by R. A. Scotti
After apprenticing in the workshop of the Florentine sculptor and painter Andréa del Verrocchio, Leonardo left the humanist cradle of Florence for the sinister court of Ludovico Sforza, the prince of Milan who was known as il Moro—the Moor—because of his dark mien and brooding disposition.
Leonardo, whose title was ingeniarius ducalis—the duke's inventor—thrived at the Sforza court. Far from being the rebel of myth, he was a skilled courtier and something of a dandy, as adept at the art of flattery as he was at everything else. According to Paolo Giovio, his biographer and a personal acquaintance, he was “the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.” He was “the delight of the entire court… by nature very courteous, cultivated and generous, and his face was extraordinarily beautiful.”
Leonardo's concern was the knowable, not the inexorable. Wrestling with the eternal questions was left to his rival Michelangelo, twenty-two years younger. An 1861 commentary on the Renaissance masters described Michelangelo as an anguished modern titan and Leonardo as the cool observer without serious vices or great virtues who “never penetrated so far as the moral world … never knew the storms of sentiment and the heart where lightning is divine light, and thunder Sacréd words.”∗2
“To me,” Leonardo wrote, “it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses—ribelli ad essi sensi—such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention.”
What today we see as the intellectual flights of a genius who was centuries ahead of his time are often the efforts of a dedicated empiricist to understand what he had observed. From a close observation of nature and an exhaustive recording of what he saw, Leonardo analyzed how things worked, then he used that knowledge to create “visual fictions.” Painting is poetry that is seen, Leonardo said, and like the poet, the painter must compose “fictions that express great things.” Leonardo applied art to science and science to art. His studies of the muscles that move to form a smile, the dilation of the pupils in response to light, and the flow of water are evidenced in Mona Lisa.
While Leonardo ventured off to Milan, Lisa Gherardini stayed close to home. She must have been pretty and precocious, because just before her sixteenth birthday, she vaulted up the social ladder, marrying Francesco del Giocondo, a thirty-five-year-old widower with an infant son. To seal the marriage contract, her father gave Francesco a farm that he owned on a ridge of hills in Poggio between Florence and Siena, and one hundred seventy gold florins.
Francesco was quite a catch, especially for a girl with such a modest dowry. (Francesco's four sisters each had a dowry of one thousand florins.) His first wife, Camilla Rucellai, had belonged to a leading Florentine family, and Francesco was described in the marriage contract as civis et mercator, a citizen and merchant. By 1503, when Lisa probably met Leonardo for the first time, the Giocondos were living in a fashionable new house on Via della Stufa with their growing family—Bartolomeo, Piero, and the baby Andréa. A daughter Camilla, named for Bartolomeo's mother, the first Signora Giocondo, had died four years before.
Leonardo's circumstances were not as easy. In 1499 the French had wrested Milan from the Sforzas. Leonardo remained to complete his fresco of the Last Supper, then he returned to Florence. At the Sforza court, he had been the star attraction for almost twenty years. When he returned to Florence, he faced both professional contenders and political confusion.
Leonardo had left the city as a young man in the glory days of Lorenzo the Magnificent, when the Renaissance was in full flower. Now he was almost fifty. Lorenzo was dead, his disappointing sons had been run out of town, and the Renaissance was migrating south. By 1503, artists were flocking to Rome to work for the formidable new pope and patron, Julius II, and younger artists were challenging Leonardo's preeminence. Michelangelo Buonarroti, just turning thirty, was completing a colossal David, and the even younger Raphael Sanzio, a precocious talent, was absorbing the art of his elders, eager to outshine them. No longer the unchallenged master, his finances strained, Leonardo da Vinci was looking for work.
His father, Ser Piero, by then an eminent notary and well connected, probably wrangled a commission for his cash-poor son. Ser Piero had recently settled a financial dispute for a wealthy silk merchant, and sometime during that unsettled decade, Leonardo began a portrait of the merchant's wife, Lisa.
2
ALTHOUGH THE EXACT DATE remains in dispute, Leonardo probably began to paint Mona Lisa in the winter of 1503. He spent that February and March in Florence. Raphael was also in the city, and he must have seen the unfinished work, because he copied Mona Lisa's pose for his own portrait of a Florentine woman, Maddalena Doni, completed in 1504. New evidence confirms the year.
In the 1500s, the art world was fiercely competitive. Artists inspired and learned from one another, borrowing, copying, and sometimes stealing ideas. From the first glimpse on Leonardo's easel, Mona Lisa caused a stir. She was his last-known work, and purely as a technical achievement, she was a revelation. Before Mona Lisa, few portraits went beyond a physical likeness. Most seemed static and impassive, the body cut off, just the head and shoulders depicted. Mona Lisa is painted at eye level and almost life-size, both disconcertingly real and transcendent.
Many artists made detailed studies and drew the outline of their paintings on the canvas or panel before they began to paint. X-rays reveal no underlying drawing and few pentimenti, false starts, or adjustments. Leonardo painted Mona Lisa directly, changing only the placement of the hands and fingers.
She sits on a loggia, or balcony, in a contrapposto position, her body angled and her face turned out, creating the arresting impression that she is looking directly at the viewer. Behind her is a low wall, and beyond that, a desolate landscape. Not a leaf, not an animal track to suggest life. Framing her on either side is a partial column that appears cropped. Since the columns are painted over the landscape, Leonardo probably added them toward the end, but what may have been an afterthought became a source of conjecture among art historians. They argued for years that Mona Lisa was originally a larger work with full columns and that the painting was cut down at some point, perhaps to fit a frame. Recent scientific studies using radiography and three-dimensional digitization should end the debate: Leonardo painted only partial columns. The original dimensions of the panel are clear, although the back was planed at some point, reducing the thickness of the original wood.
In the early 1500s, oil painting was a new medium, just beginning to replace tempera, and it involved considerable trial and error. Painters did not know how their methods and materials would stand up over time. If the primer was too thin, the painting would eventually deteriorate. If it was painted on, say, a red ground, the colors would darken.
Leonardo was always experimenting. To paint Mona Lisa, he took a delicate technique often used in watercolors, called sfumato, a “vanishing into smoke,” and applied it to oils. Using fine silk brushes to eliminate any trace of individual strokes, he applied very thin successive layers of paint and glazes so fine as to be almost evanescent. Leonardo made Mona Lisa a study in chiaroscuro—a painting of light and shadow. Her image is soft and blurred around the edges like a photograph slightly out of focus.
The contrapposto position, the hallucinatory background, and the sfumato technique were startling innovations in 1503. Vasari called her “revolutionary” and believed that Leonardo had endowed her with extraordinary powers of enchantment.
She is a strange painting—a juxtaposition of extremes. A woman pregnant with possibility and ambiguity is set against a barren world, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. Like the woman, the background may be real or imaginary, but the two sides are not ali
gned. If the figure were removed, like poorly hung wallpaper, the edges would not match.
Adding to the strangeness, the figure and the landscape have distinct perspectives. She is seen vertically at eye level, but the background is an aerial view. Instead of creating a confused or disjointed effect, the double vision is strangely evocative, suggesting almost an optical illusion that enhances the mystique. What is a beautiful young woman doing in such a desolate place? She has a hint of décollétage, a suggestion of spreading hips, the result of childbirth, most likely. Although it is barely discernible with the naked eye, recent digital studies suggest that she is wearing a guarnella, a transparent netting that women of the Renaissance wore over their dresses when they were pregnant. Lisa del Giocondo was not pregnant in 1503, but from the outset, Leonardo's intention seemed more than simply fulfilling a routine commission to render a particular likeness.
Financial records suggest that he agreed to paint the silk merchant's wife solely for financial gain. Portraiture may not have appealed to him. He had done only a few others, with significant time spans between them, and he had avoided numerous requests. Isabella d'Este, the Marquise of Mantua and the sister-in-law of his longtime patron Ludovico Sforza, repeatedly asked Leonardo to paint her portrait. She was arguably the most powerful and interesting woman of her time, and not easily denied. Why did Leonardo put off Isabella d'Este but agree to paint a sweet though undistinguished young matron?
Mona Lisa was a departure for him. In his other portraits of privileged women, the subjects are dressed for posterity. Ginevra de’ Benci has the curled hair and laced bodice of an upper-class Florentine. Lady with an Ermine is clearly identifiable as a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, probably Cecilia Gallerani. The ermine was an emblem of il Mow, and the headband and double necklace were fashionable in the Sforza court.
Mona Lisa wears no hint of rank, wealth, or fashion. She would never win the golden apple. Her forehead is too broad, her lips too thin, her figure less than Greek. She is certainly not a fashion plate. Her dress is nondescript, the color and design devoid of style. Leonardo stripped her of all adornments. He allowed her none of the artifice that women since ancient times have employed to enhance their allure. She herself—not her accoutrements—fascinates.
If Mona Lisa is not the most beautiful, fashionable, or glamorous woman, she is the most beguiling. It is the immediacy of the image—caught in a moment, like the frame of a film—that enthralls. She touches without words, offering not a kiss or a caress but the anticipation. She catches us looking at her, and like a woman surprised in the bath, the embarrassment is ours, not hers. If we try to look away, she follows us and will not let go.
Art historians suggest that Mona Lisa evolved over time from an individual to an archetype—with all the attributes of Eve before and after the fall. But the painting suggests the opposite. Consider the dress. It is dull and drab. A border of vinci, or knots—a device that recurs like a doodle in the artist's notebooks—delineates the neckline. Otherwise, the dress is as plain as a nun's habit.
Lisa's husband showered her with silk dresses, veils, and jewels. Her wardrobe and jewelry were of sufficient value to be noted in his will. Would a pretty young woman with a wealthy husband and an armoire full of the finest silks—especially one who had not grown up with such luxury, being painted for the first time by a celebrated artist—choose a drab brownish dress to wear and no jewelry? Would any woman?
Lisa's portrait would hang on the wall of her new house for all to admire. She would want to look her most beautiful. She probably spent hours trying on one dress after another before settling on the perfect one, then choosing jewelry to complement it. Leonardo himself dressed elegantly. By his own account, “The painter sits before his work, perfectly at his ease and well-dressed, and moves a very light brush dipped in delicate color; and he adorns himself with whatever clothes he pleases.”
Perhaps Lisa's original choice was fuchsia silk and flattering, and the painter insisted she change into her plainest dress. Leonardo da Vinci was a charismatic personality and more than twice her age. Not wanting to offend him, she would have acquiesced with secret reluctance. She was only in her twenties, a young mother, new to the more aristocratic society of the city, newly moved to a fancy house, and perhaps unsure of herself. She may have lacked the confidence, or been too polite, to protest. But her disappointment must have been transparent, because Leonardo went to great lengths to dispel her gloom. He brought in an orchestra of musicians to cheer her, Vasari says, yet the most Mona Lisa could muster was the trace of a smile.
It must have been a galling time for Leonardo. Donate Bramante, his old friend and collaborator from the Milan days, was in Rome building the monumental new Basilica of St. Peter. His young challengers were also being called to the Vatican—Michelangelo to sculpt a massive tomb for Pope Julius and later to paint the Sistine ceiling, Raphael to fresco the rooms of the Papal Palace. While they were in Rome becoming immortal, Leonardo was painting the young Signora del Giocondo. He would not make it a simple portrait.
Mona Lisa may have been a conscious bid for immortality—Leonardo setting out purposefully to conjure from shadow and light a woman who would exert a fatal attraction over men. He believed that he possessed the power. In his notes on painting, he wrote:
The painter can so subdue the minds of men that they will fall in love with a painting that does not represent a real woman. It happened to me that I made a religious painting which was bought by one who so loved it that he wanted to remove the Sacréd representation so as to be able to kiss it without suspicion. Finally, his conscience prevailed over his sighs and lust, but he had to remove the picture from his house….
If the painter wishes to see beauties to fall in love with, it is in his power to bring them forth, and if he wants to see monstrous things that frighten or are foolish or laughable or indeed to be pitied, he is their Lord and God.
Some believe that Leonardo succeeded so well, he seduced himself. Whatever his intention, Mona Lisa is a continuum of desire. History has proved no defense against her, or age, fading grace, or darkening palette.
By pure coincidence, a few days after the theft, the American publisher Thomas Y. Crowell published the English translation of a journal purportedly kept by the painter. The dilapidated manuscript, allegedly discovered in a Renaissance palace in Florence, recounted his romance with his Gioconda.∗3 Petrarch had his Laura, Dante his Beatrice, and, Romantics liked to imagine, da Vinci had his Mona Lisa. Leonardo was cast as Pygmalion and Mona Lisa as his Galatea. After she vanished, a popular postcard pictured Mona Lisa returning to town in a carriage driven by Leonardo.
Today we know from the sophisticated tests conducted at the Louvre that Leonardo painted Mona Lisa's heart at the very center of the composition and made it the most luminous point.
3
MONA LISA TOOK LEONARDO years to achieve, as long as it took Michelangelo to fresco the Sistine ceiling. For each square yard Michelangelo covered, Leonardo painted about an inch. He was legendary for jumping from project to project and completing few of them. As Vasari wrote, “His knowledge of art, indeed, prevented him from finishing many things which he had begun, for he felt that his hand would be unable to realize the perfect creations of his imagination, as his mind formed such difficult, subtle and marvelous conceptions that his hands, skilful as they were, could never have expressed them.”
But Leonardo painted Mona Lisa intermittently for four years and carried her with him until the end of his life. She must have been with him in 1515 when he returned to Milan and met Frangois I. Whether it was love at first sight or a gradual seduction, the young French king became infatuated with Mona Lisa.
From Paolo Veronese's panoramic Wedding Feast at Cana, Frangois I gazes across the Louvre gallery at the beguiling southern temptress who had captured his fancy so many years before. The destinies of the two have converged at surprising, seemingly random points. Through their centuries-long history together, they shared s
eparation, Réunion, and a sumptuous bath, and now in the Louvre, not one hundred feet apart, they share the home that Frangois transformed from a gloomy medieval fortress into a Renaissance palace.
In Veronese's crowded tableau, the French king sits at a long wedding table where the A-list of sixteenth-century society has gathered to celebrate the marriage of Eleanor of Austria. Frangois occupies the place of honor on the right hand of the bride; Mary Tudor of England is on her left. Others in attendance are Frangois's rival Emperor Charles V; the Ottoman potentate Suleiman I; and the Italian noblewoman, poet, and cherished friend of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna. Wine is flowing, and there is music provided by a singular orchestra of artists. Veronese and his friends have put aside their brushes and taken up assorted instruments. He and Tintoretto are playing the cello. Titian is on the bass, and Jacopo Bassano is playing the flute.
In the fresco, Frangois I appears to be middle-aged, his face and figure thickened but still strong, a man just beyond the prime of life but younger than Leonardo was when prince and painter met for the first time. Leonardo was sixty-three then, and he possessed the aura of mystery that attends genius. Frangois, only twenty-one and new to the throne, was a young Goliath, a strapping seven-foot force of enthusiasm and ambition. What he lacked in looks, he made up for in his exuberant personality.
Like his English contemporary and friend Henry VIII, another young king who lived fast and hard and died spent, Frangois was a true galant, a man of immense optimism and appetites. He lusted for beauty in its manifold forms—beautiful art, beautiful architecture, beautiful lovers, beautiful wives. He is famously quoted as saying, “A court without ladies is a springtime without roses.” When he joined the club of European monarchs, he was eager to take on the world—to outconquer and outshine the emperor Charles V,∗4 to claim more territory, collect more art, bed more beauties, shoot more boar, and import the best and the brightest talents to France.