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Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa

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Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa Mona Lisa: A Portrait Without a Commissioner? 169 Chapter 12 Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa: A Portrait without a Commissioner? Joanna Woods-Marsden University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Emerita, Department of Art History Twelve years ago, I gave a paper on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at the Sym- posium for the Virtue and Beauty exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which remains unpublished [Fig. 12.1]. When kindly invited by Constance Moffatt to contribute to this festschrift in honor of Carlo Pedretti, I decided to explore the field of Gioconda studies in the intervening decade, especially in light of the major scientific investigation of the work published in 2006 by the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, and the recent cleaning of the best sixteenth-century copy, that in the Prado [Fig. 12.2].1 As it turns out, archival and conservation scholars have succeeded in clarify- ing some of the mysteries surrounding this painting, enabling a better under- standing of it within the history of Renaissance female portraiture. Here I will use this recent scholarship to focus on the following features of Leonardo’s likeness: (1) the identification of the sitter; (2) the missing shafts of the colon- nettes that frame her person; (3) her inappropriate hairstyle; (4) her lack of sartorial magnificence; (5) a possible source for one aspect of her attire; and (6) the anomalous timing of the commission, and the role played by her husband, the presumed patron. I will conclude that he probably did not commission the painting. * I thank Connie Moffatt for inviting me to contribute to this celebration of my predecessor at UCLA; Luke Syson for his generosity in commenting on a draft, and Amedeo Belluzzi and Carolyn Malone for discussing it with me; my colleague, David A. Scott, for bibliographic refer- ences; Cindy Hollmichel of UCLA’s Inter-Library Loan for her invaluable and always cheerful help; and David Ziegler for his indispensable advice on the visual material. I dedicate this essay, finished in Summer 2013, to the memory of my late colleague in Art History, Don McCallum, who, albeit an expert in Japanese art, was always eager to discuss European paint- ing. Due to severe space limitations, the notes had to be reduced to a minimum. 1 Jean-Pierre Mohen, Michel Menu, and Bruno Mottin, eds., Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting (New York: Abrams, 2006); Vincent Delieuvin, La Sainte Anne: l’ultime chef-d’oeuvre de Léonard de Vinci (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2012), cat. 77. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004304130_014 170 Woods-marsden Figure 12.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Mona Lisa (begun 1503). Paris, Musée du Louvre. Until recently, Vasari was believed to have been the first writer to identify the sitter in his Lives in 1550. In 2008, however, a much earlier reference to her was discovered: a marginal note in a 1477 printed edition of Cicero’s Epistolae ad Familiares in Heidelberg. In October 1503, Agostino Vespucci, a Florentine chancery official under Machiavelli, mentioned the caput Lisa del Giocondo that Leonardus Vincius was currently painting.2 Struck by a passage in which Cicero claimed that Apelles had left a painting unfinished, Vespucci compared Leonardo to his classical predecessor: “So Leonardo da Vinci does in all his paintings, such as his Head of Lisa del Giocondo, and Anne, Mother of the Virgin. We will see what he will do concerning the Hall of the Great Council, 2 Veit Probst, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Mona Lisa: Leonardo da Vinci trifft Niccolò Machiavelli und Agostino Vespucci (Ubstadt-Weiher: Regionalkultur, 2008), 13, f. 11 recto..
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