The Gioconda
The portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, better known as La Gioconda ( La Joconde in French) or Monna Lisa, is a pictorial work of the Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci. It was acquired by King Francis I of France at the beginning of the 16th century and has been the property of the French state ever since. It is exhibited at the Louvre Museum in Paris, being, without a doubt, the "jewel" of its collections.
Her name, La Gioconda (the Alegre, in Spanish), derives from the most accepted thesis about the identity of the model: the wife of Francesco Bartolomeo de Giocondo, whose real name was Lisa Gherardini, from which her other name comes: Monna (lady, in old Italian) Lisa. The Louvre Museum accepts the full title indicated at the beginning as the original title of the work, although it does not recognize the identity of the sitter and only accepts it as a hypothesis.
It is an oil on poplar panel measuring 79 × 53 cm, painted between 1503 and 1519, and retouched several times by the author. It is considered the most successful example of sfumato, a very characteristic technique of Leonardo, although currently its original coloring is less perceptible due to the darkening of the varnishes. The painting is protected by multiple security systems and set at a stable temperature for optimal preservation. It is constantly checked to verify and prevent deterioration.
Through historical studies it has been determined that the model could be a neighbor of Leonardo's, that his descendants could meet and that the model could have been pregnant, due to the way they hide their hands. Despite all the assumptions, the firm answers to the various questions surrounding the work of art are frankly insufficient, which generates more curiosity among the admirers of the painting.
The fame of this painting is not only based on the technique used or its beauty, but also on the mysteries that surround it. In addition, the robbery it suffered in 1911, the reproductions made, the multiple works of art that have been inspired by the painting and the existing parodies contribute to making La Gioconda the most famous painting in the world, visited by millions of people annually.
Author
Leonardo da Vinci was born in the hamlet of Anchiano in the municipality of Vinci, in Italy. It was the result of the illegitimate relationship between the notary Ser Piero and his servant, Catarina Vacca. At the age of 14, he entered the prestigious workshop of the Florentine painter Andrea Verrocchio, where he trained as an artist with Sandro Botticelli and Perugino. He developed the study of mathematics, geometry, architecture, perspective and all the sciences of observation. of the natural environment, which were considered essential at the time. As a further education, he also studied architecture and engineering. Leonardo was a Renaissance humanist, noted in multiple disciplines. He served people as diverse and influential as Lorenzo de' Medici, the Duke of Sforza, the rulers of Mantua, and King Francis I from France.
Due to the meticulousness of his technique and also to his many other occupations as an inventor and designer, Leonardo's pictorial production is extremely scarce: experts reduce the works of relatively secure authorship to barely twenty, and of them very few They have conclusive documentary evidence. Among his most outstanding paintings are The Virgin of the Rocks, The Lady with the Ermine, the mural of The Last Supper and, the most famous of all: La Gioconda or The Mona Lisa.
History
La Gioconda has been considered the most famous painting in the world. Its fame is probably due to the multiple literary references, the various hypotheses about the identity of the protagonist and the spectacular theft which was subjected on August 21, 1911.
It is also the last great work of Da Vinci. After finishing the painting, Leonardo took his work to Rome and then to France, where he kept it until his death at his residence in the castle of Clos-Lucé. It is known that it passed into the hands of the French king Francis I, who would have bought it for an amount of 12,000 francs (4,000 gold escudos), although it is not clear if it was in 1517, before the artist's death, or with after his death in 1519.
After the king's death, the work moved to Fontainebleau, then to Paris, and later to the Palace of Versailles. With the French Revolution it arrived at the Louvre Museum, where it moved in 1797. In 1800, the then first consul Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the painting removed from the museum and placed in his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace until he returned it to the museum in 1804. It stayed there permanently, except for a brief hiatus during World War II, when the painting was kept in the castle of Amboise and later in the abbey of Loc-Dieu.
Until 2005 it was located in the Sala Rosa of the Louvre, and since then it has been in the Salon des Estates. of the painting are known thanks to the biographical work of the painter Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Leonardo.
Technique
Leonardo drew the outline of the painting and then applied the oil diluted in essential oil. The technique used, known by the Italian term sfumato, consists of dispensing with the clear and precise contours typical of the quattrocento and wrapping everything in a kind of mist that blurs the profiles and produces an impression of total immersion in the atmosphere, giving the figure a three-dimensional feel.
The painting was painted on a poplar board covered with several layers of plaster. It is kept in a 40 mm thick bulletproof glass case, specially treated to avoid reflections. The chamber that houses the painting is designed to maintain a constant temperature of 20 °C and 50% relative humidity, which seeks to guarantee optimal conditions for the stability of the painting.
The painting has a 12-centimeter vertical crack in the upper half, perhaps due to the removal of the original frame, although current infrared study reveals that the crack may be as old as the board itself. The crack was repaired between the mid-18th century and the beginning of the 19th century with two metal pieces in the shape of a butterfly fixed on the back. Of these, one was later released. At present, the crack has been determined to be stable and has not worsened over time.
However, to rule out any danger, a team of French curators was set up in 2004, who permanently monitor the state of the painting, preventing any alteration caused by time.
Description of the work
In this portrait the lady is seated in an armchair and rests her arms on the arms of the seat. In her hands and her eyes you can see a characteristic example of pain and the game that the painter makes with light and shadow to give a sensation of volume.
She appears seated in a gallery, seeing the bases of some columns cut to the sides.
The gallery opens onto a landscape perhaps inspired by the views that Leonardo was able to see in the Alps, during his trip to Milan, although a last investigation revealed that the background could correspond to the city of Bobbio, in the region of Emilia-Romagna. Previously, it was thought that the landscape, which has a humid atmosphere and seems to surround the model, was in Arno or in a portion of Lake Como, without having reached any definitive conclusions.
Many attempts have been made to reconcile the two halves of the landscape that appears behind the model, but the discrepancy between the two sides is so great that it does not allow one continuous image to be designed. The left side seems to be lower than the right, entering in conflict with physics, since water cannot remain still if there is unevenness in the terrain. In this regard, art historian E.H. Gombrich writes:
Consequently, when we focus our gazes on the left side of the picture, the woman seems taller or more upright than if we focus on the right. And his face also seems to be modified with this change of position, because neither in this case the two parts correspond exactly.E. H. Gombrich
In the middle of the landscape appears a bridge, known in Bobbio as the Gobbo bridge or the Vecchio bridge, and which shows an element of civilization that could be signaling the importance of engineering and architecture. The geographical location of the bridge was possible thanks to a codex left by Leonardo da Vinci, which shows the scene in which it was painted. A flood, which occurred years later in the Trebbia river, destroyed the bridge, which was later rebuilt.
The model lacks eyebrows and eyelashes, possibly due to an overly aggressive restoration in past centuries, in which the glazes or slight lines with which they were painted would have been eliminated. Vasari, in fact, does speak of eyebrows: «In the eyebrows we could see the way in which the hairs arise from the flesh, more or less abundant and rotated according to the pores of the skin; they couldn't be more real". According to other experts, plucked eyebrows were common in Florentine lineage ladies; either Leonardo avoided painting the eyebrows and eyelashes to make his expression more ambiguous, or perhaps because he never finished the work. construction site.
The lady looks slightly to her left and shows a smile considered enigmatic. Vasari recounts that:
While portraying her, she had people singing or playing, and buphones that made her happy, to try to avoid that melancholy that is usually given in portrait painting.
She wears a veil on her head, a sign of chastity and a frequent attribute in portraits of wives.
The left arm rests on the arm of the chair. The right hand rests on the left. This posture conveys an impression of serenity and that the portrayed character dominates his feelings.
Leonardo da Vinci's technique is more easily appreciated thanks to the "immersion" of the model in the atmosphere and landscape that surrounds her, further enhanced by the advance in the "atmospheric perspective" of the background, which would be the final achievement of the Baroque, where colors tend to be bluish and transparent, increasing the sensation of depth.
Conservation Status
The conservation of the work is medium, with quite evident cracking on the entire surface and a fairly significant crack that, from the upper edge, descends vertically over the character's head. This crack remains stable and it is not foreseeable that it will worsen, thanks to the fact that the work is kept in an air-conditioned space. The most criticized conservation deficiency is the dirt that masks the colors; the painting is covered by layers of varnish that have yellowed over time, a common effect in substances of natural origin. In past centuries, when solvents did not exist, the opacity of old paints was palliated or concealed by applying new layers of varnish. Leonardo's painting accumulates several, and those responsible for the Louvre are reluctant to remove them for fear of altering the appearance of the work. The hypothesis of an upcoming restoration of La Gioconda now seems even more remote, after a controversy sparked in 2011 by the cleaning of another work by the artist in the Louvre, The Virgin, the Child Jesus and Santa Ana, an intervention considered abusive by some experts and which led to the resignation of two technicians opposed to it.
Using a computer program, the color that the work should have if the layers of dirt were removed has been recreated. The restoration in 2011-2012 of the copy kept in the Museo del Prado (Madrid), painted simultaneously in the master's workshop, can help to imagine what the Louvre work originally looked like.
Riddles
For several centuries, unanswered questions about Leonardo's work have been growing, causing passionate polemics among many authors and researchers. Faced with the large number of questions, the answers are usually not very convincing, so the debates are still open. Especially during the 19th and 20th centuries, theories about the origin of the model, the expression on her face, the author's inspiration and many others, have taken center stage and require a deep historical and scientific analysis.
The smile
In the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa seeking the effect that the smile disappears when looking at it directly and reappears only when the eye is fixed on other parts of the painting. The play of shadows reinforces the feeling of bewilderment that the smile produces. It is not known if she really smiles or if she shows a gesture full of bitterness.Sigmund Freud interpreted the Mona Lisa's smile as Leonardo's latent memory of his mother's smile.
Margaret Livingstone, an expert in visual perception, revealed at the European Congress of Visual Perception held in 2005 in La Coruña, that the enigmatic smile is "an illusion that appears and disappears due to the peculiar way in which the human eye it processes the images.” Livingstone stresses that artists have been studying human visual perception for much longer than medical specialists themselves.
The human eye has photopic, retinal or direct vision, and scotopic or peripheral vision. The first is useful when it comes to perceiving details, but it is not apt to distinguish shadows, which is the specialty of the second. Leonardo painted the smile of Mona Lisa using shadows that are best seen with the peripheral vision. As an example to illustrate the effect, one can focus on a single letter on a printed page and see how difficult it is to recognize the rest of the letters.
In a very different order of things, and trying to find out the mood of the model during the posing, specialized software was used in "emotion measurement", which was applied to the painting to obtain relevant data about her expression. The conclusion reached by the program is that Mona Lisa is 83% happy, 9% upset, 6% fearful and 2% angry. The software works on the basis to analyze features such as the curvature of the lips or the wrinkles produced around the eyes. After obtaining the measurements, he compares them to a database of female facial expressions, from which he obtains an average expression.
Presumed pregnancy and physical condition
Researchers from the National Research Council of Canada who examined the work in 2004 used a three-dimensional infrared scanner, the results of which, of little importance, were published on September 26, 2006.
The use of this technique, which allows a resolution 10 times finer than human hair, allowed researchers to appreciate previously unknown details. They have opined that the thin and transparent chiffon veil, hooked to the neck of the blouse, was a garment used by pregnant women or women who had recently given birth. Among their peculiar conclusions, the study considered that the weight of the The model was 63 kilos and 1.68 meters tall, as well as that she wore her hair in a bun covered by a bonnet behind her head, and that no secret message appears in any of the layers of the painting, such as It was told in the novel The Da Vinci Code.
For his part, Julio Cruz Hermida, from the Complutense University of Madrid, states that the model suffered from bruxism (teeth grinding), alopecia (hair loss) and early Parkinson's disease.
Identity of the model
Various hypotheses have been generated around the identity of the model. The current Catalog Raisonné (2017) of Leonardo da Vinci identifies Lisa Gherardini as a likely candidate and only Isabel d'Este as a plausible alternative.
The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1550:
He made for Francesco del Giocondo the portrait of his wife Mona Lisa and, despite dedicating to him the efforts of four years, left him unfinished. This work is now held by King Francis of France in Fontainebleau.
In 1625, Cassiano dal Pozzo saw the work in Fontainebleau and wrote about it:
A portrait of natural size, in a table, framed in carved walnut, is a half figure and portrait of a such 'Gioconda'.
Based on these testimonies, the model has been identified with Lisa Gherardini, the wife of wealthy merchant Francesco del Giocondo.
However, in 1517, before Vasari's writing, Antonio de Beatis visited Leonardo at the castle of Cloux and mentioned three of his paintings, one of them of a Florentine lady made from life at the request of Julian II de' Medici.
Although Antonio de Beatis could have seen a different panel, this testimony seems to conflict with that of Vasari and Cassiano del Pozzo, so some have supposed that the model was actually a friend or lover of Julian II de' Medici.
Some other little-known theories state that it could be Isabel of Aragón, whom Leonardo drew in pencil to later do an oil painting; or Constanza d'Avalos, Duchess of Francaville, mentioned in a poem of the time, where it is said that Leonardo painted her "under the beautiful black veil"; or Isabella Gualanda, a Neapolitan lady. According to this last theory, Leonardo would have painted the portrait in Rome commissioned by Juliano de Médicis and would have recycled an unfinished portrait that he had made of Lisa Gherardini.
Other proposals have been that the model could be a lover of Leonardo himself, a teenager dressed as a woman, a self-portrait of the author in a female version, or even a simple imaginary woman. In this regard, Sigmund Freud suggested that the painting reflected a worrying masculinity. Studies supporting the model's masculine identity theory identify him as Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Il Salai.
Some scholars believe the subject of the painting is Leonardo's mother, Caterina (1427-1495).
In 2005, Armin Schlechter discovered a note by Agostino Vespucci in the margin of a book in the Heidelberg University Library collection, which strongly confirmed the traditional belief that the subject of the portrait was Lisa. In this statement, Vespucci, who was a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci, compares Apelles, the great painter of Antiquity, with Leonardo, and refers to three works he was working on at that time: the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, another of Santa Ana and the mural of The Battle of Anghiari. This small notation dates from October 1503, approximately 47 years before the references made by Giorgio Vasari. Furthermore, the book where the comment on “Mona Lisa” was made belongs to the author Marcus Tullius Cicero, and particularly this edition was published in 1477.
On the other hand, in the tax files of 1480 the identity, whereabouts and place of birth of the model can be verified. She was born on June 15, 1479 and died on July 15, 1542, at the age of 63, in the convent of Santa Úrsula in Florence. According to the historian Giuseppe Pallanti, who deals with the subject in his book The Mona Lisa Story, Gherardini entered the convent four years after becoming a widow, where His daughter Marietta was already a nun.
Based on these data, the Italian genealogist researcher Domenico Savini assures that there are descendants of Gherardini; It is about Natalia and Irina Strozzi, daughters of Prince Girolamo of Tuscany. Assuming that Leonardo's model was the woman who died in the convent, the forensic doctor Maurizio Seracini has offered to search the body and do a DNA analysis to establish the relationship of the Strozzi with Gherardini.
In addition to these elements, official census documents from the time confirm that Leonardo da Vinci's father lived directly opposite Gherardini's family. The historian assumes, without further evidence, that the portrait was a gift from Giocondo to his wife because of her second pregnancy, at the age of twenty-four. There are detractors of the theories put forward by Pallanti, but his opinions are mostly accepted.
To satisfy the historical curiosity about the veracity of the theories expressed, in 1987 the first studies were carried out, superimposing a self-portrait of Leonardo on the painting of the Mona Lisa; the result was a great similarity in the dimensions and physical features. The detractors of said investigation allege that, since the author is the same, the lines are similar and therefore they generate confusion. Lillian Swartz and Gerald Holzman, the directors of said test, assure that the author took a self-portrait, giving himself the appearance of a woman.
So much has been the obsession to clarify the identity of the sitter, that Dr. Matsumi Suzuki (Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 2002), a Japanese researcher, reconstructed the Mona Lisa's skull by means of a bone analysis, and from said calculation generated the possible voice of the model. The researcher ensures that voice reproduction is ninety percent reliable. He has also carried out the same simulation for the author of the work, of which he is a bit wary because the beard reflected in the self-portraits hides some important details.
The title of the box
The official title of the work, according to the Louvre Museum, is Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, although the painting is better known as La Gioconda or Mona Lisa.
This title is first documented long after the author's death. Regarding the name of Mona Lisa, more used in Anglo-Saxon sources, Monna is the diminutive in Italian of Madonna, which means Madam.
The robbery
On August 21, 1911, Italian carpenter Vincenzo Peruggia (a former employee of the Louvre Museum) arrived at the Louvre Museum at 7 a.m., dressed in a white work smock like those worn by maintenance staff at the museum, took down the painting and then, on the Visconti staircase, separated the panel from its frame, abandoning the latter. He then left the museum with the painting hidden under his clothes, which he later placed in a suitcase.When the painter Louis Béroud entered the room shortly after to see the painting, he noticed his absence and warned him immediately to the police. The museum remained closed for a week to proceed with the investigation.
A few years earlier, several other pieces had been stolen from the museum, which led the police to assume that the two events were related. Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso became suspects since they had been linked to the disappearance of some pieces of sculpture from the museum, in addition to some statements in which Apollinaire supported the proposal made by the futurist Marinetti to burn the museums to make way to the new art. Both were later shown to be innocent. At the same time that the investigations into the robbery were being carried out, the Belgian adventurer Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret was captured, who confessed to being the author of another robbery that occurred in 1906, but not that of La Gioconda.
During the absence of the work, the record number of visitors to the museum was broken; they came to appreciate the hole left in the wall by the painting that had been stolen.
The painting was recovered two years and one hundred and eleven days after the theft, after Peruggia was captured. The detainee tried to sell the original painting to the director of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, Alfredo Geri, who was accompanied by the police. Peruggia claimed that his intention was to return the work to his true homeland, and that he was only the victim of a fraudster; the courts of justice sentenced him to one year and fifteen days in prison, which they later reduced to seven months and nine days. Before returning to the museum, the painting was exhibited in Florence, Rome, and Milan.
In 1932, the journalist Karl Decker published information according to which the intellectual author of the theft would have been an Argentine merchant named Eduardo Valfierno, who would have died in 1931, in order to sell six false copies, and he even provided the names of the alleged collectors defrauded, but the veracity of this account could not be proven.
Vandalism
On December 30, 1956, Bolivian Ugo Ungaza Villegas threw a stone at the Mona Lisa during an exhibition at the Louvre. He did it with such force that he destroyed the display case, and detached a piece of pigment from his left elbow. The painting was protected by glass, since a few years before, a man who declared he was in love with it had cut it with a blade and had attempted to steal it. Bulletproof glass has since been installed to protect the painting from further attack.
Subsequently, there were other incidents. On April 21, 1974, while the painting was on display at the Tokyo National Museum, a woman threw red paint at it, protesting the lack of access to the museum for disabled people. And on August 2, 2009, a woman Stunned by the denial of her application for French citizenship, she threw a ceramic mug bought in the Louvre shop, shattering it against the glass. Fortunately, the painting was undamaged in both cases. On May 29, 2022, a man in a wheelchair in a wig threw a pie at her. The painting was not damaged.
Reproductions and parodies
The Mona Lisa has acquired the status of a cultural icon. Its reproductions and use in advertising, everyday objects and also as a cultural reference are numerous. Some include:
- Reproductions, copies and versions
- The best quality copy of the painting is the one found in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which would have been made in parallel to the original. Almost identical in terms of measurements (76x57 cm of the Prado, 79x53 cm the original), it was believed that the support of the copy was an oak board; however, in a recent investigation it has been determined that it is a walnut board. The most notorious difference there was with the original, which was the black background, turned out to be a repinte that was withdrawn in a restoration (2011-2012) and revealed a landscape of great quality. Although some researchers had proposed as possible authors of this table to the German Hans Holbein the Young and Spanish Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina, and even Leonardo himself, after the restoration, the authorship is divided between two of the students closest to the teacher: Andrea Salai and Francesco Melzi. This picture survived the devastating fire of the Alcázar de Madrid, which occurred on 24 December 1734.
- Some authors claim that Leonardo himself made the reproduction known as Mona Lisa de Isleworthbut its authenticity is widely questioned. This painting is the property of a consortium that created a foundation in 2010 based in Switzerland that manages the rights of the work.
- The free reproduction of Rafael, which is displayed in the same museum as the work of Leonardo.
- An anonymous copy that is kept in the Italian Parliament.
- A copy in the Luchner collection at Innsbruck, of which it has been thought that it could be the work of Salai.
- The call Monna Vanna, perhaps also the work of Salai, of which there are several versions, has been considered by some as the representation of The Gioconda naked.
Copy The Gioconda located in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
The call Mona Lisa de Isleworth.
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- Parodias
- In 1919, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp painted a parody Mona Lisa wearing mustache and knob and with registration L.H.O.O.Q. (meaning) She's got hot asstranslated from French).
- Salvador Dalí painted his portrait on the background landscape of Leonardo's work, in a way of ridiculing.
- Fernando Botero painted in 1958 the painting Mona Lisa at age twelvewhere it represents an extremely obese and deformed woman as parody The Gioconda.
- Samuel Clemens reproduced The Gioconda based on dark pigments on a canvas of 40 x 60 feet in Oregon.
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