Is there another Mona Lisa?
One of the most intriguing controversies surrounding the Mona Lisa is the question of whether Leonardo painted more than one portrait of Lisa Gherardini. This week PBS explores this tantalizing topic in a new episode of its popular “Secrets of the Dead” series.
According to the two-Mona Lisa theory, Leonardo may have painted Lisa's face and parts of her figure, leaving assistants to finish the rest. He may have presented this work to Lisa and her husband Francesco del Giocondo, who had commissioned a portrait of his wife.
In 1584, in his Treatise on Painting, the Florentine artist and chronicler Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, an acquaintance of Leonardo’s long-time secretary, wrote that “the two most beautiful and important portraits by Leonardo are the Mona Lisa and the Gioconda.”
We know that one of these works ended up in the Louvre. If it existed, where did the other one go?
Great Britain is one guess, although no one can supply the when, where and how of its transport. In 1913 a certain Earl Brownlow in Somerset discretely let it be known that he might be willing to part with a purported Leonardo in his family’s possession.
Hugh Blaker (1873-1936), a British painter and art dealer searching for the almost mythical “second” Mona Lisa, was eager to see it. As soon as he beheld the portrait, Blaker later reported, he was sure it was a Leonardo.
Heart pounding, he negotiated its purchase “for a modest sum.” The art dealer brought the prized work to his home and studio in Isleworth, just outside London, where it became known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa.
“The Mona Lisa is perfectly beautiful,” Blaker wrote to his sister. “ I am sure it was done in Leonardo’s studio before the Louvre picture was finished … it is NOT A COPY (sic) as we understand the term … It is indeed a capture.”
Despite endorsements from some leading experts, all based on “connoiseurship,” or subjective appraisal, Blaker never succeeded in establishing the portrait as a genuine Leonardo.
In 1936, a British art enthusiast, Henry F. Pulitzer, took one glance at the painting and lost his heart. Through what he called “a most improbable combination of circumstances,” he managed to purchase the Isleworth Mona Lisa in the 1960s.
Pulitzer hung the painting in his drawing room and, according to a companion, “practically lived in that room, even had his meals there, just so he could be with his Mona Lisa.” After his death, his adored Lisa was locked away in a bank vault in Switzerland.
In recent years the privately funded Mona Lisa Foundation in Zurich has supported research on the painting it has renamed the Earlier Version. Art sleuths using cutting-edge technology have attempted to prove what long seemed unprovable: that Leonardo painted this portrait as well as the Louvre’s grande dame.
Their findings are among the “secrets of the dead” that PBS investigates this week. Check your local listings for a station and air time. I will certainly be tuning in!
Dianne Hales is the author of MONA LISA: A Life Discovered and La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. Photo of the Earlier Version reprinted with permission from the Mona Lisa Foundation.
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