¶ The Mona Lisa: Enigma and Early Fame
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Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, Of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses, or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed?
All the thoughts and experience of the world have edged and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age, with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgers.
She is older than the rocks among which she sits and Like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave, and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange webs with eastern merchants. And as Lida was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne the mother of Mary, and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes.
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids. And So that was the Victorian art critic Walter Pater in very Victorian prose.
And he was describing one of the most celebrated women who's ever existed. Her face familiar to probably not millions of people, but hundreds of millions, if not billions. A woman who's often regarded as the ultimate femme fatale, A woman into whom is poured, well certainly according to Walter Pater, every woman who has ever existed, beautiful, mysterious, exotic, erotic, and dangerous.
Well, I say a woman, he's describing actually a a painting of a woman. A painting which is surely the most uh well known painting in the world The Mona Lisa. Tom, the Mona Lisa. Are you a fan?
Well, I d I I've always taken it so for granted that I wouldn't really have called myself a fan. Um it's fame is and of itself such a fascinating thing that that's what prompted me to think that this might be a good topic for the rest is history. But having plunged into uh the deep waters of the Mona Lisa's history and explored the rocks that are older than time among which he sits, Um I am now definitely a fan, yes.
Tremendous.
It's a painting that is a lot more interesting than than I had. thought. I mean, I think basically I've kind of been anaesthetized to its beauty. And I guess that's true of lots of people. You kind of see it as a fridge magnet rather than as a painting, don't you? But it's it is fascinating. And one of the reasons for its fame
um, is actually that passage that you read. It's one of the most kind of famous passages of purple prose in the whole of of English literature. But he wrote that in eighteen sixty nine. Back when he wrote that The Mona Lisa was not remotely as famous as it is today, and the reason for that is that the paintings that had cut through in the Victorian period
were those that were very easily copied. So paintings with kind of clear boundaries. But there's a quality to the Mona Lisa which seems to defy reproduction. It's actually very, very hard to reproduce. And this wasn't for want of trying. People have been trying to capture the essence of this extraordinary painting right from the beginning. So there's a famous copy of it in the Prado, which was done while um the Mona Lisa had only just been painted.
But it's it you know, it doesn't get its essence at all. Then they um in going into the eighteenth into the nineteenth century they try and do it with copper plate prints. Then of course ph photographs But even photographers apparently to begin with struggled to um capture the Mona Lisa in their photographs because the the technology just wasn't up to reproducing it.
And it's only by the 1880s that photography has evolved technologically enough to um allow for kind of accurate photographs of the Mona Lisa. re reproduced on a mass scale. And as a result of that, of course, the image of the Mona Lisa gets spread um across Europe, across the world, and I think it is I mean you said maybe it's the most recognizable painting. I would say there's no doubt about it at all. It is the most recognizable painting that has ever been in the whole of history.
¶ Description and The Sfumato Effect
And yet at first glance well I mean y as you say at first glance you you barely notice it because it's ubiquitous, so you don't really think anything of it. It's it's part of the furniture. But when you look at it There's nothing remarkable about it. There's nothing exceptional about it compared with, for example, some of the paintings that you did on the Restis History Club miniseries at Law Clumming. A painting like Las Meninas by Balathke is much more
you know, appears much more nuanced, much more layered, much more sophisticated. The Mona Lisa is just a woman sitting on a balcony looking out at you. What's so special do you think about this that makes it hard to reproduce?
Before we get into that we should just describe it for the three people perhaps in the world who've never seen it. So there's something distinctive about her pose. distinctive certainly when when when it was painted. So she's kind of sitting in profile, but she's tur her her torso has turned round so that her face is almost staring into the eyes of the the person who is standing in front of the painting. Her face is is pale, she's got brown eyes.
She's got quite full cheeks. Um kind of she's certainly not thin. Um she has no eyebrows. Um she has long, delicately curling hair, but this is covered by an almost translucent veil. She has a very plain, dark dress. She has no jewelry, no adornments of any kind. And of course the most famous thing about her expression, probably the most famous thing about the entire painting. is her smile. And we'll be coming to that.
Yeah, people go on about that, but I mean I don't even think it really is much of a smile. If someone looked at me like that and said I'm smiling at you, I'd be like, Are you really?
Really? That is part of the mystery is that people respond to the smile in many different ways. But just before we come to that The one thing about the painting that is overtly fantastical is the landscape against which the Mona Lisa is set. Um so this is a landscape that's very barren, it's it's kind of wild, it's tortured. Um you have jagged mountains, uh rocks,
Lakes.
And the only signs of a kind of human physical presence, there's a winding road and there's um an arch bridge crossing crossing a river.
Tom, I commend you for this because you've made me look at the painting already in a new way. I've never even noticed the background to be honest with you.
Okay, so if you're looking at it, the the the striking thing about about the the quality of the paint. And I think this is the reason why it is so difficult to reproduce. Isn't the subject, it it's it's the way in which this woman and the landscape have been painted. Um because there's a very distinctive quality to it and it's traditionally described as fumato, as smoky. Um and the effect of this is brilliantly described by
Certainly the the leading British expert on the Mona Lisa, who is Martin Kemp, who isn't the bassist from Spandau Ballet. Not him. Um I think he's the professor of art at Oxford or something. You'd know, you're a an Oxford uh doctorate.
Yeah. He actually is the same person.
So so Martin Kemp describes the effect of sumato as being the paradox of a precisely rendered indefiniteness. So it's It's not precise. I mean there's a a sense of kind of of smokiness to it. Now, how do you render indefiniteness precisely? This is the kind of question that already by the beginning of the 19th century was puzzling German idealist philosophers.
So let's quote the most famous German idealist philosopher who is Hegel, and he was lecturing in the eighteen twenties on the Renaissance. Great to have Hegel back. Here is evident a supreme rounding. Nowhere is there any harsh or sharp line, transition is everywhere, light and shadow are not effective as purely direct light and shadow, but they both shine into one another.
just as an inner force works throughout an external thing. Now what that means in practical terms for the impact of this portrait of Mona Lisa is that the corners of her eyes and of her mouth are blurred. it it's hard to get an exact sense of what they actually look like. And as we've mentioned, there are no visible eyebrows. And this makes it difficult to read her expression.
And you've already touched on the most famous puzzle. Is there a smile at all? If it is a smile, is she looking happy? Is she looking sad? Is it a knowing smile? Is it Um a modest smile. Is this the smile of a Florentine matron, or is it the smile of a vampire who is older than the rocks among which she sits?
to me, do you know I recognise that smile straight away. It's it's the weak smile of somebody who's heard a joke about the Kaiser a thousand times and it's and is thinking I should never have come to this rest of his history get together. This is awful.
¶ Mystery, Pop Culture, and Leonardo's Life
Yeah.
Well, you see, there is the power of the s fumato because each person will see in the smile what he or she
What they fear.
Or perhaps desire, who knows? But certainly this is where I think um Walter Pater is coming in with his notion of her as, you know, um a a kind of timeless, infinite, vampiric figure. The fact that there is a mystery to her, that her smile is something elusive and enigmatic and potentially tantalizing. And it's this that really since the nineteenth century has made the Mona Lisa seem almost a sinister figure in the imaginings of many people, and the painting to be something that contains
codes, clues, directions to something that seems to lurk just beyond human comprehension. And this is an idea that, of course, is still going incredibly strong, and friend of the show, Dan Brown,
Yeah.
He's notoriously all over.
For it.
So in the Da Vinci Code, the Mona Lisa, he says, embodies the sacred feminine.
And
In the m in the in in the plot of the Da Vinci Code, the Mona Lisa is in the the Louvre behind its stained glass window, and a clue is found written in blood. on this stained glass window. And even though the uh the Mona Lisa it actually doesn't feature very prominently in the plot of the Da Vinci Code, when they came to make a film and they wanted a poster, it's it's the Mona Lisa that is on the the poster. Of course.
And obviously the reason for why the Mona Lisa is on the film poster is because it's the world most famous painting. And one of the reasons that it's the world's most famous painting is precisely because it seems so full of mystery, a a painting suited to a film about kind of codes and ancient mysteries.
So two obvious questions then. So first of all, um is it only famous because of the mystery, rather than because of any other quality? And secondly, what actually behind all the stuff about the mystery and the murk and the smokiness, what actually do we know about it? So let's take the first one. Um, is it so famous purely because of this sort of th the questions rather than because of any innate quality?
I mean I think that is the big question and Let's come to that later. So we'll we'll kind of e explore what it is that has made the Mona Lisa as famous as it is. And I think it it it it's really interesting because it it tells us a lot about the history of How conceptions of culture have evolved over the centuries and particularly perhaps in the in the in the twentieth century.
Um your second question. Yeah. I mean let's assume the Mona Lisa isn't a portrait of a vampire. Then then who is it a portrait of? When was the painting begun? When was it finished? Uh I mean was was it ever finished? And these are all kind of pretty basic questions that have been furiously debated for centuries and centuries and centuries.
But not unusual questions. No Tom. Not unusual questions. I mean these are the questions that people ask about all kinds of Renaissance paintings, don't they?
Absolutely.
No, who who painted it, why, when, where, who's the sitter, all of that kind of thing.
Yeah, and I think that the intensity of the controversy that seems to lie around these questions when it comes to the Mona Lisa is actually just another marker of how incredibly famous it is. Because Every art historian, everybody who aspires to be an art historian, knows that if you come up with a new theory about the Mona Lisa, you'll immediately get it into the newspapers.
So there's a kind of incentive there to come up often with quite mad theories. Yeah. However, there is one thing that we absolutely do know about the painting, and that of course is the identity of the person who painted it. And even Dan Brown gets that right because it's there in the title of his book, It's Leonardo
So he gets the name wrong. He gets the name wrong,'cause Leonardo da Vinci Da Vinci, I mean I can't believe there are any listeners who don't know this. Da Vinci is not his surname. Da Vinci just means from Vinci, which is where he was born. Like if Dan if Dan Brown wrote a book about you and he called it the From Salisbury Code. Yeah. Exactly.
So Leonardo da Vinci, we know that he paints it. And I he of course is s you know, one of the great figures of European culture, an extraordinary man, I think entirely deserving of his own series on the rest of history in due course. But for now, let's zoom in on one particular moment in that extraordinary life of his, um, and it is April fifteen hundred. and we are in Florence, which is Leonardo's native city. This is almost certainly where he'd been born forty eight years before.
Um and he is the illegitimate son of um a Florentine notary, Sir Piero da Vinci, who came from the small town of Vinci, which is about twenty miles west of Florence, so hence the name. And Leonardo, right from the beginning, is Everyone recognizes that he is an astonishing talent. So he gets apprenticed very early um to a famous Florentine um artist. He works in his workshop. He qualifies as a master.
And he is recognized even in Florence, which is a city, you know, I mean it's the archetype of a great centre of culture, Flor uh Renaissance Florence, as a man of really stupefying talent. Strikes people as stupefying about him isn't necessarily his his talent as an artist. I think he is rated slightly below his younger contemporaries, Michelangelo and Raphael, on that score. But the sheer range of his interests
So he's a complete polymath. He's not just a painter. He's also um a would-be engineer. He's a natural philosopher. There is no limit to the things that he's interested in. And this of course makes him um
an object of great interest to the cultural elites in Florence at the time, uh which Dominic we've we've done a series on, and this is the Medici and specifically Lorenzo the Magnificent, the uh the guy who serves in the popular imagination as the archetype of The Florentine patrons of great art.
Renzo took him up, didn't he? And used him as in among other things, as a as a kind of ambassador and but also as a kind of gift.
¶ Leonardo's Milanese Era and Return to Florence
So he sends him to uh Ludovico Schwarzer, who's the Duke of Milan. Florence's relations with Milan, enormously important in this period. And Schwarzer Um, who's a patron of the arts himself is very taken with Leonardo, doesn't he? And Leonardo basically ends up working for Schwarzer for about almost twenty years, eighteen years.
Yeah, eighteen years in all. So by fifteen hundred, um, Leonardo is returning from from Milan via Venice to Florence. He's done pretty well for himself in Milan. So he's um he's famous as as a great painter. Um i he's he's done this mural, The Last Supper. Very important in the Da Vinci Code, very important also in the history of Western art. Um and two very innovative portraits of women. Um and one of these portrays Ludovico Sforza's young mistress, Chichilia Galerani.
Um and she is shown rather coily, kind of fondling an ermine.
Yeah.
And Tabby's favourite picture, I think.
I think so, yeah. She loves fondling an ermine. But the uh the other thing about Leonardo is that he's um he's got a utilitarian value as well as an aesthetic one, hasn't he? Because he's also designing all kinds of I mean obviously he's designing all his mad stuff like parachutes and helicopters.
Tanks.
But he's designing kind of hydraulics projects and stuff and city works and all these kinds of things and fortifications and defences and things like this. I mean, your claim about him being a polymath is well borne out by all this.
I gather that the kind of the mad stuff, so the tanks and the the helicopters, it's unlikely any of them would have worked even had the technology been available to make them work. But the fortifications and the and the canals and everything, absolutely, and that essentially is why Schwarzer loved him. Um I mean the the the ability to paint his mistress fondling an ermine was was a a a kind of an advantage. But it's the it's the engineering that really makes Leonardo's fortune.
And he returns to um to Florence pretty well off, so he's um four months before he arrives in Florence. He sends a very large sum of money, about six hundred ducats, to a Florentine bank. So he'll have something there waiting for him when he he returns to Florence. And just to give people a sense of how much that is, Twenty ducats will rent you a very nice house in the centre of Florence for a year. So so Leonardo, you know, he's he's done well for himself.
But what did you say this was fifteen hundred? So fifteen hundred, by the time he comes back, Florence's golden age has passed. They've been through the whole business with the Barnfire, the Vanities, and Southern Arola. Mm-hmm. The Medicio have actually been kicked out of Florence, haven't they? And Florence is a republic again. And the biggest development, you know, one of the great developments in medieval Italian or early modern Italian history
The French invasion of fourteen ninety four has thrown Italy into total tumult. Schwartz has been kicked out in Milan. The French have been rampaging through um the Italian peninsula and they are the big power brokers now. And basically Leonardo that leaves Leonardo a bit adrift, doesn't it? He needs a new patron because he doesn't have the Medici, he doesn't have Schwarzenegger.
Yeah, so that's why he's left Milan is as you say, Swartzer's been kicked out. But the problem is that even though he's a very big name, I mean he's he's famous across Italy, he does also bring a certain amount of baggage with him. So in particular, he has a reputation for Never finishing project. So George Evasari, who will write the first biography of Leonardo.
famously says of Leonardo that he started many things and never finished them. And the most notorious example of this had happened in Milan, which was a massive equestrian monument to the father of um Ludovico Sforza. being um aborted when the French invade Italy because the Milanese need the uh the bronze that um that was going to be used for the mould. They need to turn it into artillery to try and stop the French. Doesn't work.
And when the the the the French occupy Milan, they shoot up the great clay model of this uh equestrian statue that Leonardo had made. So there's there's nothing left of it. Um and this casts a slight shadow over his reputation. So there's a story that when um Michelangelo, who is younger than Leonardo and should properly be showing him respect, when Michelangelo meets Leonardo, he scoffs at him.
and says that um the casting of the bronze had been beyond Leonardo's technological abilities. And I think that this is a kind of um a reproach that he has to bear, however unfairly. There's also the problem that he hasn't actually done that many paintings while he was in Florence. And the most famous painting, The Last Supper, I mean, this isn't readily accessible for anyone from Florence. And it's probably already starting to fade because Leonardo's experimented with mad kinds of paints.
So he is actively looking for commissions and not just to make money, but also I think as a way of advertising what he can do as an artist, because every painting will be able to serve him as a kind of calling card. And so the first two years that he's back in Florence, we know from his records that he is taking on a lot of work. He's doing a l taking a lot of commissions. These commissions do not include the Mona Lisa because
as I say, we have detailed records, the Mona Lisa isn't mentioned in them. And in fact, it is a part of the mystery of the painting. that the Mona Lisa isn't mentioned in any of Leonardo's surviving drawings, any of his surviving notebooks, so that you know, that adds a certain quality of of of mystery to it.
¶ The Mona Lisa's Commission and Vasari's Account
So he goes on, he he works I mean, uh unbelievably. One day we'll do a series on the Borgers and he works for Cheslery Borgia, doesn't he, as chief engineer. So making tanks and helicopters for the Borgers. Yeah.
So that's in fifteen oh two through the to the early months of fifteen oh three.
And then fifteen oh three, the spring of fifteen oh three, he is back in Florence. Some critics and biographers think this is the point when he did the Mona Lisa. Others like Kenneth Clark, who did the great civilization BBC series at the end of the sixties. He thought it might have been a year later, fifteen oh four. Um so let's say fifteen oh three, fifteen oh four, or possibly even a later date, that's when he does the Mona Lisa.
Yeah, so this is a debate that again d has been running and running and running. So it's fifteen oh three to perhaps fifteen eleven, fifteen twelve. These these this is the kind of the yeah the range of date.
But the bigger question which I suppose is is allied to that, is who is the person in the picture? And I mean the name Mona Lisa It's later. I mean, it becomes popularised in the nineteenth century, but it's first coined in what the fifteen forties by Giorgio Vasari, who you've already mentioned in his great book The Lives of the Artists, the great biographer of Renaissance Italy.
Yeah. So kind of a hundred and sixty portrait sketches of of of the artists of the age. Vassari's great hero is Michelangelo, but he does give Leonardo a decent write up. And so if we If we estimate that the amount of space that Bisari gives to an artist is a reflection of um how much he esteems the artist, then Michelangelo's number one. Uh then Raphael, then Giotto. Um, much earlier painter, of course. Um, and then Leonardo. So Leonardo is number four.
pretty good podium i mean one of them one of them is not getting a medal
Renato not quite podiuming there, is he? He's he's just missed bronze. So this is what Fassari has to say. He mentions the Mona Lisa explicitly. He writes Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of the wife of Francesco Del Giacondo, Mona Lisa. So I mean there's one thing, it's not the Mona Lisa, it's the Mona Lisa properly. Um, but it gives us the name. Uh and Mona Lisa is Madonna Lisa, so my Lady Lisa.
But that sentence also gives us the name that is used in Italy and in France. So in Italy it's La Giaconda, in France it's um la Jaconde. And there's a pun there. So it's the feminine form of Lisa's husband's name. So essentially it's kind of Mrs. Giacondo, La Giaconda. But Gioconda and Jacond they mean in Italian and French respectively, kind of happy, cheerful, joyous. Um and Vesari implies in his Life of Leonardo that Leonardo leaned into this pun.
and that Mona Lisa's smile was key to his vision of the painting right from the very start. So Vasari writes While he was painting Monaza, who was a very beautiful woman, he had her constantly entertained by singers, musicians, and jesters so that she would be merry and not look melancholic as portraits often do.
As a result, in this painting of Leonardo's, there was a smile so enchanting that it was more divine than human, and those who saw it marvelled to find it so similar to that of the living original.
I mean I think again that's attributing the smile with more jollity than the painting deserves. But anyway, that anecdote may not even be true, right?
Uh possibly but possibly not, because um when Vesari wrote up that anecdote he was living in Florence. Uh just a short distance from the Giaconda family home at a time when Mona Lisa was still alive. So it is perfectly possible that he got that directly from La Giaconda's mouth. I mean We can't know, but it's possible I would say.
¶ Lisa del Giocondo's Life and Family
So who is she? Who's who's her husband? What's going on there?
I mean he's literally called Mr Happy, but um
Well, as well he should be, because um Francesco Del Giacondo is doing very well for himself. So he's very ambitious, he's very upwardly mobile, and he's becoming incredibly rich. His of humble background, his grandfather had begun as an artisan in the barrel making business and he ends up running an entire barrel making empire.
Um, then uh Francesco's father had moved on from the barrel making um into textiles, which is the obvious place that you go for kind of high end products, much more money to be made. And Giocondo himself then expands into silks, into money lending, and into sugar.
Mm.
This is the the early days of the Atlantic sugar economy. Yeah, yeah. And it has been thought that perhaps um Mona Lisa had access to lots of sugar and her teeth rotted, and this is why she's not showing her her her teeth and That's one of the clues to the mystery of the smile, don't you?
That's really trying too hard. But this is a very familiar Florentine journey. You start uh like the minute you did. You make money in one thing, then you move into I mean, textiles, wool is what um Florentine money is based on, and then you move into banking or moneylending or whatever and you diversify.
So what Francesco was doing is absolutely standard now and then he does the standard thing, which is that he invests all a lot of his money into land, doesn't he? So especially now that the war has broken out with the French And Italy is absolutely being ravaged and ripped apart. It makes sense to invest in property and in land because that is the safest possible bet.
And of course what you also do, and this is a timeless story, I mean we see it a l so much in English history as well, is that if you are socially mobile from a humble background, you invest in um an upper class wife. And this is what Francesco does by marrying um Lisa. Gerardini because Lisa Gerardini is from an ancient Tuscan family um that ranked as one of the original founders of the Florentine Republic, so a tremendous aristocratic pedigree.
It is obviously a bit embarrassing for Lisa that she has to marry the grandson of a barrel maker. But her father is is not a good businessman. He's running short of money. He needs money. And so he essentially sells Lisa to Francesco and you know, it's it it it's a good marriage. So Lisa is fifteen when she marries Francesco. Um Francesco is thirty.
and she is his second wife and as we've heard will end up outliving him. And I think that although the um the context for the marriage is a mercenary one, it seems to have been a a relatively successful marriage. So Francesco keeps his side of the bargain by becoming fabulously rich, and Lisa sticks to hers by having lots of children and she has six in all. Um four of them survive infancy and she also um she brings up
a son of Francesco's by his first wife, and again, their relationship seems to have been very good. All the evidence points to the fact that she was a a v a very kind and supportive stepmother. There is one scandal which erupts in 1512 and it's focused on Lisa's daughter Camilla, who the year before so in 1511 had become a nun at the age of twelve.
So I mean it's quite early. But it's a way b essentially um of avoiding having to pay a dowry for her. So you either marry her off or you park her in a nunnery. Yeah. And that's what they do with Camilla. And in fifteen twelve, four men, including Madley, a brother of the Cardinal of Pavia, um, are reported to have climbed um up a ladder into the convent where Camilla was installed.
and two nuns, it is said, were waiting for them, and the uh the intruders, I quote, touched the breasts of the said nuns, and there was apparently lots of fondling and groping. And Camilla is said to have been one of these two nuns. And the four men were found guilty, but the two nuns were absolved. So a whiff of scandal, but perhaps no more than that.
But apart from that, Lisa's life is pretty uneventful, isn't it? So as you said, Francesco, fifteen years her senior, he dies in fifteen thirty seven, and in his will he says she is his beloved, a noble spirit, a faithful wife. She lives to a pretty good age for the time, seventy, so she dies about twelve or thirteen years later. We don't know exactly when, and that's all we know. That's all we know of this character.
Which is amazing because if she is the person in the Mona Lisa, then her face has a claim to be the most famous face. of anyone who's lived in the whole of history, which is a a kind of jaw dropping thought.
¶ Alternative Theories of Identity: Debunking Myths
Wow, yeah. But is she the woman? Because There are some critics who say this is not the woman. She may not have existed at all. This may be a fictional person. This may be a kind of um just a generic embodiment of of female beauty or of um
you know, a feminine elegance and grace or whatever. Because, for example, there is no record of Leonardo having been paid by anybody for this painting, right? And if he had done it for a rich patron, you would assume he would have been paid and he would have kept the receipts.
Yeah, and he keeps seems to have kept the painting with him until he died. Um we've got that landscape which is is not a a realistic landscape, it's not a a a landscape that anyone can identify. Um, so is this fantastical background painted in that way because it's appropriate to a woman who also is invented?
And we do know from his notebooks that Leonardo was very interested in the I th the kind of the notion of there being ideal beauty. Is the Mona Lisa not r a real person at all? But what if she's a real person? I think that Certainly for the past two hundred years, there's been a feeling that The Mona Lisa is a bit boring. I mean she's just the wife of a an Italian businessman. Um couldn't she be someone slightly more interesting?
So there've been various candidates. So one of them is um a woman called Pacifica Brandano and she was the mistress of um the son of Lorenzo the Minificent, a guy called Giuliano de' Medici. um and he ends up returning to Florence, reestablishing Medici rule, and he's essentially the kind of the autocrat of Florence between fifteen thirteen and fifteen sixteen Um, why does anyone think that um the Mona Lisa might be this this woman Pacifica Brandano?
There's actually quite a good reason. It's because the only person that we know of who saw the Mona Lisa in the lifetime of Leonardo and described it in writing, he claimed that the painting had been commissioned by Giuliano. Um and if so, then wouldn't it be his mistress? Then there's um another much more famous woman who is identified with the Mona Lisa, and this is Isabella Deste, who was the Marquise of uh Mantua.
and she's the most famous, the most celebrated female patron of the arts in the Renaissance. And again, there are there are reasons for thinking that it might be her. So she was always imploring Leonardo to paint her portrait. Um, Leonardo actually went to Mantua and made sketches of her.
We've said that the the the backdrop to the Mona Lisa, the landscape, is fantastical. Assuming that it isn't, assuming that it is actually a portrait of somewhere in Italy, um, it might be the Dolomites. I mean it's Much more likely to be the Dolomites than Tuscany. Um and uh Mantua is quite near the the Dolomites and also uh in the painting she's seated on a chair with an armrest and uh the armrest apparently is uh often used to symbolise a ruler.
I think the way that you're narrating that suggests to me that you absolutely do not believe it. I mean, it doesn't look like the Dolomites at all.
I think that there is a slight quality of people not wanting to believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays, and it would be much more fun if it was the Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marlowe or something.
That is exactly what I thought when I when you started down this line. I thought this is exactly what it is. People just do not want a humdrum explanation and they're s they're groping desperately for something exotic.
Okay, well well let's continue with some slightly more exotic ones. So um Sigmund Freud, you can guess who he thinks about laser is.
Amaze me and tell me that it's not his mother.
It is his mother. Uh so Freud suggested that that the smile, this famous smile, was inspired by Leonardo's childhood memories of his mother's smile.
Sometimes a smile is just a smile, Sigmund.
Yeah, sometimes. Um, another very popular theory recently is that it's this guy, Sally, who was Leonardo's apprentice, um, his friend, worked in his workshop um and was almost certainly his lover.
Hold on Salah is a bloke Okay, that's a this is a stretch.
So Sallite is, you know, he he serves Leonardo as a model for his painting of John the Baptist. which is in the Louvre, together with the Mona Lisa. He provides the model for a sketch of of an angel And the idea that uh the Mona Lisa might be another portrait of Salah was proposed um fifteen years ago by an Italian art historian called Silvano Vincenti.
The reason that he advances this is that Vinchetti says that um the Mona Lisa's facial features do resemble those of Sali, and you can see them if you compare it to to Leonardo's painting of John the Baptist. Also he says that you can see the letter S in Mona Lisa's eyes if you look very closely and squint and stand on your head while you're doing it. Right.
Yeah, good luck doing that in the Louvre.
And we compared it to Shakespeare. There was a guy, wasn't there, who went who wanted to dig up Shakespeare's body to prove that it wasn't actually Shakespeare. And Vinchetti has he's kind of he's uh very much on that groove. Because he wanted to go to the site um where Lisa Gerardini had been buried and t to dig her up and to find her skull, use it to reconstruct her features and thereby prove that she couldn't have been the sitter um in the Mona Lisa.
Then two final theories just before we come to the break. One theory is the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Leonardo himself. And this was first suggested back in 1913 by a French painter called Maurice Vay, and he argued that the lower half of the face is female, but the upper half is Leonardo's. And in nineteen eighty seven an American artist called Lillian Schwartz
made a famous computer mashup of the Mona Lisa with the self portrait of Leonardo, the kind of famous one. It's presumed to be self-portrait, we don't know for sure, but it's the one where he kind of looks like Gandalf he's got the long white hair and the you know. They match up pretty well. And can kind of see how perhaps there's a hint there of them having the same facial features. And then finally, we have um a theory that's been proposed by top symbologist Robert Langdon. Um and he proposes
Yeah.
But the Mona Lisa is an androgynous fusion of the Egyptian god Amun, so A-M-O-N, an anagram of Mona, and the goddess Isis, aka Lisa.
Sayo!
Mona, Lisa, it's all there. Um, and Robert Langdon, of course, is the hero of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Um, and this is what Dan Brown has. Langdon say. Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da Vinci's little secret. DaVinci again. And the reason for Mona Lisa's knowing smile.
Do you know who says this? Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks says it in the film, a a person who's been on the rest is history w and yet and had no shame about his involvement in that film.
So, uh are you convinced by any of those?
No, of course, I mean I have to say Tom, I think the way you've set it up suggests to me that it's none of these people, because you've said it with a degree of scepticism. I mean it's definitely not that bloke who's a bloke. I d I think that's a a definite note, and I also don't think it's half of it is Leonardo da Vinci's face.
¶ The Definitive Revelation: Vespucci's Note
Okay. However, what is undoubtedly the case is that throughout the twentieth century It was generally accepted by art historians that absolute certainty about the identity of the Mona Lisa was impossible. So I will quote Donald Sassoon, who is the author of the definitive history of the Mona Lisa. I've drawn a lot on his book for for for this episode.
And at at the end of his book he declares himself agnostic as to who the painting portrays, so to quote him. My conclusion is that the evidence is too scanty for us to arrive at any firm identification. We shall never know Not that this will stop people from trying, and of course he's quite right people do continue to try. He then added this reflection. There is always the remote possibility that some new evidence will be unearthed. And do you know, Dominic?
Do you know, listeners? He was not wrong. Because four years later, after Donald Sassoon wrote that, in 2005, Exactly such a piece of new evidence was unearthed and the brilliant thing about it, it conclusively proves who the woman portrayed in the Mona Lisa had been. And more than that, it specifies pretty precisely exactly when Leonardo had begun painting it.
Ladies and gentlemen, do not go.
Go away.
We will return after the break with these stunning revelations.
🎵 Music
Welcome back everybody to the rest is history. I am waiting with bated breath to find out who the Mona Lisa really was and when the great painting was painted. Tom, you promised us an absolute bombshell. I hope you're gonna deliver.
Okay, so let's go to the Florentine Chancellery. in october fifteen oh three, where a clerk in the chancery is reading an edition of the letters of the great Roman Orator Cicero, This is a guy called Agostino Vespucci. He's very clever, very well connected man. So he's a humanist scholar, and of course humanist scholars all they do at this point is read Cicero. Yeah. He's an assistant to uh Niccolò Machiavelli. Famous uh author of uh political treatises and he is a professional associate.
of Leonardo because he's one of the administrators who just recently have signed a a contract with Leonardo to paint the the great council hall in Florence. with a spectacular battle scene, an illustration of a a a great Florentine victory. And as he's reading this book, This guy Vespucci comes across a reference in one of Cicero's letters to a famous Greek painter called Apelles.
As Cicero describes Apelles as someone who had completed with the most polished art the head and bust of Venus, but left the other part of her body in coate. Vespucci is very struck by this and he um reaches for um a pen and he makes a note in the margin and he writes Apelle's the painter That is what Leonardo da Vinci does in all his pictures, as in the head of Lisa del Giocondo, and Anne the mother of Mary.
We will see what he will do in the hall of the Great Council, which he has now contracted to decorate, and then he dates it fifteen oh three, October. Whoa. So a massive, massive bombshell. Freud is wrong. Doctor Robert Langdon is wrong. I mean, everyone who thought it wasn't the Mona Lisa is wrong. And so a huge shout out to Dr. Armin Schlechter, who is a librarian in the university library in Heidelberg, and he made the discovery in 2005. And just to list what it proves, to make it clear.
Vasari was absolutely right, the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Francesco del Giaconda's wife Lisa Gerardini. Leonardo began the painting in fifteen oh three, which makes perfect sense because as we said in fifteen oh two he'd been off. um in Rome working as chief engineer for Cesare Borgia.
and in fifteen oh four, of course, he's gonna start work on this great battle scene in the the Florentine Council Hall. We also know that Lisa had just given birth to her second son, and so you can imagine that that might be A cause of celebration, something that her husband might want to mark by commissioning a portrait. And we can even work out um who might have introduced Leonardo to Francesco, because Leonardo's father, Serpiero, was Francesco's lawyer. And so I think that
This clearly in a sense demythologizes the Mona Lisa. It's it's not a portrait of Leonardo in Drag. It's it's not his mother. It's not the sacred feminine. We can set the commissioning of the Mona Lisa Absolutely in the context of daily life in Florence, these kind of networks of social relations that made the city run, you know, family proud businessmen, commissions, lawyers, all of this. So on one level There's no mystery. However.
¶ Early Impact, French Ownership, and Obscurity
Yeah, there are lots of questions, aren't there? Because for example, if he did this as a commission, why does he not hand it over and get paid for it? Why doesn't he give it to the Gigondo family?
Yeah, I mean that's a that is a massive question. So I mean various answers to that question have been suggested. Maybe the chance to use it as a a calling card, as um an advertisement for his talents. it ends up being worth more to him than the the the fee he would have got from Francesco. Um maybe he can't bear to to finish it. So Vasari in his biography says that Leonardo never finished it.
Or maybe, you know, it does have some special meaning for him. Maybe he does see it as his great masterpiece. Maybe he just can't bear to be separated from it. And it's certainly the case that right from the beginning it is viewed by everyone who sees it as a really revolutionary painting.
So the pose of its sitter, the lifelike quality of the portrait, the mysterious quality of the landscape, all of this combines to make it seem to people who come and see it really kind of thrilling, really innovative.
That really surprises me because, as a Mona Lisa skeptic, as it were, I'd always assumed that the aesthetic value of it was. as it were, projected onto it later. Once it became famous, people said, Oh, it's obviously brilliant, blah, blah, blah. But people probably didn't think it was brilliant at the time. But you're telling me that's wrong and that even at the time, for example, other Renaissance painters thought this is special. Yeah.
Right so Raphael is in Florence at the time when Leonard is painting it. Um, he comes and sees it and he's blown away by it. And it's uh a patently a massive influence on Raphael's painting. And this distinctive pose that the Mona Lisa has, it's very widely copied, um, so much so that that pose comes to be called the Giaconda. So it's that famous.
And by the end of his life Leonardo has become a tourist attraction in his own right, and having the chance to see the Mona Lisa is a part of the package. When people come and visit Leonardo, they want to see this painting. Um now when Leonardo dies, he's not actually in France, he's not even in Italy. He is um in France at Amboise on the Loire. Um he dies there on the second of May 1519, and the story is that he dies in the arms of the French king, Francois I, Francis I.
Because Leonardo had gone to the court of Francis I in fifteen sixteen. And he goes there partly because there are just no patrons worthy of his status who are willing to employ him in Italy, and partly because Francis I really, really wants him and is willing to pay anything. And it actually reminds me a bit of the way in which Mohammed bin Salman, the strongman of Saudi Arabia,
um, paid an obscene amount of money for the Salvata Mundi, this painting that has been attributed to Leonardo. There are you know, there are plenty of people who think it isn't a Leonardo. Um, but it's now gone to Saudi Arabia rather in the way that Leonardo went to the court of Francis the First. And when Leonardo dies, Francis the First makes sure to buy the Mona Lisa. And the result of this is that the painting is going to end up becoming part of the cultural patrimony.
not of Italy, but of France, and this is crucial for its future history.
So it's become part of French tradition. But in the next couple of centuries, the French don't make a huge amount of it, do they? So, for example, in 1625, Louis XIII. actually gives it away. He well, he agrees to give it away to the Duke of Buckingham, with his famously long legs, great favourite of uh James the First.
Basically Buckingham's gonna give him a holbein and I think a Titian, and it's actually Louis's courtiers who say, Hold on, this is actually quite a good painting, don't give it away.
Yeah, it's such a shame because Simone Lisa could've ended up in London.
I I think if it had ended up in London, maybe it wouldn't have been such a big deal.
I think you're absolutely right. But it is tr you're you're right that kind of for two centuries after Leonardo's death the the painting does go into eclipse. So, you know, it's it's not showcased.
It's not a great treasure of the French king. In 1695 it it gets moved to Versailles, but it's put in a pretty obscure corridor. I mean it's not something that most people would would would notice. And then in 1750 There's a very clear demonstration of how the Mona Lisa is rated because 110 of the best paintings in the Royal Collection at Versailles.
are put on display at the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris for the delectation of invited visitors. So a hundred and ten paintings. The Mona Lisa is not one of those hundred and ten paintings. So it's not even top hundred.
So that complicates things because you said right at the beginning, oh people thought it was amazing right from the start, but obviously now there's a period where people don't think it's amazing, and something changes, doesn't it?
That is because Renaissance painting goes out of fashion. There isn't a category of Renaissance painting at that point. And Leonardo's luster has dimmed. The posthumous reputation of Leonardo is also bound up with the kind of the the the decline in the the the value of the Mona Lisa.
¶ The Louvre, Romanticism, and the Femme Fatale
So what's changed? What changes and when? Is it the the wake of the French Revolution? It's always the French Revolution, isn't it? Yeah.
French Revolution is crucial because of course suddenly you know, these paintings are not stuffed away in a royal palace. They are being brought out for the people to admire and enjoy and The revolutionaries um set up a great new museum in the Louvre. Um, and the Mona Lisa is moved there. It it it is briefly transferred to Napoleon's bedroom, along with a load of other paintings. So it's in Napoleon's bedroom from eighteen hundred up to when he becomes emperor.
in eighteen oh four. And the Mona Lisa then goes back to the Louvre. And from that point on, the Mona Lisa is on public display in the world's largest and most prestigious museum. You know, Paris is the acknowledged capital of European high culture. And so it's in the right place now for it to a start ascending the list to go up, you know, towards the kind of the the top of the pops.
But slower process than you would think. So Uh eighteen fifty two there was a list drawn up, a sort of estimate of all the artworks in the Louvre, and they they ranked their value, didn't they? And the Mona Lisa was ranked at ninety thousand francs. But there's a painting by Titian at one hundred and fifty thousand, there's one by Raphael at four hundred thousand francs, another Raphael at six hundred thousand francs. So by those criteria, the Mona Lisa is still a relatively amino. Yeah.
But then progressively over the course of the 19th century the Mona Lisa starts to benefit from really quite profound changes in cultural and intellectual taste. And I guess that the most influential of those is romanticism. You know, it's a very broad brush word, but let's use it as a shorthand. So it's shorthand for the worship of genius, admiration for works of art that have a sense of mystery, perhaps of incompletion about them.
Um, and of course a fascination with wild and sublime landscapes. Romantics love a wild and sublime landscape. And all of this massively helps to inflate the reputation of Leonardo. who, over the course of the nineteenth century, starts to be seen as not just a genius, but the supreme genius of
as we will see, what comes to be called the Renaissance. And the reason for this is precisely the range of things that he does. You know, he's a painter, he leaves lots of his paintings unfinished. Romantics love that. But he's also someone who's interested in mountains and tanks and fetuses and swans and eyeballs and everything. Just everything. And so peop you know, r romantics love that. And so he comes to be seen as a universal genius. And if he's a universal genius,
then what can the Mona Lisa be but a universal woman? So, in other words, the fating of Leonardo, the establishment of Leonardo as the archetype of a great genius, is the absolutely necessary precondition for the fating of the Mona Lisa as the greatest painting of all time. So to quote Donald Sassoon, the Mona Lisa acquired its special status because of its association with Leonardo, not the other way round. So I think Leonardo as supreme genius, that is a
one crucial um influence on the inflation of the Mona Leas's reputation. The other one And this is what Walter Pater is all about. Romantics have a massive thing for for predatory females, uh for for for femme fatale, as they come to be called. And there's a brilliant book which um was published way back in nineteen thirty three which covers this. Um it's called The Romantic Agony, translated into English. It's by an Italian critic called um Mario Praz.
And he writes brilliantly about how over the course of the nineteenth century, male artists and writers become obsessed with a a very distinctive vision of female beauty, and to quote Praz. tainted with pain, corruption, and death. And Praz writes about how by the end of the nineteenth century
This beauty had become illumined with the smile of the Giaconda. And this is where Walter Pater comes in. He's a massive, massive influence on the English speaking world. That passage that you read, I mean, it may seem kind of, you know, purple To us. But it it it it determines how people in the English speaking world see the Mona Lisa for generations and generations. But the guys who really go big on this, uh unsurprisingly since they own it, are the French.
So I'll cite two two writers in particular. And the first is uh Theophil Gautier, who was a a poet, um a novelist, a critic. And he is the guy who before Peter establishes Mona Lisa as a not just as an archetype of beauty, but as an eternal archetype of beauty. Someone who has essentially existed since the beginning of time. She's older than Egypt, she's older than Greece, older than Rome.
So to quote uh Gautier, she is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers, so a bit like Cleopatra there, who Cleopatra was supposed to sleep with men and then kill them. She has the serene countenance of a woman, sure that she will remain beautiful for ever, and certain to be greater than the ideal of poets and artists. So again perhaps the hint there of the vampire, someone who is always beautiful, feeding off the blood of her prey,
People are projecting an awful lot onto the Moonleaser, aren't they? But but I mean another example, the historian Jules Michelet Sara's an enormous history of the French Revolution, the first historian to use the word Renaissance, by the way. Um or at least to to take it back up from Vassari and to popularise it. And and Michelet goes even further, doesn't he? He basically c says, you know, the Mona Lisa's a um dominatrix is that too strong a dominatrix?
Well you can read w read what he said about her. This canvas attracts me, revolts me, consumes me. and I go to her in spite of myself as the bird to the snake. But you can see, I mean, this is all kind of very exciting for people in Victorian parlours reading this kind of thing. And of course, as the nineteenth century goes on, towards the twentieth century Photography for the first time is starting to
um, be equal to the challenge of uh capturing the image of the Mona Lisa. So by the end of the the nineteenth century, you've got all this purple prose about uh vampires and snakes and things. And for the first time, you have images of the Mona Lisa that are very easy to reproduce and so people can can actually look at it without having to go to the Louvre and kind of see it in the flesh, as it were.
¶ The 1911 Theft, Feminization, and Parodies
And I would say that by the beginning of the twentieth century The main lease is probably the most famous painting in the Louvre, probably one of the the most famous paintings in the world. It's kind of had a very meteoric rise. But there's one final thing that's needed to complete its ascent to the absolute top of the echelon. And this happens on the twenty first of august, nineteen eleven. And what happens puts the Mona Lisa on the front page of newspapers around the world.
So, 21st of August 1911. It's a Monday and the Louvre is shut for cleaning. While it's shut, people walk through the room in which the Mona Lisa is kept. And they find that it's gone. There is only the empty frame in which it had been contained, and there is complete outrage. The director of France's Museums is sacked.
Um, the Petit Parisien, which i at the time was the world's largest circulation newspaper, splashed the painting on the front page together with the the brilliantly caustic comment, Well at least we still have the frame. Um The news goes round Paris, round France, round the world, huge crowds.
kind of descend on the Louvre, go to look at where the painting had been, much larger crowds than had ever assembled when the Mona Lisa was actually in situ. And there's a desperate kind of Inspector Cluseo type pursuit of the of the painting. Which is always raking up ludicrous suspects. So one of them is uh the famous poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who is arrested And Apollinaire and a friend of his, who is an up and coming Spanish painter resident in Paris at the time, called Pablo Picasso,
um actually end up on trial. Both Apollinaire and Picasso are acquitted. It's a suggestion of how this crime um is not only inflating the reputation of the Mona Lisa, but is also kind of rubbing up against artists and poets and painters who are the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Which I think is another part of why the Mona Lisa suddenly comes to seem much more interesting to people than it had previously done.
However, the police seem helpless. A year passes, um, there are no leads, and by nineteen thirteen, so that's a couple of years after the theft. The Mona Lisa is removed from the catalogue of the Louvre, it's basically an admission of defeat, you know, this painting is gone, we're never going to get it back. But then
As dramatically as it had vanished, the Mona Lisa reappears. And it reappears because in Florence, where of course the Mona Lisa had originally been painted, an antique dealer called Alfredo Geri gets a letter which has been signed Leonardo. And in this letter, Leonardo says that he wants to hand over the Mona Lisa to the Effizi, the Great Gallery in Florence, and he hints that he wants to do this for patriotic reasons.
He does also say that he wants five hundred thousand lira to cover his expenses. But he he's going very big on the fact that he's he's he's Italian and he's doing this for patriotic reasons. So the antique dealer um arranges to meet him and Leonardo duly arrives from Paris, um and Jerry and the head curator from the Offizi
um asked to see the Mona Lisa. He kind of pulls the the Mona Lisa out from his suitcase, unwraps it, the head curator of the Fitzi inspects it. It's clear it is indeed the Mona Lisa, and so uh they have the thief arrested. And he turns out to be a guy called Vincenzo Perugia, and he was um an Italian painter decorator who had been working um in the Louvre painting the walls on the fateful Monday that the painting was stolen, and he'd seized his chance.
And he just lifted it out from his frame, hidden it under his coat, um, walked off um across the courtyard at the Louvre, he'd kind of waved at a guard and gone out through the door, and that was that. And he'd kept it for a year and a half hidden under his bed. And, you know, his his motivation, which he he holds to throughout his subsequent trial, is that he was outraged that the Mona Lisa was in Paris. Um he thought it should be in Florence.
And one of the reasons why he's so outraged is he thought that Napoleon had stolen it from the Offizi. So this was his motivation.
And there's no reason to doubt that he was genuinely suffused with nationalist enthusiasm.
The problem is he he turns out to be really boring. You know, people had wanted a a master criminal, a kind of gentleman cracksman. Um and he's not at all and because he is does not become the focus of media attention, which he might otherwise have done, instead the the star is Mona Lisa. And what the previously the painting had been called it. It's from this point on that the Mona Lisa starts to be feminized. The Mona Lisa is she. She is coming back to Paris.
she is returning to the Louvre. She is being put back in her frame. And when she is put back in her frame in the Louvre, she sits from that point on as the absolute symbol, the absolute embodiment of high art, of high culture, with capital letter both of them capital letters. And from that point on The reputation of the Mona Lisa as the embodiment of the Renaissance Western art of art full stop is absolutely secure. Although it does have the kind of paradoxical effect.
that now the Mona Lisa is the icon of high art, of course, enthusiasts of high art start to turn against it and to say, Oh, it's a bit vulgar, it's a bit trashy, it's
She becomes the embodiment of middle brow art enthusiasm, doesn't she? I mean, isn't that the you know, somebody if you're a student and you go in and somebody's got a print of the Mona Lisa on their wall, you kind of think You you don't really know much about art. Didn't you not think? Yeah.
Yeah, it's the classic FM of Of art. But this internal course, I mean, only um fuels her further ascent into the stratosphere of fame. And you can see it operating in all kinds of ways. So because she's famous. Because people are meant to take her seriously and and kind of offer her obeisance, of course she starts to be parodied. And the most famous of these parodies is done in nineteen nineteen, so only, you know, um, a few years after her her abduction and return.
And this is done by the artist Marcel Duchamp, who's also very keen on um urinals, and he gets uh a postcard of the Mona Lisa and he draws a moustache and a goatee on it. Um and he calls it in English, uses the um the letters L H O O Q. But Dominic, with your mastery of French. Explain to people what that means in French.
It's a tremendous example of French humour. L H O O Q in French is L Acheau Q, which means she is ho basically she's hot in the ass, she's hot in the behind. Um so tremendous banter there from Marcel Dichon.
¶ Global Icon of Art and Tourism: A Final Reflection
Outrage and consternation, and of course the scandal just further amplifies the Mona Lisa's fame. Um, then of course there's mass reproduction. So the more scope for reproducing the Mona Lisa, the more she's reproduced. Um and it's really telling that in nineteen sixty three she is the first painting
to be uh reproduced by Andy Warhol. I mean, that's the true measure of fame. Um and Warhol had been inspired to do it by the fact that in nineteen sixty three the Mona Lisa had come to uh to America a kind of diplomatic gift from de Gaulle to Kennedy. And so that makes the Mona Lisa even more famous in America. Then in nineteen seventy four it visits Japan and that kind of
lights the fuse on Japanese enthusiasm for going to the Louvre and taking photographs of the Mona Lisa. And I would say that it's not an exaggeration that now The Mona Lisa ranks not just as the archetype of high art But kind of as the ultimate global icon of tourism. I mean it's the one object in the world probably that tourists, the mass of tourists want to see more than anything else. I mean it is the single most popular object held by any museum in the world.
And the Louvre is the most visited museum. Um, you have nine million people going there a year. And I think according to surveys, more than half of those people say that they're going specifically to see the Mona Lisa.
Sayo!
It it now has its own dedicated room, it's got its own kind of crowd management procedures, it's got its own security arrangements. But it's still kind of messing up the ability of the Louvre to present all its other paintings because the the curators in the Louvre have always insisted that the Mona Lisa be presented as a Renaissance painting, so alongside other Renaissance paintings.
And the effect is that people just you know, they rush past all the other Renaissance paintings, including Leonardo's picture of John the Baptist, and they all kind of gather round uh the Mona Lisa. And so the plan now, this is part of uh President Macron's kind of Napoleonist ambitions, his grand projet, his uh is going to be his kind of final legacy project, and he's called it the New Renaissance.
Um he so the Mona Lisa is going to be moved to uh an underground gallery. It's going to be entirely exclusive to the Mona Lisa. There will be no other work of art inside it, and that is scheduled to open in twenty thirty one. So Lisa Gerardini will end up having her very own suite of rooms in the most visited museum in the world. Um and I think that I love it that an otherwise entirely obscure Florentine woman is so astronomically insanely famous.
Such an interesting story and yet I have to say I find it quite an an unbelievably uninteresting painting. But it is a fascinating story.
I think the more I I trace the history of how it's come to be famous Uh and the m the many ways in which it's been understood, the more you can see that that all these everything that people have seen in it is kind of there. I mean it it It is kind of infinite in the ways that it can be interpreted and seen, and that might not be true of other paintings.
I think the story is so interesting and it's such an interesting case study in art history and art criticism. But frankly, as a painting, I can think of hundreds of paintings I'd rather look at than the main leader. Anyway, that does not in any way diminish the story, which is fascinating. Tom, merci beaucoup and uh arrived. Bye bye.
🎵 Music
Why did we really go to war with Iraq?
And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons? Mass destruction.
I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of The Rest is Classified, and in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures, Iraq WMD.
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