The truth about Mona

5 April 2012

This year may mark the 500th anniversary of a painting that has a not unreasonable claim to have become the most famous in the world: the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci. We are, however, by no means certain of the date of what we see — the first thoughts about the portrait may have been initiated in 1502, but the final surface, the finish by which we judge it, could well be a decade later, later still, according to come experts. For five centuries or so, men have been bewitched, bothered and bewildered by this woman’s enigmatic smile and, until the ingenious Lewis Carroll invented the grin of the disappearing Cheshire Cat, it had no beguiling rival.

"What does it mean?" has been the anguished cry of poets and peasants, philosophers and novelists, "was she another Lucrezia Borgia, or is the smile benign?"

Men ask themselves her age but cannot tell whether she is young and ever virginal, or as old as the hills behind her and a woman of experience; in desperation they draw moustaches on her upper lip and, at their wits’ end, throw themselves from windows. Now, at last, we know the answer — she is pregnant.

This is the assertion of Sherwin Nuland, professor of clinical anatomy at Yale University, and it has been enthusiastically adopted by Alan Yentob, High Panjandrum of Drama, Entertainment and Children’s Television at the BBC, in his current celebration of the life and works of Leonardo. It is perhaps unkind to recall a remark made by Kenneth Clark, the Great Lord of Civilisation, who really knew a thing or two about Leonardo, that "the identity of the Mona Lisa ... will continue pleasantly to occupy the minds of those who have a taste for puzzles and acrostics."

Her pregnancy proves, Yentob believes, that she is Lisa del Giocondo, and her pregnancy is proved, Nuland believes, by fingers so swollen that she can no longer wear her rings and by the position of her hands, folded and resting on her upper abdomen, "the particular attitude of women far advanced in pregnancy."

I wonder if Nuland knows that his theory was first advanced by an EngIish professor, Kenneth Keale, in 1959, in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol XIV No 2? I suppose, 44 years on, it is permissible for a scientist to claim discovery again? I wonder, too, if Nuland has ever seen the Mona Lisa, or whether his thesis is based on particularly sfumato reproductions printed a century ago?

In the flesh, so to speak, the left forearm rests along the arm of a chair and between the right forearm and the belly there is a deeply shadowed space suggesting a straight back and a flat belly. As for the fat fingers, on both hands these appear, even to the naked eye, to have been fudged by later repainting, having a pattern of cracking in the paint (craquelure) that is so different from that in the face that we must consider the possibility that their painter used a different medium.

There is thus the chance that they were painted later, even much later, than the face — and here we run into the problem of whether or not Leonardo completed the painting; if he did not, then it is possible that the hands as we see them are a later intervention, not by him, but by an assistant or imitator completing the picture — perhaps after Leonardo’s death in 1519, to make it saleable to Francois I, King of France.

The fat fingers are not proof of pregnancy. Nuland’s further argument, that any rich Florentine lady would have had hands laden with rings unless her fingers were swollen, is defeated by two points: they would have been the last details to be added to finished realisation of the hands, and in the only other portrait of a woman by Leonardo in which a hand appears, the Lady with an Ermine, rings are conspicuously absent from the fingers of one of the most beautiful hands in the history of western art.

If Nuland knew anything about Italian Renaissance portraiture he would not have made the assertion, for rings are absent as often as present, even from the hands of the most splendidly accoutred women.

As for proof that this mysterious woman is Lisa del Giocondo — has anyone, other than a few wilful scholars, ever doubted it? Giorgio Vasari, preparing his biographies of painters for the first edition of 1550, tells us that the portrait is of her, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and that Leonardo worked on it for four years and then left it unfinished; the picture has ever since been known as La Gioconda, La Joconde and Mona Lisa — Mona an abbreviation of ma Donna, a polite form of address, my Lady, so to say.

Lisa was born in 1479; in 1495 she became Francesco's third wife, she 16, he 35. Francesco's first two wives died within a year of marriage, one certainly in childbirth, the other probably of its consequences. Lisa, too, gave birth within a year, to an heir, Piero, in 1496; in 1499 a daughter died at birth; and in 1502 a second son, Andrea, survived his birth, the year before the date customarily assumed to have marked the start of Leonardo's painting.

It is this last event that is now supposed to have been Francesco's reason for commissioning the portrait. But why? Surely the joy and jubilation at Piero's birth in 1496 would have been a better reason? Or had young Piero died before his brother's birth?

Why did the portrait remain in Leonardo's possession until his dying day? Did Francesco die before it was finished? That would explain why Lisa wears a black veil over her undressed hair, perhaps why she is smiling, and quite certainly why what may have been begun as a formal portrait within the Florentine stereotype developed into an image far beyond mere portraiture and became a record of Leonardo's wry relationship with women - his physical distaste for them tempered by his scientific curiosity, his intellectual detachment informed by the scrupulous observer's eye.

Had I been Alan Yentob's researcher fumbling through the archives of Florence, I'd have looked for the death dates of Francesco and Piero, and then for the date of Lisa's death, for she may well have been alive and in her sixties when Vasari was in Florence, researching the facts of Leonardo's life - imagine that conversation. But that's the trouble with Leonardo: the facts are so few that we imagine too much.

The man who knows nothing of Leonardo will find a great deal to enjoy in Yentob's celebration of "one of the greatest artists and engineers who ever lived". It has touchingly poetic moments. Occasionally it tells the simple truth. There are sudden insights that take it far beyond the level of the Reader's Digest.

Yentob himself as a presenter is quietly convincing and beautiful in a grave and saintly way - though one is occasionally reminded of Rasputin - but to have made a great introduction to Leonardo he needed better scholarship than the shallow delvings of BBC researchers and, above all, he needed someone to tell him how to look at paintings, how to interpret them, for it is not enough to stand almost mute before them and utter brief conventional praises. True, he enlisted the help of experts other than the flawed Professor Nuland, but the best of them, Professor Martin Kemp, whom I know to be expert in the honest, old-fashioned, academic sense, seems to play the role too agreeably and obligingly, as though overwhelmed by the non-academic milieu of television.

I rejoiced to see Leo Stevenson, an exact and scrupulous imitator of old masters and a giver of complicated technical information in classically simple terms, but among other experts the level of expertise seemed very meagre and not much above the Janet Street-Porter type of exegesis. This lavish series must have cost millions to produce, and when I consider what it could have been, I weep.

Larded with the bog-standard clichés of the television programme, the sops to the audience for Match of the Day, the moments of near slapstick, the vicissitudes of the Mona Lisa paralleled by those of 'Allo 'Allo's Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies, and all the hackneyed habitual conventions to which, it seems, every director is addicted, this "story of an undisputed genius" is only evidence of the overwhelming primacy of television over art. It has contributed nothing to scholarship - indeed worse than nothing - and precious little to understanding.

On what was Leonardo's reputation founded? In a working lifetime of half a century he painted a dozen or so works that are ruined, unfinished, scarcely begun or not advanced beyond the drawing stage, and only half that number finished and in reasonable condition. Painting too often lost its interest for him and he turned his attention to other things: studies and inventions that could never be completed.

He is credited with inventing the tank, the aeroplane, the lathe, the screw-jack, the worm-screw, the revolving crane, but nothing came of any of them and he played no part in an industrial revolution. He is praised as a great anatomist, but his studies did nothing to advance surgery and medicine, and nothing for the accuracy of his painted figures.

He is praised for his botanical studies, but he did nothing for the science of botany or its classifications. He is praised as an architect, but it was his near contemporary, Bramante, who advanced Renaissance architecture, and Michelangelo took it further still; not one single building can be attributed to Leonardo, and he withdrew from the one competition that might have secured a major commission.

He is praised for his studies of water and its turbulence, but these are not expressions of astonishing observation, not miraculous snapshots of currents and waterfalls, not even of intuition in these matters, but beautiful pictorial diagrams of what he thought might be happening in and under water.

His science led nowhere - few knew of it, few understood it, and he had neither followers nor influence. There are no relics of his engineering: Italy is not littered with his aqueducts and bridges, he did not drain marshes, move mountains, build ideal cities or even provide armaments to make Milan, Florence or Rome into a superpower - Milan fell to the French and Rome was sacked with not a single shot fired from Leonardo's miraculous cannon.

He had no real effect on the history of art. He is praised for his astonishing command of expression, but he was merely pursuing a Florentine tradition demonstrable in the work of Masaccio, Castagno, Pollaiuolo, Donatello, Luca della Robbia and Verrocchio.

He is praised for his studies of perspective but the ground had already been broken for him by Uccello, Alberti, Piero della Francesca and a host of others. He is praised for his invention of aerial perspective, but the evidence of Quattrocento painting is that it had already been observed and that Leonardo merely codified the observation.

As for his practice as a painter, we have only to read Vasari's comments on his failures as a technician and to look at the paintings themselves; his practice as a sculptor is remembered only for his boastful ambition - the legs of no Ozymandias remain. We have a myth and a gullible multitude who want it to be true.

Part two of Leonardo is on BBC1 on Sunday at 7pm, with the final part on 4 May.

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The truth about Mona

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