What began as a simple retelling of a long-ago heist of a single art work has blossomed, like a mushroom in the woods, into a longish account of the travels and travails of Leonardo da Vinci’s la Gioconda after her arrival in France in the early 1500s. The 1911 theft is now one point on enormous, unstoppable flow chart that can be read in multiple directions simultaneously. Call it the Mona Lisa Effect. It’s my hope that the patient reader doesn’t find the barrage of information and retellings bewildering while accepting the pleasure of getting lost in a maze.
Long overdue part 3 follows, in what, with fingers crossed, I’m hoping is a four-part entry mapping the lady’s travelogue, a little like the old stickers we used to put on our suitcases. (Before we began hurrying so much and forgot that boastful pleasure.) That some patient reader may notice the absence of speculation as to the meaning of the painting, if it can be said to have one, is intentional. To bend a few lines from a poet, I’m the first to put it to you, and the last to explain.
Somewhere past the halfway mark is the paid subscriber line. You could cross it : it’s cheaper than a flight to Paris, the wait is shorter to get in, the crowds have thinned out, and there aren’t a hundred Instaddicts to block your view.
(If you’re in town for the real thing, Sunday morning early while Paris is still half-asleep is your only hope.)
Part 1 is here and 2, there. Paid subscribers, whom I really cannot thank enough since months sometimes go by without entries, get the pleasure of a gallery of photographs of the heroic movements and personalities involved in hiding France’s art works from the Nazis during World War Two, a trove I recently discovered while doing research at Château Chambord.
The French La Joconde and Italian la Gioconda are employed throughout this piece alongside the more prosaic Mona Lisa, as she’s known in the Anglo world.
Lights Go Down in the Theater
If this were a film the first image would be of a caravan winding its way through the hills somewhere in the south of France, the Var or Vaucluse. A brilliantly sunny day as coaches roll over bumpy roads, a train of horses in front, carts and storage wagons behind. It’s noon and it’s hot. Every so often, an old man with long stringy hair and one arm in a sling sticks his head out of his sedan to check on the wagon carrying his valuables. The coaches bear the insignia of a salamander with a crown floating overhead. Cut.
Experts and others have been interrogating Mona Lisa’s smile and her restless, vagabond history for centuries. Critics, historians, researchers, artists, modernists in particular, not to mention the police, all pay close attention. Why this painting, why the fascination ? Contrary to reputation, it isn’t the first smile in the history of art. Antonello da Messina beat Leonardo to that enigmatic, fleeting gesture mid-15th century, and the portrait of his man, a tax collector with a fat purse, a man with a secret, catches that curl of the lips and the psychological ambiguity of a smile. Did da Vinci know the Sicilian painter’s work ? Both of them are, in different ways, innovators and outliers : Messina, dispensing with most of the props, concentrated on portraits of unusual depth. He too wandered in search of patrons, while absorbing new techniques from Northern Europe. Like daVinci his work has fallen in and out of favor, remaining ahead of its time; he inspired the artists who came to prominence in Venice a century later.
Let the poet from Hibbing put in his two cents in and watch as he changes the perspective: Mona Lisa « musta had the highway blues /You can tell by the way she smiles. » (Visions of Johanna) Aha ! She’s looking at us and not the other way around. Maybe she gets tired of people queueing up to stare and needs a frequent change of location. That might explain her last trip out of France, in 1974, to Japan. (At 30,000 feet the view must have been spectacular, but the wood panel cracked in the dry air.)
Still, if Da Vinci’s painting has racked up the miles, few people know why. Peruggia’s crime in 1911 was motivated by the belief that the work was stolen Italian property. Not so: Mona Lisa crossed the frontier in a cart bumping over roads laid down in Roman times and the painter, nearing seventy, in ill health, came with it. The year is 1516. Some twelve months later, Leonardo, who resided at Cloux (now Clos Lucé) in the Loire, received an important guest on his European tour.
"The Lord (Luigi of Aragon) with the rest of us went to see Sir Lunardo Vinci of Florence, more than LXX years old, an excellent painter of our age, who showed our Lordship four, one of a certain Florentine woman, done in life, at the request of the magnificent Iuliano de Medici, the other of the young Saint John the Baptist, and one of the Madonna and her son who are placed in the bosom of Saint Anne, all very perfect".
Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, journal October 10, 1517
The cardinal, his secretary and entourage were on the road for nearly a year, heading from Rome to Spain, their stated objective to meet Charles I of Spain, soon to rule the Holy Roman Empire. But the cardinal didn’t let that get in the way of a detour to the Loire, presumably for a meeting with François, King of France. There was even time to meet the painter at Clos Lucé. Was this Roman priest looking for Leonardo, or was the old Italian painter (b. April 1452) merely a stop on their tour ? Was he an unhappy exile or indeed a prisoner of the French king ? We shall see. His fame, or rather the utter lack of it, was nowhere then near the universal esteem he enjoys now.
De Beatis clears up one of the mysteries of La Joconda, her presence in France during the second decade of the sixteenth century – only to add another. He mentions four paintings but lists only three, until the next day at the royal château in Blois, when he jots in his journal, “There was also an oil painting from life of a certain lady of Lombardy: a beautiful woman indeed, but less so, in my opinion, than Signora Gualanda.” A note in the margin of De Beatis journal identifies the lady in question: Signora Isabella Gualanda, born in Naples in 1491, related through her mother to the woman portrayed in da Vinci’s Lady with Ermine, which also hangs in the Louvre. Is that the painting he means ? Is Gualanda Mona ? Impossible, say art historians who rarely agree about anything. Mona Lisa is a late work of Leonardo’s, perhaps unfinished but definitely of a middle-aged woman from Florence, so de Beatis’ comment turns everything upsidedown. What painting did he see ? Lady with Ermine is early da Vinci, done before Isabella Gualanda was born. So they say. Who is Isabella Gualanda ? No known portraits of her exist. De Beatis is a fastidious name dropper who couldn’t resist muddying the waters.
I’m saving the pivotal events that led Leonardo and his four paintings to France for last. Let’s take a too-quick tour of the painting’s most audacious adventures – including the daring communal effort that kept da Vinci’s masterwork out of Nazi hands – before visiting the merry month of December 1515 and the characters who attended the Conference of Bologna that played a part in the endless tug of war between France and Italy. It changed history, political, territorial and not least artistic.
Napoléon Wades In
Even Bonaparte wanted a closer look and private time with the lady from Florence. By 1800 the First Consul and Josephine were living in the Tuileries Palace, and the painting was moved so it hung in the couple’s bed-chambers. Napoleon, with his consuming interest in art and his desire to possess, is the source for the idée fixée that Mona Lisa was stolen; he carried off some 1,300 paintings from Italy during his various campaigns but da Vinci’s wasn’t one of them. Veronese’s Wedding in Cana, which faces it in across the parquet floor of the Louvre, is. Peruggia might have tried to steal that !