Vanished Smile (17 page)

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.
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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 and 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,
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da Vinci scholars remain divided. What is indisputable truth to one expert is dubious evidence to another.

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.

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.”
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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 history. 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,
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registered the first precise description of Mona Lisa. It is clear from his words that she had already received the disastrous varnishing:

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.”

With these few exceptions, scant notice was taken of Mona Lisa until Napoleon arrived on the scene. By then the Louvre was in its third incarnation. The fortress turned royal palace was reconfigured as a museum during the Revolution. The idea of a public showcase to display the royal collection originated with Louis XVI. The ambitious plan seemed fitting for the birthplace of the Enlightenment, but the Revolution intervened.

The
sans culottes
seized the idea as they seized the royal family. The revolutionaries would accomplish what three hundred years of Valois and Bourbons had failed to do: complete the Louvre palace and give the king's collection to the people. The change from palace to public space was a revolutionary act and an inspired public relations coup, if somewhat late in coming. Royal collections in Austria and Germany, the Vatican, the Quirinale Palace in Rome,
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the Escorial in
Madrid, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg had already opened their doors to the public, although visitors to the Hermitage had to arrive in full dress because they were entering the czar's house.