited the city over the last two decades, I have always managed to find her—in one form or another.
Once I watched a young Italian, his black curls pulled into a ponytail, create a billboard-sized Mona Lisa in chalk on the pavement of a pedestrian-only street. Tee-shirted tourists licked cones of gelato as he deftly outlined her figure and shaded her contours in vibrant hues. With the ease of a thousand repetitions, his fingers kept moving as he told me that, of all the masterpieces he paints to earn a few euro, she is his favorite.
“Perchè?” I asked. Why?
“La Gioconda vive!” (Mona Lisa lives!) the street artist replied.
So does her giocondità. My dictionary translates this archaic term as “cheerfulness,” but I prefer an art historian’s far more poetic definition as “the state of the soul when it is content or serene.” It is this spirit—always female and forever Florentine—that I look for when I return to Lisa Gherardini’s hometown.
Early one morning as I walk along the Arno, I pause to wait for a traffic light to change. Gazing ahead, I see a bright dot in the distance moving toward me. As I keep watching, I realize that it is a young woman on a bicycle, but distinctly unlike any of the other Italian cyclists whirring along the busy street.
She is dressed head to toe in white—a creamy sheath dress with chiffon spaghetti straps, white open-toed shoes with four-inch heels, a pearl ankle bracelet, a gossamer scarf tossed loosely over her shoulders. Long curls that Leonardo would have delighted in painting bounce gently on her shoulders. Perfectly balanced, she pedals without any obvious effort. Something in her grace, her classic beauty, her otherworldly aura enthralls me.
In one smooth movement, the slender woman descends to walk her bicycle across the wide street. We approach each other from opposite sides of the crosswalk. Our eyes meet briefly and then, demure as a Renaissance maiden, she glances away. I walk a few steps and then turn around to catch a final glimpse. She has done the same. Then I see it.
A tiny smile plays around her lips.
The smile of una donna vera. The smile of a Mona Lisa.