by R. A. Scotti
Frangois seems like an overgrown boy as he cavorts through history, returning to Italy again and again for art and adventure, conquest and culture. He loved and admired all things Italian. The hunting lodge of Fontainebleau, his favorite palace, had nothing comparable to the large and evocative fresco Leonardo had completed on the refectory wall of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. New to the throne and new to Renaissance art and artists, Frangois was so affected by The Last Supper that he wanted to move the entire wall to France. When that proved impractical, he offered to import its creator instead.
Born in the Florence of the Medici, the Renaissance had moved to Rome in the extraordinary papacy of Julius II. After the pope's death, Frangois aspired to recenter it in Paris. He brought Italian artists to France, turned the Louvre fortress into a palace, and began to collect the art that would become the nucleus of its collection. His most celebrated coup was persuading Leonardo to emigrate.
According to Vasari, “so great was Leonardo's genius … that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease,” yet by 1515 he had endured more than a dozen uncertain years without a secure patron or a stable sinecure. Although the king offered him generous patronage, royal protection, and a chateau in the Loire valley near the royal manor house in Amboise, Leonardo vacillated. While he had a restless mind, he had firm roots in the Italian peninsula. He had spent virtually his entire life between Florence and Milan, a distance of fewer than two hundred miles. His imagination roamed, but never at the expense of personal and professional security. After another unsettled year spent mostly in Rome, Leonardo accepted the king's invitation. He moved to France in the summer of 1516.
Leonardo was accustomed to both adoring disciples and the whims and egos of patron-princes, and in France, he found sanctuary. Frangois gave him the charming manor house, Clos-Lucé. The king welcomed so many Italian artists and visitors to his court that Vasari described Fontainebleau as “almost a new Rome.” Among those who crossed the Alps were Leonardo's old friend Niccolo Machiavelli; the painter Primaticcio; the architect Sebastiano Serlio; and later, the celebrated fabricator and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.
In France, Leonardo was the first among equals. According to Cellini, the king was “extremely taken with his great virtue. … He believed there had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo.”
4
IN OCTOBER 1517, Luigi Cardinal d'Aragona visited France. Wealthy, cultivated, and well connected (his father was the bastard son of the king of Naples, and his cousin was Queen Isabella of Aragon), the cardinal was a quintessential Renaissance prince of the Church, with all that entailed: material riches, intellectual curiosity, a beautiful mistress and daughter, enormous ambition, and an utter absence of scruples. It was rumored that he murdered both his sister, the Duchess of Amalfi, and her husband. The cardinal's European trip combined business and pleasure. He was curious to see the world beyond Italy and eager to gain the support of the rulers of Europe. He had hoped to follow Julius II as pope. Now he was lobbying to be named the king of Naples.
Autumn is beautiful in the Loire valley, and while Cardinal d'Aragona was visiting King Frangois at Fontainebleau, he also stopped in to see Leonardo, who was nearing the end of his work and his life. The cardinal's secretary, Antonio de Beatis, kept an enthusiastic journal of their trip, and he describes the visit in some detail. Leonardo showed them three paintings: a Madonna and child with St. Anne; a young John the Baptist; and a portrait that he called “a certain Florentine lady done from life at the instigation of the late Magnificent Giuliano de' Medici.”
Some thirty years later, in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari wrote: “Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Monna Lisa, his wife.” Although he never saw the painting, Vasari rhapsodized over it:
Whoever wished to see how far closely art could imitate nature was able to comprehend it with ease; for in it were counterfeited all the minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted, seeing that the eyes had that luster and watery sheen which are always seen in life, and around them were all those rosy and pearly tints, as well as the lashes, which cannot be represented without the greatest subtlety. The eyebrows, through his having shown the manner in which the hairs spring from the flesh, here more close and here more scanty, and curve according to the pores of the skin, could not be more natural. The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, appeared to be alive. The mouth, with its opening, and with its ends united by the red of its lips to the flesh-tints of the face, seemed, in truth, to be not colors but flesh. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse. And indeed, it may be said that it was painted in such a manner as to make every valiant craftsman … tremble, and lose heart….
Monna Lisa, being very beautiful, he always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits that they paint. And in this work of Leonardo's, there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvelous, since the reality was not more alive.
To extol a work with such unrestrained enthusiasm, sight unseen, indicates that Mona Lisa was well known in the art circles of Florence, but Vasari's rhapsody has been raising eyebrows ever since. What eyebrows? Whose eyebrows? Mona Lisa has none. Never have eyebrows, or the singular lack of them, provoked so much discussion and theorizing, or spawned so many academic careers.∗5 The conspicuously missing eyebrows threw Vasari's entire account into doubt.
His description provoked questions that were still being debated in 1911. If Vasari was wrong about her eyebrows, was he also wrong about her identity? Why did Leonardo, standing in front of a painting—presumably Mona Lisa—in France in 1517 describe it as “a portrait of a certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation of the late Magnifico Giuliano de' Medici”?
Giuliano de’ Medici was one of the sons of Lorenzo the Magnificent, expelled from Florence when the Medici lost power. He had lived in exile in Rome for years. Why would he commission a portrait of a silk merchant's wife? There was no question of an affair between them. Lisa del Giocondo had never left Florence, and Giuliano de’ Medici could never return. Did Leonardo paint two Mona Lisas—one for Giuliano de’ Medici, never finished because he died in 1516, and one for Francesco del Giocondo, never delivered? Or was he describing a different painting entirely? If Mona Lisa is not Lisa del Giocondo, the silk merchant's wife, who is she?
Da Vinci scholars have scrutinized Vasari's passage and the cardinal's travel log as closely as the Rosetta Stone. To add to the conundrum, when Vasari wrote his account, Mona Lisa was gracing the French king's bathroom, and the earliest royal inventories identified her alternately as “a courtesan in a gauze veil” and “a virtuous Italian lady.”
Art historians puzzling over Mona Lisa's identity have suggested many candidates. She is Isabella of Aragon, Beatrice d'Este the Duchess of Milan, one of Giuliano de’ Medici's many mistresses—probably Pacifica Brandano or Costanza d'Avalos—or she may be his wife, Philippa of Savoy, aunt of Frangois I, which could explain why the king was so eager to own her. Others contend that she is an idealization, a self-portrait of the artist, even a man in drag.
In a valiant effort at reconciliation, one biographer of Leonardo imagined a Romeo-and-Juliet romance between Giuliano de’ Medici and Lisa, young lovers at fifteen, cruelly parted when the Medici were routed from Florence. In this scenario, Giuliano, living in exile in Rome, where his brother was pope, asked Leonardo to paint his first love, by then a presumably contented wife and mother.
In spite of the many theories to the contrary, Vasari's identification is the most credible. He had many opportunities to get his facts straight. Lisa del Giocondo nee Gherardini was widowed at fifty-nine an
d died four years later, in 1542. Florence was a small town, the Giocondos were a prominent family, and Vasari's book was a huge best seller.
If he had made an error as egregious as misnaming the subject, someone in the small tight circle of Florentine artists—one of Lisa's sons, for example, or Francesco Melzi, the vigilant keeper of the da Vinci flame, whom Vasari very likely consulted for his history—would have insisted on a correction. That Vasari misidentified the sitter in the first place is unlikely; that he did not correct his mistake in the second edition, published in 1568, is implausible. He fixed several minor errors. (For instance, he had mistakenly referred to Francesco as Lisa's brother.)
Through the years, layers of meaning were applied to Mona Lisa like sfumato. The uncertainties surrounding her identity became an ongoing controversy that generated a vast Gioconda literature. Misjudgments, scant records, and false assumptions heightened the intrigue. The facts were blurred, the truth obscured.
When Mona Lisa vanished in 1911, her identity was still an open question. Even today, when new research supports Vasari's contention,∗6 da Vinci scholars remain divided. What is indisputable truth to one expert is dubious evidence to another.
5
LEONARDO DIED WITHIN TWO YEARS of the cardinal's visit without in any way resolving the confusion he had caused and raising further questions. He always had several young men in his household as students, assistants, companions, and servants. For many years, Francesco Melzi and Leonardo's adopted “son and heir,” the notoriously fickle Salai, had been the closest to him. They were opposites—aristocrat and urchin, prince and prodigal. Giovanni Francesco Melzi was a noble young man, intelligent, talented, and devoted to his master. He came to Leonardo as a student and became his confidant and companion in his old age. Giovanni Giacomo di Pietro Caprotti was ten when Leonardo adopted him. He was Leonardo's bane and joy, an impudent rascal and troublemaker with the face of a seraph. Leonardo named him Salai—little devil—and indulged him endlessly. Salai did not survive long without Leonardo's protection. He was killed in a street brawl, probably in 1524.
In Leonardo's last will and testament, written days before his death, he bequeathed all his work, both writings and art, to Melzi. Nonetheless, when Salai died, he had twelve paintings in his possession, including “two portraits of women, the second called la Ioconda.” According to a contemporary accounting, as late as 1531, Salai's sisters still owned Ioconda and six other works. At some point between that date and Frangois I's death in 1547, Mona Lisa returned to France.
The king paid dearly to possess her. Father Pierre Dan, a Jesuit who cataloged the royal art collection in the seventeenth century, noted that Frangois spent the extravagant sum of four thousand gold crowns—the equivalent of nearly twelve tons of pure silver, or about $9.7 million today—for Mona Lisa, the “premier en estime, comme une merveille de la peinture”—the most esteemed work in the royal collection, a miracle of painting. But exactly when the purchase was made and from whom are as murky as everything else about her.
Mona Lisa began her new life in Fontainebleau in the Appartement des Bains, the king's luxurious bathroom. Far from being merely or even extravagantly functional, the Appartement des Bains was a six-room suite—an exclusive men's club where Frangois and his guests could indulge, and overindulge, every whim. The rooms included a bathing pool, steam room, gambling room, and lounge, all elaborately frescoed. The king's growing art collection was on display. Since painters were often on hand to immortalize royal favorites in the bath, Mona Lisa was probably copied a number of times.
The Appartment des Bains was not a choice spot for an art collection. Steam and oil paint do not mix well, but it took some fifty years for the royal heirs to realize the hazards in even the most luxurious bathroom. The king's collection was moved upstairs to the newly named Cabinet des Tableaux, later called the Pavilion des Peintures.
In the ensuing decades, Mona Lisa narrowly escaped a swap—the Stuart king Charles I of England offered to trade a Titian and a Holbein for her—and suffered a shellacking. Perhaps in a misguided effort to repair the effects of her bathroom days, Mona Lisa received a thick coat of lacquer. The Dutch painter Jean de Hoey or his son Claude, keepers of the royal collection in the early 1600s, may have been the guilty parties. The clumsy conservation first dulled, then destroyed, Leonardo's colors. Over time, the varnish cracked, producing a surface web of fine fissures called craquelure.
Spared from further ravages of humidity, her luster darkening beneath the heavy varnish, Mona Lisa rested undisturbed and largely unnoticed in the upper floor of Fontainebleau for a further fifty years, until another young king came courting and swept her away. Although a century separated them, the Valois Frangois I and the Bourbon Louis XIV shared a love for all things Italian—humanist thought, Renaissance restraint, and the bewitching Lisa. Louis moved her from Fontainebleau to his new palace in Versailles.
The longest-reigning monarch in European history, Louis XIV was crowned in 1643 at the age of five and sat on the throne for seventy-two years. Like Frangois, he imagined Paris as the center of the world and the Louvre as a magnificent Italianate palace, and like Frangois, he wanted to import the foremost Italian artist. In the seventeenth century, that was the divinely talented, supremely arrogant Gianlorenzo Bernini. The fact that Bernini was the pope's architect, in the throes of an ambitious project to build a square the size of the Colosseum in front of the new St. Peter's Basilica, did not weaken the French king's resolve.
Although he had moved his court and his Mona Lisa to Versailles, Louis wanted to complete the transformation of the Louvre that Frangois had begun. When diplomacy and sweet talk failed to persuade Pope Alexander VII to share Bernini, the Sun King resorted to more militant tactics. With the French spurred and booted to invade Italy, the pope capitulated. In 1655 he agreed to lend his architect to France for three months to build the Louvre. It was not as happy a sojourn as Leonardo's.
From Bernini's first day in Paris, the enterprise was a disaster. He was taking a siesta when the king's minister arrived to greet him, and relations deteriorated from there. Bernini was contemptuous of the petit bourgeois mentality of the French and dismissed practical questions about time and cost as issues for a quartermaster, not for the world's premier artist. “Do not speak to me of anything small,” he warned. Bernini was equally impertinent to the king, telling Louis, “Inasmuch as you have not seen the buildings of Italy, you have remarkably good taste.”
While Louis XIV reigned, Mona Lisa was ensconced in the royal bedroom, but like all grand’ amours, she lost her favored position when the king died. As he tired of them, Louis would retire his mistresses to a convent and move on. No green pastures for aging paramours. Mona Lisa suffered a similarly cloistered fate. After the king's death, she was moved from the royal bedroom to a darkened hideaway in Versailles. Sequestered there in the Direction des Batiments, she waited out the madness of the French Revolution. Neglect may have saved her from the frenzied mobs.
6
DEATH DIMINISHED LEONARDO'S LUSTER. Although it is difficult to believe today, when he enjoys the celebrity of a media star, the artist and his work were neglected for years. During his lifetime, Leonardo was recognized as a giant who “painted in such a manner as to make every valiant craftsman … tremble and lose heart.”∗7 But he left no da Vinci masterpiece to astound travelers on the Grand Tour of Europe. No Sistine ceiling or divine David, like Michelangelo. No rooms filled with frescoes, like Raphael. No magnificent basilica, like Bramante.
Leonardo's largest works were the Last Supper fresco, flaking from the refectory wall of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, and the unfinished Battle of Anghiari, lost when Vasari refurbished Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The few easel paintings he completed were in private collections, and the da Vinci of the extraordinary notebooks, the empiricist, engineer, and naturalist, remained the unknown Leonardo until the nineteenth century.
Mona Lisa became little more than a footnote in art hist
ory. Locked away in the private collection of the French kings, she was never glimpsed in public. Every hundred or so years, someone took note of her. Paolo Giovio, writing about Leonardo in the sixteenth century, makes a cursory mention of the sale of the portrait to Frangois I, but he is commenting on the extravagant price the king paid, not on the painting. A century later, on a visit to Fontainebleau in 1625, another cardinal's secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzo,†8 registered the first precise description of Mona Lisa. It is clear from his words that she had already received the disastrous varnishing:
A life-size portrait on wood, half-length, of a certain Gioconda, in a carved walnut frame. This is the finest workmanship of the painter that one could see and lacks only the power of speech, for all else is there. The figure is a woman between twenty-four and twenty-six years old, looking straight ahead, not at all in the style of Greek female statues, but rather full with form and softness in the cheeks. The areas around the lips and the eyes have an unattainable quality, more exquisite than anyone could hope to achieve. The hairstyle is very simple but finished. The dress is black or dark brown, but it has been treated with a varnish that has given it a dismal tone, so that one cannot make it out very well. The hands are extremely beautiful and, in short, in spite of all the misfortunes that this picture has suffered, the face and the hands are so beautiful that whoever looks at it with admiration is bewitched.
In the eighteenth century, Louis XIV's historian, André Felibien des Avaux, saw Mona Lisa at Versailles and was entranced: “Truly … I have never seen anything more finished or expressive. There is so much grace and so much sweetness in the eyes and the features of the face that it seems alive. … One has the impression that this is indeed a woman who takes pleasure in being looked at.”