Art: Who?

Four centuries of bafflement over the expression Leonardo da Vinci put on a face in a picture the world has come to know as the Mona Lisa would be ended by a few facts about the fat-cheeked woman sitting smugly against the sea-green setting of winding water and oddly spired landscape.* Forty years after Leonardo’s death a painter-journalist named Giorgio Vasari told the world that that woman had been Madonna Lisa, third wife of a Neapolitan named Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo. Of Lisa little is known. Last week Dr. Raymond S. Stites, professor of art and esthetics at Antioch College, ended a twelve-year job of checking Vasari, announced that the woman was Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua. Of Isabella d’Este, “first lady of her time,” a great deal is known.

The Estensi were one of the proudest and most ancient reigning houses in Italy. In Leonardo’s time, besides the heir Alphonso, whom Lucrezia Borgia married after she had had her third husband murdered, there were two d’Este daughters, Isabella and Beatrice. Leonardo was working at the splendid court of Ludovico Sforza, later duke of Milan, when his patron married Beatrice, younger and more beautiful of the two. Between her marriage at 16 and her death in childbirth at 22, Leonardo saw much of her and painted two of her husband’s mistresses. Two years after her death he left Sforza and stopped at Mantua where he saw the elder sister, Isabella, in her own magnificent court. He was 47 she 25, already a brilliant, beautiful Latin aristocrat of the Renaissance. She made him promise to paint her portrait and he did a preliminary chalk drawing, which is now in the Louvre. He moved on to Florence and finally in 1502 into the employ of the “Bloody Borgia,” Cesare, to follow for a year in the violent wake of the Borgia’s bull bannerols. He got many a letter from Isabella inviting him to Mantua. She may have asked her brother, Lucrezia’s husband, to ask Cesare to excuse Leonardo. Until 1506 Leonardo worked in Florence, only no miles from Mantua. At any rate, sometime between 1499 and 1506, between his meeting with Isabella and his departure from Florence, Mona Lisa is supposed to have been painted. Was it of Lisa del Giocondo in Naples or of Isabella d’Este in Mantua?

Professor Stites found that Vasari had credited his choice of Lisa to a manuscript by an anonymous Florentine who, in fact, does not mention a Leonardo portrait of Lisa. On the other hand, he found a profile study of Isabella by Leonardo in Vienna’s Imperial Museum and another in Leonardo’s signet ring in the royal archives in Mantua. His difficulty was that the Mona Lisa is nearly full-face, but he thought he saw similarities. Probing on, he found a Leonardo statue in Berlin whose profile strongly resembles the known Isabella profiles. Seen full-face, this statue markedly resembles the Mona Lisa. Dr. Stites thought he had solved his problem.

Whether Leonardo had loved Isabella, he could not say. But he felt he could say that Leonardo, usually rated an isolated, loveless psychotic whose appearance of amiable charm was false, had loved Sforza’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, Countess Bergamo. Leonardo might also have loved Isabella.

*To Walter Pater the expression meant, in a famed paragraph in his Renaissance, that: ”Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”