Vanished Smile (16 page)

Financial records suggest that he agreed to paint the silk merchant's wife solely for financial gain. Portraiture may not have appealed to him. He had done only a few others, with significant time spans between them, and he had avoided numerous requests. Isabella d'Este, the Marquise of Mantua and the sister-in-law of his longtime patron Ludovico Sforza, repeatedly asked Leonardo to paint her portrait. She was arguably the most powerful and interesting woman of her time, and not easily denied. Why did Leonardo put off Isabella d'Este but agree to paint a sweet though undistinguished young matron?

Mona Lisa was a departure for him. In his other portraits of privileged women, the subjects are dressed for posterity. Ginevra de’ Benci has the curled hair and laced bodice of an upper-class Florentine.
Lady with an Ermine
is clearly identifiable as a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, probably Cecilia Gallerani. The ermine was an emblem of
il Mow
, and the headband and double necklace were fashionable in the Sforza court.

Mona Lisa wears no hint of rank, wealth, or fashion. She would never win the golden apple. Her forehead is too broad, her lips too thin, her figure less than Greek. She is certainly not a fashion plate. Her dress is nondescript, the color and design devoid of style. Leonardo stripped her of all adornments. He allowed her none of the artifice that women since ancient times have employed to enhance their allure. She herself—not her accoutrements—fascinates.

If Mona Lisa is not the most beautiful, fashionable, or glamorous woman, she is the most beguiling. It is the immediacy of
the image—caught in a moment, like the frame of a film—that enthralls. She touches without words, offering not a kiss or a caress but the anticipation. She catches us looking at her, and like a woman surprised in the bath, the embarrassment is ours, not hers. If we try to look away, she follows us and will not let go.

Art historians suggest that Mona Lisa evolved over time from an individual to an archetype—with all the attributes of Eve before and after the fall. But the painting suggests the opposite. Consider the dress. It is dull and drab. A border of
vinci
, or knots—a device that recurs like a doodle in the artist's notebooks—delineates the neckline. Otherwise, the dress is as plain as a nun's habit.

Lisa's husband showered her with silk dresses, veils, and jewels. Her wardrobe and jewelry were of sufficient value to be noted in his will. Would a pretty young woman with a wealthy husband and an armoire full of the finest silks—especially one who had not grown up with such luxury, being painted for the first time by a celebrated artist—choose a drab brownish dress to wear and no jewelry? Would any woman?

Lisa's portrait would hang on the wall of her new house for all to admire. She would want to look her most beautiful. She probably spent hours trying on one dress after another before settling on the perfect one, then choosing jewelry to complement it. Leonardo himself dressed elegantly. By his own account, “The painter sits before his work, perfectly at his ease and well-dressed, and moves a very light brush dipped in delicate color; and he adorns himself with whatever clothes he pleases.”

Perhaps Lisa's original choice was fuchsia silk and flattering, and the painter insisted she change into her plainest dress. Leonardo da Vinci was a charismatic personality and more than twice her age. Not wanting to offend him, she would have acquiesced with secret reluctance. She was only in her twenties,
a young mother, new to the more aristocratic society of the city, newly moved to a fancy house, and perhaps unsure of herself. She may have lacked the confidence, or been too polite, to protest. But her disappointment must have been transparent, because Leonardo went to great lengths to dispel her gloom. He brought in an orchestra of musicians to cheer her, Vasari says, yet the most Mona Lisa could muster was the trace of a smile.

It must have been a galling time for Leonardo. Donate Bramante, his old friend and collaborator from the Milan days, was in Rome building the monumental new Basilica of St. Peter. His young challengers were also being called to the Vatican—Michelangelo to sculpt a massive tomb for Pope Julius and later to paint the Sistine ceiling, Raphael to fresco the rooms of the Papal Palace. While they were in Rome becoming immortal, Leonardo was painting the young Signora del Giocondo. He would not make it a simple portrait.

Mona Lisa may have been a conscious bid for immortality—Leonardo setting out purposefully to conjure from shadow and light a woman who would exert a fatal attraction over men. He believed that he possessed the power. In his notes on painting, he wrote:

Some believe that Leonardo succeeded so well, he seduced himself. Whatever his intention, Mona Lisa is a continuum of desire. History has proved no defense against her, or age, fading grace, or darkening palette.

By pure coincidence, a few days after the theft, the American publisher Thomas Y. Crowell published the English translation of a journal purportedly kept by the painter. The dilapidated manuscript, allegedly discovered in a Renaissance palace in Florence, recounted his romance with his Gioconda.
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Petrarch had his Laura, Dante his Beatrice, and, Romantics liked to imagine, da Vinci had his Mona Lisa. Leonardo was cast as Pygmalion and Mona Lisa as his Galatea. After she vanished, a popular postcard pictured Mona Lisa returning to town in a carriage driven by Leonardo.

Today we know from the sophisticated tests conducted at the Louvre that Leonardo painted Mona Lisa's heart at the very center of the composition and made it the most luminous point.

MONA LISA TOOK LEONARDO
years to achieve, as long as it took Michelangelo to fresco the Sistine ceiling. For each square yard Michelangelo covered, Leonardo painted about an inch. He was legendary for jumping from project to project and completing few of them. As Vasari wrote, “His knowledge of art, indeed, prevented him from finishing many things which he had begun, for he felt that his hand would be unable
to realize the perfect creations of his imagination, as his mind formed such difficult, subtle and marvelous conceptions that his hands, skilful as they were, could never have expressed them.”

But Leonardo painted Mona Lisa intermittently for four years and carried her with him until the end of his life. She must have been with him in 1515 when he returned to Milan and met Frangois I. Whether it was love at first sight or a gradual seduction, the young French king became infatuated with Mona Lisa.

From Paolo Veronese's panoramic
Wedding Feast at Cana
, Frangois I gazes across the Louvre gallery at the beguiling southern temptress who had captured his fancy so many years before. The destinies of the two have converged at surprising, seemingly random points. Through their centuries-long history together, they shared separation, Réunion, and a sumptuous bath, and now in the Louvre, not one hundred feet apart, they share the home that Frangois transformed from a gloomy medieval fortress into a Renaissance palace.

In Veronese's crowded tableau, the French king sits at a long wedding table where the A-list of sixteenth-century society has gathered to celebrate the marriage of Eleanor of Austria. Frangois occupies the place of honor on the right hand of the bride; Mary Tudor of England is on her left. Others in attendance are Frangois's rival Emperor Charles V; the Ottoman potentate Suleiman I; and the Italian noblewoman, poet, and cherished friend of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna. Wine is flowing, and there is music provided by a singular orchestra of artists. Veronese and his friends have put aside their brushes and taken up assorted instruments. He and Tintoretto are playing the cello. Titian is on the bass, and Jacopo Bassano is playing the flute.

In the fresco, Frangois I appears to be middle-aged, his face and figure thickened but still strong, a man just beyond the prime of life but younger than Leonardo was when prince and painter met for the first time. Leonardo was sixty-three then, and he possessed the aura of mystery that attends genius. Frangois, only twenty-one and new to the throne, was a young Goliath, a strapping seven-foot force of enthusiasm and ambition. What he lacked in looks, he made up for in his exuberant personality.

Like his English contemporary and friend Henry VIII, another young king who lived fast and hard and died spent, Frangois was a true
galant
, a man of immense optimism and appetites. He lusted for beauty in its manifold forms—beautiful art, beautiful architecture, beautiful lovers, beautiful wives. He is famously quoted as saying, “A court without ladies is a springtime without roses.” When he joined the club of European monarchs, he was eager to take on the world—to outconquer and outshine the emperor Charles V,
^∗4
to claim more territory, collect more art, bed more beauties, shoot more boar, and import the best and the brightest talents to France.

Frangois seems like an overgrown boy as he cavorts through history, returning to Italy again and again for art and adventure, conquest and culture. He loved and admired all things Italian. The hunting lodge of Fontainebleau, his favorite palace, had nothing comparable to the large and evocative fresco Leonardo had completed on the refectory wall of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. New to the throne and new to Renaissance art and artists, Frangois was so affected by
The Last Supper
that he wanted to move the entire
wall to France. When that proved impractical, he offered to import its creator instead.

Born in the Florence of the Medici, the Renaissance had moved to Rome in the extraordinary papacy of Julius II. After the pope's death, Frangois aspired to recenter it in Paris. He brought Italian artists to France, turned the Louvre fortress into a palace, and began to collect the art that would become the nucleus of its collection. His most celebrated coup was persuading Leonardo to emigrate.

According to Vasari, “so great was Leonardo's genius … that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease,” yet by 1515 he had endured more than a dozen uncertain years without a secure patron or a stable sinecure. Although the king offered him generous patronage, royal protection, and a chateau in the Loire valley near the royal manor house in Amboise, Leonardo vacillated. While he had a restless mind, he had firm roots in the Italian peninsula. He had spent virtually his entire life between Florence and Milan, a distance of fewer than two hundred miles. His imagination roamed, but never at the expense of personal and professional security. After another unsettled year spent mostly in Rome, Leonardo accepted the king's invitation. He moved to France in the summer of 1516.

Leonardo was accustomed to both adoring disciples and the whims and egos of patron-princes, and in France, he found sanctuary. Frangois gave him the charming manor house, Clos-Lucé. The king welcomed so many Italian artists and visitors to his court that Vasari described Fontainebleau as “almost a new Rome.” Among those who crossed the Alps were Leonardo's old friend Niccolo Machiavelli; the painter Primaticcio; the architect Sebastiano Serlio; and later, the celebrated fabricator and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.

In France, Leonardo was the first among equals. According to Cellini, the king was “extremely taken with his great
virtue. … He believed there had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo.”

IN OCTOBER 1517
, Luigi Cardinal d'Aragona visited France. Wealthy, cultivated, and well connected (his father was the bastard son of the king of Naples, and his cousin was Queen Isabella of Aragon), the cardinal was a quintessential Renaissance prince of the Church, with all that entailed: material riches, intellectual curiosity, a beautiful mistress and daughter, enormous ambition, and an utter absence of scruples. It was rumored that he murdered both his sister, the Duchess of Amalfi, and her husband. The cardinal's European trip combined business and pleasure. He was curious to see the world beyond Italy and eager to gain the support of the rulers of Europe. He had hoped to follow Julius II as pope. Now he was lobbying to be named the king of Naples.

Autumn is beautiful in the Loire valley, and while Cardinal d'Aragona was visiting King Frangois at Fontainebleau, he also stopped in to see Leonardo, who was nearing the end of his work and his life. The cardinal's secretary, Antonio de Beatis, kept an enthusiastic journal of their trip, and he describes the visit in some detail. Leonardo showed them three paintings: a Madonna and child with St. Anne; a young John the Baptist; and a portrait that he called “a certain Florentine lady done from life at the instigation of the late Magnificent Giuliano de' Medici.”

Some thirty years later, in his
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
, Giorgio Vasari wrote: “Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of
Monna Lisa, his wife.” Although he never saw the painting, Vasari rhapsodized over it: