Publisher's Synopsis
THE Mona Lisa in the Louvre has been accepted for four centuries as the one, only, and original version of the famous portrait of Madonna Lisa Giocondo painted by Leonardo da Vinci. It is difficult to break down a tradition of such long standing, yet this is what is claimed to be done in the following pages. But in order to accomplish this, theories and arguments, no matter how strong and plausible they be, count as nothing unless substantiated by facts and direct contemporaneous evidence, and it is on these latter that the onus probandi lies. The fact that there are two Mona Lisas in existence to-day, both of superlative intrinsic merit, and both the work of Leonardo da Vinci, the one with a record of four centuries behind it, the other which has scarcely been heard of before and has only just emerged from obscurity, creates a Sphinx-like problem not easy to solve. The unknown Isleworth Mona Lisa can, however, afford to stand on her own merits and cast her enigmatic smile on those who taunt her with her lack of pedigree. But convinced of the genuineness of the Isleworth painting, and that upon the authority of the soundest of expert knowledge, I determined to solve the riddle. How I have succeeded I leave the reader to judge. As, however, this treatise is complex and discursive, I purpose here to give a short outline of its whole theory. In 1501 four pictures by Leonardo da Vinci were seen in his studio in Florence. Two of these were the St. Anne and the Madonna with the Spindles; the other two were portraits, on which his pupils were engaged, as was then the common custom, filling in details, in which he also assisted. The two portraits have never hitherto been identified nor accounted for, and they have been gratuitously assumed to have been lost, why or wherefore no one knows; yet, as I prove, Leonardo himself never lost a single drawing, much less a painting. But at this very time, 1501, it is established, beyond cavil, that Leonardo painted the portrait of Madonna Lisa to the order of her husband. Hence I maintain that one of the portraits seen was a Mona Lisa, since there is not the slightest particle of evidence to the contrary. But what was the second portrait? Vasari tells us, fifty years later, that at this very time Leonardo produced the St. Anne and the Mona Lisa portrait, as well as the portrait of another lady in Florence, but as it is proved that this lady died thirty years previously, it could not possibly have been her portrait. As Leonardo, however, almost invariably commenced two versions of each of his works, which he rarely finished, I maintain the second portrait seen in 1501 was a second version of the Mona Lisa. In 1505 Raphael saw the Mona Lisa in Florence, and made, for his own purpose, a study of it which now hangs in the Louvre. The St. Anne and a Mona Lisa are also to-day in the possession of the Louvre authorities. But this Louvre Mona Lisa, I prove conclusively, cannot be the one from which Raphael drew his study, and this shows there must have been another version, which Raphael saw and studied, and it was this version that went unfinished to Madonna Lisa's husband, who had commissioned it from the master. Again at Cloux in France in 1517, some eighteen months before his death, Leonardo showed the Cardinal of Aragon the St. Anne and the portrait of a Florentine lady, which he described as painted to the order of Guiliano de Medici.
