No old master is more masterly than Leonardo da Vinci. His Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. And yet his oeuvre is small, no more than 15 works, some unfinished and all fragile. The rest is notebooks and legendry. He was supposed to be charming and eloquent, a wonderful singer and musician, well-informed on a wide variety of subjects – in short, a companion fit for princes, who willingly financed his aspirational lifestyle, no matter how little work he actually carried out. As a young man he was so beautiful that some think he is the model for Verrocchio's David in the Bargello and for the angel in Verrocchio's Tobias and the Angel. Certainly the best-looking boy in Verrocchio's workshop would have been asked to pose as one or the other or both, but whether it was Leonardo is not something we can know.
Mona Lisa has been securely identified by Vasari as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and the portrait as the one in the possession of François I now in the Louvre. It was assumed that the picture was painted in Florence after Leonardo returned from his travels with Cesare Borgia in 1503 and before he went back to Milan in 1506. The assumption was verified in 2005 when a librarian at the University of Heidelberg, preparing a copy of the 1477 edition of Cicero's Epistoles ad Familiares for an exhibition, came upon a marginal note by Agostino Vespucci comparing Leonardo with Apelles, in which he notes that Leonardo was then working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. The note is dated 1503.
There is therefore no call for further speculation about who the original of the Mona Lisa might be, and yet it goes on. Most recently Silvano Vincenti, head of the Italian National Historic Properties Evaluation Commission, has tried hard to get us to believe that the model for the portrait is a man – namely, Giangiacomo Caprotti da Oreno, whom he identifies as Leonardo's servant, nicknamed "Salai". According to Vasari, Salai was "a very attractive youth of unusual grace and looks, with very beautiful hair which he wore curled in ringlets and which delighted his master". Salai was a small child when he entered Leonardo's household in 1490. He remained with Leonardo until the great man's death, when he inherited the Mona Lisa. He is supposed to have signed paintings as "Andrea Salai" – which would be odd, because, though it was usual for painters to use their sobriquets as surnames, it is most unusual for them to change their given names. The nickname is often explained as meaning "Satan"; it is more likely to mean "the dirty one". Either way, you might wonder why an adult Salai would choose to be identified by such a disparaging name.
A drawing by Leonardo of a leering nude boy with masses of coiled tresses and a teenager's erection, until recently in the Royal Collection, has "Salai" written on the back. This drawing is clearly related to Leonardo's peculiar image of an effete male figure smirking and pointing skywards, now in the Louvre, usually identified as John the Baptist. Vasari does not mention a Saint John; instead he refers to a painting of "the head of an angel raising one arm, which is foreshortened as it comes forward from the shoulder to the elbow, and lifting a hand to its breast with the other". The Louvre painting would appear to be a debased version of this subject, to which the attributes of the Baptist were added by another hand. What is worse, the foreshortening of the pointing arm has also been distorted.
In Italy, then as now, beautiful boys were two a penny; all Leonardo's fellow painters used beautiful boys to model not only St Sebastian, St John, David, Apollo, Eros, Bacchus, and flying hordes of angels, but the Blessed Virgin as well. None of this constitutes evidence that the subject of the Mona Lisa is a man. However, it was usual when painting society portraits to require the subject to sit only for the face, and to use other models for the body and clothing. The Mona Lisa is almost certainly a composite.
A drawing attributed to Salai, in the Musée Condé in Chantilly, usually called Mona Vanna, is a cartoonish nude version of the Mona Lisa. To compare the two is to see at once that, though the pose is identical in the drawing, the head is bigger in relation to the body, the nose and chin more prominent, the arms and torso beefier, the expression more lecherous and the breasts absurd. In the half-dozen paintings and drawings based on this conceit, none of which can be securely attributed, Mona Vanna really does look like a man with implants. It is inevitable that, as more and more kings and princes lavished favours on Leonardo in return for less and less finished work, his hardworking contemporaries would have taken the mickey. Michelangelo started it when he sneered that Leonardo had no idea how to cast his 70-ton bronze equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, as in fact he didn't. The first moustache was drawn on the Mona Lisa long before Marcel Duchamp was born.
Comments in chronological order (Total 19 comments)
20 February 2011 11:37PM
Before we discuss such a venerated painting we must look at the so called evidence. It has not been supplied... Leonardo was able and did microscopic writing as a result of his optical studies and experimentation making mirrors etc... so the possibility of microscopic writing is possible... Leonardo most definitely sketched and used Salai (Leonardo's assistant nickname meaning little devil) but this idea that it is Salai is not new just the so called supporting evidence yet shown to us..... As usual we must assume Human Nature is on display... in this case an agenda till the evidence is shown... Mona Lisa is Venerated and should be.... show us the "L" and "S"..... could there be and "I" and an "A" there also giving us LISA..... Agendas in art is common but agendas with Leonardo are universal.. If the the letters are there they will mean something but please demonstrate it before assuming what it means, all the best ben sweeney
www.leonardoshand.com
21 February 2011 12:08AM
Greatest.... Title ever.....as usual Ms.Greer shows insight, comprehensiveness and wit while deconstructing "THE Leonardo's Style"........when dealing with a possible Leonardo one must first ask are these seen in Nature!.......
all the best, ben sweeney
leonardoshands.com
21 February 2011 3:27AM
You have just got to love this stuff. I have no idea what Germaine is going on about, but as always, I just had to read it.
Verrocchio ... is that something caught in swimming pools?
Vespucci ... was that a two-stroke or a four-stroke?
Silvano Vincenti, head of the Italian National Historic Properties Evaluation Commission ... you talkin' to me?
very attractive youth of unusual grace and looks, with very beautiful hair which he wore curled in ringlets ... as I recall Germaine once claimed that Frank Zappa cured the the pubic crabs in her eyebrows, so this bit I may follow.
a leering nude boy with masses of coiled tresses and a teenager's erection ... ditto.
Gotta love it!
21 February 2011 9:31AM
Quite right too, of course Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. It was the Earl of Oxford, or was it Bacon?
Tedious revisionism for its own sake and a desperate attempt to raise one's profile. Hit them where it hurts Germaine, you should have had enough practice at that....
21 February 2011 9:50AM
It's been ventured before, that it could be da Vinci himself, now it could be Salia. There are more similarities between a womans face and a mans face, than there are differences. Take a good look, without prejudice at Michaelangelos' 'David', the mouth and the eyes in particular, seperate from the rest of the face, and they look remarkably 'feminine' As a former crossdresser, I have experience of trying to pass as a woman, so I know what I'm talking about. Male, female, whatever, it doesn't matter, surely the actual painting is what matters. I wish everyone would stop trying to make some kind of Dan Brown mystery of it.
21 February 2011 10:03AM
Does it matter who it is?
The last thing ever discussed when discussing art, is the quality of the image and its execution. The rest is just trivia.
21 February 2011 11:05AM
A year ago I bought this painting at an auction of young artists in Rotterdam. The artist Nina Laura painted this portrait (link below) without example as part of a series: imaginary people. That was her challenge in a step to a next stage. It reminds me in some funny way to think of Mona Lisa. That was perhaps the reason I bought it I realized later. Mona Lisa as an imaginary person!
http://www.ninalaura.com/images/stories/Paintings/06imaginaryportraitws.jpg
21 February 2011 12:48PM
She's unlikely to be imaginary because the chances are this was done as a commission. A painting would often only be undertaken if there was a buyer who would define the subject matter (witness the many religious paintings into which the sponsor has been painted as an onlooker). And since it's not a religious subject, this suggests that it's a private commission and hence more likely to be a portrait of someone real who was important to the purchaser. Like a rich merchant's wife, for instance.
21 February 2011 2:22PM
Wasn't she originally depicted with a moustache?
21 February 2011 2:28PM
Excellent article with Germaine on her usual good form.
Maybe we can look forward to her thoughts on the Mary Kelly exhibition at Manchester's Whitworth? An artist making front pages while Tracey Emin was still at school and saying a lot more in the process. I've always wanted to see Kelly's Post-Partum Document and will be doing so later this week.
21 February 2011 4:04PM
I prefer Caravaggio
If your going to be a renaissance painter you might as well be as mad a box of murderously psychopathic frogs.
21 February 2011 5:10PM
It's a painting of Dan Brown in Drag?
21 February 2011 5:26PM
This discussion always reminds me of the fabulous song "All Around The World" by Little Willie John:
If I don't love you, baby, Grits ain't groceries Eggs ain't poultry And Mona Lisa was a man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u00ytxRIZDk
21 February 2011 8:07PM
he might as well,Why the fuss? Thailand is full of ladyboys.
21 February 2011 8:13PM
Many artists use/d one model for all of the 'characters' in their paintings - just convenience. Easier to change the hair style than the model.
21 February 2011 8:18PM
The hairdo? Mona Liso has less hair than the daughter of madonna.
She had that naughtie gesture.If it was for the hair She or he might have considered extensions.
22 February 2011 9:16AM
All the talk of genius aside, as a reneissance artist Michaelangelos work is by far the more beautiful, the elegant, the skillful. Apparently then as now, Da Vinci just has the name Da Vinci - all one needs to ensure an eternity of American/Japanese tourists gawping at his work through camera lenses...
23 February 2011 12:11AM
How many experts does it take to prove Mona Lisa was not a man with implants?
Possibly the same number of "feminists" who have failed the women they purport to represent.
You have failed to achieve the provision of the appropriate number of toilets in public places.
In most venues, theatres , airports etc. we have the sad sight of cross legged women shuffling gamely along to hopefully not embarrass themselves before the play resumes, the plane takes off.........
"Women will never be free when they queue up to pee"
Priorities!!!!! forget scoring minor points on art history.
23 February 2011 6:27AM
Ms Greer's comment of "no call for further speculation" on the identity is both correct in the first meaning of that word, as to unsubstantiated and erroneous speculation, as in the latest "Salai" claim or the earlier "Leonardo in Drag" theories, etc., yet wrong to presume that more definitive evidence of the actual identity of that so called "Mona Lisa" painting which now hangs at the Louvre does not exist. In fact the subject of that Louvre painting is not "Lisa Gherardini ",(Giocondo) or "Jaconde". Her actual identity will be shown by actual visual evidence, from Leonardo's own hand, to be another sitter. This will be revealled
as part of a forthcoming 40 year research project, now in preparation to be published in book form, together with revelations of his unknown working methods and lost works, in coming months. It will finally and definitively resolve this enigma once and for all. Leonardo's evidence will prove irrefutable.
Yes, there was another painting by Leonardo with Lisa Gherardini as its sitter, which may still be extant, but it is not the Louvre painting. Thank you.