Leonardo, Mona Lisa and" La Gioconda". Reviewing the Evidence

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Leonardo, Mona Lisa and "La Gioconda". Reviewing the Evidence Author(s): Jack M. Greenstein Source: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 25, No. 50 (2004), pp. 17-38Published by: IRSA s.c.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1483789Accessed: 27-10-2015 01:20 UTC

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JACK M. GREENSTEIN

Leonardo, Mona Lisa and La Gioconda. Reviewing the Evidence

...and but for express historical testimony, Two articles changed scholarly opinion. In 1991, Janice we might fancy that this was his ideal lady, Shell and Grazioso Sironi published the inventory of the estate

embodied and beheld at last. of Gian Giacomo Caprotti di Oreno, known as Salai.4 Leo- nardo's companion for twenty-nine years (from 1490 until his

Walter Pater death in 1519), Salai died intestate at age 44 in January 1524. The inventory, compiled at Milan in April 1525, lists twelve

During the 1990s, a surprising consensus emerged about paintings with subjects traceable to Leonardo's workshop. La Gioconda [Fig. 1]. For seventy-five years, experts had doubt- Some must have been painted by Salai, but five with very high ed Giorgio Vasari's identification of the sitter as Mona Lisa del valuations have subjects corresponding to Leonardo's auto- Giocondo.1 Vasari, they said, should not be trusted: he never graph works that were later recorded in the royal collection at met Leonardo and never saw the painting; he composed his Fontainebleau. Shell and Sironi argued that the "painting account in ca. 1545-1547, four decades after the work was paint- called La Joconda" is Leonardo's masterpiece and that this ed, without having consulted Leonardo's associate Francesco entry confirms Vasari's identification of the sitter. Two years Melzi; his description dwells on spurious details and omits such later, Frank Zollner published a review of the archival evidence distinctive features as the dark veil, poised hands, rotating pose, on the Giocondo family.5 Correcting the death dates for Lisa balcony setting, and background landscape; he incorrectly stat- and her husband Francesco, he argued that Vasari's account ed that the painting was left incomplete.2 Scholars continued to was based on information that they provided. call it Mona Lisa, La Gioconda, or La Joconde, only because Both articles were well received. Most scholars accepted there was no better alternative. As Martin Kemp explained in Shell and Sironi's argument, but Sylvie Beguin demurred on the 1981, "I cannot disprove this [Vasari's] identification-at least it grounds that, much as Leonardo cared about Salai, he would is not positively daft-any more than it can be confirmed. Were not have left his royal patron Francis without any of his works.6 the painting not so famous and universally beguiling, we would Her theory that the highly valued paintings in Salai's estate were have no difficulty in accepting it as yet another portrait from the copies and Francis I had the originals now has the support of Renaissance of a sitter unknown to us."3 a new archival discovery by Bertrand Jestaz: an account-book

17



JACK M. GREENSTEIN

1) Leonardo da Vinci, (<La Gioconda),, Louvre, Paris. Photo: Reunion des Mus6es Nationaux/Art Resource.

18



LEONARDO, MONA LISA AND LA GIOCONDA. REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE

reference from 1518 to an enormous payment of 2604 livres 3 sols 4 deniers tournois (equivalent to 6250 lire imperiale) from the treasurer of Francis I in the Duchy of Milan "to messer Salai di Pietro d'Oreno, painter, for some paintings on panel which he gave to the King."7 Yet, since the title "La Joconda" derived from Leonardo's masterpiece even if the Salai paintings were copies, this theory does not affect Shell and Sironi's contention that the inventory confirms Vasari's identification of the sitter.8 Kemp, for example, having previously proposed re-titling the work "Lady on a Balcony", now cites the inventory and includes information about Lisa del Giocondo in an on-line encyclopedia article on Leonardo.9 Zollner's argument is endorsed by E. H. Gombrich and others.10 For Daniel Arasse, "his careful study of the archives [...] put[s] to rest once and for all, one hopes, the myths surrounding the identity of the model."11

Nonetheless, the case is not as solid as this consensus suggests. Nothing in the archives nor in Leonardo's volumi- nous writings conclusively connects Leonardo with the Giocondo family. The best informed early critics, including all sources who saw painting before 1642, did not think that the title "La Gioconda" referred to the surname of the sitter. Despite Arasse's claim, Zollner's argument is at best circumstantial and even so rests on debatable interpretations. A careful reconsid- eration of the evidence shows that Vasari's account does not incorporate testimony from a sitter or patron, that the Giocondos were not likely patrons for Leonardo, and that the portrait was not a commissioned work. By providing the earliest title, however, the inventory limits the possibilities about the sitter and illuminates the purpose of the painting.

A "Painting Called La Joconda"

The Salai inventory establishes that the title "La Gioconda" descended from Leonardo's immediate circle, probably from Leonardo himself. The inventory is part of a notarial act ratified on 21 April 1525 to settle a dispute between Salai's sisters over the division of his estate. Two copies of the act survive: a version without annotations (often called an imbreviatura) that was begun in one hand and completed in another; and a messier, emended version (often called an extensa) written entirely in the hand that completed the neater document.12 In the neater document, the formal list of Salai's possessions is labeled "copia" and dated "1525 on the first day of April"-three weeks before the act was ratified;13 it is probably a copy of the inventory submitted by the cataloguer of Salai's estate. The inventory in the messier document has the same list of paintings, but also has cancellations and annotations that the dated "copy" lacks.

Most paintings are identified by subject: i.e., a "painting of Saint Anne" (quadro de Santa Anna), a "painting of a lady portrayed" (quadro de una dona aretrata), a "painting with a Saint John large" (quadro cum uno Santo lohanne grando), a "painting with a Saint Jerome large" (quadro cum uno Santo Hieronimo grando), a "painting with a half nude woman" (quadro cum una meza nuda), a "painting with a Saint Jerome half nude" (quadro cum uno Santo Hieronimo mezo nudo), a "painting with a Saint John little young" (quadro cum uno Santo loanne pizinino zoveno), a "Christ in the form of a God the Father" (Christo in modo de uno Dio Patre), a "Madonna with a son in her arms" (madona cum uno filiolo in brazo), a "Christ at the column not finished" (Christo ala colona non fornido).14 Two of the twelve are "called" by name: a "painting called a Leda" (quadro dicto una Ledde) and a "painting called La Honda" (quadro dicto la Honda C? [indecipherable abbreviation]). Since Leda was an unusual theme, which few cataloguers would have recognized, and the meaning of "La Honda" is obscure, dicto probably indicates that the title was told to the cataloguer. In the annotated inventory, dicto La Honda is cancelled and a carat after quadro indicates an indecipherable interlinear correction, which is also cancelled [Fig. 2]. The phrase "called La Gioconda" (dicto la Joconda), neatly written in the left margin just below the level of the preceding entry, is linked by a line with a loop above the cancelled interlinear annotation to the valuation 100 scudi, or 505 lire imperiale, in the right-hand column. This valuation-half that of Salai's house-corresponds to quadro dicto la Honda on the neat "copy" of the inventory.15 Since dicto la Joconda appears only in the annotated document, it surely represents a correction to the inventory by knowledgeable parties.

Shell and Sironi reasonably interpret the marginal annotation dicto La Joconda as replacing dicto la Honda and hold that the preceding entry quadro de una dona aretrata referred to a different painting. Bertrand Jestaz and Edoardo Villata dis- agree. They argue that una dona aretrata and la Joconda were the same painting, since there is a blank where the assessed value of the dona aretrata should haven been entered.16 If so, Salai owned eleven, not twelve paintings, only four with valuations worthy possibly to be Leonardo's originals. But their argument is not convincing, since the list of twelve paintings with no cancellations on the neat "copy" indicates that twelve paintings were inventoried, and indeed valuations were given to all twelve paintings on the messier inventory, before it was corrected with the interlinear addition of a blank valuation for dona aretrata and with lines linking la Honda and three other paintings to their correct valuations. Moreover, other inventoried items without valuation (e.g. Smeraldo pizinino numero uno and Sugacho de homo) are clearly not identical with the items that precede or follow them.17

19



JACK M. GREENSTEIN

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20




However the Salai inventory is interpreted, there is no question that "La Gioconda" was the title of Leonardo's original. It was used again in Milan on 28 December 1531 by another notary in a list of nine, low-priced paintings belonging to Salai's sister Lorenziola Caprotti.18 Eight of the paintings had subjects that also appeared on the Salai inventory, and the ninth title, "one French woman [?]" (alius habet figuram unius galice), might well have been another name for una dona aretrata.19 But it is not altogether clear that the paintings owned by Lorenziola in 1531 were the same paintings that she and her sister had inherited from Salai. For her nine paintings were deposited against a debt of 26 scudi, a figure far less than the valuations on the Salai inventory, where La Gioconda and St. Anne were appraised at 100 scudi each.20 Even though the value of the goods deposited as collateral surely exceeded the amount of the debt, the difference in valuation is striking.21 In a society without public art institutions and galleries, without auctions and a resale market for art, and without a system for authentication and dis-attribution, it is difficult to see how the same paintings appraised at more than 415 scudi in 1525 could have been held so cheap six years later, even if they were copies.22

In any case, the Caprotti list indicates that in 1531 the title "Gioconda" was sufficient to identify the subject of the painting without qualification: "another [painting] has a figure of Gioconda [alius habet loconde figuram]". The same title was used by every early source who saw Leonardo's original at Fontainebleau. But Vasari, who never saw the painting, did not use the title "La Gioconda". Instead, he spoke of a portrait of "Mona Lisa", wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and his title was adopted by other learned critics who based their accounts on his.

The title on the Salai inventory may be read in two ways. It confirms Vasari's identification of the sitter if "La Joconda" is a proper name, a Milanese spelling for the name of the matron of the Giocondo family. This reading is reasonable: today "La Signora Giocondo" would be called (in Milanese spelling) "La Jocondo", but in the Renaissance the endings of surnames were sometimes changed to indicate the gender of the referent. Nonetheless, few in Milan would have known that the title "La Joconda" referred to an unremarkable Florentine woman named Lisa del Giocondo.

Thirty-five years before Shell's and Sironi's discovery, Carlo Pedretti offered a different reading. He proposed that "La Gioconda" was a "generic title", meaning the jocund, or smiling, woman.23 Vasari, he suggested, conflated reports about Leonardo's painting of a smiling woman at Fontaine- bleau with an earlier tradition, recorded in the Codex Maglia- bechiano (ca. 1540), that Leonardo "portrayed from life Piero Francesco del Giocondo."24

The Salai inventory lends support to Pedretti's proposal. It proves that the title "La Gioconda" pre-dates, rather than derives from, Vasari's account and so could have reached Vasari independently of the tradition recorded in the Codex Magliabechiano. That the inventory lists a "painting called [dicto] la Joconda", rather than a "painting of [de] la Joconda", and that the title is "La Joconda", not "La Signora Joconda," "La Jocondo", or "Mona Lisa" allow for the generic reading that Pedretti proposed. Pedretti's reading would also hold if the marginal annotation pertained to the entry quadro de una dona aretrata, as Jestaz and Villata unconvincingly suggest, since it is the painting (quadro), not the woman, that is "called La Gioconda" (dicto la Joconda), and aretrata indicates only that una dona is "delineated," not that a real person is portrayed.25

A version of Pedretti's theory also provides the best explanation for the inconsistencies among the early Florentine accounts of Leonardo's career. The entry on Leonardo in the Book of Antonio Billi (ca. 1516-ca. 1525) does not mention the painting, even though it includes works that Vasari omitted.26 Anonimo Magliabechiano, who knew Billi's book, listed a portrait from life of "Piero Francesco del Giocondo," not of Mona Lisa. Most scholars correctly hold that this entry is erroneous, because there is no evidence of a male portrait from the second Florentine period in Leonardo's paintings, Notebooks or drawings, in the works of his followers, or in other sources.27 A century ago, Carl Frey suggested that the name "Piero Francesco del Giocondo" was a scribal error for "the wife of [la moglia di] Francesco del Giocondo" and so referred to Mona Lisa.28 Zollner convincingly argued that the name is correct as written and referred to Mona Lisa's eldest son.29 Born in 1496, Piero Francesco del Giocondo was four years-old when Leonardo came to Florence in 1500, and ten when he moved back to Milan in 1506. Since this was not the right age for a portrait in Renaissance Florence, Zollner claimed that Piero Francesco was incorrectly cited as the sitter when he was actually an oral informant. But this clever suggestion is unfounded, because Anonimo Magliabechiano does not cite oral informants in his lists of works.

Most likely, the entry is due to confusing reports from France reaching Florence after Billi and before Anonimo Magliabechiano-perhaps around 1534 when Catherine dei Medici married Henry II, son of King Francis I, owner of the painting. The most common French form for Leonardo's title is 'Joconde" (or "loconde"), a name of indeterminate gender, used by later French writers for the female sitter in Leonardo's painting and for the male character locondo in Canto 28 of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516).30 If Anonimo Magliabechiano (or his source) interpreted the French title as

21



JACK M. GREENSTEIN

male, he might have assumed that it referred to Piero Francesco, who was middle-aged in ca. 1540, perhaps because Leonardo produced so many drawings of beautiful young men.31 Then, as Pedretti suggested, Vasari amended this tradition, because, having learned that the painting represents a woman-perhaps from someone in the Medici circle or from a pupil of Raphael-he concluded that the title referred to Lisa del Giocondo.

Whatever the case with these Florentine sources, reading "La Joconda" in the Salai inventory as a generic title is no less reasonable than reading it as a surname, especially since the smile is the most famous feature. The inventory pre-dates Vasari by two decades, and without Vasari, there would be little reason to connect the painting or its title with Lisa del Giocondo. Indeed, a careful, open-minded review shows that before 1642 no source using the title "La Gioconda" thought that Gioconda was the sitter's surname, not even those familiar with Vasari's account.

What's in a Title? Mona Lisa and La Gioconda

The other two sixteenth-century sources who adopted the title "Mona Lisa" did so on Vasari's authority without having seen the painting. The Florentine nobleman Raffaello Borghini (1537-1588) followed Vasari so closely in II Riposo (1584) that he is often described as Vasari's successor. Like Vasari, he related that Leonardo painted both the portrait "of madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo", which went "to King Francis in France", and the portrait of Ginerva de' Benci in Florence after the St. Anne cartoon and before the Battle mural commission.32

The discussions by the Mannerist painter and theorist Gian-Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1600) are more telling. As a Milanese, Lomazzo had access to information independent of Vasari's account from Leonardo's friend, associate and heir, the painter Francesco Melzi (ca. 1492-ca. 1570). Melzi had joined Leonardo's workshop at Milan in ca. 1508 and remained with him until his death at Cloux in 1519.33 Vasari's story of Mona Lisa is set in Florence prior to Melzi's arrival. Perhaps, this is why Lomazzo's earliest reference to Mona Lisa, in his Book of Dreams of 1563, is nothing other than a summary of Vasari's story, including the erroneous statement that the portrait at Fontainebleau was never finished:34 "The portrait of Mona Lisa, which he [Leonardo] worked on for four years, [even if] as yet unfinished shows what nature and art together are capable of doing. The portrait is now in France at Fontainebleau."35

Lomazzo next referred to "Mona Lisa" in 1584, when he praised the composition of Leonardo's portraits, especially

those "ornamented in the guise of Spring, like the portrait of La Gioconda and of Mona Lisa, in which [ne' quali] he has expressed most marvelously, among other things, the mouth in the act of smiling" (my emphasis).36 This passage from the Treatise on Painting has been cited as evidence that Leonardo painted two (more or less identical) portraits of Mona Lisa.37 The claim is untenable, but so is the suggestion, later withdrawn, that Lomazzo was offering "Mona Lisa" and "La Gioconda" as alternative titles for the same portrait.38 The syn- tax, the conjunction "and", the plural "quali", and the context leave little doubt that in 1584 Lomazzo thought that Mona Lisa and La Gioconda were two different portraits, as is confirmed by the plural ritratti in the index of the Treatise: "Gioconda, et mona Lisa con auuertenze de i suoi ritratti".39

How Lomazzo heard about a painting called "La Gioconda" is not known, but whatever his source, it led him to lose confidence in Vasari's account. For in the Idea of the Temple of Painting (1590) he cited the portrait of "Mona Lisa" at Fontainebleau as one of Leonardo's few "finished works" and referred to Mona Lisa as a "Neapolitan."40

Having gone blind in ca. 1570, Lomazzo is unlikely late in life to have obtained reliable new information about La Gioconda or any other work by Leonardo-especially after Melzi had passed away. And the mistaken references to the "guise of Spring," to portraits "of Mona Lisa and of La Gioconda" and to "Neapolitan Mona Lisa" show that he was confused about what Leonardo actually painted.41 But Lomazzo's knowledge of Italian is un-impeached, and the passage and index in the Treatise shows that a competent, well informed speaker of Renaissance Italian thought that the title "La Gioconda" did not refer to "Mona Lisa."

The Italian scholar, patron and art collector Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657) also did not think that La Gioconda was a portrait of Mona Lisa. Although he published little, Dal Pozzo was internationally recognized as an expert on art. In Rome, he assembled a large library and museum, known as the "Paper Museum" for its vast collection of drawings of plants and animals, antiquities, architecture, and art.42 Leonardo was a special interest. Dal Pozzo not only owned an indifferent copy of La Gioconda, but also conceived an edition of Leonardo's art theoretical writings-a project that reached fruition a quarter century later when the Trattato della Pittura was published in Paris in 1651 with illustrations by his friend Nicolas Poussin. Given his interests and erudition, Dal Pozzo must have known Vasari's account, and he probably knew Lomazzo's Treatise and Idea as well. It is therefore significant that his eyewitness account of Leonardo's paintings at Fontainebleau in 1625 makes no reference to "Mona Lisa." He reported seeing "a life-size portrait on panel of a half-length

22




figure in a carved walnut frame, which is the portrait of a certain Gioconda [una tal Gioconda]... The figure shows a Lady [una Donna] of 24 to 26 years."43 The formula "una tal Gioconda" indicates that Dal Pozzo did not know who this "Gioconda" was and, in subsequent references, the "figure" in the painting is simply called a "Lady"(capitalized by Dal Pozzo). The descriptive moniker "Gioconda" is also the only hint that the lady is joyous or smiling. Dal Pozzo, moreover, was careful to differentiate the painting that he saw from the portrait discussed by Vasari. Vasari said that the portrait of Mona Lisa was left unfinished; Dal Pozzo observed that the portrait of Gioconda "is the most accomplished work that one might see of this artist, because in it nothing is lacking except speech." Vasari dwelt in minute detail on the eyes, nose, mouth, and neck; Dal Pozzo described the headdress, clothing, hands, and overall shape of the face (faccia). Vasari praised the hair-by-hair rendering of Mona Lisa's eyebrows (/e ciglia); Dal Pozzo pointed out how Leonardo's handling made such details unnecessary: "We note that with respect to that otherwise beautiful Lady a little something is missing at the eyebrow [nel ciglio], but the painter makes it inconspicuous, as if she did not need to have it."44 Clearly, Dal Pozzo did not accept Vasari's testimony. Perhaps, like Lomazzo, he thought that La Gioconda and Mona Lisa were different works (and that Mona Lisa was lost?45); perhaps, that Vasari was mis- informed. What is certain is that he declined to identify the Gioconda at Fontainebleau as Mona Lisa del Giocondo.

With the early French critics, the situation is more compli- cated. Italian speakers could understand "Gioconda" as a generic title, because "gioconda" was an Italian word long before it was the title of Leonardo's painting.46 According to French dictionaries, however, "joconde" was not a French word until the nineteenth century, when it was used for a mys- terious and seductive woman, like the cool charmer in Leonardo's painting.47 Before that "loconde" was the French name for Ariosto's character "locondo"-an Italian country gentleman from Rome-in translations of the Orlando Furioso (from 1544 on) and for the title character of Jean de La Fontaine's tale 'Joconde" (1665) based on Ariosto, as well as the title of operas and plays based on La Fontaine's tale.48 In seventeenth-century France, then, 'Joconde" was not a descriptive word, but the French form for an Italian proper name. The earliest French sources seem to have understood its descriptive, root meaning, but later critics said that it was the sitter's surname. This French misprision initiated the modern tradition for reading the Italian title "Gioconda" as a femi- nine form of the surname Giocondo.

The earliest record from Fontainebleau (1608-1610)-an aide-memoire drawn up by Pierre Antoine de Rascas de

Bagarris (1562-1620), Master of the Cabinet, Medallions and Antiquities of the King at Fontainebleau from 1608 to 1610- identifies the painting as "La Jocunda... de Leonard del Vins."49 Drawn up shortly thereafter, an inventory of the Parisian estate of Sebastien Zamet, superintendent of the royal chateau from 1599 until his death in 1614, lists fourteen copies after paintings at Fontainebleau, including "another picture painted on wood, mounted in a gilded frame with moresques at the corners and in the middle, in which is represented a gioconda" (ou est represente une jocunde).50 The diction (une jocunde-written in lower case) befits a generic description, not a proper name. The spelling might also be significant. The Italian word "gioconda" derives from the Latin adjective "jucunda" (pleasant, delightful, agreeable). That these two early French sources employ forms close to the Latin, rather than "joconde", suggests that they understood the descriptive meaning of the title.

Only in 1642 did a critic explicitly connect La Gioconda with a woman named Mona Lisa. In his guidebook to the "mar- vels" at Fontainebleau, Pere Dan explained that Leonardo's most esteemed painting

is the portrait of a virtuous Italian lady, and not a courtesan (as some believe), named Mona Lisa, commonly called Gioconda, who was the wife of a Ferrarese Nobleman called Frangois locondo [nommee Mona Lissa, vulgiare- ment appellee Joconde, laquelle estoit femme d' un Gentilhomme Ferrarois appelle Frangois locondo], an inti- mate friend of the said Leonardo who had asked his [Francois's] permission to make a portrait of his wife.51

The diction indicates that it is Lisa del Giocondo herself, not the painting, who was "commonly called Gioconda"- something that Dan could not possibly have known. Dan was also confused about who this Mona Lisa was. Although the virtuous wife of "Frangois locondo", she is not Vasari's Mona Lisa, for her husband is a Ferrarese nobleman, not a Flo- rentine merchant, and Leonardo undertook her portrait on his own initiative, rather than on commission. Dan, moreover, wrote the surname, and only the surname, of the husband in Italian, but the rest of the account in French. In so doing, he insinuated that, like "loconde" in translations of Ariosto, 'Joconde" the common title of the painting was French for "locondo", the surname of the sitter's husband, when in fact it was French for the painting's Italian title "La Gioconda."

Dan's identification of the sitter as the wife of a Ferrarese nobleman did not take hold, but his interpretation of the title as a vulgarization of the sitter's surname was inscribed as fact in the first published edition of Leonardo's writings. The

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JACK M. GREENSTEIN

Trattato della Pittura (Paris, 1651), edited and introduced by the French bibliophile and art collector Raffaelle (Trichet) du Fresne (1611-1661), is a compilation of passages from Leonardo's Notebooks, drawn from an abridgement by Dal Pozzo of the Codex Urbinas, supplemented with material from the manuscripts then in the collection of Count Galeazzo Arconati of Milan, and illustrated with engravings after Poussin.52 Although the Italian edition was criticized for its organization, apparatus and changes to Poussin's designs, it was translated into English, French, and German and so served as the primary printed source for Leonardo's writings into the nineteenth century. Du Fresne prefaced the Trattato with a "Life of Leonardo", based on Vasari but embellished with information from other sources. The account of La Gioconda rehearses Vasari's identification of the patron and sitter, his praise of its fidelity to nature, his story of the jesters and musicians, and his claim that Leonardo left the work unfinished.53 At the beginning, Du Fresne interpolated Dan's explanation of the title: "Then he made for Francesco del Giocondo the portrait often named after his wife Lisa [but] commonly called La Gioconda" (Fece poi per Francesco del Giocondo il ritratto tanto nominate di lisa sua moglie, volgarmente chiamato la Gioconda). Here, for the first time "La Gioconda" is explicitly said to be the common title for the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the sitter identified by Vasari.

After this publication, the painting's title was routinely interpreted as Mona Lisa's surname. In 1666, the French administrator, critic and historian of art Andre Felibien (1619-1695) provided the following account in his second Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes:

He made there [at Florence] several portraits, among others that of Lisa wife of Frangois Gioconde. This is the same one that is in the Cabinet of the King and that is known rather as the Gioconda [la Gioconde] of Leonardo.54

Reissued at Trevoux in 1725, and translated into English (1705), German (1711) and Italian (1755), the Entretiens was a fundamental text on the history of art for over a century. Felibien's formulation is repeated in 1731 by Abbe Pierre Guilbert who reported seeing among the small paintings in the Cabinet of the Emperors "a portrait of Lisa, wife of a Florentine, named Gioconde [nommee Gioconde] by Ambroise Dubois... The original on panel is in the Petite Gallerie at Versailles."55 Here as in Felibien's Entretiens, "Gioconde" is presented as both the title of the painting and the surname of Mona Lisa.

The Salai inventory, then, gives the title of Leonardo's portrait, but this title may not be a family name. Modern scholars assume that "La Gioconda" refers to Lisa del Giocondo. In so doing, they are following the lead of French critics from the middle of the seventeenth century. Lomazzo and Dal Pozzo disagreed. Although they knew Vasari's account and the title of painting, they did not think that the painting called La Gioconda was the portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo. Since "La Gioconda" might be a descriptive, generic title, the Salai inventory does not settle the question of the sitter. The identification of the sitter as Mona Lisa del Giocondo still rests on Vasari.

Vasari on Mona Lisa

Few writers have so shaped the interpretative tradition as Vasari. Before the discovery of the Salai inventory, he was the earliest secure written source on the portrait.56 Without his story, no one would think that Leonardo portrayed the unremarkable wife of a Florentine merchant. His reliability is, and long will be, a key issue for the historical study of La Gioconda.

Vasari places the portrait of Mona Lisa at the intersection of three narratives. The first involves the making and disposition of the work:

Leonardo made for Francesco del Gioccndo a portrait of his wife Mona Lisa, and for four years he fussed [penatovi] over it leaving it unfinished, which work is today with King Francis of France in Fontainebleau.

Next, he explained why a portrait of an ordinary Florentine lady was worthy of its royal collector:

In this head, whoever wishes to see how art can imitate nature can easily understand it, because here were repro- duced [contrafatte] all the details that can be painted with subtlety. It happens that the eyes have the lusters and the moistness that are always seen in life, and around them are all those livid rosy tints and the hairs that cannot be done without the greatest subtlety. Nothing could be more natural than the eyebrows [/e ciglia], for they have been made the same way that hairs sprout in skin-here more thickly and there more thinly-and curve in accordance with the pores of the flesh. The nose with those beautiful nostrils all rosy and delicate seems to be alive. The slightly open mouth, with its edges [fini] joined by the red of the lips to the flesh- color of the face, truly appears to be flesh and not something painted. Whoever looks most intently at the pit of the

24




throat sees the pulses beating there. In truth one can say that this has been painted in such a manner to make even the boldest artist-no matter who-tremble and despair.

Finally, that there is more to Leonardo's achievement than imitative skill:

He even used this technique that, Mona Lisa being most beautiful, while he portrayed her, he continually employed musicians or singers and jesters who made her merry, in order to chase away the melancholy that painting often seems to give to portraits. And in this [portrait] of Leonar- do's there was a smile so pleasing that, to one who sees it, it was a thing more divine than human, and it was considered a marvelous thing for being no different than life.57

Vasari's Leonardo emerges in the details. Thinking Leonardo a perfectionist unable to finish what he starts, Vasari had him spend four years on the portrait without completing it- the span needed to paint the Last Supper (which Vasari also incorrectly thought was left unfinished).58 Considering Leonardo the originator of the terza maniera of Renaissance art-the style that surpassed nature-he described how Leonardo "repro- duced all the details that can be painted" and yet made the figure delicate, rosy, and alive.59 Holding that heaven endowed Leonardo with "infinite grace," he explained how Leonardo brought about a smile "more divine than human."60

How relevant his description is to La Gioconda is questionable. Women are often praised for their delicate eyebrows, lustrous eyes, rosy nostrils, red lips, and quivering throats in Renaissance panegyrics.61 As Patricia Rubin explains, "Vasari was consciously echoing this tradition, describing the Mona Lisa in terms taken from the literature of love and its poetic ideals of beauty."62 Although such commonplaces apply well to sitters in scores of Renaissance portraits, Vasari's pane- gyric hardly fits La Gioconda. The red tints that he purported to see around the eyes and nostrils are not visible; the eye- lashes and eyebrows, whose hairs so impressed him, never were there.63 Nor was the painting left unfinished. If not for the smile, Vasari would seem to be describing an altogether different portrait. Yet, his explanation of this detail is also problem- atic: the melancholy that the smile supposedly replaces is rarely seen in Quattrocento portrait-painting, especially on women, since ladies were not celebrated for their gravitas.

Renaissance critics had little compunction about describing and passing judgment on works that they never saw.64 Yet, it is possible that Vasari was remembering a work by Leonardo when he wrote about the portrait of Mona Lisa. Think away the smile, and picture the face that Vasari described with a down-

cast expression, as if still exhibiting the melancholy that the jesters and musicians supposedly drove away. What we have, I suggest, is the portrait mentioned by Vasari immediately before his story of Mona Lisa, one whose female sitter Kenneth Clark describes as "an exquisite melancholy beauty"-the portrait, that is, of Ginevra de' Benci, in whose paternal house Vasari saw Leonardo's unfinished Adoration of the Magi [Fig. 3].65

The Renaissance provenance of the Benci portrait has not been traced. Although the inscription, laurel and palm on its reverse form the impressa of Bernardo Bembo, Venetian poet and ambassador to Florence in 1475-1476 and 1478-1480, it was not in his collection, nor elsewhere in Venice, in the early sixteenth-century when Marcantonio Michiel catalogued the art collections of Venice.66 In fact, the style suggests that painting pre-dates Bembo's arrival in Florence.67 Most likely, it was commissioned by the Benci family and the impressa was added to commemorate the honor paid to Ginevra when she was chosen by Bembo as the object of his Platonic love in a chivalric contest celebrating virtue and beauty.68 In any case, since all Leonardo's other known portraits were at locations that Vasari had not visited when he composed his description of Mona Lisa, the Ginevra de' Benci is the one and only portrait by Leonardo that he might have seen.

An incident recorded in the second edition of the Lives (1568) all but proves that Vasari did not know what La Gioconda looked like. In a chapter on Lombard artists, Vasari recalled seeing at the Mint of Milan in 1566 two copies by Fra Girolamo Bonsignori (ca. 1460-1519) after Leonardo's paintings: one was "a young St. John the Baptist, very well imitated", the other a portrait "in which is a woman who smiles."69 Neither painting has been traced. Very likely, the "young St. John the Baptist" was a copy of Leonardo's Louvre St. John or St. John in the Desert. The other painting was probably a copy of La Gioconda, since there are no contemporary copies of his other portraits, and it is his only known portrait of a smiling woman. If so, Vasari did not recognize La Gioconda by sight-a failure that would all but disqualify Lisa del Giocondo as the sitter, had Vasari ever met her. If the copy was of a different, lost work, Vasari's description of Mona Lisa and her smile-the one distinctive feature that he got right-is not sufficient to differentiate it from the portrait of a smiling woman copied by Bonsignori.

Zollner's Vasari

Zollner gives the strongest defense of Vasari. He shows that Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo were alive long after Vasari arrived in Florence in 1524 or 1525.70 If Vasari made "attempts to gain first-hand information from Florentine citi-

25



JACK M. GREENSTEIN

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26

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zens", he wrote, "one can assume that he had known both Lisa and her husband Francesco who-according to unpub- lished documents-died in spring 1539 [...]. Thus Vasari's

description of Lisa's portrait, written before the death of Francis I in 1547, may well have been based on first-hand information obtained from Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo."71

Zollner maintains that any correct information in Vasari's account must be based on "attempts to gain first-hand information." He argues that Vasari correctly dated La Gioconda by placing it after the St. Anne cartoon and before the Battle mural. It must date after the cartoon, Zollner reasons, because it was not in Leonardo's studio when Fra Pietro da Novellara saw the cartoon there in April 1501. Since Leonardo owed works to Florimond Robertet, treasurer of France, and Isabella d'Este, Duchess of Mantua, he is unlikely to have undertaken a private portrait before leaving Florence in June 1502 to join the court of Duke Cesare Borgia. On the other hand, several drawings and paintings produced by Raphael in Florence and usually dated from ca. 1504 onwards incorporate motifs from La Gioconda. Zollner therefore proposes a starting date of Spring or Summer of 1503-after Leonardo returned from the Borgia court in March, but before he began work on the Battle mural cartoon in October. This proposed starting date falls around three years before Leonardo left Florence for Milan in June 1506. Zollner admits that a span of three years "does not correspond exactly to the four years mentioned by Vasari, although it is a tolerable inaccuracy, assuming that Vasari cal- culated a period of four years following Francesco and Lisa, who may have indicated to him 1503 and 1506 as the relevant dates (counting 1503 through 1506 yields four years)."72

Although his reconstruction of events is based on incomplete documentation, Zollner maintains that "it can [...] be usefully checked against the only complete set of documents for the period in question: Leonardo's bank account in the Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova."73 Published by Gustavo Uzielli in 1872, these documents show the following:74

7 and 14 January 1500: deposits from Milan totaling 600 gold florins 24 April 1500: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 10 November 1501: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 4 March 1503: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 14 June 1503: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 1 September 1503: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 21 November 1503: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 27 April 1504: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 24 February 1505: withdrawal of 25 gold florins 15 April 1505: withdrawal 25 gold florins

20 May 1506: withdrawal of 50 gold florins 12 May 1507: withdrawal of 150 gold florins; notation that withdrawals since 24 April 1500 total 600 gold florins.

Zollner claims that Leonardo did not withdraw money from April 1500 to November 1501, because he was being provided with room and board by the Servites, as Vasari said. The situation was different after Leonardo's return from service to Cesare Borgia; from March 1503 to April 1504, Leonardo with- drew 50 florins every three months or so. According to Zollner, these regular withdrawals indicate that Leonardo "was probably earning nothing at all." He therefore hypothesizes "that Leonardo was not very busy in spring of 1503 and was therefore willing to do a private portrait for a Florentine citizen", Francesco del Giocondo.75

Zollner rounds out his argument by discussing the puta- tive patrons. In Spring 1503, Lisa del Giocondo was twenty- four years old, an age consistent with the appearance of the woman in La Gioconda. A few months earlier, on 12 December 1502, she had given birth to their second son Andrea. And on 5 April 1503, Francesco purchased a house on Via della Stufa. Childbirth and a new house, Zollner explains, were both worthy motives for a portrait. He then compares La Gioconda with other Florentine domestic portraits and finds that it "continues-though in a somewhat more sophisticated way than preceding examples-the tradition of female [domestic] portraiture." Zollner concludes that La Gioconda is "a typical painting, which only romanticism has taught us to perceive as being enigmatic and transcend- ing human comprehension."76

Zollner's Evidence

Zollner's reconstruction is impressive. His emphasis on money, documents, and patronage has a solid historical feel, and the assimilation of the Western world's most famous painting to "typical" Florentine domestic portraits is appealing- ly matter-of-fact. Some characterizations-such as the com- parison of the Giocondos' patronage with that of the Doni and Strozzi-are forced or misleading.77 But to his credit, Zollner takes care to distinguish evidence from interpretation; to interpret the evidence consistently; and to admit to his assump- tions. Within the framework of his positivistic logic, he provides as detailed an account as the evidence allows. Yet, nothing in the archive actually connects Leonardo with the Giocondos, and without this connection, Zollner's excellent research on the Giocondo family is not relevant to La Gioconda.78 Zollner's argument, like Shell's and Sironi's inter-

27



JACK M. GREENSTEIN

pretation of the title in the Salai inventory, depends on Vasari's identification of the sitter.

Although Zollner establishes that Vasari could have met Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo, there is no primae facie evidence that he actually did. Beyond the commonplace that Lisa was beautiful, nothing is said about their person, family, occu- pation, interests or home. The story of the portrait is the only place in the Lives where Lisa's name appears. Vasari mentioned Francesco twice more, both times in connection with paintings in his family chapel.79 But these references do not indicate that he met Francesco, since Vasari certainly knew Domenico Puligo, who painted the chapel altarpiece in 1526 and was an associate of Vasari's teacher Andrea del Sarto and his friend Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.80 Nor is the lone remark that Giovanni Gualberto del Giocondo and his brother Nicole owned Puligo's best work, a painting of St. Jerome Writing, sufficient to justify Zollner's otherwise unsubstantiated statement that Vasari knew these two cousins of Francesco, since this information about the owners might likewise have come from Puligo.81

Zollner claims that three purported "facts" in the account show that Vasari interviewed the Giocondos: first, the detailed description, which "even mentions Lisa's smile"; second, that the painting was at Fontainebleau; third, that it dates from Leonardo's second Florentine period.82 However, none of these "facts" indicate that the Giocondos, or indeed any patron or sitter were Vasari's informants. The first is hardly a fact, since the details are part of a fanciful and inaccurate description; as the title feature, the smile would have been known to anyone who had heard of Leonardo's painting called "La Gioconda". The second fact did not originate in Florence. Since the painting was sold to Francis I by Salai or his heirs in Amboise or Milan, no Florentine patron or sitter would have had firsthand knowledge of its location without having traveled to Fontainebleau. Vasari likely learned where it was through Florentine contacts with the French royal court. Only Z6llner's third so-called fact lies within the special competence of a Florentine citizen with firsthand knowledge. But any of Raphael's former associates could have told Vasari that La Gioconda was painted in Florence during the second Republic. This fact too does not bespeak the Giocondos as informants.

Indeed, nothing in Vasari's account of Mona Lisa reflects the interests, attitudes or knowledge of any sitter or patron. A sitter surely would have had something to say about her experience: where and when the sessions took place, how long they lasted, what she wore, whether she had to hold a pose, which features were captured best, and so forth. Yet, Vasari's only comment about the supposed sitting is the story of the

musicians and jesters, which Zollner admits "sounds like an appealing literary invention."83 Likewise, a patron would surely have had something to say about his experience: what it was like to work with Leonardo and how disappointed, and out of pocket, he was that the commission was unfulfilled. None of this appears in Vasari. If Vasari did interview a sitter or patron, he learned very little from her or him.

Of course, Leonardo was famous for his ability to portray in the studio "as if he had been present" someone previously seen on the street.84 Thus, Lisa and Francesco might have heard about the painting called La Gioconda and assumed that it portrayed a member of their family. In this case, however, they could not claim it was made for them without bending the truth.

Zollner's assumption that any correct information must be the result of meetings with firsthand sources reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Vasari's enterprise. Although the Lives are arranged chronologically and he considered himself a historian, Vasari was neither trained nor constrained to seek out reliable informants and to separate fact from fiction.85 He lived in a culture where, as Lauro Martines explains, story- telling was the "mass media of the day, the equivalent of our newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio shows."86 Tales about artists were especially valued, as they were of interest to a broad cross-section of Florentine society.87 This is why mer- chants, like Antonio Billi and Anonimo Magliabechiano, compiled notebooks on art with lists of works, character sketches, and stories about artists.88 Leonardo was the subject of tales long after he departed Florence, and the stories circulating in Vasari's time would have been sufficient for the few so-called facts about La Gioconda that Zollner cites. As in oral tales of popular culture, the "facts" in Vasari's Lives are seamlessly intermixed with fictions.89 Under such circumstances, they hardly constitute historical information and certainly do not substantiate Zollner's claim that Vasari "had first-hand knowledge of Lisa's portrait."90 Indeed to make this claim, even though Vasari never saw the painting and never met Leonardo, is to misconstrue the meaning of "first-hand knowledge."

Zollner, furthermore, conveniently ignores Vasari's treat- ment of the Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci. This portrait is securely dated by style, circumstance, and the sitter's age to the mid-1470's.91 But Vasari places it just before La Gioconda. Elsewhere, he reports visiting "the house of Amerigo de' Benci, opposite the Loggia of the Peruzzi."92 Had Vasari been the careful investigator that Zollner assumes, he would have learned from the Benci (whether they had the portrait or not) that this portrait dated from the mid-1470s, when Ginevra was seventeen, not from thirty years later.

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Even if we accept Z6llner's proposed dating for La Gioconda, Vasari's chronology is riven with errors and ambi- guities. Zollner assumes that the St. Anne cartoon mentioned by Vasari is the one seen at Leonardo's studio by Fra Pietro Novellara in April 1501. But Leonardo produced at least two cartoons and one painting of the theme, and the cartoon described by Vasari does not correspond to the work seen by Novellara.93 Thus, it is misleading to claim that Novellara's let- ter confirms Vasari's accuracy.

After the story of Mona Lisa, Vasari said that Leonardo was awarded the commission for the Battle mural, because the "excellence of the works [...] so greatly increased his fame." For this portrait to increase Leonardo's fame so greatly, it would have to be well advanced. Since Vasari had Leonardo fuss over it for four years without completing it, canny readers not predisposed to acquit Vasari of his errors might well think that he placed the portrait four years before the Battle mural commission, not the three to six months in Zollner's reconstruction.

Still more egregious is Vasari's confusion about how long Leonardo remained in Florence. Documents establish that Leonardo divided his time between Milan and Florence from May 1506 until July 1508, and thereafter made Milan his home until September 1513.94 In October 1513, he was in Florence, but by December 1 had taken a position with Duke Giuliano dei Medici in Rome. His transfer from Florence to Milan was noted by Anonimo Magliabechiano (albeit in a somewhat confused fashion), but Vasari said nothing about it.95 (This omis- sion alone is sufficient proof that Vasari did not consult a patron, for no patron awaiting delivery of a commissioned work would have failed to notice when Leonardo left town.) Instead, Vasari extended Leonardo's second Florentine period through the election of Pope Leo X in 1513. In the Life of Leonardo, this interval is filled with anecdotes about the Battle mural project, and in the Life of Gian-Francesco Rustici, Vasari said that Leonardo never left Rustici's side throughout the lengthy process of fashioning, casting, and chasing the statue group of St. John Preaching to a Levite and Pharisee on the Florentine Baptistry.96 This statue group was commissioned in 1506, cast beginning in 1509, and installed in 1511.97 Vasari, however, delayed the project until after the Medici pageant of 1515. He thus had Leonardo working in Florence from 1500 to 1513 or 1515-plenty of time for the "non-credulous" chronology proposed above.

Zollner's clever interpretation of Leonardo's finances is no less skewed.98 The bank records show Leonardo withdrawing money in 1503-1504, not accepting a commission. Artists' contracts usually provided payments for expenses and a stipend for works in progress.99 All Leonardo's documented

Florentine commissions were structured this way.100 If money were his motive, he would have insisted on in-progress payments. Thus, if, as Zollner suggests, the bank records show Leonardo living off his savings, they contradict, rather than support, Vasari's claim that Francesco del Giocondo commissioned Leonardo to paint a portrait of his wife Lisa.

Nor was Leonardo as unencumbered in Spring and Summer 1503 as Zollner says. In April, he was in Fiesole making a study of the flight of birds.101 In June, he inspected the fortress of La Verruca and visited the Florentine forces besieg- ing Pisa.102 In July, he prepared a map of the Arno as part of a plan to divert it away from Pisa. Work on this project, cham- pioned by Machiavelli, started on August 20th.103 How much Leonardo was paid for these services to the Republic we do not know, but it is likely to have been something.104

On October 18th, Leonardo registered in the Painters' Guild and a few days later was assigned a workspace, where he could prepare a cartoon for the Battle mural.105 When the commission was finalized in December, he began to receive a regular stipend from the Republic.106 Yet, he continued to withdraw funds until April 1504, perhaps because he used his money in other ways than for living expenses.

Even before the Battle mural commission, Leonardo did not act like someone short on funds. On April 8, 1503, he lent four gold ducats to Attavante di Gabriello, the miniaturist, and bought Salai rose colored stockings costing three gold ducats; on April 17, he sent money to a monk; on April 20, he spent 210 soldi on cloth for Salai.107

Had Leonardo needed money in 1503, he had better options than a commission from a merchant. He could, for example, have delivered to Florimond Robertet the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, well advanced in April 1501 when Fra Pietro Novellara visited his studio.108 Or he might have fulfilled his promise to paint a portrait of Isabella d'Este from the cartoon made in 1500.109 King Louis XII of France also expected something from him.110 With such Lords clamoring for his services, why would he have accepted a commission from Francesco del Giocondo?

Accepting a private commission, moreover, may have hurt his chances for the more lucrative and important Battle mural commission. Given how slowly bureaucracies move, discussions of the project must have been underway well before Leonardo was selected in October 1503.111 Having previously reneged on two contracts in Florence-one with the Priors, who controlled the project-Leonardo had a reputation for not delivering commissioned works.112 Why risk the appearance of a possible conflict of commitment for so small a work as a domestic portrait while he sought a major public commission?

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JACK M. GREENSTEIN

Lisa and Francesco del Giocondo just do not measure up to Leonardo's other patrons. Except for the Benci-his first commission-all his patrons were nobles, prelates, heads of state, their familiars (courtiers), and civic, fraternal, or ecclesias- tical bodies.113 His Musician (ca. 1485) portrays a member of Duke Ludovico Sforza's court (perhaps Franchino Gaffurio, Josquin des Pres or Atlante Migliorotti); his Lady with an Ermine (1489-90), Ludovico's mistress, Cecilia Gallerani.1 14 An epigram from ca. 1497 by Antonio Tebaldeo praises a portrait of Ludovico's next mistress, the noblewoman Lucretia Crivelli.115 The so-called La Belle Ferronniere (ca. 1495-1499) portrays a Lady of the Milanese court, perhaps Crivelli or Ludovico's wife, Beatrice d'Este. A profile drawing of 1500, later pricked for transfer, is a study of a portrait of Isabella d'Este, Duchess of Mantua.116 Later in Rome (1513-1516), he portrayed a "certain Florentine lady" for Cardinal Giuliano dei Medici.117

The Benci portrait is the exception that proves the rule. As a twenty-two year old painter working in his master's shop, Leonardo might have accepted an ordinary commission in ca. 1474. But the Benci were no ordinary family. Though untitled bankers, they belonged to the upper crust of Florence's social elite.118 Like Lisa del Giocondo nee Gherardini, Ginevra de' Benci (1457-1520) was married at age sixteen to a widower more than twice her age.119 There the similarity ends, for Ginevra's husband, Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini, belonged to a prestigious old family, prominent for generations in Florentine government, and unlike Francesco del Giocondo, commanded an enormous dowry.120 In 1478, four years after the marriage, he was elected Gonfaloniere (chief magistrate) and two years later, Prior. Nor was Ginevra an ordinary bride. Not only was she chosen by Bembo as the ideal subject for Petrarchan sonnets on virtue and beauty, but she was herself an accomplished poet.121 Ginevra's brother Giovanni was also author and like Leonardo, was interested in horses, and natural science as well as literature.122 Leonardo soon became, if he was not already, a close friend; three decades later they were still in touch, exchanging maps, books and semi-pre- cious stones.123

In 1503, Leonardo was the most sought-after painter in Italy. Why would he humble himself by accepting a commission from Francesco del Giocondo for "a typical painting", when three decades earlier he was already working for the Florentine elite?

Does the Sitter Matter?

The evidence allows three possible scenarios for the sitter's identity, discussed here in order of increasing plausibility.

First and least likely, that La Gioconda was an especially ambi- tious domestic portrait, commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo, as Vasari reported. This scenario interprets Lisa's garments as the latest fashion, her veil as symbol of her married state, her smile as maternal contentment. Currently the most popular, it fits today's middle-class ideology and fulfills prevalent theories about the social role of art. But it raises more problems than it resolves. In a society where the activities of women were carefully monitored, wouldn't Lisa's meetings with Leonardo have been public knowledge? Why then was the portrait not known to Antonio Billi and Anonimo Magliabechiano, whose accounts of Leonardo include works (Leda and St. John) and information (a second Milanese sojourn) that Vasari missed? Why was it not delivered to the patron and why didn't the patron pursue a remedy in a court of law or, at least, in public opinion?

Theories attributing the non-delivery to a protracted period of production do not provide a satisfactory answer. Raphael's pictorial responses to La Gioconda show that it was well advanced-if not complete-when Leonardo moved to Milan. Even if the landscape was unfinished -as some scholars suggest-Leonardo might have painted it over with sky or a dark field (as he did with a window in the Lady with an Ermine). Moreover, Leonardo did not act like one facing possible legal action in Florence for reneging on a commission. After going to Milan in 1506, he returned in 1507 for six to nine months, and half a dozen times thereafter. He might have delivered the painting during any of these visits.

Nor does La Gioconda fit so comfortably within the tradition of domestic portraiture. It lacks the most common tokens of familial display-jewelry, crests and other signs of wealth and status. The balcony is too elevated, the mountainous landscape too wild, for a domestic, urban context. In size, La Gioconda rivals the largest private portraits to date in Renaissance Florence: Piero Pollaiuolo's Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1471), Botticelli's Giuliano dei Medici (1476 or 1478), and Domenico Ghirlandaio's Giovanna dei Tornabuoni, nee Albizzi (1488)-grand paintings for the elite.124 Did the young, bourgeoise Lisa del Giocondo warrant a portrait of such mag- nitude?

Zollner and Arasse describe the sitter as a modest, but stylish Florentine wife. Citing a 1461 Venetian handbook advis- ing married girls to cover their heads in public, they interpret her veil as a symbol of her married state, and Zollner claims that her dark dress was the latest in Renaissance fashion, like the "Spanish" clothing that was the rage in 1502 at the wed- ding of Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso d'Este.125 But was such international couture appropriate for a Florentine merchant's wife, especially given the hatred aroused by the Spanish war

30




in Naples? In the class-conscious society of Renaissance Florence, wouldn't the Giocondos seem to be over-reaching? Since sumptuary customs change with time and locale, it is not clear how a Venetian handbook from 1461 is relevant to the situation in Florence four decades later. Even if it is, what has its advice about covering the head in public to do with a gauze veil worn by a lady on a high, covered balcony over- looking a deserted landscape?

Joanna Woods-Marsden sees the sitter differently. Noticing how Leonardo departed from the traditions of Florentine domestic portraiture, she characterizes the "indecorously" flowing hair and the hint of cleavage as "unconventional-indeed, unique"-and proposes that the Giocondos may have been reluctant to accept the work because it made Lisa look "loose."126 Her theory has the merit of accounting for the non-delivery of the painting, but fails to place patronage in its context. If the Giocondos wanted an ordinary domestic portrait, why would they have hired Leonardo, who never produced one? And why would Leonardo have accepted such a commission at a time when noble patrons sought his services? Many distinguishing features of La Gioconda are anticipated in the works by Leonardo that a prospective patron should have seen: the Ginevra de' Benci and the cartoon of Isabella d' Este, which Leonardo brought to Florence.127 Both featured half-length women with prominent hands-lost when the Benci portrait was trimmed- who pose without jewelry in a house-dress (gamurra) with ele- gant trim. Ginerva appears before a landscape and Isabella, in a rotating pose. Nor are the flowing hair and indication of cleavage as "unique", as Woods-Marsden claims. Isabella's hair flows freely over her shoulders in the cartoon, and Ginerva's cleavage is suggested by the plunging split of her neckline in the portrait. (The marble Lady with a Bunch of Flowers carved by Andrea Verrocchio, when Leonardo was still in his workshop is even more revealing, since the contours of the breasts, even the nipples, show through the drapery.128) Woods-Marsden's association of "loose hair" with "loose morals", moreover, depends on a 1554 Venetian text, doubtful in its relevance to the Florentine context of La Gioconda.129 Indeed, in paintings by Leonardo's Florentine contemporaries Sandro Botticelli [Fig. 4] and Filippino Lippi, the Virgin Mary is coiffed like Gioconda, with hair pulled back beneath a veil and loose curls framing the face.130 Revealing necklines and hair far more provocative than Gioconda's were also common attributes of ideal beauties.131 Since there is not a single feature linking La Gioconda with the interests or station of the Giocondo family, isn't it much more likely a painting of a fictive smiling lady than a domestic portrait gone awry? And had Francesco rejected it, wouldn't he have become fodder for

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Florentine story-tellers, a perfect example of the merchant whose means and ambitions outstripped his taste and social skills?

Second scenario: that La Gioconda resembles Lisa del Giocondo, but was not a commissioned portrait of her. In this scenario, Lisa initially served as Leonardo's model, or he fashioned a smiling lady in her likeness from memory. Either way, Lisa was not represented propria persona in her social identity as a Florentine wife, but was presented as an ideal beauty. This scenario is attractive, because it allows for the widest variety of theories, but it does not resolve the many problems attending Vasari's claim that the portrait was a commissioned work. Nor does it justify the title Mona Lisa unless it is made clear that the identity of the model did not much matter, except

31

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JACK M. GREENSTEIN

perhaps to a small group of family and close friends who were neither the patrons nor the primary public for the work. For a lady named Lisa del Giocondo, moreover, to have just the

qualities that Leonardo wanted for an ideal "Gioconda" seems a coincidence too good to be true.132

Third and best, that La Gioconda was painted by Leonar- do on his own initiative to show what art can do.133 In this scenario, Vasari's identification of the sitter and patron is pure fiction, based on mistaking a generic title for a proper name, but some inkling of Leonardo's purpose might be found in Vasari's claims that "in this head, whoever wishes to see how art can imitate nature can easily understand it [...]. In truth one can

say that this has been painted in such a manner to make even the boldest artist-no matter who-tremble and despair." Painted for display, not for a patron, La Gioconda is a show-

piece of art. It represents a fictive smiling woman, who is so natural that she seems to have been taken from life. Whether Leonardo employed a model or fashioned her from memory or

imagination does not matter, since no knowledge of the model is needed to appreciate the painting. The unusual clothing, implausibly elevated balcony, and preternaturally wild land-

scape, lift the portrait out of any immediate domestic, urban or social context. Yet, "Gioconda" passes as an actual, living Florentine lady because art makes her real.

My warm thanks to Professor John Marino for his advice on this paper.

1 The debate was started by Andre Charles Coppier, "La Joconde' est-elle le portrait de 'Mona Lisa'?", Les Arts (Paris), no. 142, January 1914, pp. 2-9; idem, "Les Vierges aux Rochers et la legende de la Joconde", Revue des Deux Mondes, March 1923, pp. 189-212. See the early response by Ettore Verga in Raccolta Vinciana, vol. 9, 1913-1917, pp. 53-55.

2 Many of these points were made by Carlo Pedretti, Studi Vinciani, Geneva, 1957, p. 133.

3 Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man, London, 1981 (reprinted 1989), p. 268.

4 Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi, "Salai and Leonardo's Legacy", Burlington Magazine, vol. 133, 1991, pp. 95-108.

5 Frank Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo", Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 121, 1993, pp. 115- 138; idem, Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa. Das Portrat der Lisa del Giocondo. Legende und Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main, 1994.

6 See Sylvie Beguin, "La Joconde et la demon", Connaissance des Arts, no. 475, 1991, pp. 62-69. Similar opinions are expressed by Janet Cox-Rearick, The Collection of Francis I: Royal Treasures, Antwerp, 1995, pp. 138-139, and Carlo Pedretti in Leonardo da Vinci.

This scenario credits Leonardo with an active role in the painting's disposition. The archival discoveries by Shell and Sironi and Jestaz confirm that Leonardo held onto the painting, bringing it from Florence to Milan, Milan to Rome (where it was seen again by Raphael), and then to Amboise, France. Nor was this retention anomalous, since Leonardo also retained three, four or more other autograph works, which were also sold or inherited by Salai.134 Surely Leonardo knew that, outside of Florence, no viewers would recognize, or care about, an ordinary Florentine merchant's wife. Why then take La Gioconda from the one and only place where the real, social identity of the sitter might matter? If it was incomplete when he left Florence, he had ample opportunity to accommo- date it to a new situation and purpose. If already complete, he would not have removed it were it not designed for a wider

spectatorship. La Gioconda is perhaps the most thought-out portrait ever

painted. For Clark, it "is one of the few works of man that may properly be described as unique"; for Walter Pater, "a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell

by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries."135 Credit Leonardo with caring about the disposition of his

work, and it is he who shows that the identity of the sitter does not matter.

Scientist, Inventor, Artist, ed. by Otto Letze and Thomas Buchsteiner, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997, p. 208.

7 Bertrand Jestaz, "Francois ler, Salai, et les tableaux de Leo- nard", Revue de I'Art, no. 126, 1999, pp. 68-72, citing Archives nationales, J 910, fasc. 6, in the chapter on "autres parties diverses": "a messire Salay de Pietredorain, paintre, pour quelques tables de paintures qu'il a baillees au Roy, IIM VIC IlI I.t. III s. IIII d."

8 The lone dissenter was Carlo Vecce, Leonardo, Rome, 1998, pp. 334-336, who stuck with the identification in his "La Gualanda", Achademia Leonardi Vinci, vol. 3,1990, pp. 51-72.

9 See Martin Kemp, "Leonardo da Vinci", The Grove Dic- tionary of Art Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 15 August 2002), http://www.groveart.com, Section I, 3.

10 E. H. Gombrich, "Keeping Up with Leonardo", review of Inventing Leonardo by A. Richard Turner, New York Review of Books, June 23, 1994, pp. 39-40; Elizabeth Cropper, Pontormo. Portrait of a Halberdier, Getty Museum Studies on Art, Los Angeles, 1997, p. 77.

11 Daniel Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci. The Rhythm of the World, New York, 1998 [French ed., Paris, 1997], pp. 388, 520 n. 611.

12 Shell and Sironi, "Salai," p. 96, call the documents an imbreviatura and an extensa, but Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture. Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance, New Haven and London, 1997,

32




pp. 160-162, more reasonably holds that they are "a roughish and fair copy."

13 Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 160-162. 14 The titles are from the "imbreviatura" transcribed by Shell and

Sironi, "Salai", p. 108. 15 Shell and Sironi, "Salai", p. 96. 16 Jestaz, "Francois ler," p. 68; and Edoardo Villata, ed., Leonar-

do da Vinci, I documenti e le testimonianze contemporanee, Ente Raccolta Vinciana, Milan, 1999, p. 287 n. 1 (henceforth cited as Villata, Documenti).

17 See the full transcription in Shell and Sironi, "Salai", pp. 107- 108.

18 Villata, Documenti, no. 347 (unpaginated addenda between pp. 302 and 305). The inventory, dated 28 December 1531, was first published by Virginio Longoni, Umanesimo e Rinascimento in Brianza. Studi sul patrimonio culturale, Milan, 1998, p. 171.

19 The list reads: "unus habet depictam figuram sancte Anne cum figura beate virginis Marie (et sti lohis) et figura Dey cum agno, alius habet (Imaginem) loconde figuram, duo habent (m)(lm)(imaginem)(figuram) imaginem sancti leronimi pro utroque, duo habent imaginem sancti lohannis pro utroque eorum, alius habet (Im) figuram unius galice, alius habet imaginem dei patris, et alius habet figuram unius nude" ("one has a depicted figure of St. Anne with a figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a figure of God with a lamb, another has a figure of Gioconda, two have an image of St. Jerome on each, two have an image of St. John on each of them, another has a figure of one French woman [?], another has an image of God the Father, and another has a figure of one nude woman". My translation omits the cancellations transcribed by Villata, Documenti, no. 347). The titles on the Salai inventory that do not appear here are: a "painting called a Leda", "Madonna with a son in her arms", and "Christ at the column not finished."

20 See Villata, Documenti, no. 348 for the debt. 21 Although the nature of the debt is not clear, it is worth noting

that one of the parties to document no. 347 represented Salai's widow Bianca Coldiroli, who was excluded from the settlement of the estate in 1525, as Shell and Sironi ("Salai", p. 96) explain.

22 415 scudi is the sum of the valuations for the eight paintings on the Salai inventory with corresponding titles. The figure does not include the value of the "galice," here interpreted as corresponding to dona aretrata, whose value is omitted on the Salai inventory. Villata (Documenti, notes to nos. 316bis, 347 and 348) gives the value of the corresponding works on the Salai inventory as 315 scudi, a figure that excludes the value of one Salai painting appraised at 100 scudi, i.e. St. Anne or La Gioconda. Whether this exclusion was inadvertent or intentional is not clear. But, given the disproportion between the valuations on the two documents, if one corresponding work on the Caprotti inventory was different (say, a copy of the Salai painting), then why not all of them?

23 Pedretti, Studi Vinciani, pp. 132, 134. Compare Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell' Arte Italiana, IX: La Pittura Italiana del Cinquecento, vol. 1, Milan, 1925, p. 38. A similar interpretation of the word "Gioconda" is offered (without reference to Pedretti or Venturi) by Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1991, pp. 62-65, who suggested that the smile was a symbol for the surname of the sitter.

24 C. Frey, ed., II codice magliabechiano cl. XVII. 17, contenente notizie sopra l'arte degli antichi e quella de' fiorentini da Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti, scritte da anonimo fiorentino, Berlin, 1892, p. 111: "Ritrasse dal naturale Piero Francesco del Giocondo."

25 Shell and Sironi, "Salai", p. 100 n. 48, interpret aretrata as the past participle of "ritrarre." Although correctly translated as "to portray", ritrarre (from ri + trahere, "to draw out" or "to extract") also

meant "to render", "to delineate" or "to reproduce" and was applied to works, including religious paintings, that we would not now call "portraits". See Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits. European Portrait- Painting in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries, New Haven and London, 1990, pp. 1-3, and especially, Jodi Cranston, Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance, New York, 2000, pp. 6-7. 83-86.

26 Villata, Documenti, no. 334. Fabio Benedettucci, ed., II Libro di Antonio Billi, Anzio, 1991, pp. 15-18, dates the entry on Leonardo to ca. 1527/30. Billi's list of Leonardo's works includes a "St. John" and a "Madonna on panel," perhaps the Madonna of the Rocks-works that Vasari omitted.

27 Most scholars do not include the notice from the Codex Magliabechiano in their catalogues of Leonardo's lost works. A few, including Pedretti (Uno "Studio" per la Gioconda, Milan, 1959, p. 30 [reprinted from L'Arte, vol. 24, 1959]; idem, Leonardo. A Study in Chronology and Style, London, 1973, p. 137) maintain that the portrait of Francesco del Giocondo is now lost.

28 Frey, II codice magliabechiano, p. 372. 29 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 117. 30 See Roland Furieux, compose premierement en ryme thus-

cane par messir Loys Ariote..., trans. by Jean Martin, ed. by Jean des Gouttes, Lyon, J. Thellusson, 1544, pp. 145-150. "loconde" or 'Joconde" also appeared in French translations by Jean Fornier (Anvers, G. Spelman, 1555), Gabriel Chappuys (Paris, C. Gautier, 1571; reprinted: Lyon, E. Michel, 1582; Lyon, P Rigaud, 1608; Rouen, C. Le Villian, 1610-1611 and 1618), and Francois de Rosset (Paris, R. Fouet, 1615; reprinted: Paris, A. de Sommerville, 1643).

31 A similar confusion of a generic description with a personal name, but in reverse, lies behind the Renaissance novella /I Moro by Giovanni Cinque. The plot is based on an incident involving Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, who was called "II Moro" in speech, poems, letters and some official documents. But the lead character in Cinque's novella is a Moor, not a Milanese Duke named II Moro. My thanks to Prof. Stephanie Jed for this example.

32 Raffaello Borghini, II Riposo, Florence, Giorgio Marescotti, 1584; facs. ed., Hildesheim, 1969, pp. 370-371 (Book 3).

33 On Melzi, see Pietro C. Marani, "Francesco Melzi", in The Legacy of Leonardo. Painters in Lombardy 1490-1530, ed. by Francesco Porzio, Milan, 1998, pp. 371-384; and Maria Teresa Fiorio, "Melzi, Francesco", The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 8 October 2002), http://www.groveart.com.

34 Another reason is that Lomazzo's purpose was to illustrate a theory of art through examples familiar to his readers, not to present an accurate account of Leonardo's life and work.

35 G. P. Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. by R. P. Ciardi, 2 vols., Florence, 1974, vol. 1, p. 109. Translation by Cox-Rearick, Collection of Francis I, p. 152.

36 Lomazzo, Scritti, vol. 2, p. 379: "... quelli di mano di Leonardo, ornati a guisa di primavera, come il ritratto della Gioconda e di Mona Lisa, ne' quali ha espresso tra I'altre parti maravigliosamente la bocca in atto di ridere".

37 E.g., J. R. Eyre, Monograph on Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa', London and New York, 1915; L. Roger Miles, Leonard de Vinci et les Jocondes, Paris, 1923; H. Pulizer, Where is the Mona Lisa, London, 1956; Jerome de Bassano, "Le Mythe de la Joconde", Bulletin de I'Association Leonard de Vinci, no. 16, March 1978, pp. 21-23.

38 In his Studi Vinciani (1957), pp. 137-138, Pedretti suggested that Lomazzo's amanuensis incorrectly wrote "e" ("and") instead of "o" ("or"), but he amended his position and correctly acknowledged that Lomazzo intended to refer to two portraits in Leonardo (1973), p. 139.

33



JACK M. GREENSTEIN

39 For the index entry, see Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell'arte di Pittura, Milan, Paolo Gottardo Pontio, 1584, p. 26.

40 Lomazzo, Scritti, vol. 1, p. 249: "l'opere finite (benche siano poche) di Leonardo da Vinci, come la Leda ignuda, et il ritratto di Mona Lisa napoletana che sono nella fontana de Belao in Francia".

41 Although Leonardo never painted a woman dressed as Spring, Melzi did in works based on La Gioconda (e.g. his Flora or Columbine in St. Petersburg and his Vertumnus and Pomona in Berlin). Perhaps a version of these is the La Gualanda mentioned by De Beatis at Blois, a painting arbitrarily linked with La Gioconda by Vecce, "La Gualanda".

42 On Dal Pozzo, see Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters. Art and Society in Baroque Italy, Icon ed., New York, 1971 (1963), pp. 98-114; Cassiano dal Pozzo. Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studi, ed. by Francesco Solinas, Roma, 1989; Francis Haskell and Jennifer Montagu, eds., The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: Catalogue Raisonne of Drawings And Prints in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the British Museum, Institut de France and Other Collections, London, 1994; and Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, Princeton, NJ, 1996, pp. 109-174.

43 Cassiano dal Pozzo, "Legatione del Signore Cardinale Barberini in Francia," Rome, Biblioteca Vaticana, MS Barberini, Latino 5688, fols. 192v-194v; transcribed by Cox-Rearick, Collection of Francis I, p. 445 n. 142. The selections translated in the text read: "un ritratto della grandezza del vero in tavola incorniciato di noce intaglia- to e mezza figura, et e ritratto d'una tal Gioconda. Questa e la piu com- pita opera che di quest' autore si veda, perche della parole in poi altro non gli manca. La figure mostra una Donna di 24 in 26 anni... Notamo che a quella Donna per altro bella mancava qualche poco nel ciglio, che il pittore non glie I'ha fatto molto apparire come che essa non doveva haverlo".

44 The Italian is given in the preceding note. The translation of the final sentence by Cox-Rearick (Collection of Francis I, p. 153) is misleading. If Dal Pozzo wanted to say that "the woman may have lacked some beauty in her face", as Cox-Rearick rendered it, he would have used faccia which appears twice earlier in the passage, not "ciglio". Moreover, "qualche poco" or "ciglio", not "bella", is the referent of the masculine pronoun "lo" of "haverlo" in the last clause and the subject of "mancava" in the first clause. I suggest that Dal Pozzo used the singular "ciglio" rather than the plural "ciglia" employed by Vasari, because there were no eyebrows to be seen on "that otherwise beautiful Lady".

45 Dal Pozzo lamented "all the misfortunes that this painting [La Gioconda] has endured" and also commented upon the poor condi- tion of Leonardo's Leda, then at Fontainebleau, but now lost.

46 See Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, 1970, s.v. "Giocondo", with numerous examples from the 13th century onwards.

47 See Le Tresor de la Langue Francaise informatise, version du 18/06/2002, ed. by Jacques Dendien (http://atilf.inalf.fr/tlfv3.htm), s.v. 'Joconde", accessed 21 August 2002. 'Joconde" is not listed in the online dictionaries of the Academie Franqaise. For the nineteenth-century association of 'Joconde" with the femme fatale, see Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa. The Making of a Global Icon, New York, 2001, pp. 91-132.

48 Ariosto's story was taken up by De Bouillon (Les Oeuvres de feu Monsieur de Bouillon..., Paris, C. de Sercy, 1663) and then by Jean de La Fontaine (Contes et nouvelles en vers, Paris, C. Barbin, 1665). For later versions, see Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du X/Xe Siecle. 1982 ed., s.v. 'Joconde".

49 Published by S. de Ricci, "Extrait d'un manuscript de Peiresc", Revue Archeologique, vol. 35 (1899), p. 342, who is corrected by Cox- Rearick, Collection of Francis I, pp. 99-102.

50 The inventory of works was drawn up by 'Jacques Quesnel, master painter at Paris". See Catherine Grodecki, "Sebastien Zamet, amateur d'art," in Les arts au temps d'Henri IV Colloque de Fontainebleau organise par I'Association Henri IV 1989 et le Musee national du chateau de Fontainebleau, Paris, pp. 185-254 at 243-249. For discussion, see Cox Rearick, Collection of Francis I, pp. 101-102. A copy made at Fontainebleau by the painter Charles Simon in 1621 is called "une Joconde" (ibid. p. 153).

51 P. Dan, Le tresor des merveilles de la maison royale de Fontainebleau, Paris [1642], pp. 135-136; for the French, see Cox- Rearick, Collection of Francis I, p. 445 n. 143.

52 The Italian edition also includes the Treatise on Painting and Treatise on Sculpture by Leon Battista Alberti. For the history of the edition, see Ludwig H. Heydenreich, "Introduction" in the Treatise on Painting [Codex Urbinas latinus 1270] by Leonardo da Vinci, ed. and trans. by A. Philip McMahon, Princeton, New Jersey, 1956, vol. 1, pp. xv-xvi; Carlo Pedretti, Studi Vinciani, pp. 257-263; idem, Leonardo da Vinci On Painting. A Lost Book (Libro A), Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964, pp. 23-24, 241; idem, Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, compiled... by Jean Paul Richter, Commentary, 2 vols., National Gallery of Art, Kress Foundation Studies in the History of European Art, no. 5, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977, vol. 1, pp. 12-47; Carlo Pedretti and Giorgio Baratta, Leonardo e II Libro di Pittura, ed. by R. Nanni, Rome, 1997, pp. 57-75. A French translation by Roland Freat de Chambray (1606-76), issued concurrently with the first Italian edition, contained the earliest printed reproduction of La Gioconda-an engraving of the head and shoulders (reversed) without the balcony or the landscape setting-but omitted the treatises by Alberti and the introductions composed by Du Fresne. Later French editions included Du Fresne's introduction.

53 Raffaelle du Fresne, "Vita di Lionardo da Vinci," in Trattato della pittura di Lionardo da Vinci, Novamente dato in luce, Paris, Giacomo Langlois, 1651, pp. 10-11: "Fece poi per Francesco del Giocondo il ritratto tanto nominato di Lisa sua moglie, volgarmente chiamato la Gioconda, il qual si vede a Fontanableo in compagnia di molti altri quadri pretiosi del re Christianissimo, e fu gia comprato quattro milla scudi da Francesco I. Si dice ch' egli stette quattro anni a lavorar quel ritratto, e che nondimeno lo lascio imperfetto, havendo il gusto tanto delicato, e I' ingegno si acuto e sottile, che per arrivar alla verita della natura, cercava sempre eccellenza sopra eccellenza, e perfettione sopra perfettione, e non appagandosi del fatto ben che bello, andava con ansieta dietro a quel piu che si pote- va fare. Mentre egli dipinse soleva havere attorno della signora Lisa gente che cantasse, sonasse e ridesse, per tenerla allegra, e non cascar nell'ordinario inconveniente de' ritratti, che per lo piu danno nel malinconico. E veramente in questo si vede un gigno tanto piacevole, che, come dice il Vasari, e cosa piu divina che humana a vedere".

54 Andre Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, new ed., 6 vols., Trevoux, 1725 [Reprinted, Farnborough, Hants. England, 1967], vol. 2, p. 266- 267: "II y a fit plusieurs portraits, entr' autres celui de Lise, femme de Fran(ois Gioconde. C'est celui-la-meme qui est dans le Cabinet du Roi, et que I'on connoit assez par la Gioconde de Leonard".

55 Abbe P Guilbert, Description historique des chateau bourg et forest de Fontainebleau, 2 vols., Paris, 1731, pp. 157-158.

56 Before the discovery of the Salai inventory, the diary of Antonio De' Beatis and some poems by Enea Irpino were used for alternate theories of the identity of the sitter, but neither should be taken as evidence about La Gioconda. Since La Gioconda was begun in Florence during the Medician exile, it cannot be the painting "of

34




a certain Florentine lady portrayed from life at the request of the late Magnificent Giuliano dei Medici" (tre quatri, uno di certa dona Firentina fatta di natuale ad istantia del quondam Mag.co Julinao de Medici), which was seen by De Beatis at Cloux (Amboise) on 10 October 1517. Likely, the work seen by De Beatis was Leonardo's autograph for the "lady portrayed" of the Salai inventory, as Shell and Sironi suggest ("Salai," pp. 97-100). For De Beatis, see J. R. Hale, ed., The Travel Journal of Antonio De Beatis. Germany, Switzerland, The Low Countries and Italy, 1517-1518, trans. by J. R. Hale and J. M. A. Lindon, London, 1979, p. 132 (for the translation, above), and Villata, Documenti, no. 314 (for the Italian). For evidence of Leonardo's portrait for Giuliano, see David A. Brown and Konrad Oberhuber, "Monna Vanna and Fornarina," in Essays Presented to Myron P Gilmore, vol. 2: History of Art, History of Music, ed. by S. Bertelli and G. Ramakus, Florence, 1978, pp. 25-86. The six poems by Irpino praising the beauty of an unidentified lady portrayed by "my Leonardo... under a beautiful dark veil," sometimes call the portrait a drawing (Chi tenta oggi ritrar Madonna in carte), other times a painting (Quel buon pittor egre- gio che dipinse) and make no mention of the smile, hands, pose, balcony setting, or background landscape; they are poetic inventions based on Leonardo's reputation, not accounts of an actual work. For key passages, see Villata, Documenti, no. 327, and more fully, B. Croce, "Un canzioniere d'amore per Costanza d'Avalos, duchessa di Francavilla," in Atti dell'Academia Pontaniana, vol. 33 (ser. 2, no. 13), 1903, memoria 6; and M. Albrecht-Bott, Die bildende Kunst in der ital- ienischen Lyrik der Renaissance und des Barock, Mainzer romanistis- che Arbeiten, no. 11, Wiesbaden, 1976, pp. 56-57. For discussion, see John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988, Bollingen Series, XXXV, 37, Princeton, NJ, 1992, pp. 124-125; Vecce, "La Gualanda," pp. 66-70; and Anna Ceruti Burgio, "Ritratti pittorici di belle donne in alcune poesie di autori parmensi del tardo Quattrocento e del primo Cinquecento", Malacoda, vol. 9, no. 50, 1993, pp. 7-16.

57 My translation of Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pit- tori, scultori e architettori nelle redazione del 1550 e 1568, ed. R. Bettarini and P Barocchi, Florence, 1966-87, vol. 4, pp. 30-31 (Life of Leonardo); hereafter cited B/B, with date of the edition only when the cited passage occurs in one edition, but not the other.

58 On the perfectionist, see B/B, vol. 4, p. 19 (Life of Leonardo). 59 On Leonardo and the terza maniera, see B/B, vol. 4, pp. 3-8,

esp. 8 (Proem to Part Three). 60 For Leonardo's infinite grace, see B/B, vol. 4, p. 15 (Life of

Leonardo). 61 Compare Vasari's description with Angelo Firenzuola, On the

Beauty of Women, ed. and trans. by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 26 (eyes), 28 (eyebrows, nostrils, and mouth), 53 (eyelids), 57 (base of nose), 59 (smile). For the tradition, see Elizabeth Cropper, "On Beautiful Women. Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style", Art Bulletin, vol. 58, 1976, pp. 374-398; eadem, "The Beauty of Women: Problems in the Rhetoric of Female Portraiture", in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Moder Europe, ed. by M. W. Ferguson, M. Quiligan, and N. J. Vickers, Chicago and London, 1986, pp. 175-190; Giovanni Pozzi, "II ritratto delle donne nella poesia d'inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione", in Giorgione e I' Umanesimo veneziano, ed. by Rodolfo Palluchini, Florence, 1981, pp. 309-41; and Victoria Kirkham, "Poetic Ideals of Love and Beauty", in Virtue & Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, ed. by David Allan Brown, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Princeton, NJ, 2001, pp. 49-62.

62 Patricia Rubin, "What Men Saw: Vasari's Life of Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist", Art History, vol. 13, 1990, p. 42.

63 Kenneth Clark ("Mona Lisa", Burlington Magazine, vol. 115, 1973, pp. 147-148) suggested that the eyebrows were removed during an early cleaning, but the conservators, who studied the painting in their laboratory, saw no trace of the eyebrows or evidence of the two dry oblong patches above the eyes that Clark mentioned. See Madeline Hours, "Etude analytique des tableaux de Leonard de Vinci au Laboratoire du Musee du Louvre", in Leonardo. Saggi e richerche, ed. by Achille Marazza, Rome, 1954, pp. 14-26. That La Gioconda never had eyebrows is confirmed by the many sixteenth-century copies that lack them, since copyists are not likely to eliminate them, but a few might have added them, thinking that the original was damaged or incomplete.

64 For example, see Luba Freedman, Titian's Portraits through Aretino's Lens, University Park, PA, 1995, pp. 97-102.

65 See B/B, vol. 4, p. 24 (Life of Leonardo, 1568 ed.) for the Benci house, and Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (1939), new edition, Harmondsworth, 1989, p. 57, for the Benci portrait.

66 On the impressa, see Jennifer Fletcher, "Bernardo Bembo and Leonardo's Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci", Burlington Magazine, vol. 131, no. 1041, 1989, pp. 811-816). Even though it speaks against her argument, Fletcher notes (p. 813) that the Benci portrait does not appear in the catalogue of Bembo's collection by Marcantonio Michiel or in other Venetian commentaries on art and that there is no trace of its impact on Renaissance painting in Venice. Long before Fletcher's identification of the impressa, John Walker ("Ginevra de' Benci by Leonardo da Vinci," in Report and Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1967, pp. 1-38) suggested that Bembo commissioned the work because Ginevra was his lover. But it is unlikely that they were lovers, since both were married, Bembo was accompanied in Florence by his wife, and neither would have wished to publicize an illicit affair with a portrait. Indeed, Lorenzo dei Medici and the other poets who celebrated Ginevra's beauty, virtue, and chastity, could hardly have done so if she were publically flaunting her marriage vows.

67 Kenneth Clark, Martin Kemp, Pietro Marani, David Allan Brown and others date the portrait to the time of Ginevra's marriage on January 15, 1474, rather than to the time of Bembo's missions to Florence. For a detailed account of the style and date, including full references, see David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius, New Haven, 1998, pp. 101-121.

68 Shearman, Only Connect, p. 118 n. 29, suggests that the impressa was added by a hand other than Leonardo's.

69 B/B, vol. 5, p. 424 (Life of Benevenuto Garofalo, Girolamo da Capri, et al., 1568 ed.): "Di mano del medesimo frate ho veduto nella medesima casa della Zecca di Milano un quadro ritratto da un di Lionardo, nel quale e una femina che ride et un San Giovanni Battista giovinetto, molto bene imitato". See also Alessandro Conti, "Osservazioni e appunti sulla 'Vita' di Leonardo di Giorgio Vasari", in: Kunst des Cinquecento in der Toskana, ed. by Monika Cammerer, Italienische Forschungen, Folge 3, Bd. 17, Munich, 1992, pp. 26-36.

70 For a biographical conspectus, see Patricia Rubin, Giorgio Vasari. Art and History, New Haven and London, 1995, pp. 9-19.

71 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 118. 72 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 120. 73 Ibidem. 74 Gustavo Uzielli, Richerche intorno a Leonardo da Vinci,

Florence, 1872; see Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie rigiardanti la vita e le opere de Leonardo da Vinci..., Milan, 1919, nos. 101, 113, 123,125,128,131,139,158,163,175, 188; Villata, Documenti, doc no. 143.

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75 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", pp. 120-121. 76 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 129. 77 Despite Zollner's claim ("Leonardo's Portrait", p. 124),

Francesco del Giocondo's commissioning of two thirdrate Florentine painters to decorate his family chapel in SS. Annunziata does not put him into the same class of art patron as the Doni and the Strozzi, patri- cian families with distinguished histories of commissions from first rate artists.

78 The birth of a child and the purchase of a house do not prove that Francesco del Giocondo commissioned a portrait of his wife. Indeed, one might argue that the expenses and duties associated with these happy events would have made it difficult for Francesco del Giocondo to spend money on a large portrait and for his wife to sit for it.

79 B/B vol. 4, pp. 250-51 (Life of Puligo), 514 (Life of Franciabigio, 1568 ed.).

80 According to Vasari, Puligo often worked in the studio of Andrea del Sarto and also collaborated with Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Vasari frequented the studios of Del Sarto and Ghirlandaio during his first years in Florence. See T. S. R. Boase, Giorgio Vasari. The Man and the Book, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1971, Bollingen Series XXXV, 20, Princeton NJ, 1979, pp. 8-12, 255; and Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, p. 77. For the date of Puligo's altarpiece see, Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 124.

81 B/B, vol. 4, p. 250 (Life of Puligo, 1568 ed.). 82 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 116. 83 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", p. 117. 84 Vasari, B/B, vol. 4, p. 24 (Life of Leonardo, 1568 ed.). 85 Vasari's errors of fact are too numerous to list, but none is

more famous than the story of Domenico Veneziano's murder at the hand of Andrea del Castagno. He even erred and fabricated when discussing his own activities. For example, he gave three different dates for his own arrival in Florence. Compare B/B, vol. 5, p. 511 (Life of Francesco Salviati, 1568 ed.), vol. 6, pp. 53 (Life of Michelangelo, 1568 ed.), 369 (Description of Vasari's Works, 1568 ed.). And his account of the dinner conversation that led him to write the Lives includes one person (Molza) who was dead and others were not concurrently in Rome during the stated year, 1546. For which, see Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 144-145.

86 Lauro Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet. Six Tales in Historical Context, with translations by Murtha Baca, New York, 1994, pp. 117-137, esp. 119 (for the quotation).

87 Martines, Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp. 213-241. 88 Although only two such Notebooks survive, there must have

been many more. See Julius Schlosser Magnino, La letteratura artisti- ca. Manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna, trans. by Filippo Rossi, ed. by Otto Kurz, 3rd ed. by La Nuova Italia, 1977, reprinted 1979, pp. 189-193, 198-199,205-206; the Introduction by Benedettucci in II Libro di Antonio Billi; C. von Fabriczy, "II Libro di Antonio Billi e le sue copie nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze," Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. V, vol. 8, 1891 (reprinted by Gregg International Publishers, Westmead, Farnsborough, Hants., 1969) pp. 299-334; C. Frey, ed., II Codex Magliabechiano.

89 Vasari said that he had begun making notes on artists long before he conceived writing and publishing the Lives. In so doing, he was following the example of merchant compilers whose Notebooks (stratti) he acknowledged consulting. See B/B, vol. 2, p. 137 (Life of Stefano) for the stratti, and vol. 6, p. 389 (Description of Vasari's Works, 1568 ed.) for the notes. For discussion, see W. Kallab, Vasaristudien, ed. by J. von Schlosser, Karl Graeser and B. G. Teubner, Vienna and Leipzig, 1908, pp. 171-207; and Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, pp.

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173-75. For Vasari's use of Renaissance novelle, see Boase, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 51-52. Vasari related that it was during a conversation on art at the meeting of an informal dining club in Rome (not unlike the one in Florence discussed by Martines) that he first conceived of the Lives. See B/B, vol. 6, p. 389 (Description of Vasari's Works). For discussion, see Philip Sohm, "Ordering History with Style: Giorgio Vasari on the Art of History", in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. by Alina Payne, Anne Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, Cambridge, UK, 2000, pp. 40-54.

90 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait," p. 120. 91 For a detailed account, see Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, 1998,

pp. 101-121. 92 B/B, vol. 4, p. 24 (Life of Leonardo, 1568 ed.). 93 No extant painting or cartoon of the theme by Leonardo, his

associates, or his immediate followers has both St. John and a lamb. Indeed, the differences between Novellara's and Vasari's description are such that Jack Wasserman ("A Rediscovered Cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci", Burlington Magazine, vol. 112, 1970, pp. 194-210) and Johannes Nathan ("Some Drawing Practices of Leonardo: New Light on the St. Anne", Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol, 36, 1992, pp. 85-102) attempt to reconstruct the design of the cartoon described by Vasari on the basis of submerged drawings beneath Leonardo's sketches. But it is much more likely that Vasari was confused and conflated reports about the different St. Annes that Leonardo is known to have worked out in detail. The accuracy of Novellara's eyewitness description is confirmed by two early copies: a Leonardesque drawing in a private collection in Geneva, inscribed on the reverse not by Leonardo (perhaps by a later hand?) "Leonardo alla Nuntiata", and a painted copy by Andrea Piccinelli, called II Brescianino, formerly in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, but destroyed in 1943. For a clear discussion, see Daniel Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 445-461. The drawing was published by Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo, Bologna, 1979, p. 42; see also his introduction to Leonardo dopo Milano. La Madonna dei fusi (1501), exh. cat., Citta di Vinci, 16 May - 30 September 1982, ed. by A. Vezzosi, Florence, 1982, p. 18 and no. 21. For the Brescianino painting, see Wilhelm Suida, Leonardo und sein Kreis, Munich, 1929, p. 131.

94 See Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 261-262. 95 Beltrami, Documenti, no. 254; Villata, Documenti, no. 334. 96 B/B, vol. 5, pp. 477-478 (Life of Rustici, 1568 ed.). 97 See John Pope-Hennessy, An Introduction to Italian Sculpture,

Part 3: Italian High Renaissance & Baroque Sculpture, New York, 1985 (reprint of 2nd ed., 1970), pp. 340-342. Also, Martin Kemp, "Leonardo and the Space of the Sculptor" (1988), in Claire Farago, ed., Leonardo. Selected Scholarship, vol. 2: An Overview of Leonardo's Career and Projects until c. 1500, New York and London, 1999, pp. 237-262 at 248-51.

98 Despite Zollner's claim ("Leonardo's Portrait", p. 120), Vasari's story of Leonardo working for the Servite brothers is not corroborated. Full documentation of the project is published by Jonathan Nelson, "The High Altar-piece of SS. Annunziata in Florence: History, Form, and Function", Burlington Magazine, vol. 139, 1997, pp. 84-94. Leonardo's name does not appear in the contracts, and no trace of his hand is visible in the altarpiece. Moreover (as noted by Kemp, Leonardo, pp. 215-216), the mathematician Luca Pacioli reported that he was sharing his lodgings with Leonardo at this time, a report which contradicts Vasari's claim that the Servite brothers were boarding him. Zollner ("Leonardo's Portrait", p. 118) is also misleading when he states that documents confirm Vasari's "penny painter" story about Leonardo. The relevant documents for the Battle mural project (e.g., Beltrami, Documenti, nos. 145, 146, 151, 153, 154, 159, 165, 166, 167;




Villata, Documenti, nos. 173, 194, 199, 201, 206, 211, 218, 221, 222) merely indicate that Leonardo and his suppliers and assistants were paid for their work and reimbursed for expenses and supplies, not that he complained about receiving small currency.

99 See Hannelore Glasser, Artists' Contracts of the Early Renaissance, London and New York, 1971; Jill Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Durer. Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, London, 1991, pp. 134-135; Anabel Thomas, The Painter's Practice in Renaissance Tuscany, Cambridge UK, 1995, pp. 101-109, 143-148,182-196.

100 See Villata, Documenti, nos. 9-10, 14-18, 188, 189. 101 See Bramly, Leonardo, p. 346. 102 See Bramly, Leonardo, p. 330-331. 103 For a full account of the project, see Roger D. Masters, Fortune

is a River: Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History, New York, 1998.

104 For a payment towards Leonardo's expenses, see Beltrami, Documenti, no. 127; Villata, Documenti, no. 181.

105 Beltrami, Documenti, no. 129, 130; Villata, Documenti, nos. 182, 183.

106 Beltrami, Documenti, nos. 132, 134, 136, 137, 140, 145, 146, 151, 153, 154, 159, 160; Villata, Documenti, nos. 187, 188 189, 194, 199, 201,205, 206, 211,212.

107 Beltrami, Documenti, no. 124; Villata, Documenti, nos. 174; Bramly, Leonardo, pp. 330, 459 n. 44.

108 See Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo da Vinci. The Mystery of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, exh. cat. National Gallery of Scotland, 1992. There is no record of its delivery, but Kemp (p. 12) and others believe that it might be the "small picture by his hand" seen by King Louis XII at Blois in January 1507.

109 Zollner's statement ("Leonardo's Portrait", p. 120) that Isabella's interest in the project had waned in 1503 is not supported by evidence. In May 1504, she reminded Leonardo that he had promised "to color" her portrait, but she offered to accept a painting of Christ at age twelve instead. See Beltrami, Documenti, no. 142; Villata, Documenti, no. 191. Nor does a lack of surviving letters about Isabella's portrait in 1503 indicate that no such letters were written, that Isabella stopped pressing her case through intermediaries, or that Leonardo regarded the portrait request as withdrawn.

110 Paolo Giovio (Beltrami, Documenti, no. 258; Villata, Docu- menti, no. 337) reports that King Louis was so taken with the Last Supper when he saw it in 1500 that he wanted to have it removed from the Refectory wall and sent to France, a story repeated and embellished by Vasari. In 1501, Novellara reported to Isabella de' Este that Leonardo was under obligation to the king (in Beltrami, Documenti, no. 108). See also Barbara Hochstetler Meyer, "Louis XII, Leonardo and the Burlington House Cartoon", Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 86, 1975, pp. 105-109.

111 Kemp (Leonardo, p. 226) plausibly suggests that Leonardo saw his efforts on the 1501 St. Anne cartoon "as playing a valuable role in re-establishing position as an artist in Florence-under the par- ticular circumstances of the Republic [...], a convenient demonstra- tion that his political heart was in the right place."

112 The other abandoned work was the Adoration for the Augustinian Brothers of San Donato a Scopeto. See Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo da Vinci. The Complete Paintings, trans. by A. Lawrence Jenkens, New York, 2000 [Italian ed. 1999], pp. 78-84,106-114; Villata, Documenti, nos. 9-10 (Priors), 14-17 (Brothers).

113 Leonardo's least prestigious patrons were the Augustinian Brothers of San Donato a Scopeto. His father was their notary and probably had a hand in arranging the commission for his twenty-nine year old son, who in 1481 was still without steady work.

114 See Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi, "Cecilia Gallerani: Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine", Artibus et Historiae, no. 25, 1992, pp. 47-66; and David Alan Brown, "Leonardo and the Ladies with the Ermine and the Book", Artibus et Historiae, no. 22, 1990, pp. 47-61.

115 Codex Altanticus, fol. 457v (ex. 167v-c); Beltrami, Documenti, Poesia VII; Villata, Documenti, no. 122. Translated and discussed by Marani, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 177-178, 205 n. 70, who holds that it refers to La Belle Ferronniere.

116 See Francoise Viatte, Leonard de Vinci, Isabelle d'Este, Paris, 1999; and, on the pricking, Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop. Theory and Practice, 1300-1600, Cambridge, UK, 1999, pp. 111-112.

117 See n. 56, above. 118 Family patriarch Amerigo di Giovanni de' Benci (1432-1468)

wrote sonnets, attended lessons at the Accademia Platonica with his nephews, and presented Marsilio Ficino with a luxury codex of some Platonic Dialogues. See Arnaldo della Torre, Storia dell'Accademia Platonica di Firenze, Florence, 1902, pp. 29, 547, 550, 555.

119 On the age of marriage in Renaissance Florence, see David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families. A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427, New Haven and London. 1978, pp. 210, 216.

120 See Anthony Mohlo, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994, pp. 57, 380, 397. For marriage strategies, see Christiane Klapish-Zuber, "'Kin, Friends and Neighbors': the Urban Territory of a Merchant Family in 1400", in her Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane, Chicago and London, 1985, pp. 68-93.

121 See Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 104 and notes. 122 See Alessandro Cecchi, "New Light on Leonardo's Florentine

Patrons", in Carmen C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci Master Draftsman, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2003, p. 131.

123 Jean Paul Richter, Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols., 3rd ed., New York and London, 1970, II, nos. 1416, 1444, 1454 and p. 416. Pedretti (Literary Works... Commentary, vol. 2, pp. 331, 341, 346) dates the citations to ca. 1500-1504 or ca. 1504-1506.

124 As observed by Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", pp. 125-127. 125 Zollner, "Leonardo's Portrait", pp. 106-107 and 136 n. 105 cit-

ing the Decor puellarum, Venice, 1461. Compare Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 389.

126 Joanna Woods-Marsden, "Portrait of the Lady, 1430-1520", in Virtue & Beauty, pp. 77-80.

127 Several letters to and from Isabella confirm that Leonardo had a drawing or cartoon for the portrait with him in Florence. See Beltrami, Documenti, nos. 103,106,142; Villata, Documenti, nos. 144, 149, 191. That Isabella d'Este was a noblewoman, supposedly "unconstrained by sumptuary laws" (Woods-Marsden, "Portrait of the Lady", p. 79), is immaterial, since a good patron would look at examples of an artist's work before hiring him.

128 Other Renaissance portraits showing cleavage or swelling breasts include: Botticelli's Woman in Mythological Guise in Frankfurt (discussed by Woods-Marsden, "Portrait of the Lady," p. 68); the Portrait of a Lady in Philadelphia, attributed to Jacometto Veneziano; the Portrait of a Woman in Berlin, attributed to Sebastiano Mainardi; and the Portrait of a Young Woman by Girolamo di Benevenuto in Washington, D. C.; for which see Virtue & Beauty, pp. 160-61 cat. no. 21 (Veneziano), 194-195 fig. 2 (Mainardi), 204-207 cat. no. 35 (di Benevenuto).

129 Woods-Marsden, "Portrait of the Lady", pp. 68, 79. 130 Examples include Botticelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate (Flo-

rence, Uffizi), Madonna of the Magnificat (Florence, Uffizi), Madonna and

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Child (New York, Metropolitan Museum), Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (the Bardi Altarpiece) (Berlin-Dahlem, Staatliche Museen), and Madonna Enthroned with Four Saints (Monte- lupo, Pieve di San Giovanni Evangelista), and Lippi's Annuniciaton with Saints (Naples, Capodimonte), Madonna and Child (Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Museum), Madonna with Saints Jerome and Dominic (London National Gallery), and Madonna with Saints (Florence, Santo Spirito).

131 Eg. Petrarch's Laura (as discussed by Brown in Virtue & Beauty, p. 182), Botticelli's Young Woman in Mythological Guise (perhaps Simonetta Vespucci) in Frankfurt, Nerocchio de' Landi's Portrait of a Lady in Washington, and Bartolomeo Veneto's Flora in Frankfurt. For Renaissance ideals of female beauty, see the works cited in n. 61, above. For Petrarch, see also Prince d'Essling and Eugene Muntz, Petrarch, ses etudes d'art, son influence sur les artistes, ses portraits e ceux de Laure, I'illustration de sus ecrits, Paris, 1902.

132 Psychoanalytical theories that Leonardo was taken by Lisa's smile impose on the Renaissance questionable modern assumption about art and the artist. See Meyer Schapiro, "Freud and Leonardo: An Art Historical Study" (1956) and "Further Notes on Freud and Leonardo" (1994) in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, Selected Papers, vol. 4, New York, 1994, pp. 153-99; and Leo Steinberg, "Shrinking Michelangelo" (review of Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytical Study of His Life and Images, by Robert S. Liebert), New York Review of Books, June 28, 1984, pp. 41-45. For a response,

see Bradley I. Collins, Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, & Art History, A Critical Study of Psychobiographical Approaches to Leonardo da Vinci, Evanston, 1997, esp. pp. 166-186.

133 On Renaissance "display pieces" in general, see Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven and London, pp. 245-270, who oddly did not discuss Leonardo in this context.

134 In addition to La Gioconda, Leonardo brought to France the three paintings that he displayed at Cloux for Cardinal Louis of Aragon in October 1517: a portrait of a "certain Florentine lady" made for Giuliano dei Medici (either the so-called Monna Vanna or a different lost portrait), a painting of "a young St. John the Baptist", and the Louvre Madonna and Child with St. Anne. (For De Beatis, see n. 56, above.) In addition, he likely had with him the Leda and the other Louvre St. John, and possibly also the Young Christ seen at Fontainebleau by Rascas de Bagarris (as in n. 49) in 1608-1610 and by Pere Dan (as in n. 51) in 1642, which may not have been autograph. The paintings sold to Francis I by Salai in 1518 (see Jestaz, "Francois ler") likely included some, if not many, of these works.

135 Clark, "Mona Lisa", p. 144; Walter Pater, "Leonardo da Vinci: Homo Minister et Interpres Naturae" (1869); reprinted with original pagination in Leonardo da Vinci. Selected Scholarship, 5 vols., ed. by Claire Farago, vol. 1: Biography and Early Art Criticism of Leonardo da Vinci, New York and London, 1999, p. 293.

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