Who painted the Mona Lisa portrait. The main secret of Mona Lisa - her smile - still haunts scientists

"Mona Lisa", she is "Gioconda", full name - Portrait of Mrs. Lisa del Giocondo, - a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, located in the Louvre (Paris, France), one of the most famous paintings in the world, which is considered to be portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, painted around 1503-1505.

History of the painting

Even the first Italian biographers of Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the place that this painting occupied in the artist's work. Leonardo did not shy away from working on the Mona Lisa - as was the case with many other orders, but, on the contrary, gave herself to her with some kind of passion. She devoted all the time that remained with him from work on the Battle of Anghiari. He spent considerable time on it and, leaving Italy in adulthood, he took with him to France, among some other selected paintings. Da Vinci had a special attachment to this portrait, and also thought a lot during the process of its creation, in the "Treatise on Painting" and in those notes on painting techniques that were not included in it, one can find many indications that undoubtedly refer to the "Gioconda ".

Model identification problem

In the information about the identity of the woman in the picture, uncertainty remained for a long time and many versions were expressed:

Caterina Sforza, illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza

Caterina Sforza

Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan

The work of a follower of Leonardo is an image of a saint. Perhaps, Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan, one of the candidates for the role of Mona Lisa, is captured in her appearance.

Cecilia Gallerani (model of another portrait of the artist - "Ladies with an Ermine")

The work of Leonardo da Vinci, "Lady with an Ermine".

Constanza d'Avalos, which had the nickname "Merry", that is, La Gioconda in Italian. In 1925, the Italian art historian Venturi suggested that the Gioconda is a portrait of the Duchess of Costanza d'Avalos, the widow of Federigo del Balzo, sung in a short poem by Eneo Irpino, which also mentions her portrait painted by Leonardo. Costanza was the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici.

Pacifica Brandano is another mistress of Giuliano Medici, the mother of Cardinal Ippolito Medici (According to Roberto Zapperi, the portrait of Pacifica was commissioned by Giuliano Medici for an illegitimate son legalized by him later, who longed to see his mother, who had already died by that time. At the same time, according to the art historian, the customer , as usual, left for Leonardo complete freedom of action).

Isabela Gualanda

Just the perfect woman

A young man in a woman's attire (for example, Salai, beloved of Leonardo)

Salai in Leonardo's drawing

Self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci

According to one of the put forward versions, "Mona Lisa" is a self-portrait of the artist

Leonardo da Vinci

Retrospective portrait of the artist's mother Katerina (proposed by Freud, then by Serge Bramly, Rina de "Firenze, Roni Kempler, and others).

Marginal check proves correct identification of Mona Lisa model

Thus, Mona Lisa really turned out to be the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo - Lisa Gherardini. The painting, as scholars prove in this case, was commissioned by Leonardo for the young family's new home and to commemorate the birth of their second son, named Andrea.

Description of the picture

The picture of a rectangular format depicts a woman in dark clothes, turning half-turned. She sits in an armchair with her hands clasped together, resting one hand on his armrest, and placing the other on top, turning in the chair almost to face the viewer. Separated by a parting, smoothly and flatly lying hair, visible through a transparent veil thrown over them (according to some assumptions, an attribute of widowhood), fall on the shoulders in two sparse, slightly wavy strands. A green dress in thin ruffles, with yellow pleated sleeves, cut out on a low white chest. The head is slightly turned.

Art historian Boris Vipper, describing the picture, points out that Mona Lisa's face shows traces of Quattrocento fashion: her eyebrows and hair on the top of her forehead are shaved.

The lower edge of the painting cuts off the second half of her body, so the portrait is almost half-length. The armchair in which the model sits stands on a balcony or on a loggia, the parapet line of which is visible behind her elbows. It is believed that earlier the picture could have been wider and accommodated two side columns of the loggia, from which at the moment there are two bases of columns, whose fragments are visible along the edges of the parapet.

A copy of the "Mona Lisa" from the Wallace Collection (Baltimore) was made before the edges of the original were trimmed, and allows you to see the lost columns.

The loggia overlooks a desolate wilderness of meandering streams and a lake surrounded by snowy mountains that extends to a high skyline behind the figure. “Mona Lisa is represented sitting in an armchair against the backdrop of a landscape, and the very comparison of her figure, which is very close to the viewer, with a landscape visible from afar, like a huge mountain, gives the image extraordinary grandeur. The same impression is facilitated by the contrast of the increased plastic tangibility of the figure and its smooth, generalized silhouette with a landscape receding into a foggy distance, like a vision, with bizarre rocks and water channels winding among them.

Current state

The Mona Lisa became very dark, which is considered the result of its author's tendency to experiment with paints, because of which the Last Supper fresco almost died. The artist's contemporaries, however, managed to express their enthusiasm not only about the composition, drawing and play of chiaroscuro - but also about the color of the work. It is assumed, for example, that initially the sleeves of her dress could be red - as can be seen from a copy of the painting from the Prado.

An early copy of the "Mona Lisa" from the Prado shows how much the portrait image is lost when placed against a dark neutral background.

Macro photography allows you to see a large number of craquelure (cracks) on the surface of the picture.

Technics

As Dzhivelegov notes, by the time of the creation of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s skill “has already entered a phase of such maturity, when all formal tasks of a compositional and other nature have been set and solved, when Leonardo began to think that only the last, most difficult tasks of artistic technique deserve to be to take care of them. And when he found in the face of Mona Lisa a model that satisfied his needs, he tried to solve some of the highest and most difficult tasks of painting technique that he had not yet solved. With the help of techniques that he had already developed and tested before, especially with the help of his famous sfumato, which had previously given extraordinary effects, he wanted to do more than he had done before: to create a living face of a living person and reproduce the features and expression of this face in such a way that they the inner world of man was revealed to the end.

Boris Whipper asks the question, “by what means is this spirituality achieved, this undying spark of consciousness in the image of Mona Lisa, then two main means should be named. One is a wonderful Leonard's sfumato. No wonder Leonardo liked to say that "modeling is the soul of painting." It is sfumato that creates the Mona Lisa's wet gaze, her smile, light as the wind, and the incomparable caressing softness of the touch of her hands. Sfumato is a subtle haze that envelops the face and figure, softening contours and shadows. Leonardo recommended for this purpose to place between the source of light and the bodies, as he puts it, "a kind of fog."

Rotenberg writes that “Leonardo managed to bring into his creation that degree of generalization that allows us to consider him as an image of a Renaissance person as a whole. This high degree of generalization is reflected in all the elements of the pictorial language of the picture, in its individual motifs - in how a light, transparent veil, covering the head and shoulders of Mona Lisa, combines the carefully drawn strands of hair and small folds of the dress into a common smooth contour; it is palpable in the modeling of the face, incomparable in its gentle softness (on which the eyebrows were removed in the fashion of that time) and beautiful well-groomed hands.

Alpatov adds that “in a softly melting haze enveloping the face and figure, Leonardo managed to make one feel the boundless variability of human facial expressions. Although the eyes of the Gioconda look attentively and calmly at the viewer, due to the shading of her eye sockets, one might think that they are slightly frowning; her lips are compressed, but barely perceptible shadows are outlined near their corners, which make you believe that every minute they will open, smile, speak. The very contrast between her gaze and the half-smile on her lips gives an idea of the inconsistency of her experiences. ... Leonardo worked on it for several years, ensuring that not a single sharp stroke, not a single angular contour remained in the picture; and although the edges of objects in it are clearly perceptible, they all dissolve in the subtlest transitions from penumbra to half-light.

Landscape

Vipper considers the landscape the second means that creates the spirituality of the picture: “The second means is the relationship between the figure and the background. The fantastic, rocky, as if seen through the sea water landscape in the portrait of Mona Lisa has some other reality than her figure itself. The Mona Lisa has the reality of life, the landscape has the reality of a dream. Thanks to this contrast, the Mona Lisa seems so incredibly close and tangible, and we perceive the landscape as the radiance of her own dream.”

Renaissance art researcher Viktor Grashchenkov writes that Leonardo, including thanks to the landscape, managed to create not a portrait of a specific person, but a universal image: “In this mysterious picture, he created something more than a portrait image of the unknown Florentine Mona Lisa, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The appearance and mental structure of a particular person are conveyed to them with unprecedented syntheticity. This impersonal psychologism corresponds to the cosmic abstraction of the landscape, almost completely devoid of any signs of human presence. In smoky chiaroscuro, not only all the outlines of the figure and landscape and all color tones are softened. In the most subtle transitions, almost imperceptible to the eye, from light to shadow, in the vibration of Leonard's "sfumato" softens to the limit, melts and is ready to disappear any certainty of individuality and its psychological state. ... "La Gioconda" is not a portrait. This is a visible symbol of the very life of man and nature, united into one whole and presented abstractly from their individual concrete form. But behind the barely noticeable movement, which, like light ripples, runs along the motionless surface of this harmonious world, one can guess all the richness of the possibilities of physical and spiritual existence.

In 2012, a copy of the "Mona Lisa" from the Prado was cleared, and a landscape background turned out to be under the later recordings - the feeling of the canvas immediately changes.

"Mona Lisa" is sustained in golden brown and reddish tones of the foreground and emerald green tones of the distance. “Transparent as glass, paints form an alloy, as if created not by a human hand, but by that inner force of matter, which from a solution gives rise to crystals perfect in shape.” Like many of Leonardo's works, this work has darkened with time, and its color ratios have changed somewhat, but even now the thoughtful juxtapositions in the tones of carnation and clothing and their general contrast with the bluish-green, "underwater" tone of the landscape are clearly perceived.

Theft

Mona Lisa would have long been known only to connoisseurs of fine art, if not for her exceptional history, which ensured her worldwide fame.

On August 21, 1911, the painting was stolen by an employee of the Louvre, the Italian mirror master Vincenzo Perugia. The purpose of this kidnapping is not clear. Perhaps Perugia wanted to return the Gioconda to its historical homeland, believing that the French had “kidnapped” it and forgetting that Leonardo himself brought the painting to France. A search by the police turned up nothing. The country's borders were closed, the museum administration was fired. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of committing a crime and later released. Pablo Picasso was also under suspicion. The picture was found only two years later in Italy - and the thief himself was to blame for this, responding to an ad in a newspaper and offering to sell the Gioconda to the director of the Uffizi Gallery. It is assumed that he was going to make copies and pass them off as the original. Perugia, on the one hand, was praised for Italian patriotism, on the other hand, they gave him a short term in prison.

Vincenzo Perugia. Sheet from the criminal case.

In the end, on January 4, 1914, the painting (after exhibitions in Italian cities) returned to Paris. During this time, "Mona Lisa" did not leave the covers of newspapers and magazines around the world, as well as postcards, so it is not surprising that the "Mona Lisa" was copied more than all other paintings. The painting became an object of worship as a masterpiece of world classics.

Vandalism

In 1956, the lower part of the painting was damaged when a visitor poured acid on it. On December 30 of the same year, the young Bolivian Hugo Ungaza Villegas threw a stone at her and damaged the paint layer at the elbow (the loss was later recorded). After that, the Mona Lisa was protected by bulletproof glass, which protected her from further serious attacks. Yet in April 1974, a woman, frustrated by the museum's policy towards the disabled, tried to spray red paint from a spray can when the painting was on display in Tokyo, and on April 2, 2009, a Russian woman who did not receive French citizenship launched a clay cup into the glass. Both of these cases did not harm the picture.

Crowd in the Louvre at the painting, today.

Plot

This is a portrait of Mrs. Lisa del Giocondo. Her husband, a fabric merchant from Florence, loved his third wife very much, and therefore the portrait was commissioned from Leonardo himself.

"Mona Lisa". (wikimedia.org)

The woman is sitting on the balcony. It is believed that initially the picture could have been wider and accommodated two side columns of the loggia, from which two bases of columns remain at the moment.

One of the mysteries is whether Lisa del Giocondo is really depicted on the canvas. There is no doubt that this woman lived at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. However, some researchers believe that Leonardo painted the portrait from several models. Be that as it may, the result was the image of the ideal woman of that era.

How can one not recall the story that was common at one time about what the doctors saw in the portrait. Doctors of various specialties analyzed the picture in their own way. And in the end, they “found” so many illnesses in Gioconda that it’s generally incomprehensible how this woman could live.

By the way, there is a hypothesis that the model was not a woman, but a man. This, of course, adds to the mystery of the history of the Mona Lisa. Especially if you compare the picture with another work by da Vinci - "John the Baptist", in which the young man is endowed with the same smile as the Mona Lisa.

"John the Baptist". (wikimedia.org)

The landscape behind the Mona Lisa seems mystical, like the embodiment of dreams. It does not distract our attention, does not allow our eyes to wander. On the contrary, such a landscape makes us completely immerse ourselves in the contemplation of the Mona Lisa.

Da Vinci painted the portrait for several years. Despite the fee paid in full, the Giocondo family never received the order - the artist simply refused to give the canvas. Why is unknown. And when da Vinci left Italy for France, he took the painting with him, where he sold it for a very large sum of money to King Francis I.

Further, the fate of the canvas was not easy. He was either praised or forgotten. But it became a cult at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1911, a scandal erupted. The Italian stole Leonardo's work from the Louvre, although the motivation is still unclear. During the investigation, even Picasso and Apollinaire were under suspicion.

Salvador Dali. Self-portrait as Mona Lisa, 1954. (wikimedia.org)

The media staged an orgy: every day, this way and that, it was discussed who the thief was and when the police would find the masterpiece. In terms of sensationalism, only the Titanic could compete.

Black PR has done its job. The picture became almost an icon, the image of the Mona Lisa was replicated as mysterious and mystical. People with a particularly fine mental organization sometimes could not withstand the forces of the newly appeared cult and went crazy. As a result, adventures awaited the Mona Lisa - from an assassination attempt with acid to an attack with heavy objects.

The fate of the artist

Painter, philosopher, musician, naturalist, engineer. Man is universal. That was Leonardo. Painting was for him an instrument of universal knowledge of the world. And it was thanks to him that painting began to be understood as a free art, and not just a craft.

"Francis I at the death of Leonardo da Vinci" Ingres, 1818. (wikimedia.org)

Before him, the figures in the paintings looked more like statues. Leonardo was the first to guess that understatement is needed on the canvas - when the form, as if covered with a veil, in some places seems to dissolve into the shadows. This method is called sfumato. It is to him that the Mona Lisa owes its mystery.

The corners of the lips and eyes are covered with soft shadows. This creates a feeling of understatement, the expression of a smile and a glance elude us. And the longer we look at the canvas, the more we are fascinated by this mystery.

Leonardo da Vinci. Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo (Mona Lisa or Gioconda). 1503-1519. Louvre, Paris.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is the most mysterious painting. Because she is very popular. When there is so much attention, an incredible amount of secrets and conjectures appear.

So I could not resist trying to unravel one of these mysteries. No, I will not look for encrypted codes. I will not solve the mystery of her smile.

I'm concerned about something else. Why does the description of the Mona Lisa portrait by Leonardo's contemporaries not match what we see in the portrait from the Louvre? Is there really a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, hanging in the Louvre? And if this is not the Mona Lisa, then where is the real Gioconda kept?

The authorship of Leonardo is indisputable

The fact that the Louvre Gioconda was written by himself, almost no one doubts. It is in this portrait that the sfumato method invented by the master (very subtle transitions from light to shadow) is revealed to the maximum. A barely perceptible haze, shading the lines, makes the Mona Lisa almost alive. It looks like her lips are about to part. She will sigh. The chest will rise.

Few could compete with Leonardo in creating such realism. Except that . But in applying the sfumato method, he was still inferior to him.

Even compared to earlier portraits of Leonardo himself, the Louvre Mona Lisa is an obvious progress.

Leonardo da Vinci. Left: Portrait of Ginerva Benci. 1476 Washington National Gallery. Middle: Lady with an ermine. 1490 Czartoryski Museum, Krakow. Right: Mona Lisa. 1503-1519 Louvre, Paris

Contemporaries of Leonardo described a very different Mona Lisa

There is no doubt about the authorship of Leonardo. But is it right to call the lady in the Louvre the Mona Lisa? Anyone may have doubts about this. It is enough to read the description of the portrait, a younger contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci. Here is what he wrote in 1550, 30 years after the death of the master:

“Leonardo undertook to complete for Francesco del Giocondo a portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, and after working on it for four years, left it incomplete ... the eyes have that shine and that moisture that are usually seen in a living person ... Eyebrows could not be more natural: hair growing densely in one place and less often in another, in accordance with the pores of the skin ... Mouth slightly open with edges connected by the redness of the lips ... Mona Lisa was very beautiful ... the smile was given so pleasant that it seems as if you are contemplating a divine rather than a human being ... ”

Notice how many of the details in Vasari's description do not match the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

At the time of writing the portrait, Lisa was no more than 25 years old. The Mona Lisa from the Louvre is clearly older. This is a lady who is over 30-35 years old.

Vasari also talks about eyebrows. Which the Mona Lisa doesn't have. However, this can be attributed to poor restoration. There is a version that they were erased due to unsuccessful cleaning of the painting.

Leonardo da Vinci. Mona Lisa (detail). 1503-1519

Scarlet lips with a parted mouth are completely absent from the Louvre portrait.

One can also argue about the lovely smile of a divine being. Not everyone sees it that way. It is sometimes even compared with the smile of a self-confident predator. But this is a matter of taste. The beauty of Mona Lisa mentioned by Vasari can also be argued.

The main thing is that the Louvre Mona Lisa is completely finished. Vasari claims that the portrait was left unfinished. Now that's a serious inconsistency.

Where is the real Mona Lisa?

So if the Mona Lisa isn't hanging in the Louvre, where is it?

I know of at least three portraits that fit Vasari's description much better. In addition, they were all created in the same years as the Louvre portrait.

1. Mona Lisa from the Prado

Unknown artist (student of Leonardo da Vinci). Mona Lisa. 1503-1519

This Mona Lisa received little attention until 2012. Until one day the restaurateurs cleared the black background. And about a miracle! Under the dark paint was a landscape - an exact copy of the Louvre background.

Pradovskaya Mona Lisa is 10 years younger than her rival from the Louvre. Which corresponds to the real age of the real Lisa. She is prettier on the outside. She has eyebrows after all.

However, the experts did not claim the title of the main picture of the world. They acknowledged that the work was done by one of Leonardo's students.

Thanks to this work, we can imagine what the Louvre Mona Lisa looked like 500 years ago. After all, the portrait from the Prado is much better preserved. Due to Leonardo's constant experiments with paints and varnish, Mona Lisa darkened very much. Most likely, she once also wore a red dress, and not a golden brown dress.

2. Flora from the Hermitage

Francesco Melzi. Flora (Columbine). 1510-1515 , Saint Petersburg

Flora fits Vasari's description very well. Young, very beautiful, with an unusually pleasant smile of scarlet lips.

In addition, this is how Melzi himself described the favorite work of his teacher Leonardo. In his correspondence, he calls her Gioconda. The painting, he said, depicted a girl of incredible beauty with a Columbine flower in her hand.

However, we do not see her “wet” eyes. In addition, it is unlikely that Signor Giocondo would allow his wife to pose with bare breasts.

So why does Melzi call her Mona Lisa? After all, it is this name that leads some experts to the idea that the real Mona Lisa is not in the Louvre, but in.

There may have been confusion over the 500 years. From Italian "Gioconda" is translated as "Merry". Maybe that's what the students and Leonardo himself called his Flora. But it so happened that this word coincided with the name of the customer of the portrait, Giocondo.

Unknown artist (Leonardo da Vinci?). Isleworth Mona Lisa. 1503-1507 Private collection

This portrait was opened to the general public about 100 years ago. An English collector bought it from the Italian owners in 1914. They allegedly had no idea what treasure they possess.

A version was put forward that this is the same Mona Lisa that Leonardo painted to order for Signor Giocondo. But he didn't finish it.

It is also assumed that the Mona Lisa that hangs in the Louvre, Leonardo already painted in 10 years. Already for himself. Based on the already familiar image of Signora Giocondo. For the sake of their own pictorial experiments. So that no one interferes with him and does not demand a picture.

The version looks plausible. In addition, the Isleworth Mona Lisa is just unfinished. He wrote about this. Pay attention to how undeveloped the woman's neck and the landscape behind her are. She also looks younger than her Louvre rival. As if really the same woman was portrayed with a difference of 10-15 years.

The version is very interesting. If not for one big BUT. The Isleworth Mona Lisa was painted on canvas. Whereas Leonardo da Vinci wrote only on the blackboard. Including the Louvre Mona Lisa.

Crime of the century. Theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre

Maybe the real Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre. And Vasari described it too inaccurately. And Leonardo has nothing to do with the three paintings.

However, in the 20th century, there was one incident that still makes one doubt that the real Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre.

In August 1911 the Mona Lisa disappeared from the museum. She was looking for 3 years. Until the criminal gave himself away in the most stupid way. Placed an advertisement in the newspaper for the sale of the painting. A collector came to see the painting and realized that the person who advertised was not crazy. Under his mattress, in fact, the Mona Lisa was gathering dust.

Louvre. Crime scene photo (Mona Lisa disappeared). 1911

The perpetrator turned out to be Italian Vincenzo Perugia. He was a glazier and an artist. Worked for several weeks at the Louvre on glass protective boxes for paintings.

According to him, patriotic feelings woke up in him. He decided to return to Italy the painting stolen by Napoleon. For some reason, he was sure that all the paintings of the Italian masters of the Louvre were stolen by this dictator.

The story is very suspicious. Why didn't he let me know about himself for 3 years? It is possible that he or his client needed time to make a copy of the Mona Lisa. As soon as the copy was ready, the thief made an announcement which was apparently to lead to his arrest. By the way, they sentenced him to a ridiculous term. Less than a year later, Perugia was already free.

So it may well be that the Louvre got back a very high quality forgery. By that time, they had already learned how to artificially age paintings and pass them off as originals.

Louvre workers do not call the most famous portrait of the world Mona Lisa. Among themselves, they designate her as the “Florentine Lady”. Apparently, many of them are sure that she was hardly the wife of Signor Giocondo. So the real Mona Lisa is somewhere else..?

Read about other titans of painting in the article “

In contact with

Laura Cumming

On August 21, 1911, an Italian painter and decorator slipped out of a closet in the Louvre where he had been hiding all night, approached the Mona Lisa, took it out of its frame, and quietly left the building. It took 24 hours before anyone noticed her absence. The fact is that the Louvre was closed for maintenance and everyone thought that someone had removed the painting to take a picture or clean it. Museums have been and remain remarkably blind to crime, even when it comes to stealing the world's most famous museum. Or perhaps not the most famous, because in 1911 the Mona Lisa was not world famous. You still had to drive to the Louvre to see it. There were engravings, although the collective portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, on which he worked for several years, had long proved extremely difficult to copy in the form of an engraving. And the photographs already existed: the French police printed 6,500 copies for distribution on the streets of Paris immediately after her disappearance, in order to not let her be forgotten. These photographic portraits could also be used for comparison with a fake, which could appear under the guise of the original. Since the Mona Lisa's paint layer is covered with a thin veil of cracks that can form on the surface of such a painting from aging, their design was difficult to fake. Wrinkles were her unmistakable passport. But a hundred years ago, the painting's fame was limited to the west, where it was extolled to the skies of romantic popularity ever since Walter Pater wrote in 1869: "She is older than the rocks among which she nestled like a vampire, she died many times ... ”, which, although not too gallant, but conveyed her strange charm to hundreds of thousands.

The picture was still waiting for real recognition: now it seems unthinkable, but in those days, reproductions of the Mona Lisa had just gained popularity. What really connected face and name was the press coverage caused by the theft. Every major newspaper in Europe wrote about it, and each article was illustrated with a reproduction of the painting. The French l "Illustration even prepared a spread, describing the story that Leonardo was in love with his model, and promised to make a color reproduction in a couple of weeks. Millions of people who may not have seen her and never even heard of her soon became experts in stolen painting by Leonardo.

One of the first suspects was Pablo Picasso. The artist had nothing to do with the crime, but he immediately tried to get rid of some of the statues, which turned out to have been stolen from the same museum. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was also interrogated. No charges were filed, although Picasso was under suspicion for a while - no doubt a great artist could have desired a great painting, according to the theory. For almost two years, the investigation yielded no results.

The painting was in Switzerland or Argentina. Or in a cold apartment in the Bronx, or a secret room in the JP Morgan mansion. In fact, she never left Paris until the thief, Vincenzo Perruggia, traveled to Florence in December 1913 after contacting a Florentine dealer named Alfred Geri, who he hoped would help. him to get rid of this untradeable hostage for cash. Geri played along, even inviting the director of the Uffizi Gallery to a meeting at the Albergo Tripoli-Italian (it goes without saying that it was quickly renamed the Gioconda Hotel). The painting was taken from a suitcase with a double bottom. Cracks in the paint layer were identified, and Jerry immediately called the police.

What did Perugia think of the creepy, mysterious, arrogant, sophisticated, distant, satanic (call her what you will) Mona Lisa, who had been more or less close to him for two long years?

First he kept it in a closet, then under the stove in the kitchen, and finally in a suitcase with a double bottom. For a while, he vainly displayed her postcard on the mantelpiece, and in a letter to Jerry, he signs himself as Leonardo Vincenzo. But pretty soon it seemed to him that it was already difficult to look at her, it was impossible to live with her; there is evidence of repeated attempts to sell it.

The object stolen by Perugia is written on a rectangle of poplar plank only 77 cm high - "even less than the size of a modern television screen!", according to the notorious remark of Americans in the 1950s. I found this reaction strange. The painting evokes the opposite feeling, that it is much larger than I could have expected. Maybe because the Mona Lisa scales in her mind to the size of an infinite number of postcards and reproductions. In fact, trapped in concrete behind a triple layer of bulletproof glass, she appears to be as big as any incarcerated criminal.

What the Mona Lisa looked like in 1911 we will never know. At present, her photograph, her fame is ahead of her, so every time she is viewed, she is judged with prejudice: does it look similar, does it look different, how does it meet our expectations? The joy of seeing any picture in reality before its dwarf reproductions, or even worse - in the false glow of a computer, is almost not available anymore. But it is hardly worth arguing that the portrait of Leonardo is a special case.

For example, her beauty. The Mona Lisa - a person, not a painting - was the epitome of beauty for many 19th-century writers and 20th-century singers. For me, she is not at all in those chipmunk cheeks, close-set eyes and hairless face.

She is known even in fragments - a stooped silhouette, smugly folded hands. But I find it hard to believe that her guiding position in cultural life really has to do with the inner beauty - of herself or the picturesque image.

The crime scene photographs of the last century show not an empty glass case, as it would be today, or even a large space on a bare wall, but only a narrow gap between Titian and Correggio - like the place of a missing tooth. It is well known that thousands of people came to look at this place, this failure, this subject of conversation - there were more people, it is often stated, than usual when the painting was there. But there was something attractive about it, not empty at all. Four iron hooks and a dusty outline: a ghostly trail of painting. Was the smile missing, or was it hanging in the air like the notorious Cheshire Cat? Some claimed that they felt its vibration, as when saying goodbye to the deceased. And it was, after all, the Mona Lisa's crowning glory, an insidious act of disappearance.

A smile is hard to portray. She almost always goes numb and dies on the canvas. In Mona Lisa, she is mysterious only thanks to Leonardo's sfumato technique - smoky, indistinct, blurry outlines make it impossible to see how the smile ends in every corner of the lips, so that it simply disappears, literally unrestricted by anything.

Sfumato is certainly not the only thing that makes her smile mysterious. There are many contributing factors, but the foremost is the complete absence of any visible context or event that could help explain this peculiar smile. Vasari reduced everything to an interlude: Leonardo hired musicians and jesters to dispel the boredom of the model. Some think she is remembering a lost love.

But if Mona Lisa is given a child, her smile will become blissful, and she will look like a secular Madonna. Put a couple of jesters in there and she will become polite and even disapproving. The art historian Edgar Wind placed her in two different scenes to illustrate this point and was able to show that the same smile could express grief at the Crucifixion or intoxicated pleasure at a wild feast.

Mona Lisa smiles, but why? No one talks, no jokes are made, no letters are read, no dinners to be had, no babies to be nursed, no kittens to be petted: what is the reason? And all the many interpretations of her smile - lonely, tragic, shy, uncomfortable, arrogant, even sinister - are due to this lack of explanation. But what they also depend on, and depended on in 1911, is in large measure an even greater absence - her eyebrows. She has such a strange look - a bare face, or as if chemotherapy has left its bitter mark, depriving her of not only her eyebrows, but also her eyelashes. Although the eyebrows are really important, as they give clarity to the image of not only the eyes, but the entire face.

Mona Lisa's eyebrows were in place during Leonardo's lifetime. A visitor to his home in France, where the artist worked in his last years for the French King Francis I, mentions them. Vasari, the great historian of Renaissance art, also gives a description of the painting: “The eyes shone and were moist, as if in real life. Around them are reddish spots and hairs, depicted with extreme skill. Eyebrows could not be more natural: the hair grows thickly in one place and thinner in another in accordance with the pores of the skin. With brows, she would still look out from the depths of Leonardo's leisurely brush strokes, but without absolute mystery.

Francis I is the reason that any of us can see this portrait. Leonardo began painting the Mona Lisa in Florence around 1503, and took the portrait with him when he left for France 13 years later. After his death in 1519, the paintings passed through several hands until Francis I succeeded in purchasing them for the equivalent of the current £9 million. After the fall of the aristocracy during the French Revolution, the painting became part of the public collection of the Louvre. A small snag in Perrugia's patriotic defense during his trial, that his motive for stealing the Mona Lisa was not money, but a desire to return her to her homeland and retaliate for Napoleon's predatory robbery of works of art in Italy, was that, First of all, the Mona Lisa was not stolen from the Italians.

The Italian press may have been touched by his statement, but not the jury at the trial. Perugia was sentenced to 12 months in 1914. He eventually returned to France and opened a paint shop in Haute-Savoie, and the Mona Lisa toured Italy in triumph before she too returned to France.

What was the real consequence of this most famous of all art thefts? First, immediate and massive repetition: thanks to the cinematic effect of the printing presses, the image of Mona Lisa, her face was sold in newspapers around the world, and with each face - the repetition of all the jokes about her smile, her supernatural powers and so on.

As early as the 1930s, French politicians were suggesting that the Mona Lisa should have its own separate gallery "because all the tourists along the Cook Line came to see her." "People don't come to look at a painting," Robert Hughes said, "but to say they've seen it." From this point on, Hughes notes the pernicious growth of an over-inflated art market. But the impact on museum culture was also devastating. Visitors should go to her gallery in the Louvre and see if she still radiates her eerie charms.

If you believe that you can slowly look at the picture, then Mona Lisa is the last in a series of works on earth with which you will succeed. You stand in line to have a look at it from behind a winding security cordon, like at the airport, to seize your short moment and immediately proceed further.

And although I cannot blame Perrugia alone for this natural disaster, and for the fact that almost no one looks at Veronese's colossal Marriage at Cana in the same gallery, as great as the indifference to it, the theft of the Mona Lisa in the past century has contributed to the growth of the painting's fame throughout the world and to the fact that the idea of a woman with a mysterious past is still here, haunting the present: the spectacle in the window continues.

Dimensions of the painting Mona Lisa

"Mona Lisa", she is "La Gioconda"; (Italian Mona Lisa, La Gioconda, French La Joconde), full name - Portrait of Mrs. Lisa del Giocondo, Italian. Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo) is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, located in the Louvre (Paris, France), one of the most famous paintings in the world, which is considered to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, written around 1503-1505. The size of the famous painting is 77 x 53 cm.

I want to sing with a smile
M o n y L i z y.
O na - a riddle with the resurrection -
For centuries .
I n t p e r e s n e t h e s i n s ,
S o t v o r i l i
E h e great m a s t e r i m e l -
Wife

E g o t a l a n t u v e l v n e y
simple citizen,
W h e m u t i o n s o o n
Still ,
B a u s u s h e v n u u o g n i ,
P o n i l t a i n u
W omen and mothers, looking at
In g a z a e .

About
T r e c a e t
L o w i m a t e r n s t v a
first call
And nothing around,
k r o m e t a y n y ,
C o t o r a i f i v e t
in u t r i n e .

"Mona Lisa", she is "La Gioconda"; (Italian Mona Lisa, La Gioconda, French La Joconde), full name - Portrait of Mrs. Lisa del Giocondo, Italian. Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo) is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, located in the Louvre (Paris, France), one of the most famous paintings in the world, which is considered to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, written around 1503-1505.

It will soon be four centuries since the Mona Lisa deprives everyone who, having seen enough of it, begins to talk about it.

The full name of the painting is Italian. Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo - "Portrait of Mrs. Lisa Giocondo". In Italian, ma donna means “my lady” (cf. English “my lady” and French “madame”), in an abbreviated version, this expression was transformed into monna or mona. The second part of the model's name, which is considered the surname of her husband - del Giocondo, also has a direct meaning in Italian and translates as "cheerful, playing" and, accordingly, la Gioconda - "cheerful, playing" (cf. with English joking).

The name "La Joconda" was first mentioned in 1525 in the list of the legacy of the artist Salai, heir and student of da Vinci, who left the painting to his sisters in Milan. The inscription describes it as a portrait of a lady named La Gioconda.

Vasari's message

"Studio of Leonardo da Vinci" in an 1845 engraving of Gioconda being entertained by jesters and musicians

According to Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), a biographer of Italian artists who wrote about Leonardo in 1550, 31 years after his death, Mona Lisa (short for Madonna Lisa) was the wife of a Florentine named Francesco del Giocondo (Italian: Francesco del Giocondo), whose portrait Leonardo spent 4 years, yet left it unfinished.

“Leonardo undertook to complete for Francesco del Giocondo a portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, and after working on it for four years, left it incomplete. This work is now with the French king in Fontainebleau.
This image, to anyone who would like to see to what extent art can imitate nature, makes it possible to comprehend this in the easiest way, because it reproduces all the smallest details that the subtlety of painting can convey. Therefore, the eyes have that brilliance and that moisture that are usually seen in a living person, and all those reddish reflections and hairs are conveyed around them, which can only be depicted with the greatest subtlety of skill. Eyelashes, made like the hair actually growing on the body, where thicker, and where less often, and located according to the pores of the skin, could not be depicted with more naturalness. The nose, with its lovely openings, pinkish and tender, seems alive. The mouth, slightly open, with edges connected by the redness of the lips, with the physicality of its appearance, does not seem to be paint, but real flesh. In the deepening of the neck, with a careful look, you can see the beating of the pulse. And truly it can be said that this work was written in such a way that it plunges into confusion and fear any presumptuous artist, whoever he may be.
By the way, Leonardo resorted to the following trick: since Mona Lisa was very beautiful, while painting the portrait, he kept people who played the lyre or sang, and there were always jesters who kept her cheerful and removed the melancholy that is usually reported painting to performed portraits. In Leonardo, in this work, the smile is given so pleasant that it seems as if you are contemplating a divine rather than a human being; the portrait itself is revered as an extraordinary work, for life itself could not be otherwise.”

It is possible that this drawing from the Hyde Collection in New York is by Leonardo da Vinci and is a preliminary sketch for a portrait of the Mona Lisa. In this case, it is curious that at first he intended to put a magnificent branch into her hands.

Most likely, Vasari simply added a story about jesters for the entertainment of readers. Vasari's text also contains an accurate description of the eyebrows missing from the painting. This inaccuracy could arise only if the author described the picture from memory or from the stories of others. Aleksey Dzhivelegov writes that Vasari’s indication that “work on the portrait lasted four years is clearly exaggerated: Leonardo did not stay in Florence for so long after returning from Caesar Borgia, and if he had begun to paint a portrait before leaving for Caesar, Vasari would probably , I would say that he wrote it for five years. The scientist also writes about the erroneous indication of the incompleteness of the portrait - “the portrait was undoubtedly painted for a long time and was brought to the end, no matter what Vasari said, who in his biography of Leonardo stylized him as an artist who, in principle, could not finish any major work. And not only was it finished, but it is one of Leonardo's most meticulously finished things."

An interesting fact is that in his description, Vasari admires Leonardo's talent to convey physical phenomena, and not the similarity between model and painting. It seems that this "physical" feature of the masterpiece left a deep impression on the visitors of the artist's studio and reached Vasari almost fifty years later.

The painting was well known among art lovers, although Leonardo left Italy for France in 1516, taking the painting with him. According to Italian sources, it has since been in the collection of the French King Francis I, but it remains unclear when and how he acquired it and why Leonardo did not return it to the customer.

Perhaps the artist really did not finish the painting in Florence, but took it with him when he left in 1516 and applied the last stroke in the absence of witnesses who could tell Vasari about this. If so, he completed it shortly before his death in 1519. (In France, he lived in Clos-Luce near the royal castle of Amboise).

In 1517, Cardinal Luigi d "Aragona visited Leonardo in his French workshop. A description of this visit was made by the secretary of Cardinal Antonio de Beatis: “On October 10, 1517, the monsignor and others like him visited in one of the remote parts of Amboise Messire Leonardo da Vinci, a Florentine, a grey-bearded old man over seventy years of age, the most excellent painter of our time, who showed His Excellency three paintings: one depicting a Florentine lady, painted from nature at the request of Brother Lorenzo the Magnificent Giuliano de' Medici, another depicting St. Anna with Mary and the baby Christ, all extremely beautiful. From the master himself, due to the fact that at that time his right hand was paralyzed, it was no longer possible to expect new good works. " According to some researchers, under "some Florentine lady "is meant" Mona Lisa ". It is possible, however, that this was a different portrait, from which no evidence has been preserved, no copies, as a result of which Giuliano Medici could not have anything to do with the Mona Lisa.

A 19th-century painting by Ingres in an exaggeratedly sentimental manner shows the grief of King Francis at the deathbed of Leonardo da Vinci

Model identification problem

Vasari, who was born in 1511, could not see the Mona Lisa with his own eyes and was forced to refer to information given by the anonymous author of the first biography of Leonardo. It is he who writes about the silk merchant Francesco Giocondo, who ordered a portrait of his third wife from the artist. Despite the words of this anonymous contemporary, many scholars have doubted the possibility that the Mona Lisa was painted in Florence (1500-1505), as the refined technique may indicate a later painting. It was also argued that at that time Leonardo was so busy working on the “Battle of Anghiari” that he even refused the Marquise of Mantua Isabella d’Este to accept her order (however, he had a very difficult relationship with this lady).

The work of a follower of Leonardo is an image of a saint. Perhaps, Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan, one of the candidates for the role of Mona Lisa, is captured in her appearance.

Francesco del Giocondo, a prominent Florentine popolan, at the age of thirty-five in 1495 married for the third time a young Neapolitan from a noble Gherardini family - Lisa Gherardini, full name Lisa di Antonio Maria di Noldo Gherardini (June 15, 1479 - July 15, 1542, or about 1551 ).

Although information about the identity of the woman is given by Vasari, there has still been uncertainty about her for a long time and many versions have been expressed:
Caterina Sforza, illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza
Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan
Cecilia Gallerani (model of another portrait of the artist - "Ladies with an Ermine")
Constanza d'Avalos, which also had the nickname "Merry", that is, La Gioconda in Italian. Venturi in 1925 suggested that "Gioconda" is a portrait of the Duchess of Costanza d'Avalos, the widow of Federigo del Balzo, sung in a short poem by Eneo Irpino, which also mentions her portrait painted by Leonardo. Costanza was the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici.
Pacifica Brandano (Pacifica Brandano) - another mistress of Giuliano Medici, mother of Cardinal Ippolito Medici (According to Roberto Zapperi, the portrait of Pacifica was commissioned by Giuliano Medici for the illegitimate son legalized by him later, who longed to see his mother, who by this time had already died. At the same time, according to According to the art historian, the customer, as usual, left Leonardo complete freedom of action).
Isabela Gualanda
Just the perfect woman
A young man in a woman's attire (for example, Salai, beloved of Leonardo)
Self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci
Retrospective portrait of the artist's mother Katerina (1427-1495) (offered by Freud, then by Serge Bramly, Rina de "Firenze).

However, the version about the correspondence of the generally accepted name of the painting to the personality of the model in 2005 is considered to have found final confirmation. Scientists from the University of Heidelberg studied the notes on the margins of a tome owned by a Florentine official, a personal acquaintance of the artist Agostino Vespucci. In the notes on the margins of the book, he compares Leonardo with the famous ancient Greek painter Apelles and notes that "now da Vinci is working on three paintings, one of which is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini." Thus, Mona Lisa really turned out to be the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo - Lisa Gherardini. The painting, as scholars prove in this case, was commissioned by Leonardo for the young family's new home and to commemorate the birth of their second son, named Andrea.

According to one of the put forward versions, "Mona Lisa" is a self-portrait of the artist

Marginal check proves correct identification of Mona Lisa model

Art historian Boris Vipper, describing the picture, points out that Mona Lisa's face shows traces of Quattrocento fashion: her eyebrows and hair on the top of her forehead are shaved.

A copy of the "Mona Lisa" from the Wallace Collection (Baltimore) was made before the edges of the original were trimmed, and allows you to see the lost columns.

Fragment of the "Mona Lisa" with the remains of the base of the column

Boris Vipper writes that, despite the traces of the Quattrocento, “with her clothes with a small cutout on the chest and with sleeves in free folds, just like with a straight posture, a slight turn of the body and a gentle gesture of the hands, the Mona Lisa belongs entirely to the era of classical style.” Mikhail Alpatov points out that “La Gioconda is perfectly inscribed in a strictly proportional rectangle, its half-figure forms something whole, folded hands complete its image. Now, of course, there could be no question of the bizarre curls of the early Annunciation. However, no matter how softened all the contours, the wavy lock of the Gioconda's hair is in tune with the transparent veil, and the hanging fabric thrown over the shoulder finds an echo in the smooth windings of the distant road. In all this, Leonardo shows his ability to create according to the laws of rhythm and harmony.

The current state of the painting is quite bad, which is why the Louvre staff announced that they would no longer give it to exhibitions: “Cracks have formed on the painting, and one of them stops a few millimeters above Mona Lisa’s head.”

Macro photography allows you to see a large number of craquelure (cracks) on the surface of the picture.

As Dzhivelegov notes, by the time of the creation of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s skill “has already entered a phase of such maturity, when all formal tasks of a compositional and other nature have been set and solved, when Leonardo began to think that only the last, most difficult tasks of artistic technique deserve to be to take care of them. And when he found in the face of Mona Lisa a model that satisfied his needs, he tried to solve some of the highest and most difficult tasks of painting technique that he had not yet solved. With the help of techniques that he had already developed and tried before, especially with the help of his famous sfumato, which had previously given extraordinary effects, he wanted to do more than he had done before: to create a living face of a living person and reproduce the features and expression of this face in such a way that they the inner world of man was revealed to the end.

Boris Whipper asks the question, “by what means is this spirituality achieved, this undying spark of consciousness in the image of Mona Lisa, then two main means should be named. One is a wonderful Leonard's sfumato. No wonder Leonardo liked to say that "modeling is the soul of painting." It is sfumato that creates the Mona Lisa's wet look, her smile, light as the wind, and the incomparable caressing softness of the touch of her hands. Sfumato is a subtle haze that envelops the face and figure, softening contours and shadows. Leonardo recommended for this purpose to place between the source of light and the bodies, as he puts it, "a kind of fog."

Rotenberg writes that “Leonardo managed to bring into his creation that degree of generalization that allows him to be considered as an image of a Renaissance person as a whole. This high degree of generalization is reflected in all the elements of the pictorial language of the picture, in its individual motifs - in how the light, transparent veil, covering Mona Lisa's head and shoulders, combines the carefully painted strands of hair and small folds of the dress into a common smooth contour; it is palpable in the modeling of the face, incomparable in its gentle softness (on which the eyebrows were removed in the fashion of that time) and beautiful well-groomed hands.

Landscape behind the Mona Lisa

Alpatov adds that “in a softly melting haze enveloping the face and figure, Leonardo managed to make one feel the boundless variability of human facial expressions. Although the eyes of the Gioconda look attentively and calmly at the viewer, due to the shading of her eye sockets, one might think that they are slightly frowning; her lips are compressed, but barely perceptible shadows are outlined near their corners, which make you believe that every minute they will open, smile, speak. The very contrast between her gaze and the half-smile on her lips gives an idea of the inconsistency of her experiences. (...) Leonardo worked on it for several years, ensuring that not a single sharp stroke, not a single angular contour remained in the picture; and although the edges of objects in it are clearly perceptible, they all dissolve in the subtlest transitions from penumbra to half-light.

Art critics emphasize the organic nature with which the artist combined the portrait characteristics of a person with a landscape full of special mood, and how much this increased the dignity of the portrait.

An early copy of the Mona Lisa from the Prado shows how much the portrait image loses when placed against a dark, neutral background.

Renaissance art researcher Viktor Grashchenkov writes that Leonardo, including thanks to the landscape, managed to create not a portrait of a specific person, but a universal image: “In this mysterious picture, he created something more than a portrait image of the unknown Florentine Mona Lisa, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The appearance and mental structure of a particular person are conveyed to them with unprecedented syntheticity. This impersonal psychologism corresponds to the cosmic abstraction of the landscape, almost completely devoid of any signs of human presence. In smoky chiaroscuro, not only all the outlines of the figure and landscape and all color tones are softened. In the most subtle transitions, almost imperceptible to the eye, from light to shadow, in the vibration of Leonard's "sfumato", all the certainty of individuality and its psychological state is softened to the limit, melts and is ready to disappear. (...) "La Gioconda" is not a portrait. This is a visible symbol of the very life of man and nature, united into one whole and presented abstractly from their individual concrete form. But behind the barely noticeable movement, which, like light ripples, runs along the motionless surface of this harmonious world, one can guess all the richness of the possibilities of physical and spiritual existence.

In 2012, a copy of the "Mona Lisa" from the Prado was cleared, and a landscape background turned out to be under the later recordings - the feeling of the canvas immediately changes.

"Mona Lisa" is considered one of the best works in the portrait genre, which influenced the works of the High Renaissance and, indirectly through them, all subsequent development of the genre, which "should always return to the Gioconda as an unattainable, but obligatory model."

Art historians note that the Mona Lisa portrait was a decisive step in the development of Renaissance portrait art. Rotenberg writes: “although the Quattrocento painters left a number of significant works of this genre, their achievements in portraiture were, so to speak, disproportionate to the achievements in the main pictorial genres - in compositions on religious and mythological themes. The inequality of the portrait genre was already evident in the very "iconography" of portrait images. Actually, the portrait works of the 15th century, with all their indisputable physiognomic similarity and the feeling of inner strength they radiated, were still distinguished by their external and internal constraint. All that richness of human feelings and experiences that characterizes the biblical and mythological images of painters of the 15th century was usually not the property of their portrait works. Echoes of this can be seen in earlier portraits of Leonardo himself, created by him in the first years of his stay in Milan. (...) In comparison with them, the portrait of Mona Lisa is perceived as the result of a gigantic qualitative shift. For the first time, the portrait image in its significance has become on a par with the most vivid images of other pictorial genres.

The "Portrait of a Woman" by Lorenzo Costa was written in 1500-06 - approximately in the same years as the "Mona Lisa", but in comparison with it demonstrates amazing inertia.

Lazarev agrees with him: “There is hardly any other picture in the world about which art critics would write such an abyss of nonsense as this famous work of Leonard's brush. (...) If Lisa di Antonio Maria di Noldo Gherardini, a virtuous matron and wife of one of the most respected Florentine citizens, heard all this, she would no doubt be genuinely surprised. And Leonardo would have been even more surprised, who set himself here a much more modest and, at the same time, much more difficult task - to give such an image of a human face that would finally dissolve in itself the last remnants of Quattrocentist static and psychological immobility. (...) And therefore, that art critic was a thousand times right when he pointed out the uselessness of deciphering this smile. Its essence lies in the fact that here is one of the first attempts in Italian art to depict the natural mental state for its own sake, as an end in itself, without any religious and ethical motivations. Thus, Leonardo managed to revive his model so much that, in comparison with it, all older portraits seem like frozen mummies.

Raphael, Girl with a Unicorn, c. 1505-1506, Galleria Borghese, Rome. This portrait, painted under the influence of Mona Lisa, is built according to the same iconographic scheme - with a balcony (more with columns) and a landscape.

In his pioneering work, Leonardo transferred the main center of gravity to the face of the portrait. At the same time, he used his hands as a powerful means of psychological characterization. Having made the portrait generational in format, the artist was able to demonstrate a wider range of pictorial techniques. And the most important thing in the figurative structure of the portrait is the subordination of all particulars to the guiding idea. “The head and hands are the undoubted center of the picture, to which the rest of its elements are sacrificed. The fairy-tale landscape, as it were, shines through the sea waters, it seems so distant and intangible. Its main purpose is not to draw the viewer's attention away from the face. And the same role is called upon to fulfill the robe, which breaks up into the smallest folds. Leonardo consciously avoids heavy draperies that could obscure the expressiveness of the hands and face. Thus, he makes the latter perform with special force, the more, the more modest and neutral the landscape and attire, assimilated to a quiet, barely noticeable accompaniment.

Leonardo's students and followers created numerous replicas of the Mona Lisa. Some of them (from the Vernon collection, USA; from the Walter collection, Baltimore, USA; and for some time the Isleworth Mona Lisa, Switzerland) are considered authentic by their owners, and the painting in the Louvre is a copy. There is also an iconography of the “Nude Mona Lisa”, represented by several options (“Beautiful Gabrielle”, “Monna Vanna”, the Hermitage “Donna Nuda”), apparently made by the artist’s own students. A large number of them gave rise to an unprovable version that there was a version of the nude Mona Lisa, written by the master himself.

"Donna Nuda" (that is, "Nude Donna"). Unknown artist, late 16th century, Hermitage

The reputation of the painting

"Mona Lisa" behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre and museum visitors crowding nearby

Despite the fact that the "Mona Lisa" was highly appreciated by the artist's contemporaries, in the future her fame faded. The painting was not particularly remembered until the middle of the 19th century, when artists close to the Symbolist movement began to praise it, associating it with their ideas regarding feminine mystery. Critic Walter Pater expressed his opinion in his 1867 essay on da Vinci, describing the figure in the painting as a kind of mythical embodiment of the eternal feminine, who is "older than the rocks between which she sits" and who "died many times and learned the secrets of the afterlife" .

The further rise of the painting's fame is associated with its mysterious disappearance at the beginning of the 20th century and its happy return to the museum a few years later (see below, The Theft section), thanks to which it did not leave the pages of newspapers.

A contemporary of her adventures, critic Abram Efros wrote: “... the museum watchman, who has not departed a single step from the picture since its return to the Louvre after the abduction in 1911, has been guarding not a portrait of his wife Francesca del Giocondo, but an image of some kind of half-human, half-snake creature, either smiling or gloomy, dominating the chilled, bare, rocky space that stretched out behind him.

"Mona Lisa" today is one of the most famous paintings of Western European art. Her high-profile reputation is associated not only with her high artistic merit, but also with the atmosphere of mystery surrounding this work.

One of the mysteries is related to the deep affection that the author had for this work. Various explanations were offered, for example, romantic: Leonardo fell in love with Mona Lisa and deliberately dragged out the work in order to stay with her longer, and she teased him with her mysterious smile and brought him to the greatest creative ecstasies. This version is considered mere speculation. Dzhivelegov believes that this attachment is connected with the fact that he found in it the point of application of many of his creative searches (see the Technique section).

Gioconda's smile

Leonardo da Vinci. "John the Baptist". 1513-1516, Louvre. This picture also has its own mystery: why is John the Baptist smiling and pointing up?

Leonardo da Vinci. "Saint Anne with the Madonna and the Christ Child" (detail), c. 1510, Louvre.
Mona Lisa's smile is one of the painting's most famous mysteries. This light wandering smile is found in many works of both the master himself and the Leonardesques, but it was in Mona Lisa that she reached her perfection.

The demonic charm of this smile especially fascinates the viewer. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about this woman, who seems either seductively smiling, or frozen, coldly and soullessly looking into space, and no one guessed her smile, no one interpreted her thoughts. Everything, even the landscape, is mysterious, like a dream, tremulous, like a pre-storm haze of sensuality (Muter).

Grashchenkov writes: “The infinite variety of human feelings and desires, opposing passions and thoughts, smoothed and merged together, responds in the harmonically impassive appearance of the Mona Lisa only by the uncertainty of her smile, barely emerging and disappearing. This meaningless fleeting movement of the corners of her mouth, like a distant echo merged into one sound, conveys to us from the boundless distance the colorful polyphony of the spiritual life of man.
The art critic Rotenberg believes that “there are few portraits in the entire world art that are equal to the Mona Lisa in terms of the power of expressing the human personality, embodied in the unity of character and intellect. It is the extraordinary intellectual intensity of Leonard's portrait that distinguishes it from the portrait images of the Quattrocento. This feature of his is perceived all the more acutely because it refers to a female portrait, in which the character of the model was previously revealed in a completely different, predominantly lyrical figurative tone. The feeling of strength emanating from the "Mona Lisa" is an organic combination of inner composure and a sense of personal freedom, the spiritual harmony of a person based on his consciousness of his own significance. And her smile itself does not at all express superiority or disdain; it is perceived as the result of calm self-confidence and complete self-control.

Boris Whipper points out that the above-mentioned absence of eyebrows and a shaved forehead, perhaps unwittingly enhances the strange mystery in her expression. Further, he writes about the power of the picture’s influence: “If we ask ourselves what is the great attractive power of the Mona Lisa, its truly incomparable hypnotic effect, then there can be only one answer - in its spirituality. The most ingenious and most opposite interpretations were put into the smile of the Mona Lisa. They wanted to read pride and tenderness, sensuality and coquetry, cruelty and modesty in it. The mistake was, firstly, that they were looking for individual, subjective spiritual properties at all costs in the image of Mona Lisa, while there is no doubt that Leonardo achieved precisely typical spirituality. Secondly, and this is perhaps even more important, they tried to attribute emotional content to Mona Lisa's spirituality, while in fact she has intellectual roots. The miracle of the Mona Lisa lies precisely in the fact that she thinks; that, standing in front of a yellowed, cracked board, we irresistibly feel the presence of a being endowed with reason, a being with whom one can speak and from whom one can expect an answer.

Lazarev analyzed it as an art scientist: “This smile is not so much an individual feature of Mona Lisa, but a typical formula of psychological revival, a formula that runs like a red thread through all the youthful images of Leonardo, a formula that later turned, in the hands of his students and followers, into traditional stamp. Like the proportions of Leonard's figures, it is built on the finest mathematical measurements, on strict consideration of the expressive values of individual parts of the face. And for all that, this smile is absolutely natural, and this is precisely the strength of its charm. It takes everything hard, tense, frozen from the face, it turns it into a mirror of vague, indefinite emotional experiences, in its elusive lightness it can only be compared with a swell running through the water.

Her analysis attracted the attention of not only art historians, but also psychologists. Sigmund Freud writes: “Who represents the paintings of Leonardo, the memory of a strange, captivating and mysterious smile that lurks on the lips of his female images emerges in him. The smile, frozen on elongated, quivering lips, became characteristic of him and is most often called "Leonard's". In the peculiarly beautiful appearance of the Florentine Mona Lisa del Gioconda, she most of all captures and confuses the viewer. This smile demanded one interpretation, but found the most diverse, of which none satisfies. (…) The conjecture that two different elements were combined in Mona Lisa's smile was born by many critics. Therefore, in the expression of the face of the beautiful Florentine, they saw the most perfect image of the antagonism that governs the love life of a woman, restraint and seduction, sacrificial tenderness and recklessly demanding sensuality, absorbing a man as something extraneous. (...) Leonardo in the face of Mona Lisa managed to reproduce the double meaning of her smile, the promise of boundless tenderness and an ominous threat.

The philosopher A.F. Losev writes sharply negatively about her: ... "Mona Lisa" with her "demonic smile." “After all, one has only to peer into the eyes of the Mona Lisa, as you can easily notice that, in fact, she does not smile at all. This is not a smile, but a predatory face with cold eyes and a clear knowledge of the helplessness of the victim that Gioconda wants to master and in which, in addition to weakness, she also counts on powerlessness before the bad feeling that has taken possession of her.

The discoverer of the term microexpression, psychologist Paul Ekman (prototype of Dr. Cal Lightman from the television series Lie to Me) writes about the facial expression of Gioconda, analyzing it from the point of view of his knowledge of human facial expressions: “the other two types [smiles] combine a sincere smile with a characteristic expression of the eyes. A flirtatious smile, although at the same time the seducer looks away from the object of his interest, in order to then again throw a sly look at him, which, again, is instantly averted, as soon as he is noticed. Part of the unusual impression of the famous Mona Lisa lies in the fact that Leonardo catches his nature precisely at the moment of this playful movement; turning her head in one direction, she looks in the other - at the subject of her interest. In life, this facial expression is fleeting - a furtive glance lasts no more than a moment.

The history of the painting in modern times

By the day of his death in 1525, Leonardo's assistant (and possibly lover) named Salai owned, judging by references in his personal papers, a portrait of a woman called "La Gioconda" (quadro de una dona aretata), which was bequeathed to him by his teacher. Salai left the painting to his sisters who lived in Milan. It remains a mystery how, in this case, the portrait got from Milan back to France. It is also not known who and when exactly cut off the edges of the painting with columns, which, according to most researchers, based on comparison with other portraits, existed in the original version. Unlike another cropped work by Leonardo - "Portrait of Ginevra Benci", the lower part of which was cut off, as it suffered from water or fire, in this case the reasons were most likely of a compositional nature. There is a version that this was done by Leonardo da Vinci himself.

Crowd in the Louvre near the painting, today

King Francis I is believed to have bought the painting from Salai's heirs (for 4,000 écus) and kept it in his Château de Fontainebleau, where it remained until the time of Louis XIV. The latter moved her to the Palace of Versailles, and after the French Revolution she ended up in the Louvre. Napoleon hung the portrait in his bedroom of the Tuileries Palace, then she returned back to the museum.

Theft

1911 The empty wall where the Mona Lisa hung
Mona Lisa would have long been known only to connoisseurs of fine art, if not for her exceptional history, which ensured her worldwide fame.

Vincenzo Perugia. Sheet from the criminal case.

On August 21, 1911, the painting was stolen by an employee of the Louvre, the Italian mirror master Vincenzo Peruggia (Italian: Vincenzo Peruggia). The purpose of this kidnapping is not clear. Perhaps Perugia wanted to return the Gioconda to its historical homeland, believing that the French had “kidnapped” it and forgetting that Leonardo himself brought the painting to France. Police searches were unsuccessful. The country's borders were closed, the museum administration was fired. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of committing a crime and later released. Pablo Picasso was also under suspicion. The painting was found only two years later in Italy. Moreover, the thief himself was to blame for this, responding to an ad in a newspaper and offering to sell the Gioconda to the director of the Uffizi Gallery. It is assumed that he was going to make copies and pass off as the original. Perugia, on the one hand, was praised for Italian patriotism, on the other hand, they gave him a short term in prison.

Vandalism

During the Second World War, the painting was transported for security reasons from the Louvre to the Amboise castle (the place of death and burial of Leonardo), then to the abbey of Loc-Dieu, and finally to the Ingres Museum in Montauban, from where, after the victory, it returned safely to its place.

In the twentieth century, the picture almost did not leave the Louvre, visiting the USA in 1963 and Japan in 1974. On the way from Japan to France, the painting was exhibited at the Museum. A. S. Pushkin in Moscow. Trips only consolidated the success and fame of the picture.

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