Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  This abortive plan was part and parcel of Leonardo’s more grandiose dream: the construction of a long canal which would obviate the navigational problems of the Arno and give Florence its own access to the sea. The river below Florence is not navigable because of the rapids between Signa and Montelupo 10 miles west of the city, and is shallow, silted and meandering for much of its course between there and Pisa: one recalls Brunelleschi’s ill-fated Badalone beached on the sandbanks of Empoli. This grand canal is distinct from the military diversion project, but his involvement in the latter probably gave impetus to this larger canalization scheme, which he had been turning over in his mind for some time. The combined effect of them – had they worked – would have been to link Florence to the sea, thus enabling the city to participate in the great adventure of New World trade and exploration, excitement about which the Florentine navigator Amerigo di Vespucci did much to encourage in letters to his Italian patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, a digest of which was published in Florence in 1504.

  This gives a topical impetus to an idea that had been around for a while: an Arno canal had been proposed as early as 1347, and Leonardo himself had been thinking about it for ten years or more. There is a sheet of notes on the subject in the Codex Atlanticus which, as it mentions Pisa as a beneficiary of the scheme, appears to have been written before the beginning of Florentine–Pisan hostilities in 1495. He wrote:

  Sluices should be made in the valley of La Chiana at Arezzo so that when in the summer the Arno lacks water the canal will not dry up. The canal should be 20 braccia wide at the bottom and 30 at the top, and 2 braccia deep, or 4 so that 2 braccia of water can serve the mills and meadows, which will benefit the area, and Prato, Pistoia and Pisa will gain 200,000 ducats a year, and will contribute labour and money to this useful project, and the Lucchese the same, because the Lake of Sesto will become navigable. I shall make it go through Prato and Pistoia, and cut through Serravalle and debouch into the lake, so there will be no need of locks.74

  He costs this out at a rate of 1 lire per 60 square braccia, though this does not include any estimate for the immense work of ‘cutting through’ the mountain at Serravalle.

  There are maps and plans which date from 1503–4 and show the proposed route of the canal. In the corner of one is a note reading, ‘They do not know why the Arno will never run in a straight channel: it is because the rivers which flow into it deposit earth where they enter, and take it from the opposite side, and so bend the river.’75 One hears the touch of testiness, the magisterial note which some would have found trying. ‘They’ do not know this elementary fact which he must now for the umpteenth time explain.

  The canal remained a dream – the failure of the military diversion was perhaps a discouragement, though the immense costs of the project were doubtless enough to discourage the Signoria anyway. No work was carried out, though the A11 autostrada between Florence and Pisa covers much the same route as the proposed canal, so one might say that Leonardo’s vision was only wrong in so far as it failed to predict the demise of the waterway itself as a medium of transport. His imagination fell short of the internal-combustion engine.

  These canalization projects, and others he later undertook in Milan, are another instance of Leonardo’s lifelong fascination with water, its currents, pressures, vortices and refractions, which he noted, analysed, sketched and indeed painted so beautifully – the sullen gleam of the padule behind Ginevra, the marine vistas of the Annunciation, the rock-eroding rivers that meander implacably behind the Madonna of the Yarnwinder and the Mona Lisa.

  MISTRESS LISA

  Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep…

  Nat King Cole, ‘Mona Lisa’ (lyrics by Jay Livingstone and Ray Evans, 1949)

  And what of the paintbrush, of which he had been so heartily sick, so impaziente, a couple of years previously? Was he painting again? It seems he was. In the summer of 1503, when he was not traipsing round the base-camps and excavation-sites of the Pisa campaign, when he was not computing the sluice-rates and shovel-hours needed to bring his cunning stratagem to pass, Leonardo was almost certainly at work on the picture that can justly be called – as it is in the subtitle of a recent book on the subject – ‘the world’s most famous painting’.76

  ‘For Francesco del Giocondo Leonardo undertook to paint a portrait of his wife, Mona Lisa; he worked on it for four years and left it unfinished.’ Thus briskly Giorgio Vasari begins his account of the Mona Lisa. It is the fullest contemporary account of the painting, and the only one to offer a name for the sitter – whether correctly or not is much debated. The painting is called the Mona Lisa on the basis of Vasari’s identification, though as a title this was not much used before the nineteenth century. In Italy the painting is always known as La Gioconda (and in France as La Joconde). This seems also to refer to Lisa del Giocondo, but as giocondo is also an adjective, meaning jocund, it functions as a purely descriptive title: The Jocund [or Playful] Woman, The Joker Lady – perhaps even The Tease. Such a pun would be characteristic of the time, and of Leonardo, but those who disbelieve Vasari’s identification say the title works perfectly well without any reference to Mrs Giocondo.77

  After his informative first sentence, Vasari devotes a paragraph to praise of the painting’s brilliantly lifelike qualities. Some of this is inaccurate, or at least off-key, because he had never actually seen the picture: it was, as he notes, ‘now in the possession of King François of France at Fontainebleau’.78 He lavishes particular praise on the sitter’s eyebrows – ‘completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another’ – whereas the Mona Lisa is notably eyebrow-less, and no trace of any previous eyebrows has been found beneath the paint surface. He concludes the passage with a little anecdotal coda: ‘While he was painting her he employed singers and musicians and always had jesters to keep her merry and to chase away that melancholy which painters usually gave to portraits; and so in this picture by Leonardo there is a smile [ghigno] so pleasing that one seems to see something more divine than human.’ This is nice, and chimes in with some of Leonardo’s comments in the Trattato about the painter working in a refined atmosphere, but again it strikes one as off-key. Where, in the actual Mona Lisa, is the evidence of this merriment? There is the smile, or the ghost of one, but not the broad grin which is the usual meaning of ghigno (from which ‘grin’ comes). As he often does, Vasari is over-egging a second-hand account to make it sound richer. His description is often criticized because of its visual inaccuracy, though of course we have even less idea what the Mona Lisa looked like when Leonardo painted it. Its currently crepuscular appearance is the result of several centuries of protective varnish, tinged yellowish by oxidation. As early as 1625 a viewer complained of the picture being ‘so damaged by a certain varnish that one cannot make it out very well’.79 This is another aspect of the picture’s obscurity – what the pro-restoration lobby would call its illegibility. She wears this veil of lacquer, with its thousands of tiny lesions or craquelures, and it will be a brave restorer who dares remove the veil to see what lies beneath.

  Vasari does not actually give a date for the painting – dates are not his strong suit – but within the narrative of the Life he places it squarely in this second Florentine period, somewhere between the St Anne cartoon of 1501 and the Battle of Anghiari fresco of 1503–6. Given that Leonardo was painting very little in 1501, as we gather from Fra Pietro Novellara, and that he was in the service of the Borgia for much of 1502, this is generally interpreted to mean that he began work on the Mona Lisa sometime after his return to Florence in 1503. This is the date favoured by the Louvre, where its 500th birthday was celebrated in autumn 2003. It may also be the date favoured by a casual joke of Machiavelli’s friend Luca Ugolini, who wrote to Niccolò on 11 November 1503 congratulating him on the birth of his first son – ‘My very dear friend. Congratulations! Obviously Mistress Marietta did not deceive you, for he is your spitting image. Leonardo da Vinci would not have done a
better portrait.’ Perhaps Ugolini was thinking of the Mona Lisa, already taking shape in Leonardo’s studio in November 1503, when he said this.80

  I have noted over the last few chapters what seem to be anticipatory frissons of the Mona Lisa – the hands and bust of Isabella d’Este, the loggia of the Tovaglia villa, the bridge at Buriano, the landscape of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder. Some of these are debatable, though the first and the last are demonstrable parallels in works of 1500–1502. That unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este, always just beyond our field of vision, is especially insistent – seen by Lorenzo Guznago in Venice in 1500; referred to by Isabella’s agents in Florence in 1501–2 (‘he will immediately undertake the portrait and send it’… ‘he has already begun work on that which Your Ladyship wanted’), this lost work seems a kind of missing link between the extant drawing of Isabella and the Mona Lisa, a notional phase between the rigid full profile of the former and the nuanced, faintly skewed full face of the latter. A red-chalk drawing at Windsor, often described as a study for the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, might also be seen as a halfway stage on this arc of movement from the d’Este profile to the Gioconda gaze.81 We know that this is how Leonardo worked, returning to images and ideas, circling round them, redefining them. Paintings evolve, metamorphose from one shape to another, like the pagan gods of the classical world. According to Vasari, Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for four years. This would make the date of composition c. 1503–7, its curtailment broadly coinciding with Leonardo’s departure from Florence in early 1508. From around that time is a sheet of anatomical drawings containing nine studies of mouths and lips, with accompanying notes about the physiology of those ‘muscles called lips’.82 One of these studies, quite distinct from the others in its light, poetic tone, shows a mouth smiling – it is almost exactly the smile of the Mona Lisa (Plate 19).

  Vasari’s account of the painting is not ideal, but he is the only contemporary writer to give a name and a date to the portrait. Is he right? Increasingly it seems likely that he is. There are a great many alternative theories about who is portrayed in the painting, most of them proposed within the last hundred years. (André Coppier’s 1914 article ‘La “Joconde” est-elle le portrait de Mona Lisa?’ began the hunt.) I have been round the block, metaphorically speaking, with these contenders, and none of them has stood up to much inquiry. The alternative candidates – Isabella Gualanda, Pacifica Brandano, Costanza d’Avalos, Caterina Sforza et al. – are rather like the authors evoked to solve the Shakespeare ‘authorship controversy’. Their proponents seek to solve a mystery, but one must first ask: is there really any mystery to solve?

  Vasari’s ‘Mona Lisa’ certainly existed.83 She was Lisa di Antonmaria Gherardini, born on 15 June 1479. Her father was a respectable but not spectacularly wealthy Florentine; the family had a town-house near Santa Trinità and a small estate in San Donato in Poggio, near Greve, where she was probably born. She married Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo in March 1495, at the age of fifteen; he was a well-to-do businessman with interests in the silk and cloth trades, thirty-five years old, already twice widowed, and with an infant son, Bartolomeo. There is a family connection behind the marriage: Lisa’s stepmother, Camilla, was the sister of Giocondo’s first wife; Lisa would have been a child when Giocondo first knew her. By 1503, the presumed date for the portrait, she had borne Giocondo two sons, Piero and Andrea, and a daughter who had died in infancy. This loss is sometimes said to be a reason for the fine black veil that covers the Mona Lisa’s hair, but this is unlikely: the baby had died four years earlier, in the summer of 1499. More probably the veil and the sombre-coloured dress are a fashion-statement: the ‘Spanish’ look, as worn by Lucrezia Borgia at her wedding with Alfonso d’Este in 1502, was all the rage. Francesco del Giocondo was in the garment-business: he knew all about the fashions. And so did the portraitist who, in Vasari’s unexcited phrase, ‘undertook to paint’ the picture.

  Giocondo was precisely the sort of client that Florentine artists sought – ‘civis et mercator florentinus’, as he is described in his marriage contract: citizen and merchant of Florence. He was the holder (on four separate occasions) of civic office, and among his business associates was Marcello Strozzi, whose sister Maddalena Doni was painted in Mona Lisa style by Raphael.84 Another connection was with the Rucellai family: his first wife was a Rucellai, as was Lisa’s stepmother. He was later linked with the Servites of the Annunziata, where he endowed a family chapel and commissioned for it an altarpiece of his patron saint, St Francis; this dates from the 1520s, but may reflect an earlier connection with the Annunziata. Giocondo’s interest in art (or art-dealing) is also suggested by a post-mortem inventory of a small-time painter and sculptor, one Maestro Valerio, who died owing Giocondo money: Giocondo recouped the debt by taking the entire stock of Valerio’s paintings, cartoons and sculptures.85

  On 5 April 1503 Francesco del Giocondo completed the purchase of a house on Via della Stufa – a new home for him and Lisa and the three boys; the youngest, Andrea, was five months old, and was perhaps the reason for the move. A new home with walls to fill – what more natural than to fill one of them, as well-to-do home-owners did, with a portrait of your comely, desirable, fashionably dressed young wife: young but already, at the age of twenty-three, softened and broadened by motherhood.

  *

  Three scraps of documentation exist for the painting prior to Vasari’s account. Do they support or contradict him?

  The first known mention of the painting is by Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, whose diary records their visit to Leonardo’s studio in France in 1517.86 There the ageing maestro showed them three paintings. Two of these are readily identifiable from Beatis’s descriptions as the St John the Baptist and the Virgin and Child with St Anne, both now in the Louvre; the third is almost certainly the Mona Lisa. It is described by Beatis (and, it is implied, by Leonardo himself) as the portrait of ‘a certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation [instantia] of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici’. The first part sounds like Lisa del Giocondo, who was certainly a Florentine lady, but the second part is more problematic. Giuliano was the third and youngest son of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Leonardo’s known relationship with him belongs to the years 1513–15, and to Rome rather than Florence.

  For some this seems to offer an entirely different account of the painting from Vasari’s, making it a late work (which the stylistic evidence would seem to confirm, and which the other two paintings shown to the visitors certainly were). This in turn has led to other candidates for the famous face. There is Giuliano’s mistress, a young widow from Urbino named Pacifica Brandano, who bore him a child in 1511 – the funereal black veil which covers the Mona Lisa’s hair might allude to her widowhood. And there is the beautiful and witty Isabella Gualanda, a Neapolitan who was in Rome at the right sort of time for Giuliano to be smitten by her, and who turns out to be a cousin of Cecilia Gallerani, whose portrait Leonardo had painted in Milan in the late 1480s.87 Either of these women might plausibly have been painted at Giuliano’s ‘instigation’, and the resulting portrait might have remained in Leonardo’s hands when Giuliano became a married man, as he did in early 1515. However, neither of them was from Florence, which is required by Beatis’s diary-entry. In fact Beatis’s description of the painting seems to rule out the possibility that La Gualanda was portrayed in it. She was a famous Neapolitan beauty; it is likely that Luigi of Aragon and Beatis – themselves from Naples – would know what she looked like, and this likelihood is increased by the fact that Beatis mentions her, and her beauty, elsewhere in the diary.88 If the portrait Leonardo showed them really was of her, Beatis would surely have said so; he certainly would not have described her as ‘a certain Florentine lady’. These trails tend to double back on themselves, and the cases for the rival claimants start to look pretty thin.

  It is generally held that Beatis scotches Vasari’s identification of Lisa del Giocondo because she could no
t possibly have been a paramour of Giuliano de’ Medici’s: she was a respectably married woman, not a courtesan, and anyway Giuliano was in exile from Florence between 1494 and 1512This noli me tangere argument seems to me questionable. Giuliano de’ Medici and Lisa Gherardini were exact contemporaries, born in 1479. It is quite likely that they met, because their families were linked by intermarriage Giuliano’s aunt Nannina was married to Bernardo Rucellai, whose niece Camilla was married to Lisa’s father: thus Lisa’s young stepmother was Giuliano’s cousin. It is therefore tenable that Giuliano and Lisa knew one another. They were fifteen years old in November 1494, when Giuliano fled the city with his family. A few months after this bouleversement, Lisa married the middle-aged widower Francesco del Giocondo, also known to her through her stepmother, Camilla.

  If this were a novel or film-script I would stretch the evidence and say that there was a tendresse between Giuliano and Lisa: that they were teenage sweethearts separated by political misfortune. This ‘star-crossed lover’ scenario would have a sequel. In 1500 Giuliano de’ Medici was in Venice. It would be natural for him to pay a call on his famous compatriot Leonardo da Vinci, who arrived in the city in February 1500; and if he did so he would probably have seen in Leonardo’s studio – as Lorenzo Guznago did on 17 March – that unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este which is a ghostly precursor of the pose and style, the ‘look’, of the Mona Lisa. In April Leonardo set off for Florence. Was it then that Giuliano de’ Medici ‘instigated’ him to paint this portrait of a ‘certain Florentine lady’ whom he remembered as a beautiful girl, though now – he hears – married with children?