Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  This is inadmissible, but serves to show that Leonardo’s only known comment about the painting, as recorded by Antonio de Beatis in 1517, is not per se a disproof of Vasari’s identification, as it is usually said to be. That Giuliano and Lisa were acquainted as teenagers is circumstantially probable; that there was a romance between them which the portrait in some way evokes or commemorates (much as the portrait of Ginevra evokes her affair with Bernardo Bembo) is unprovable but not incredible. This need not displace the more prosaic likelihood that her husband commissioned the portrait (as Vasari says he did): rather it deepens the emotional register of the picture, infuses it with nostalgia and melancholy and collusion – a hinted memory of those Florentine love-games of the old Medici days.

  Another early document was found in the Milanese archives in the early 1990s.89 It is an inventory of Salai’s estate, drawn up after his sudden death in March 1524, in which are listed a number of paintings in his possession. Some of them have titles corresponding to known works by Leonardo. The high values assigned to them suggest that they were thought of as originals rather than copies. Whether they really were is another matter: Salai was a prolific and proficient copyist of the master’s work. Among these is ‘a painting called La Joconda’, priced at 505 lire.90 This has been thought to strengthen Vasari’s case, since it shows that the painting was known as the Gioconda some years before his identification of its subject as Lisa del Giocondo.

  A third document is usually passed over in silence because it is brief and erroneous, but I believe it has a bearing. In the Anonimo Gaddiano’s biography of Leonardo occurs the following statement: ‘Ritrasse dal naturale Piero Francesco del Giocondo.’ The usual interpretation of this is that the Anonimo is saying, in error, that Leonardo painted a portrait from life of Lisa’s husband. In fact, as Frank Zöllner points out, the Anonimo is not saying that at all – Lisa’s husband was Francesco; Piero di Francesco was her son.91 This is even less likely, given that Piero was only eight when Leonardo left Florence in 1508. I suspect that the true error is one of copying. The Anonimo’s manuscript is sometimes careless or fragmentary; there are omissions and insertions – for instance, the line immediately below the Giocondo notation reads, ‘Dipinse a [blank] una testa di [Medusa crossed out] Megara.’ I believe the correct reading of the Giocondo sentence is similarly fragmentary. It is not ‘Ritrasse dal naturale Piero Francesco del Giocondo’, but ‘Ritrasse dal naturale per Francesco del Giocondo…’, where the omission marks represent a discontinued sentence: ‘For Francesco del Giocondo he painted a portrait from life of…’ Compare this to Vasari’s opening, where the sentence is completed: ‘Prese Leonardo a fare per Francesco del Giocondo il ritratto di Mona Lisa su moglie.’ If this is right, Vasari seems to be correctly using an original source that the Anonimo had in some way garbled.

  The upshot of these fragments of evidence is that Vasari’s account of the painting’s genesis is probably right: it is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, commissioned by her husband in about 1503, when she was in her early twenties. To some it seems unsatisfactorily prosaic that the world’s most famous painting should depict an obscure Florentine housewife (the rival claimants are all more glamorous and aristocratic), but to me this kernel of ordinariness seems to add to the poetry. This is, at any rate, how the painting began. Vasari also says Leonardo ‘left it unfinished’, which presumably means it was unfinished when he left Florence in 1508. It was still in his possession nine years later, when Antonio de Beatis saw it, and it may well have evolved during this interim. This painting was a long-term companion, a continuous presence in a series of studios, the maestro alighting on it as occasion served, to retouch and rethink, to see in it things he had not seen before. In that long meditation the portrait is imbued with those subtle tonalities, those nuances of meaning one feels but can never quite define. The passage of time is written across the Mona Lisa: the evening light that falls on her face, the aeons of geological time in the mountain-forms behind her, and of course that almost-smile which is perpetually an instant away from becoming an actual smile: a future moment which will never arrive.

  In another sense, as a cultural object, the painting had a long future ahead of it. Its axiomatic famousness is essentially a modern phenomenon. Early commentators enthused, but they did not seem to consider the painting particularly extraordinary or unique. The elevation of the Mona Lisa to iconic status happened in the mid nineteenth century; it was born out of northern Europe’s fascination with the Italian Renaissance in general, and Leonardo in particular, and it was given a particular Gallic, or indeed Parisian, twist by the presence of the painting in the Louvre. Her image became bound up with the morbid Romantic fantasy of the femme fatale: that idea of an ensnaring, exotic belle dame sans merci which so exercised the male imagination at that time.

  An important figure in the Gioconda’s elevation to fatal status was the novelist, art-critic and hashish-smoker Théophile Gautier. For him she was ‘this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously’; her ‘divinely ironic’ gaze intimates ‘unknown pleasures’; she ‘seems to pose a yet unsolved riddle to the admiring centuries’; and so on. In a telling aside during one of his rhapsodies, he remarks, ‘She makes you feel like a schoolboy before a duchess.’92 Another who quaked in her presence was the historian and Renaissance-enthusiast Jules Michelet. Looking at her, he wrote, ‘you are fascinated and troubled as if by a strange magnetism’; she ‘attracts me, revolts me, consumes me; I go to her in spite of myself, as the bird to the snake’. Similarly, in the Goncourt brothers’ journal for 1860, a famous beauty of the day is described as ‘like a sixteenth-century courtesan’ who wears ‘the smile full of night of the Gioconda’.93 Thus the Mona Lisa was co-opted into a chorus-line of dangerous beauties alongside such luminaries as Zola’s Nana, Wedekind’s Lulu, and Baudelaire’s Creole belle Jeanne Duval.

  The famous description of the painting by the Victorian aesthete Walter Pater, first published in 1869, was certainly influenced by this extended bout of Gallic swooning. Yeats later paid Pater’s flagrantly purple prose the compliment of chopping it up into free verse, in which form it sits more happily:

  She is older than the rocks among which she sits;

  Like the vampire,

  She has been dead many times,

  And learned the secrets of the grave;

  And has been a diver in deep seas,

  And keeps their fallen day about her…94

  Oscar Wilde comments perceptively on this seductive Pateresque blarney, ‘The picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.’95 But the idea of the Mona Lisa’s ‘secret’ continued to reverberate. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), Lucy Honeychurch’s sojourn in Tuscany gives her a touch of the Gioconda mystery – ‘He detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things she will not tell us.’96

  Others reacted more sceptically, as in Somerset Maugham’s novel Christmas Holiday (1939), where a quartet of art-lovers ‘gazed at the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman’. Iconoclastic young critics like Roberto Longhi poured scorn on the painting, and even Bernard Berenson – though hardly daring to question ‘a shaman so potent’ as Pater – confessed to his covert dislike of this revered work: ‘She had simply become an incubus.’ When T. S. Eliot called Hamlet ‘the Mona Lisa of literature’ he meant it in a negative sense: that the play was no longer seen for what it was, but had become, like the painting, a receptacle for subjective interpretations and second-rate theories.97

  The other life-changing event in the career of the Mona Lisa was her abduction from the Louvre on the morning of Monday 21 August 1911.98 The thief was a thirty-year-old Italian painter-decorator and petty criminal, Vincenzo Perugia. Born in the village of Dumenza, near Lake Como, he had been in Paris since 1908, one of thousands of Italian immigrants in the city – the macaroni, as t
he French dubbed them. He had worked briefly at the Louvre, which was why he was able to get into the building unchallenged – and out again, carrying the Mona Lisa stuffed under his workman’s smock. A police hunt ensued, but despite his criminal record, and despite his having left a large thumb-print on the frame, Perugia’s name never came up. Among those suspected of involvement were Picasso and Apollinaire; the latter was imprisoned briefly, and wrote a poem about it. Perugia kept the painting in his lodgings, hidden under a stove, for more than two years. Then, in late November 1913, he sent a letter to an antique-dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, offering to ‘return’ the Mona Lisa to Italy. He demanded 500,000 lire. The letter was signed ‘Leonardo Vincenzo’. On 12 December, Perugia arrived in Florence, by train, with the Mona Lisa in a wooden trunk, ‘a sort of seaman’s locker’; he checked into a low-rent hotel, the Albergo Tripoli-Italia on Via Panzani (still in business, though now called – what else? – the Hotel La Gioconda). Here, in the presence of Alfredo Geri and Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi, Perugia opened the trunk, revealing some old shoes and woollen underclothes; then – as Geri relates – ‘after taking out these not very appetizing objects [he] lifted up the false bottom of the trunk, under which we saw the picture… We were filled with a strong emotion. Vincenzo looked at us with a kind of fixed stare, smiling complacently, as if he had painted it himself.’99 He was arrested later that day. Efforts were made to turn Perugia into a cultural hero, but at his trial he proved a disappointment. He said he had first intended to steal Mantegna’s Mars and Venus, but had decided on the Mona Lisa instead because it was smaller. He was imprisoned for twelve months; he died in 1947.

  The theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa were the clinching of her international celebrity. Both unleashed a swarm of newspaper features, commemorative postcards, cartoons, ballads, cabaret-revues and comic silent films. These are the heralds of the painting’s modern existence as global pop-icon. Marcel Duchamp’s defaced Gioconda of 1919, saucily entitled L.H.O.O.Q (i.e. ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, or ‘She’s hot in the arse’) is the most famous of the send-ups, though it is pre-dated by more than twenty years by the pipe-smoking Mona Lisa drawn by the illustrator Sapeck (Eugene Battaile). And so the way was open for Warhol’s multiple Gioconda (Thirty are Better than One); for Terry Gilliam’s animated Gioconda in the Monty Python title sequence; for William Gibson’s ‘sprawl novel’ Mona Lisa Overdrive; for the classic citations in Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’, Nat King Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Vision of Johanna’; for the joint-smoking poster and the novelty mouse-pad. Personally I suspect that I first became aware of the Mona Lisa through the Jimmy Clanton hit of 1962, which began:

  She’s Venus in blue jeans,

  Mona Lisa with a pony tail…

  I’m not sure the ponytail would suit her, but the song’s wonderful bubble-gum blandness illustrates well enough the fate that has befallen this mysterious and beautiful painting.

  THE ANGHIARI FRESCO (I)

  A summer spent dividing his time between excursions into the Pisan hills, conversations with Machiavelli, mathematical studies with Luca Pacioli, and portrait-sessions with Lisa del Giocondo (with or without musicians and comedians) sounds to me a pretty good summer for Leonardo da Vinci, but by the autumn he was considering a new commission, for a major public work equivalent in scale – and potential stress – to the Last Supper. The commission was for a fresco to decorate one of the walls of the enormous Council Hall (the Sala del Maggiore Consiglio, later the Sala del Cinquecento) on the first floor of the Palazzo Vecchio. The hall had been built in 1495, as part of the new republican dawn that followed the expulsion of the Medici.100

  The original contract has not survived, but the commission can be dated around October 1503, for on the 24th of that month the Signoria issued instructions for Leonardo to be given the key to a large disused refectory known as the Sala del Papa (the Pope’s Hall) in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella.101 This official provision was doubtless to give him the space he needed for the huge cartoon which was to be the template of the fresco. A later contract, dated 4 May 1504, says that Leonardo had ‘agreed some months previously to paint a picture in the hall of the Great Council’, and had been paid an advance of 35 florins. The deadline for completing the work (‘without any exception or cavil whatsoever’) is given as the end of February 1505. Later documents show that he received a stipend of 15 florins a month while working on it.102

  And so Leonardo takes up new quarters at Santa Maria Novella, with its magnificent Albertian façade which he had seen being built more than thirty years before, and its walls decorated with the luminous frescos of Domenico Ghirlandaio, with their portraits of Ficino and Luigi Pulci and Poliziano, and of the young Medici boys – faces from his youth, ghosts from another Florence. The Sala del Papa was in the ramble of buildings to the west of the church (now the Carabinieri headquarters, heavily sentried). The room was not in good condition – a further instruction from the Signoria orders that the roof should be repaired to make it rainproof. The windows were ‘rough’ and needed to be made secure. On 8 January 1504 a carpenter, Benedetto Buchi, was brought in with panels, runners, shutters and crossbars to close them up.103 These necessary building works perhaps pre-date Leonardo’s definitive arrival. A fragmentary sheet in the Codex Atlanticus has an inventory of his household goods – forty-four items: chairs and tables, towels and napkins, brooms and candlesticks, a feather mattress, a copper basin, a soup-ladle, a frying-pan, ‘lampstands, inkwell, ink, soap, colours’, ‘trivet, sphere, pen-holder, lectern, rod, sponge’: the clutter of small necessities.104

  Throughout February the scene resembles a building-site – the carpenter is making the platform and ladder, ‘with all the necessary devices’. The main beam of the platform is a 5 braccia length of elm-wood; it is secured by a hawser or cable of hemp – in other words the platform is hanging rather than scaffolded, its height and position being adjustable by pulleys. A paper-merchant, Giandomenico di Filippo, arrives with a ream of paper which will be glued together for the cartoon. Another brings rougher, cheaper paper to cover the windows. Wax, turpentine and white lead are delivered from the apothecary’s. A consignment of sponges arrives. Also at work is a builder, Maestro Antonio di Giovanni. He is making a doorway from Leonardo’s private rooms which will ‘go directly to the said cartoon’ – we glimpse in this specification the punishing artistic labours to come: the blinkering, the solitude. Soon the work will take him over: soon he will be pacing from his room to the drawing and back again, wrapped up in concentration. One recalls Bandello’s reminiscence of work on the Last Supper – the bursts of galvanic activity, the longueurs of arms-folded contemplation.

  On 27 April Leonardo drew out another 50 florins from his bank-account. It seems the advance he had received from the Signoria was already spent.

  War has been Leonardo’s milieu over the past couple of years – as servant to the ruthless ambitions of the Borgia, as engineer to the Florentine war-effort against Pisa – and even here in his new studio in Santa Maria Novella he cannot quite shake off the connection, for war was precisely the subject of the work on which he was now embarking. The Signoria wished to decorate their great Council Hall with an emblematic scene from a famous Florentine victory. In 1440 – and thus still just about in living memory – an attack of Milanese troops under the condottiere Niccolò Piccinino had been beaten off by Florentine troops in an engagement outside the Tuscan village of Anghiari, in the hills not far from Arezzo. Leonardo may well have known the place: he would have passed that way en route to Urbino the previous year; it is marked on his map of the Val di Chiana.

  Again Machiavelli is involved. Among Leonardo’s papers is a long description of the battle, translated from a Latin account by Leonardo Dati.105 The handwriting is that of Machiavelli’s assistant Agostino di Vespucci; it was no doubt written at Machiavelli’s suggestion, to give Leonardo information and ideas about the subject. It seems that a narrative
fresco was envisaged, showing various scenes over a period of time. ‘Begin with the address of Niccolò Piccinino to the soldiers… Then let it be shown how he first mounted on horseback in armour and the whole army came after him, 40 squadrons of cavalry and 2,000 foot-soldiers’, and so on. Dati’s account of the battle includes a visionary scene where St Peter appears ‘in a cloud’ to the Florentine commander (the battle was fought on St Peter and St Paul’s day, 29 June), and is in general rousing and rhetorical – as the Signoria doubtless hoped Leonardo’s fresco would be. A very different account was later written by Machiavelli himself in his Istorie fiorentine, where the battle is described as a brief skirmish, during which only one man was killed – and he only by accident, when his horse fell on him.106 But now, for the painter, here was the propaganda version.

  The commission is clear: a stirring scene of Florentine military valour, a giant trionfo to bolster the republic’s resolve in these days of uncertainty. But from the outset – as one can see from the many preparatory drawings – Leonardo’s treatment caught also a powerful sense of the horror and brutality of war.107 We see in those drawings the snarling mouths of the fighters, the terrified rearing of the horses, the stretched muscles, the hacking weapons. There is in them an element of catharsis: a confrontation of his own complicity in the warmongering of the day. In these drawings are distilled certain grisly scenes he had witnessed during his months with Borgia. And he also knew the kind of things to focus on to catch the lurid drama of the battlefield, for more than a decade earlier in Milan he had penned a long text entitled ‘How to represent a battle’:

  First you must show the smoke of the artillery, mingling in the air with the dust thrown up by the movement of horses and soldiers… The air must be filled with arrows in every direction, and the cannon-balls must have a train of smoke following their flight… If you show one who has fallen you must show the place where his body has slithered in the blood-stained dust and mud… Others must be represented in the agonies of death, grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies and their legs contorted… There might be seen a number of men fallen in a heap over a dead horse.108