Move over, Salvator Mundi. That holy image, marketed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450.3m (£335m) six years ago and holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction – in spite of scepticism about its authorship, quality and history. Now there is potentially an even more sellable Leonardo doing the rounds, with similarly questionable claims being made as it goes on public view in Turin. Although it is not currently for sale, it’s hard not to believe that the private owners aren’t sorely tempted. Is this painting’s exhibition in Italy the start of a campaign that will end in Leonardo beating his own world record?
Salvator Mundi became known as “the male Mona Lisa”, lending it the glamour of Leonardo’s most well-known work. But the Mona Lisa Foundation in Zurich, which is championing the painting showing in Turin on behalf of its anonymous owners, is suggesting that it is the original Mona Lisa. It argues that it’s the first version of the famous painting, depicting a younger Lisa than the one Leonardo worked on all his life and had with him at the chateau of Amboise where he spent his last years, and which now attracts an unending selfie-snatching crowd in the Louvre.
What a sensation! The. Original. Mona. Lisa. The fascination of the Mona Lisa is as impossible to deny as it is difficult to explain. Some date its magnetic fame from its theft in 1911, which hit the headlines worldwide. But that is not when it became iconic. People were already obsessing about the artwork in the 19th century when the critic Walter Pater raved that Lisa in her green, misty setting is some kind of sexy underwater “vampire”. And the painting was renowned across Europe centuries before that when the 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari enthused that the Mona Lisa seemed to have a pulse.
So have the Mona Lisa fans been adoring the wrong painting for the last five centuries? Should they really be worshipping the “Isleworth Mona Lisa”, as it’s been pretentiously nicknamed, because it was previously owned by an art dealer there? (And does the Swiss foundation know Isleworth is a London suburb and not a fairytale castle?)
In my view, there isn’t a chance in hell that this is a Leonardo. The claims being made for the Isleworth Mona Lisa seem implausible.
It seems inconceivable to me that the most subtle, observant and relentlessly patient of artists would have produced such a lousy, lackadaisical image of a human face. Leonardo did great portraits of women before he even started the Mona Lisa, and in each one he created a haunting inner presence: the pale melancholy of Ginevra de’ Benci; the self-possessed energy of Cecilia Gallerani. The so-called Isleworth Mona Lisa is, by contrast, completely lacking in personality. Her grin looks inane and fixed, unlike the true Mona Lisa’s deeply studied smile which reflects Leonardo’s anatomical dissections of human facial muscles, right down to the lips.
Even the shape of this Mona Lisa’s face seems wrong – not just because it differs from the Louvre painting but because it doesn’t have the classical proportions or fleshy reality that Renaissance artists aimed for. Has it been carbon-dated? It looks like a modern face, though presumably it is a copy done sometime between the 1500s and the 1700s when it is said to have reached Britain. But it’s a bad copy. Or a deliberate fake.
The difference in facial appearance, says the Swiss foundation, is that the Isleworth Mona Lisa depicts its subject when she was young. It claims to have proof that Leonardo did two versions of his masterpiece and this is the first, begun in Florence in 1503.
The history it is presenting to “prove” this is questionable. The Mona Lisa is a very well-documented painting, and those documents don’t point to the existence of two paintings; just one, which Leonardo worked on for many years.
Vasari said Leonardo started it in Florence and the subject is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. In 2005, a note was found in a book in Heidelberg University’s library that proves him right: a Florentine government employee wrote in 1503 that Leonardo was working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. Was this the Isleworth Mona Lisa or the Louvre one?
The evidence points to it being the boring old version that’s in the Louvre. For the Mona Lisa Foundation’s argument omits something crucial about this source. It specifically emphasises that Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa is unfinished – and doesn’t look like being finished any time soon.
This account of Leonardo making a start and leaving it on his easel while he worked on his inventions matches the creation of the Louvre’s Mona Lisa, which X-rays and other scientific imaging show was built up in a complex, slow way: when Leonardo first painted Lisa, she didn’t even smile.
The painting’s promoters also contend that a drawing of a woman between two pillars by Raphael is a copy of the Isleworth Mona Lisa. However, when Leonardo started his portrait in 1503, it was an instant sensation. Raphael saw it in Leonardo’s workshop and immediately started drawing and painting his own variations on it. This is a drawing for one of those versions in which he portrays a woman in the fashionable Mona Lisa pose.
Does any of this matter? Not really. It is magical that an artist who died in 1519 can generate this much fuss. I very much doubt the owners will end up selling what looks like a poor copy as an authentic Leonardo. But even if it does become recognised as the young Mona Lisa out of some chaotic mixture of hype, cynicism and romance, it won’t harm Leonardo.
His paintings are portals into his astonishing mental universe, whose true treasures are in his notebooks. This was a human being who understood fossils and geological time, who dissected and drew our inner landscapes and saw that our very natures would one day be remade by technology.
As for the Mona Lisa – Leonardo himself started the fictions that swirl around his masterpiece. When a group of ecclesiastical travellers visited him at Amboise near the end of his life, they were told a cock-and-bull story about the woman on his easel. Leonardo claimed the Mona Lisa was commissioned by Giuliano de’ Medici – the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent – as a portrait of his mistress. Why? It was a good story, combining the snob appeal of the Medici name plus a sexy aura of secret love. Certainly better than simply saying she was a respectable middle-class Florentine.
Leonardo, among all his other brilliances, knew how to sell art and himself. That’s how he ended up living in a free chateau with his friends at the expense of the king of France. If he saw this latest fuss about his work, he would probably lend his support to the dubious Isleworth Mona Lisa – for a cut of the auction price.
• Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance by Jonathan Jones is published by Thames and Hudson, £30. To order a copy for £26.40, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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