Here comes yet another news story about Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Except this Mona painting isn’t Leonardo’s. And if you compare digitals of both Mona paintings and take into account new information about the non-Leonardo, you might say as I do that the non-Leonardo is a better likeness of the model - Lisa Gherardini, the 24-year-old wife of a Florentine silk merchant.
How, you may ask, can anyone know what Mona Lisa actually looked like? For the answer, you need the new information.
The non-Leonardo Mona (let’s call it Mona 2), owned by Madrid’s Prado and long deemed a replica made after Leonardo’s death, bears a black background with no sign of Leonardo’s bounteous Tuscan landscape.
But after examining Mona 2 with infrared technology recently, Prado conservators not only found the Tuscan landscape sitting under the black paint, but they also discovered a drawing under the paint that matches the under-drawing in the Leonardo painting – down to changes in the composition as the painting developed.
Explaining the match, Alison Wright, a specialist in Italian art at University College London has said, “It was a matter of Leonardo’s students recording his every movement.”
Explaining the black over-paint, Prado’s curator Miguel Falomi has said that it was probably added in the mid-17th century to conform to other portraits of the time set against dark backgrounds.
And to hear Prado’s technical specialist Ana Gonzalez Mozo describe Mona 2 as “a high quality work,” Leonardo may even have had a hand in painting it.
The obvious upshot of the under-drawing discovery is that both portraits were drawn/painted at the same time and side by side. And according to Bruno Mottin, chief conservator at the Centre de Recheche et de Restauration des Musee de France, Leonardo’s likely painting partner was Andrea Salai., one of his favorite apprentices for more than two decades.
The Louvre, which owns Leonardo’s Mona, agrees with the Prado’s findings and will show Mona 2 together with Leonardo’s Mona March29 to June 25.
So why do I think Mona 2 is the better likeness? For one thing, the eyebrows in Mona 2 are more marked than in Leonardo’s Mona, leading me to think that Leonardo retouched reality and tweezed Lisa Gherardini’s eyebrows and Salai didn’t. What’s more, the famous smile reaches to the eyes in Mona 2, while the smile in Leonardo’s Mona is so controlled that the eyes seem never to have gotten the message. In that way, the state of mind in Mona 2 seems more convincing. As well, the gown in Mona 2 is redder, when tends to enliven her more. Which makes sense. After all, Lisa was only 24.
Of course, Leonardo wasn’t the only painter with apprentices whose work is confused with their teacher. I’m thinking of Peter Paul Rubens’ epic “Triumph of the Eucharist” series, held by the Ringling Museum, which freely acknowledges that Rubens apprentices helped him paint it.
But when it comes to Rubens’ self-portrait with his wife Isabella Brandt, called “Pausias and Glycera,” also held at the Ringling Museum, I submit that Rubens had nothing to do with it - particularly the portrayal of Isabella.
Yes, the gesture of Pausias, a mythological artist famed for his love for Glycera, with his left arm on her shoulder, describes Rubens’ well-known devotion to his wife.
Here are some other well-known facts about Rubens. Passionate about painting real people, he used the women of his two marriages as models, Isabella and after she died, Helene Fourment, who was related to Isabella. And both women had the same round face, large, lidded eyes, and small mouths.
You can see these features in the face of all of Rubens’ paintings of women. In fact, you can see this clearly by comparing Isabella in Rubens’ famous “Rubens and Isabella in a Honeysuckle Bower,” owned by Alte Pinakothek, Munichwith Helene in Rubens’ equally famous portrait “Helene Fourment in a Fur Wrap.”
You can’t see such features in Isabella in “Pausias and Glycera.”
And unless some infrared technology finds an under-painting of Isabella with these features in this painting, I think it’s fair to say that Rubens didn’t paint it.
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