Vanished Smile (15 page)

LEONARDO DRIVING MONA LISA Dating from the time of the theft, this amusing postcard of Leonardo driving Mona Lisa reflects the popular belief that the creator had fallen in love with his creation. (Courtesy of Musée de la Carte Postale, Antibes, France)

LEONARDO WROTE THAT
a woman should be painted in a demure position, her head lowered and inclined to one side, her eyes cast down modestly so that her gaze never meets the viewer. Then he painted Mona Lisa.

Like a Prometheus, he seemed to breathe life into panel and pigment. While the criminal act was shocking, it seemed almost inevitable. Mona Lisa's presence is so real, her gaze so personal, that no frames could contain her indefinitely. She is too much a woman, too sensual, too vibrant, and it seemed only a matter of time, albeit 109 years, before she moved on.

Who was Mona Lisa, and what was in Leonardo's mind when he painted her? Was she an actual woman who sat for her portrait or a fiction of the painter's imagination? We know from his pupil and secretary Francesco Melzi that Leonardo never threw away a drawing or a page of writing, and he filled thousands of pages with sketches and notes. Yet there is no trace of Mona Lisa in his notebooks—no preliminary studies of her, not a mention, not a jotting. No contracts or bills in the records of the period mention a commission.

Like most Renaissance works, the painting is unsigned, undated, and untitled, and what historical details we have are contradictory. Leonardo, who relished puns and puzzles, left no clue to her identity except her smile. Art historians have been trying to read her body language for centuries. Without
props to explain her, she becomes her own narrative, a psychological study as much as an oil painting.

In 1550 the Florentine artist and author Giorgio Vasari christened the painting “Monna Lisa,” which in English translation became Mona Lisa. It may be the most famous misspelling in history. Vasari is the richest but not always the most reliable contemporary source on the Renaissance art world. In his book
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
, he identified the sitter as Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant in Florence.

According to Vasari, Mona Lisa's story began in the wine country of Tuscany, the year after the young Leonardo da Vinci received his first commission. In 1478 the Signoria, the governing authority of Florence, advanced the twenty-six-year-old artist twenty-five gold florins to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of San Bernardo in Palazzo Vecchio. Leonardo never delivered the work, establishing a precedent that would dog his reputation, but the following year, a successful delivery was made that in retrospect was momentous.

On the fifteenth of June 1479, in the vineyards of Chianti, purple grapes fattening on the vine, in a picturesque farmhouse that is now a picturesque tourist inn called Vignamaggio, a daughter was born to Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini and his third wife. Since the first two Signore Gherardinis had died in childbirth, the successful delivery of a healthy child was a cause for rejoicing. Antonmaria, a farmer of modest means, named the baby Lisa. Even in Chianti-soaked moments, he could never have dreamed that a young painter from a neighboring town would make her immortal.

Born on April 15, 1452, near the village of Vinci, Leonardo was the product of a romp in the hay between Piero da Vinci and a peasant girl on his father's estate. Like all of Chianti, Vinci belonged to the city-state of Florence, ruled by the Medici, a banking family that had become a political dynasty.
Eventually, Ser Piero would settle down in Florence and become a prominent notary, roughly equivalent to an attorney today.

The Ten Commandments notwithstanding, contemporary society attached no stigma to illegitimacy. Among the eminent bastards of the age were princes, cardinals, and at least one pope, the Medici Clement VII. Raised in his father's house, Leonardo grew up to be a Renaissance Adonis, tall and broad-shouldered with a lithe, athletic build. According to an anonymous contemporary biographer known as Anonimo Gaddiano,
^∗1
he had “a beautiful head of hair, curled and carefully combed in golden ringlets that fell to the middle of his chest.” “At a time when long mantles were fashionable,” he dressed in knee-length rose-colored velvet tunics that showed off his legs. Gifted in every art and possessed of an eclectic, endlessly curious mind, Leonardo did not blend into the landscape.

Renaissance artists were traveling salesmen, brushes and chisels for hire, traveling from city-state to city-state, competing for commissions. No longer bound to a specific guild as they had been in the Middle Ages, artists were independent contractors. Packing their pigments and saddling their horses, they shuttled from prince to prelate. Painting on canvas was just coming into vogue. (Michelangelo dismissed it as a pastime for dilettantes.) Most paintings were murals, and artists went wherever the work was, moving from town to town, from Florence to Mantua, Perugia to Milan, Urbino to Rome, and beyond. The best were sought after and liberally paid. Their reputation was spread by envoys, ambassadors, and warring princes who came to Italy for conquest and found culture and a new art.

After apprenticing in the workshop of the Florentine sculptor and painter Andréa del Verrocchio, Leonardo left the
humanist cradle of Florence for the sinister court of Ludovico Sforza, the prince of Milan who was known as
il Moro
—the Moor—because of his dark mien and brooding disposition.

Leonardo, whose title was
ingeniarius ducalis
—the duke's inventor—thrived at the Sforza court. Far from being the rebel of myth, he was a skilled courtier and something of a dandy, as adept at the art of flattery as he was at everything else. According to Paolo Giovio, his biographer and a personal acquaintance, he was “the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.” He was “the delight of the entire court… by nature very courteous, cultivated and generous, and his face was extraordinarily beautiful.”

Leonardo's concern was the knowable, not the inexorable. Wrestling with the eternal questions was left to his rival Michelangelo, twenty-two years younger. An 1861 commentary on the Renaissance masters described Michelangelo as an anguished modern titan and Leonardo as the cool observer without serious vices or great virtues who “never penetrated so far as the moral world … never knew the storms of sentiment and the heart where lightning is divine light, and thunder Sacréd words.”
^∗2

“To me,” Leonardo wrote, “it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses—
ribelli ad essi sensi
—such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention.”

What today we see as the intellectual flights of a genius who was centuries ahead of his time are often the efforts of a dedicated
empiricist to understand what he had observed. From a close observation of nature and an exhaustive recording of what he saw, Leonardo analyzed how things worked, then he used that knowledge to create “visual fictions.” Painting is poetry that is seen, Leonardo said, and like the poet, the painter must compose “fictions that express great things.” Leonardo applied art to science and science to art. His studies of the muscles that move to form a smile, the dilation of the pupils in response to light, and the flow of water are evidenced in Mona Lisa.

While Leonardo ventured off to Milan, Lisa Gherardini stayed close to home. She must have been pretty and precocious, because just before her sixteenth birthday, she vaulted up the social ladder, marrying Francesco del Giocondo, a thirty-five-year-old widower with an infant son. To seal the marriage contract, her father gave Francesco a farm that he owned on a ridge of hills in Poggio between Florence and Siena, and one hundred seventy gold florins.

Francesco was quite a catch, especially for a girl with such a modest dowry. (Francesco's four sisters each had a dowry of one thousand florins.) His first wife, Camilla Rucellai, had belonged to a leading Florentine family, and Francesco was described in the marriage contract as
civis et mercator
, a citizen and merchant. By 1503, when Lisa probably met Leonardo for the first time, the Giocondos were living in a fashionable new house on Via della Stufa with their growing family—Bartolomeo, Piero, and the baby Andréa. A daughter Camilla, named for Bartolomeo's mother, the first Signora Giocondo, had died four years before.

Leonardo's circumstances were not as easy. In 1499 the French had wrested Milan from the Sforzas. Leonardo remained to complete his fresco of the Last Supper, then he
returned to Florence. At the Sforza court, he had been the star attraction for almost twenty years. When he returned to Florence, he faced both professional contenders and political confusion.

Leonardo had left the city as a young man in the glory days of Lorenzo the Magnificent, when the Renaissance was in full flower. Now he was almost fifty. Lorenzo was dead, his disappointing sons had been run out of town, and the Renaissance was migrating south. By 1503, artists were flocking to Rome to work for the formidable new pope and patron, Julius II, and younger artists were challenging Leonardo's preeminence. Michelangelo Buonarroti, just turning thirty, was completing a colossal
David
, and the even younger Raphael Sanzio, a precocious talent, was absorbing the art of his elders, eager to outshine them. No longer the unchallenged master, his finances strained, Leonardo da Vinci was looking for work.

His father, Ser Piero, by then an eminent notary and well connected, probably wrangled a commission for his cash-poor son. Ser Piero had recently settled a financial dispute for a wealthy silk merchant, and sometime during that unsettled decade, Leonardo began a portrait of the merchant's wife, Lisa.

ALTHOUGH THE EXACT DATE
remains in dispute, Leonardo probably began to paint Mona Lisa in the winter of 1503. He spent that February and March in Florence. Raphael was also in the city, and he must have seen the unfinished work, because he copied Mona Lisa's pose for his own portrait of a Florentine woman, Maddalena Doni, completed in 1504. New evidence confirms the year.

In the 1500s, the art world was fiercely competitive. Artists inspired and learned from one another, borrowing, copying, and sometimes stealing ideas. From the first glimpse on Leonardo's easel, Mona Lisa caused a stir. She was his last-known work, and purely as a technical achievement, she was a revelation. Before Mona Lisa, few portraits went beyond a physical likeness. Most seemed static and impassive, the body cut off, just the head and shoulders depicted. Mona Lisa is painted at eye level and almost life-size, both disconcertingly real and transcendent.

Many artists made detailed studies and drew the outline of their paintings on the canvas or panel before they began to paint. X-rays reveal no underlying drawing and few pentimenti, false starts, or adjustments. Leonardo painted Mona Lisa directly, changing only the placement of the hands and fingers.

She sits on a loggia, or balcony, in a
contrapposto
position, her body angled and her face turned out, creating the arresting impression that she is looking directly at the viewer. Behind her is a low wall, and beyond that, a desolate landscape. Not a leaf, not an animal track to suggest life. Framing her on either side is a partial column that appears cropped. Since the columns are painted over the landscape, Leonardo probably added them toward the end, but what may have been an afterthought became a source of conjecture among art historians. They argued for years that Mona Lisa was originally a larger work with full columns and that the painting was cut down at some point, perhaps to fit a frame. Recent scientific studies using radiography and three-dimensional digitization should end the debate: Leonardo painted only partial columns. The original dimensions of the panel are clear, although the back was planed at some point, reducing the thickness of the original wood.

In the early 1500s, oil painting was a new medium, just beginning to replace tempera, and it involved considerable trial and error. Painters did not know how their methods and materials would stand up over time. If the primer was too thin, the painting would eventually deteriorate. If it was painted on, say, a red ground, the colors would darken.

Leonardo was always experimenting. To paint Mona Lisa, he took a delicate technique often used in watercolors, called
sfumato
, a “vanishing into smoke,” and applied it to oils. Using fine silk brushes to eliminate any trace of individual strokes, he applied very thin successive layers of paint and glazes so fine as to be almost evanescent. Leonardo made Mona Lisa a study in chiaroscuro—a painting of light and shadow. Her image is soft and blurred around the edges like a photograph slightly out of focus.

The
contrapposto
position, the hallucinatory background, and the
sfumato
technique were startling innovations in 1503. Vasari called her “revolutionary” and believed that Leonardo had endowed her with extraordinary powers of enchantment.

She is a strange painting—a juxtaposition of extremes. A woman pregnant with possibility and ambiguity is set against a barren world, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. Like the woman, the background may be real or imaginary, but the two sides are not aligned. If the figure were removed, like poorly hung wallpaper, the edges would not match.

Adding to the strangeness, the figure and the landscape have distinct perspectives. She is seen vertically at eye level, but the background is an aerial view. Instead of creating a confused or disjointed effect, the double vision is strangely evocative, suggesting almost an optical illusion that enhances the mystique. What is a beautiful young woman doing in such a desolate place? She has a hint of décollétage, a suggestion of spreading hips, the result of childbirth, most likely. Although it is barely discernible with the naked eye, recent digital studies
suggest that she is wearing a
guarnella
, a transparent netting that women of the Renaissance wore over their dresses when they were pregnant. Lisa del Giocondo was not pregnant in 1503, but from the outset, Leonardo's intention seemed more than simply fulfilling a routine commission to render a particular likeness.