The Isleworth Mona Lisa: have Leonardo da Vinci fans worshipped the wrong portrait for centuries?
Move over, Salvator Mundi. That holy image, marketed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450.3m (£335m) six years ago and holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction – in spite of scepticism about its authorship, quality and history. Now there is potentially an even more sellable Leonardo doing the rounds, with similarly questionable claims being made as it goes on public view in Turin. Although it is not currently for sale, it’s hard not to believe that the private owners aren’t sorely tempted. Is this painting’s exhibition in Italy the start of a campaign that will end in Leonardo beating his own world record?
Salvator Mundi became known as “the male Mona Lisa”, lending it the glamour of Leonardo’s most well-known work. But the Mona Lisa Foundation in Zurich, which is championing the painting showing in Turin on behalf of its anonymous owners, is suggesting that it is the original Mona Lisa. It argues that it’s the first version of the infamous painting, depicting a younger Lisa than the one Leonardo worked on all his life and had with him at the chateau of Amboise where he spent his last years, and which now attracts an unending selfiesnatching crowd in the Louvre.
What a sensation! The. Original. Mona. Lisa. The fascination of the Mona Lisa is as impossible to deny as it is difficult to explain. Some date its magnetic fame from its theft in 1911, which hit the headlines worldwide. But that is not when it became iconic. People were already obsessing about the artwork in the 19th century when the critic Walter Pater raved that Lisa in her green, misty setting is some kind of sexy underwater “vampire”. And the painting was renowned across Europe centuries before that when the 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari enthused that the Mona Lisa seemed to have a pulse.
So have the Mona Lisa fans been adoring the wrong painting for the last five centuries? Should they really be worshipping the “Isleworth Mona Lisa”, as it’s been pretentiously nicknamed, because it was previously owned by an art dealer there? (And does the Swiss foundation know Isleworth is a London suburb and not a fairytale castle?)
In my view, there isn’t a chance in hell that this is a Leonardo. The claims being made for the Isleworth Mona Lisa seem implausible.
It seems inconceivable to me that the most subtle, observant and relentlessly patient of artists would have produced such a lousy, lackadaisical image of a human face. Leonardo did great portraits of women before he even started the Mona Lisa, and in each one he created a haunting inner presence: the pale melancholy of Ginevra de’ Benci; the self-possessed energy of Cecilia Gallerani. The so-called Isleworth Mona Lisa is, by contrast, completely lacking in personality. Her grin looks inane and fixed, unlike the true Mona Lisa’s deeply studied smile which reflects Leonardo’s anatomical dissections of human facial muscles, right down to the lips.
Even the shape of this Mona Lisa’s face seems wrong – not just because it differs from the Louvre painting but because it doesn’t have the classical proportions or fleshy reality that Renaissance artists aimed for. Has it been carbon-dated? It looks like a modern face, though presumably it is a copy done sometime between the 1500s and the 1700s when it is said to have reached Britain. But it’s a bad copy. Or a deliberate fake.
The difference in facial appearance, says the Swiss foundation, is that the Isleworth Mona Lisa depicts its subject when she was young. It claims to have proof that Leonardo did two versions of his masterpiece and this is the first, begun in Florence in 1503.
The history it is presenting to “prove” this is questionable. The Mona Lisa is a very well-documented painting, and those documents don’t point to the existence of two paintings; just one, which Leonardo worked on for many years.
Vasari said Leonardo started it in Florence and the subject is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. In 2005, a note was found in a book in Heidelberg University’s library that proves him right: a Florentine government employee wrote in 1503 that Leonardo was working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. Was this the Isleworth Mona Lisa or the Louvre one?
The evidence points to it being the boring old version that’s in the Louvre. For the Mona Lisa Foundation’s argument omits something crucial about this source. It specifically emphasises that Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa is unfinished – and doesn’t look like being finished any time soon.
This account of Leonardo making a start and leaving it on his easel while he worked on his inventions matches the creation of the Louvre’s Mona Lisa, which X-rays and other scientific imaging show was built up in a complex, slow way: when Leonardo first painted Lisa, she didn’t even smile.
The painting’s promoters also contend that a drawing of a woman between two pillars by Raphael is a copy of the Isleworth Mona Lisa. However, when Leonardo started his portrait in 1503, it was an instant sensation. Raphael saw it in Leonardo’s workshop and immediately started drawing and painting his own variations on it. This is a drawing for one of those versions in which he portrays a woman in the fashionable Mona Lisa pose.
Does any of this matter? Not really. It is magical that an artist who died in 1519 can generate this much fuss. I very much doubt the owners will end up selling what looks like a poor copy as an authentic Leonardo. But even if it does become recognised as the young Mona Lisa out of some chaotic mixture of hype, cynicism and romance, it won’t harm Leonardo.
His paintings are portals into his astonishing mental universe, whose true treasures are in his notebooks. This was a human being who understood fossils and geological time, who dissected and drew our inner landscapes and saw that our very natures would one day be remade by technology.
As for the Mona Lisa – Leonardo himself started the fictions that swirl around his masterpiece. When a group of ecclesiastical travellers visited him at Amboise near the end of his life, they were told a cock-and-bull story about the woman on his easel. Leonardo claimed the Mona Lisa was commissioned by Giuliano de’ Medici – the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent – as a portrait of his mistress. Why? It was a good story, combining the snob appeal of the Medici name plus a sexy aura of secret love. Certainly better than simply saying she was a respectable middle-class Florentine.
Leonardo, among all his other brilliances, knew how to sell art and himself. That’s how he ended up living in a free chateau with his friends at the expense of the king of France. If he saw this latest fuss about his work, he would probably lend his support to the du
bious Isleworth Mona Lisa – for a cut of the auction price.
• Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance by Jonathan Jones is published by Thames and Hudson, £30. To order a copy for £26.40, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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flat, like a pancake. After further analysis, astronomers spotted more anomalies. They determined that before telescopes detected the object, it had accelerated while travelling past the sun. This is normal for comets, rocky icebergs that melt in the heat and release gases that act like booster rockets. This is what gives comets their signature tail, but this asteroid didn’t have one. According to Loeb: “No tail, no comet.” In a paper co-written with Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which investigates UFOs for the US Department of Defense, Loeb later hypothesised that ’Oumuamua could be a solar sail from an interstellar craft, using sunlight to accelerate through space. In other words, it belonged to aliens.
In what was a big year for UFOhunters, 2017 was the year that the Pentagon admitted to investigating UFOs. The $22m budget was reportedly also used to investigate alleged UFO sightings and all manner of unexplained goings on. Loeb rode the wave of interest to international fame.
His destiny certainly wasn’t written in the stars. Loeb, partly of German descent, grew up on a chicken farm in Israel. His grandfather, Albert Loeb, a veteran of the first world war, fled the Nazis when it was clear that fighting for his country at Verdun wouldn’t protect him from antisemitism. “He left everything behind, and about 56 people of the family stayed in Germany because they said they would leave on the last train. And the last train led to the concentration camps,” Loeb says. Albert arrived in Palestine and helped the British by giving them aerial photographs of an important dam in Frankfurt, which they later bombed. “That was his revenge,” says Loeb.
Around the time ’Oumuamua made headlines, Loeb lost both his parents. He was particularly close to his mother, who was very loving and always encouraged his intellectual curiosity. “I used to go to the hills on a tractor and read philosophy books, mainly existential ones. So, I was interested in the big questions of our existence.”
***
When we meet, Loeb is a few months back from his expedition to Papua New Guinea, where he collected spherules – tiny glassy beads of metal and rock – debris from the 2014 meteorite. US Space Command telescopes, designed to detect enemy missiles, tracked the meteorite. Exactly how the trajectories and positions of objects are measured is classified, but it claimed to be “99.999%” certain that the fireball’s origins were interstellar. Loeb believes that because the meteorite was travelling so fast, and did not burn up high above the Earth, it must have been made of something more robust, even artificial. “This object was faster than 95% of the stars near the sun, relative to what is called the local standard. That’s what led me originally to suspect maybe it’s a spacecraft,” Loeb says, glee written all over his face. “It was able to maintain its integrity to very high stress. And so, we said it must be tougher than even iron meteorites.”
So far, Loeb and his team have only recovered small spherules from the path of the meteorite – a bit like collecting water droplets that have cascaded from a burst water balloon – but they are planning on heading out next spring to look for bigger pieces. “Then you can easily tell if it’s a rock or a technological gadget base. And, of course, if it’s a gadget, it would have screws, it would have perhaps buttons on it,” he says.
Would he press those buttons? “I asked the students in my class the same question. Half of them said: ‘No, don’t do that because it will affect all of us.’ And half said: ‘Yes, we are curious.’ And then one of the students asked me: ‘Professor, what would you actually do?’ And I said that I will bring it to a laboratory and examine it before engaging with it.”
This is one of the central questions of alien hunting: do we actually want to find them? Is it a good idea to reach out to species that could be just as violent as humans, as well as more advanced?
“I’ll tell you what bothers me the most,” Loeb says. “It’s not so much that curiosity could be dangerous – it’s that childlike bullying is more prevalent than childlike curiosity in academia. People just try to step on every flower that rises above the grass level. This negativity is very damaging because it suppresses innovation.”
Loeb’s critics would counter that he is prone to making extraordinary claims without good evidence. Before heading to Papua New Guinea, Loeb advertised his expedition on a giant screen in Times Square. He then liveblogged his discoveries from the Pacific. His detractors say this approach misleads the public and distorts how “real science” is done.
They may have a point. After collecting the spherules, Loeb declared on television that his discovery was “the first time that humans hold material belonging to a big object that came from outside the solar system.” But at the time it wasn’t clear where the spherules had come from. It still isn’t.
Spherules cover the Earth, and most aren’t from meteorites. Their origins range from volcanoes to the Industrial Revolution and the iron age. As it turns out, Harvard’s analysis showed the samples had unusual compositions, but whether they belong to the meteorite Loeb is looking for, let alone if that in turn was created by extraterrestrials, will require much more research.
Loeb sees his detractors as selfimportant and jealous, as well as myopic and risk-averse in the extreme. He strongly believes that blogging his research improves public understanding of the scientific process. “Some people told me: ‘It’s the first time we see how science is done. Because we often hear just in press conferences the final result.’ They [scientists] sit on a stage and tell the public what the truth is, and the public doesn’t like that because it appears like the work of the elite,” he says. He insists his blogs are like detective stories. “And the public loves detective stories. I mean, what’s the problem?”
The problem, of course, is that scientists usually keep quiet until their peers have had a proper look at their work. “That’s another way to do it,” Loeb said when the New York Times put this to him in August. “But it was not a crime.”
What is criminal, he suggests, is the underfunding of his chosen field, especially compared with something like Cern. “The Large Hadron Collider was billions of dollars looking for supersymmetry, and it’s not there. They haven’t found it.” He’s not a big fan of theoretical physicists, either. “There is a whole community of people trying to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. These are people working on string theory, extra dimensions and the multiverse, and they don’t have a single piece of evidence, yet they work on it for decades. And they think that they are promoting the frontier of physics.”
The next day I return to Loeb’s house for his show, joining an audience of his students, friends, colleagues and family. Loeb hopes to take it from his attic to off-Broadway, and stands a good chance. Joshua Ravetch, who co-created and directed Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show Wishful Drinking, is at the helm, and an Oscar-winning songwriter, Alan Bergman, has written a song for the show.
The performance takes the form of a monologue, broken up by slides and short videos. Loeb begins with ’Oumuamua, and it is not long before he is throwing shade at his critics. “I felt like the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale, pointing to the astronomical community and saying ‘The emperor has no clothes’ – ’Oumuamua has no tail.”
Then it’s on to the many theories about the asteroid. The possibility that it was a nitrogen iceberg? “We’ve never seen a nitrogen iceberg, and it would not survive the interstellar journey.” The theory that it was a dark comet? “We’ve never seen that either. I guess it would be dark, so invisible.” As for the suggestion that it was a comet, after all, with a core of ice – a water iceberg … “Well, OK, we’ve seen those,” Loeb quips, to the sound of music from Titanic.
He goes on to liken the pushback he’s received to the oppression that Galileo and Marie Curie endured, before invoking the Wright Brothers. “In the year 1900 it was a stated fact that human flight was an impossibility – end of discussion. No less than Thomas Edison announced that it would not be possible. The New York Times stated that it would take at least a million years for men to fly – a million years.” Such comparisons are unlikely to convert anyone who sees him as an egotist.
But perhaps that’s a little unfair. Before I leave, I ask Loeb what is to be gained from looking for aliens, and his reply is surprisingly humble. “We know from our private life that if we find a partner, it gives new meaning to our existence,” he says. “So finding a partner somewhere in the form of another civilisation that can teach us things that we can imitate, that we can aspire to, will give us a meaning to our cosmic existence. The universe will not be pointless any more.”
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ing animal, regardless. So happy to be home and around others. That’s my kinda bird!
9. Chuck E Cheese says ‘poggers’
Absolutely bizarre video. This is a clip taken from a livestream on the official Chuck E Cheese Twitch channel. He didn’t say a single word until this moment near the very end of a two-hour stream. Before this, he just sat there and occasionally turned to the camera and laughed. Why did they make him do this.
10. Improv chimps
I think improv is god’s greatest gift but in 2019 I straight-up performed to a crowd of zero at a student bar. There will always be an improv chimp in my heart.
• Elliot posts his designs and videos on Instagram and YouTube as @elliotisacoolguy. He’s been told they’re funny even if you’re not a graphic designer.