The Mona Lisa Controversy
I must admit, I’m rather astonished at the way the Wall Street Journal and the BBC have approached the controversy over the Mona Lisa portrait that went on exhibit in Singapore in December of 2014. For those of you who missed it, on December 15 the Mona Lisa Foundation, based in Switzerland, unveiled a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa portrait that appears to be very different from the original in the Louvre. The Foundation claims that this portrait is actually an earlier version of the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo in 1503.
I would agree with that assessment. But reading the counterarguments in the Wall Street Journal and on BBC.com, I almost have a feeling of watching an episode of “Survivor”: Vote her on, or off the island? Is she an autograph portrait, or not? Yes, or no? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, since these current affairs publications are more preoccupied with provocative news than with careful, in-depth research.
The truth is, as every serious investigator of Leonardo’s works knows, during the Renaissance and particularly at the Leonardo studio, the epithet “autograph” was a highly flexible concept. The Master accepted commissions, and his pupils c.q. associates carried them out, with the Master taking responsibility for the crucial passages.
By the late Quattrocento, when business in Florence was booming and workshops churned out panels at an unprecedented pace, smart patrons had figured that out, of course. Such patrons started to specify, in their contracts, what exactly they expected the Master to paint himself. When in the 1480’s, the Prior of the Spedale degli Innocenti contracted with Domenico Ghirlandaio for a panel of the Adoration of the Magi, the agreement stipulated that “said Domenico” was to “color and paint the said panel all with his own hand in the manner shown in a drawing on paper” (Baxandall, 1976), lest he had any other ideas.
In fact, that’s how Leonardo himself learned his trade: by working on panels formally credited to his master Verrocchio, including the Dreyfus Madonna (1472), Tobias and the Angel (1473) and the Baptism of Christ (1476). The boundaries between master and pupil, between “original” and “workshop product” were far more ambiguous than we, with our 21st century bias towards “originality”, would like it to be.
So is this portrait, traditionally known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, a copy? Of course not. A copy aims to duplicate the original. And as a child can see, the Isleworth and the Louvre portrait are fundamentally different: in their size, in the proportion of the sitter to the background, and indeed in the background itself: they are completely different. Most importantly, the face of the Isleworth is a likeness of a real woman; the Louvre version, as several authors have argued, is a composite, an idealization. So if the Isleworth is a copy, then it’s a damned funny one. That argument simply doesn’t fly.
But is it a workshop product? Of course it is – but to the same extent that the Madonna Litta (c. 1491-5), the Madonna of the Yarnwinder (c. 1500-7), or the Bacchus (1510-1515) are workshop products with some considerable involvement by Leonardo. The extent to which da Vinci was involved in these works will, I fear, be debated for centuries to come.
But in my view, having spent considerable time with the Isleworth original (and not some reproduction, as others have done), there is no question that the face, the hands and the sleeves--the most important passages in the portrait, in short-- were indeed painted by Leonardo. In fact, I was floored by the pristine quality and intense luminosity of the face. If we accept the evidence from Vasari and the Heidelberg document, that Leonardo began the Mona Lisa commission in the early 1500’s, then I honestly wonder who, in the early 1500’s, was capable of creating such delicate flesh tones of diffused light and shadow, which would become Leonardo’s hallmark.
So is this an earlier version of the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo? To my mind, there is no doubt that it is. And why not? If the only argument against this portrait is one of subjective connoisseurship, rather than scientific evidence, then I think the issue is hardly settled. Nor is this, by any means, an attempt at lèse-majesté against the Louvre portrait, which will always rank as one of Leonardo’s finest masterpieces. But as several scholars from Sir Kenneth Clark on down have speculated, the historical documentation about the Mona Lisa doesn’t match—and that problem is only resolved by the possibility that Leonardo painted not one, but two versions of La Gioconda.
Prof. Jean-Pierre Isbouts
Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara and the co-author of “The Mona Lisa Myth” (2013)
Cited References:
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; p. 6.
Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 1568 ed.
Veit Probst, “Rätselhafte Mona Lisa: Wer ist die geheimnisvoll lächelnde Dame auf Leonardo da Vincis Bild?” in UniSpiegel (Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 2008).
