The Mona Lisa is sometimes posited as being Leonardo Da Vinci's greatest
work ...
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| The Mona Lisa |
..... but actually its a rather small, and faded image of a rather unattractive woman by our current Western standards of white beauty.
Now its not generally known that there is in fact apparently at least one other painted version of the same female model, that is not only in some opinions, more attractive, but which at the very least came of his workshop studio, and very possibly is the painting that Leonardo himself would have preferred to have been remembered for of the two versions.
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| The Other Mona Lisa |
The 'other Mona Lisa' is currently known as the 'Isleworth Mona Lisa,' and was bought by an Englishman from Italy to England in the 1780's, and ended up in a country house in Somerset for at least a century, before the English art connoisseur Hugh Blaker acquired and displayed it, in 1913.
The debate has since raged as to how much of the Isleworth version painting is purely Leonardo (such as the hands and face), and what was his workshop studio assistant's. But I would like to point out that most painters of that era had workshop studio assistants, who very often painted parts of their works, and that the accepted version of the painting in the Louvre, likely won't have been 100 per cent painted by Leonardo either. So you might as well ask how much of that version was Leonardo, and how much was his assistants?
One could even argue that as the Louvre version is the older faced model, its just as likely to be a copy of the original earlier version, and it was this version which was cobbled together by his assistants, with a few final touches from Leonardo himself, and fobbed off to the French court for a fast buck. Leonardo was notorious for not finishing works, and it would have suited him to get money for very little effort.
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| Prado Version Mona Lisa (attributed to a pupil) |
But it doesn't end there .... there is another contemporary copy version of the painting, which hangs in the Prado museum in Madrid, Spain. But this painting is wholly attributed as entirely a copy of the Louvre version of the Mona Lisa, painted by someone (a pupil) in his workshop studio studio (probably at the same time), and as the earliest copy. Its what the Louvre version probably should look like, as it has survived the ages in far better condition than the original by Leonardo.
Anyway, now you have seen all versions, and I leave it to you to form your own opinions.
Interesting that although the subject is the same, the backgrounds are different. Is there a code hidden in all these backgrounds?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe they simply reflect where each version was painted? Thanks for the comment.
DeleteLisa del Giocondo of the Gherardini family of Florence was a plump housewife of a cloth merchant called Franchisco del Gioconde and was living in a Florantine street called the Via della Stouffa. In France 'La Giaconde', In Italy 'La Giacondo' but in the rest of the world 'Mona Lisa'. Her real name is Madonna Lisa but was shortened to Mona Lisa .... as for her smile, its not unique, Leonardo da Vinci used that stock smile in all his later female pictures.
ReplyDeleteHer real mystery is, why hasn't she got any eyebrows?
Do you know what, I had never consciously thought about her lack of eyebrows. I guess that I just took it as some fashion thing, but now I think on it, other female paintings of the period including by Da Vinci, do have eyebrows, so I guess it is a mystery. Thanks for the comment.
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