Two–Mona Lisa theory
Furthermore, various accounts contain inconsistencies and incompatibilities with respect to the dates when Leonardo began and ended work on the painting, by whom it was commissioned, the state of completion in which it was left, and what ultimately became of it.
The sketch contains characteristics differing from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, including prominent columns that were initially argued to have been trimmed from the original.
[3]: 12 Dianne Hales quotes the sixteenth-century painter and art theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo as identifying two versions of the painting: "In 1584, in his Treatise on Painting, the Florentine artist and chronicler Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, a supposed acquaintance of Leonardo's longtime secretary Melzi, wrote that 'the two most beautiful and important portraits by Leonardo are the Mona Lisa and the Gioconda'".
[2] Another statement considered as evidence for this purpose was made by Fra Pietro da Novellara in a 1501 letter to Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua, detailing Leonardo's activities from a visit to his studio.
[28] In 2005, a scholar at Heidelberg University discovered a marginal note in a 1477 printing of a volume by the ancient Roman philosopher Cicero.
[22] In response, Delieuvin stated "Leonardo da Vinci was painting, in 1503, the portrait of a Florentine lady by the name of Lisa del Giocondo.
[29] The art historian Martin Kemp, while doubting the two-painting theory, nevertheless notes difficulties in confirming the dates with certainty,[30] and the sixteenth-century biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote of Leonardo's work on the Mona Lisa that "after he had lingered over it four years, [he] left it unfinished",[14] though the painting in the Louvre appears to be a finished piece.
[9][7][8][31] Notably, even those who believe that there was only one true Mona Lisa have been unable to agree between the two aforementioned fates, or to otherwise account for the incompatibility of the facts of record with only one painting.
[34][35] However, the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon states that the Mona Lisa was executed for the deceased Medici, Leonardo's steward at the Belvedere Palace between 1513 and 1516.
Eyre noted that the absence of these features in the Louvre's Mona Lisa is contrary to Vasari's description of the eyebrows on the painting, that '"[t]hey spring from the flesh, their varying thickness, the manner in which they curve according to the pores of the skin, could not have been rendered in a more natural fashion".
[3]: 22–23 Some researchers accounted for this disparity by asserting that the subject never had eyebrows, and that it was common at this time for genteel women to pluck these hairs, as they were considered unsightly.
Cotte discovered that the painting in the Louvre had been reworked several times, with changes made to the size of the sitter's face and the direction of her gaze.
He also found that in one layer the subject was depicted wearing numerous hairpins and a headdress adorned with pearls which was later scrubbed out and overpainted.
The most widely endorsed contender is the Isleworth Mona Lisa, which had been examined by a number of experts in the 1910s and 1920s, and was later hidden in a Swiss bank vault for 40 years before being unveiled to the public on September 27, 2012.
[52] The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has dated the piece to Leonardo's lifetime, and an expert in sacred geometry has found it to conform to the artist's basic line structures.
This version was included in an 1824 "Account of the Principal Pictures belonging to the Nobility and Gentry of England", which lists "The Mona Lisa sitting on a Chair" as a painting by "Lionardo da Vinci"; it was then owned by Sir Abraham Hume.
