Did Leonardo create a Topless Mona Lisa?
It is always a bit baffling to see how any speculation about Leonardo da Vinci can generate headlines around the world. It shows how this elusive artist, who lived 500 years ago, can still stir our imagination. So it was last week, when the Arts page of The New York Times breathlessly reported that Leonardo da Vinci may have drawn a nude portrait of the Mona Lisa. How shocking!
As always, the real story is quite different, and a great deal less sensational — though no less intriguing. That nude versions of the Mona Lisa exist has been known for centuries. The theme is commonly referred to as Monna Vanna, after a character in Dante Alighieri’s love poem La Vita Nuova. In this case, it is probably a mischievous interpretation of the Mona Lisa theme by Leonardo’s pupil and longtime companion Salaì, poking fun at what was rapidly becoming a venerable icon after Leonardo’s departure to France.
That the Monna Vanna has very little to do with the model who sat for Leonardo’s original portrait — Lisa del Giocondo, a prim and proper Florentine housewife, and spouse of a wealthy silk merchant — is obvious to anyone who has only a passing understanding of Leonardo’s art. The ¾ position of the Mona Lisa has been replaced with a nearly profile view.
What’s more, the muscular left arm, the thick neck, and the hint of an Adam’s apple in this drawing all suggest that the model was a man, rather than a woman, and that the breasts were added later. This was not unusual in the Renaissance. Michelangelo, too, used male models for his depiction of women, not only in his Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, but also for the sculpted figures of Night and Day in the Medici Chapel in Florence.
The heavy lidded eyes and murky sfumato of the face, as well as the poor execution of the hands, make it very difficult to believe that this could be a Leonardo autograph. That any expert could advance that notion with a straight face is a mystery to me, except for the obvious desire to promote the upcoming exhibition at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, where the drawing has been quietly residing since 1862.
It is generally accepted that Salaì executed an oil painting on the Monna Vanna theme, which makes it plausible that this drawing may have been a preparatory study — it has all the hallmarks of Salaì’s technically accomplished but rather dry and unimaginative style. And as it turns out, the Monna Vanna was wildly successful. There are, by some estimates, around thirty copies of this nude portrait in circulation, some good, and some very bad.
A typical example is the Monna Vanna version that I saw in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg last year. In fact, the popularity of this topless portrait extended well into the 19th century, when Maurice Maeterlink wrote a play, Monna Vanna, which in turn was turned into opera treatments by three (!) different composers, including Sergei Rachmaninoff. Needless to say, the belle époque went wild over this portrait. That popularity extended into the 20th century, when it inspired no less than three silent films.
So the idea that anything about this drawing, or the theme of Monna Vanna, is in any sense “new” is laughable. That it continues to fascinate us, however, is certainly beyond question.
