Clark K. Mona Lisa

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Mona LisaAuthor(s): Kenneth ClarkSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 115, No. 840 (Mar., 1973), pp. 144-151Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/877242 .

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EDITORIAL

matically of the Bologna Exhibition catalogues, the Councilof Europe series, the London National Gallery's superbvolumes, the successive parts of the Royal collection Cata-

logue (see p.185); or of such individual works as 'Artistsin Seventeenth-century ome' (1955) or Degas Monotypes 1968).

The development of the catalogue, which has stimulatedscholars who have otherwise been reluctant to publish their

findings in monographic form, such as Wilde and Mahon,has had the effect of 'tightening up' art books in general.The beautiful picture-book, with virtually no text, is less

common; and libraries, with limited budgets, now take ahard look at volumes without the necessary apparatus.

Along with the new degree of post-War professionalismthere has grown up a much more flexible approach to art

history itself. There is now a greater interest in the psycho-logical and sociological aspects, the role of patronage andart criticism. This applies to architecture (see p.I89) andthe decorative arts quite as much as it does to painting and

sculpture. It is symptomatic that perhaps the most signifi-cant book of the era should be E. H. Gombrich's Art andIllusion (I96O). Equally characteristic, in their different

ways, are the volumes in the Prentice-Hall 'Sources andDocuments' series, and books devoted to an individual workof art, notably the Penguin series and Eitner's more elaboratetreatment of The Raft of the 'Medusa' (Phaidon).

Time passes, the standard work becomes not only out of

date but unobtainable. Partly in response to the needs ofnew libraries, this situation has created a flourishing businessin new editions and reprints, not all of them, alas, as welldone as the Clark-Pedretti revision (1968) of Clark's oldWindsor Leonardo catalogue (I935), or as useful as theCornmarket Press reprint of Waagen in eight volumes (1970).Although the revision of a standard work may have to be

done by another scholar, or even a committee, it is notusually a very satisfactory method (p.174).

It is possible to fill a small library with good books and

catalogues produced since the War; there is much aboutwhich publishers (Phaidon, T. & H., Faber, Zwemmer, etc.)can feel proud. It is only when the infinitely larger numberof unsatisfactory volumes are considered that the overall

picture is seen to be less happy. What we should be lookingto publishers for now are stronger signs of the pertinacityand high intellectual standards that have made Pevsner's'Pelican History of Art' the most important series createdsince the War. Where authors are concerned, any loweringof standards is not, and need not be, a problem; there mustbe more scholars working on more topics than ever before.

Can we then perhaps hope, among so much intellectualactivity, for a little more of the distilled essence that havemade Kenneth Clark's volumes on Landscape nto Art (I949)and The Nude (1956) among the most stimulating and en-

lightening works published in the last thirty years?

KENNETH CLARK

M o n a i s a

THE Directors of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE have had anadmirable idea in sponsoring a series of lectures oi the artof portraiture. Some of the greatest pictures ever paintedhave been portraits - we need think only of Titian, Rem-brandt and Velasquez to accept that statement; and yet theaesthetic theory of the last seventy years runs entirelycounter to the fact of experience that a truthful likeness of anindividual can be a great work of art. It is always desirable,although very seldom possible, to narrow the gap betweenfact and theory, and I hope that this may be the outcome ofthe series which I have the honour of inaugurating to-day.1But having had this reasonable idea, those responsible forthe series had a notion so perverse that I can only supposethat it was intended as a kind of ironical joke: that the series

should begin with a lecture on the Mona Lisa. This mys-terious objet de culte, even though it may have originated inthe contemplation of a real person, has none of the qualitiesthat move us in the works of Velasquez and Rembrandt. It isone of the few works of man that may properly be describedas unique. There is no good trying to laugh it off or to thinkthat one can explain it by the usual processes of formal or

philological analysis. To try to answer the riddle of the

Sphinx has been a traditional form of self-destruction. At myage this is of no importance. At least I can begin by sum-

I. Kenneth Clark's lecture was delivered on 17thJanuary 1973 in the LectureTheatre at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is here published without

change--ED.

marizing the facts as they are revealed by documents, com-parative material and scientific examination.

The first reference to a portrait of a woman by Leonardois in the account written by Antonio de Beatis of the visit on

Ioth October 1517, by Cardinal Louis of Aragon toLeonardo when he was living in the Manor of Cloux, nearAmboise. He says that 'Leonardo showed the Cardinal three

pictures, one of a certain Florentine lady, done from the lifeat the instance of the late Magnificent, Giuliano de' Medici,the other of St John the Baptist as a young man, and also oneof the Madonna and child who are placed in the lap of St

Anne, all of them most perfect.' The rest of de Beatis's

description is equally convincing, and he says 'all this I haveseen with my own eyes.' As the St Anne and the St John and a

portrait of a lady are known to have been in the collection ofFrancis I there is a strong presumption that the portrait des-cribed by de Beatis is the so-called Mona Lisa. The nextmention of the picture is by Vasari in 1550, which I must

quote at length:

'Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the

portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife; and after he had lingered over itfour years, left it unfinished: which work is now in the possessionof King Francis of France, at Fontainebleau. In this head, who-ever wished to see how nearly art is able to imitate nature, wasreadily able to comprehend it; since therein are counterfeited allthose minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted:

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MONA LISA

seeing that the eyes had that lustre and watery sheen which arealways seen in the living creature, and around them were allthose rosy and pearly ints, together with the eyelashes, hat can-not be depicted except by the greatest ubtlety.

The eyebrows, also, by reason of his having represented hemanner n which the hairs ssue from the flesh, here more thickand here more scanty, and turn according o the pores of theflesh, could not be more natural. The nose with its beautiful

nostrils, rosy and tender, seems to be alive. The mouth with itsopening, and with its ends united by the red of the lips to theflesh tints of the face, appeared, ndeed, to be not colours butflesh. Whoever ntently observed he pit of the throat, saw thepulse beating in it. And, in truth, one could say that it waspainted n a manner hat made every able artificer, be he whomhe may, tremble and lose courage.

He employed, also, this device: Monna Lisa being verybeautiful, while he drew her picture, he retained those whoplayed or sang, and continually ested, that they might make hercontinue merry, in order to take away that melancholy thatpainters are often used to give to the portraits which they paint.And in this picture of Leonardo's, here was a smile so pleasing,that the sight of it was a thing more divine than human; and itwas held to be a marvel, n that it was not other than alive.'

Vasari had not been to Fontainebleau, and so had neverseen the picture, as is evident from his description. Hedescribes a realistic picture of a beautiful woman, withvarious additional touches which make it more like aFragonard than the submarine goddess of the Louvre. Hemistakenly assumes that, like all Leonardo's work, it wasunfinished. He had evidently been informed that the sitterwas smiling, and provides an unconvincing explanation.Nothing could be less likely to produce the Mona Lisa'sexpression than a series of funny stories. I will return to thequestion of the eyebrows later as they provide interestingevidence of the picture's material condition. But what abouthis identification of the sitter with Mona Lisa? There is not a

shred of evidence, either way, any more than there isevidence for de Beatis's dentification of the sitter as a friendof Giuliano de' Medici. But we may record that the AnonimoGaddiano, from whom Vasari drew much of his informationabout Leonardo, says that Leonardo painted a picture ofFrancesco del Giocondo, but does not mention his wife. Thiscould conceivably be the side door through which theGioconda crept into history.

The first unquestionable description of the picture is bythat most industrious and reliable scholar, Cassiano dalPozzo. It dates from 1625, when Cassiano was recording hisimpressions of the picture at Fontainebleau. He says 'A life-size portrait, half-length of a certain Gioconda, in a carvedwalnut frame. This is the most finished work of

the painterthat one could see, and lacks only speech for all else is there.It represents a woman of between 24 and 26 years old, seenfrom in front, but not entirely full face, as Greek statues are.It has certain delicate passages around the lips and the eyesthat are more exquisite than anyone could hope to achieve.The head is adorned by a very simple veil, but this is paintedwith great finish. The dress is black, or dark brown, but ithas been treated with a varnish which has given it a dismaltone, so that one cannot make it out very well. The hands areextremely beautiful, and, in short, in spite of all the mis-fortunes that this picture has suffered, the face and the handsare so beautiful that whoever looks at it with admiration is

bewitched. Note that this lady, in other respects beautiful, isalmost without eyebrows, which the painter has not re-corded, as if she did not have them.'

Well, that is clearly the picture before you (detail, Fig.i),and it shows how inadequately Vasari had been informed.However, it does refer to un tal Gioconda. hat may be due tothe fact that Cassiano had read Vasari; or it may mean that

a tradition of the sitter's identity had grown up in the i i oyears since de Beatis had visited Cloux.This is all the written evidence about the Mona Lisa that is

worth recording, and I must now turn to the stylistic orinternal evidence. I will begin by trying to decide when thepicture was painted.

Leonardo's career may be divided into five fairly distinctperiods. First the young man in Florence, the painter ofgrace and movement, of the Uffizi Adoration nd the Virginwith the Cat, the miraculous eye undistracted by science orspeculation; second the official painter to the MilaneseCourt, occupied with great commissions, like the SforzaMonument, the Last Supper, and the reinforcement of theCathedral, and also with small ones, stables for the

Duke,hot water for the Duchess's bathroom; also, with jokes andparadoxes to amuse the guests. In this period there appearedLeonardo the scientist, but it was mechanical science thatinterested him - the structure of a skull, the construction ofmachines, the measurement of light passing over a sphere.Third, the return to Florence in 1500, and a renewed interestin arts of design, intensified, no doubt, by a short visit toRome. These were the years when Leonardo's deas came tohim in visual form, and practically all the great motives thatwere to occupy him for the rest of his life, first appear insmall sketches done between 1500 and 15o6: the Battle ofAnghiari, he Leda, he St John, the Virgin nd St Anne. There isalso an intensified interest in anatomy and the movement of

water. The fourth period begins with his return to Milan,with much to-ing and fro-ing to Florence. He continuedreluctantly to work out the pictorial ideas of the Florentineperiod, but his real interest had shifted from art to science.His approach to science was no longer mechanical, orarithmetical, but organic. His researches into anatomy, inparticular the problems of generation and the action of theheart, began to influence his sense of form. His observation ofthe forces of nature, wind, water and geology, intensified hissense of the mystery of creation. Finally, after his move toRome in 1513 to work for Giuliano de' Medici, he retreatedmore and more into a private world, both of thought andform. Vasari's much criticized description of his activities hasa kind of symbolic truth, because in his growing distrust ofthe powers of the human intelligence, he did spend a gooddeal of time on futile exercises.2 However, he continuedsporadically to draw and paint, and even after his first moveto France he occupied his mind with problems of architec-ture.

Now to which of these five periods would we, on internalevidence, be disposed to attribute the Mona Lisa? Obviouslynot the first two. Three of the portraits painted at the Courtof Milan have survived, and they are a long way from theMona Lisa, both in style and sentiment. Indeed the so-called

' E.g. half magical, geometrical igures n Codex Atlanticus.

145







MONA LISA

Belle Firronnikre s so different that for a long time its authen-ticity was doubted, although nobody who has looked in-tensely at her eye can doubt that she is by Leonardo. TheBelle Firronniere, on grounds of costume and its relation toBoltraffio, must date from the middle or late 1490's. Onewould have supposed that the Mona Lisa must have been

painted at least a decade later than this decidedly un-

mysterious commission.On almost every ground the Mona Lisa looks as if it were

the work of Leonardo's fourth period, the years after hisreturn to Milan, when he was at work on the Leda and thesecond stage of the St Anne. But here a complicating factor

appears that cannot be lightly brushed aside.

In 1504 Raphael, who was preparing his portrait ofMaddalena Doni, did a pen and ink drawing which is un-

questionably related to the Mona Lisa (Fig.3). The pose isoften spoken of as Leonardo's discovery. This is an over-statement. Italian painters had long accepted the fact that

portraiture was a Flemish invention. If the idea of paintinga sitter half-length with head, body turned slightly to its

side, and eyes looking straight at the spectator, was inventedby anyone, it was by Jan Van Eyck. So Leonardo could havebeen familiar with this type of pose in Flemish portraiture,and recognized that it was more restful and imposing thanthe elaborate pose of his own enchanting and IngresqueCecilia Gallerani. However, there is no question that Raphael'spose is due to a common origin in Flemish painting. Not

only are the similarities too close, but the two columns thatare so prominent in the Raphael drawing are visible in

early copies of the Mona Lisa, and the bases are still faintlydiscernable in the original.

Raphael's drawing is usually taken as evidence that theMona Lisa was painted before 1504. I would myself draw the

opposite conclusion. Although Raphael was the greatestassimilator in the history of art, he never admitted into hiswork a direct copy. It is an extraordinary fact that amongstall the beautiful inhabitants of the Stanze there is not onewhose pose is taken directly from the antique sculptures hestudied so intensely. The idea that he would have executeda portrait in the same pose as one painted in the precedingyear by his most illustrious contemporary is inconceivable.But of course he had something to go on: perhaps a drawingor even a cartoon on the scale of Leonardo's portrait ofIsabella d'Este. In spite of her repeated supplications Leonardonever carried this cartoon any further, and Raphael mayhave felt fairly confident that he would not have continuedto work on a drawing which had its origin in the portrait of

an unknown Florentine lady.All Leonardo's projects were worked on for many years:

the Sforza monument for over eighteen; the Leda for over ten,the St Anne for over twelve, the St John at least ten. It istherefore reasonable to suppose that the most finished of hispaintings should have occupied him for several years. Thedesign came to him when practically all his visual inspira-tions came to him, between I500 and I504. When was itexecuted? Professor Pedretti believes that it was very late.I do not agree. After 1512 Leonardo was not inclined tospend so much time on creating a dense continuum of paint.The head of the Virgin in the Louvre St Anne (detail, Fig.4)is almost a coloured drawing. If it be objected that the St

John shows an equally finished execution, I would reply thatthere is no reason to date the picture after 1513, and manyreasons for dating it earlier. The only reason for dating theSt John at the end of Leonardo's career is the feeling thatanything so inexplicable must belong to his last mysteriousyears. But this is not born out by technical or documentaryevidence. Then the drapery of the Mona Lisa's sleeves has a

classic sharpness very different from the disturbing folds inthe St Anne (detail, Fig.4). Umbilical, intestinal, pancreatic- this is the drapery that reveals Leonardo's obsession withhuman anatomy. By comparison the Mona Lisa's sleeves arealmost like drapery drawings of Leonardo's youth. It is truethat some of the drapery drawings for the St Anne are com-parable to Leonardo's earlier draperies: but we do not knowhow far they antedate the picture. Finally, the landscape ofthe St Anne (detail, Fig.4) is painted with a more than

Turneresque freedom of handling, whereas the landscape ofthe Mona Lisa (detail, Fig.5) is as accurately defined as thatof his earlier Madonna in Munich. The background of theMona Lisa is usually compared to a red chalk drawing atWindsor which shows a storm breaking over the foothills of

the Alps. And this drawing is related to a magnificentpassage in one of Leonardo's notebooks, the LeicesterCodex: 'On one occasion above Milan, over in the directionof Lake Maggiore, I saw a cloud, shaped like a huge moun-tain, made up of banks of fire, because the rays of the sun,which was then setting red on the horizon, dyed it with theircolour. The great cloud drew to itself all the little clouds thatwere round about it. And the great cloud remained station-ary, and retained the lights of the sun on its apex for an hourand a half after sunset.' Unfortunately this gets us no further.as the Leicester Codex was used over a long period. But itdoes confirm, what is indeed evident from the drawing, thatLeonardo's careful studies of the Alps were made in Milan,that is to

saybefore

1499or after

I5o6;and there can be no

question that of the two periods the latter is the more

probable. On the other hand, I find it much firmer and moredetailed than the Alpine studies on red paper, that can bedated precisely in 1511. These record the observations thatLeonardo had at the back of his mind when he created thelunar landscape of the St Anne, and they show that in the

years before his departure from Milan he had made expedi-tions beyond the foothills of the Alps into the regions of

perpetual snow. Flying back from Venice the other day, Iwas struck by how one passed from the landscape of theMona Lisa to that of the St Anne, both of which representquite accurately the forms of the terrain.

All this confirms my belief that the Mona Lisa was painted

between I506 and I510; but of course she was based on adrawing or cartoon which had been executed in Florenceabout 1504, and may conceivably have represented the thirdwife of Francesco del Giocondo. After all, the Mona Lisawould have been only about seventy when Vasari wascollecting the materials for the 155o edition of the Lives. Itwas hard luck on her to have to give up her portrait drawing(but then so did Isabella d'Este) and she may well have madea point of asserting her identity. Assuming Raphael's sketch(Fig.3) to be a fairly accurate record, she was wearing theordinary costume of the time, and her hair was bound by asimple fillet, without a veil. Leonardo took his cartoon withhim to Milan, and transferred it to panel, retaining the pose,

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MONA LISA

but gave the sitter a timeless costume and a widow's veil. Heprobably added the landscape (Raphael had indicated theconventional landscape of his youth). And of course herecreated the face. Did he find another sitter? The closecontinuous modelling of the Mona Lisa's face can hardlyhave been done from memory. But we know, from twoexamples, the Angel in the Vierge aux Rochers and the head ofthe

LouvreSt

Anne,how

completelyLeonardo could

trans-form a study from nature into an ideal head, and we canreasonably suppose that the same process took place, to aneven greater degree, with the Mona Lisa. The drawings forthe head and hands may be in one of the two Leone volumes,each of which were the same size as that which contained thewhole Windsor collection. They were last heard of in Spainand may still be there. Try finding a book in the Library ofthe Escorial. Did the head belong to a well-known person?De Beatis's suggestion seems to be most unlikely as I cannotbelieve the picture is as late as I513. Needless to say, othernames have been put forward from among the wives andmistresses of Milanese noblemen or of their French con-querors. The most powerful of these claimants is the widowed

Marchesa of Francavilla, Constanza d'Avalos. This identi-fication was put forward by Adolfo Venturi in his enormoushistory of Italian art, and repeated in his article on Leonardoin the Italian Encyclopedia. It is (I believe) upheld by M.Malraux, and still hits the headlines. It is based on a sonnetby a poet named Enea Arpino, which describes a portrait ofthe Marchesa in terms that, although they contain no con-clusive details, would fit the Louvre picture well enough.The sonnet ends with the lines:

'Quel bon pittor egregio che dipinseTanto bello sotto il pudico veloSupero 'arte e se medesimo inse'

Unfortunately the name of the bon pittor egregio s not given.A searcher for clues might point to the prominence given tothe word vinse. But I think it is only there to rhyme withdipinse, and means that the painter has surpassed himself.Supporters of this theory maintain that the Marchesa couldhave sat to Leonardo in Rome in 1502. But if Leonardo didvisit Rome in that year, which is unlikely, it could have beenfor only a short time, and all authorities have agreed thatMona Lisa was painted over a long period. It is inconceivablethat Leonardo, whose paintings usually occupied him foryears, should have completed this most finished work advivum n a few months.

In the end, was the sitter a real person? Or did Leonardodevelop his first cartoon of 1504 by studies of the head of ananonymous lady whose mysterious expression had taken his

fancy and allowed him to release certain obsessions? I doubtif we shall ever know; and the identity of the Mona Lisa, likethat of Mr W.H., will continue pleasantly to occupy theminds of those who have a taste for puzzles and acrostics.

The Mona Lisa, or Mrs W.H. as we should perhaps callher, seems to have exerted her spell as soon as the picturewas completed, for a number of accurate copies were made,most of which, for some obscure reason, seem to have foundtheir way into the great houses of England. Some of theseseem to have been done in Milan, which is another reason fordating the picture earlier than 1512, for Leonardo certainlytook it with him to Rome. I suppose that if all the early copieswere put in a row (a nightmarish prospect) one might make

some sort of guess at which were painted in Milan and which(if any) in Rome. Every thirty years or so collectors claimthat they own the original Mona Lisa: it is a sort of epidemic.People who own copies of famous pictures are exceptionallyobstinate and ingenious, as every gallery director knows.They will discover the most bizarre evidence, they will workout theories of substitution, they will have books privately

printed,and

they will even go to the expense of lawsuits. Ihope I shall not be taken to court if I say that the dark greenobject that hangs almost invisibly in the Louvre is theoriginal picture painted by Leonardo. It has an impeccablepedigree. It was bought by Francis I for the French RoyalCollection. Whereas all the other Leonardos in Francis I'sCollection escaped from Fontainebleau, and returned to theRoyal Collection later, through Richelieu, the Mona Lisanever left it. As we saw, the picture was described in detail byCassiano dal Pozzo in 1625. The head and shoulders wereengraved as an illustration to the French translation ofLeonardo's Treatise on Painting, published by de Frdart in1651 (Fig.2), the same year as the first edition;3 it was theonly picture by Leonardo to be included, the other illustrations

being derived from diagrams or from reconstructions basedon drawings by Poussin. It followed the French court fromFontainebleau to Versailles, and there remained, withoutattracting any notice, till after the Revolution, when itwas taken, with the rest of the Royal Collection, to the newlyopened gallery in the Louvre.

But apart from this circumstantial evidence, there is theextraordinary quality of the picture itself. One can see it agood deal better in an un-retouched black and white photo-graph than on the walls of the Louvre, where, in addition tocrowds and darkness, it is obscured by a thick, green, bullet-proof glass. But when one sees the original out of the frameand in strong daylight, the effect is overwhelming. Themajesty and finality of the

pose,the

uncanny delicacywith

which light passes over the smooth white egg-shell face, onehad anticipated. But the beautiful colour is a surprise. Thecloak is a rich and subtle grey, quite blue in certain places,gradated to a darker tone but never coming near Cassianodal Pozzo's description '0 negro o lionato scuro'. The sleevesare cinnamon or saffron, the warmest note in the picture.The background is blue, and was once much bluer, as onecan see in certain places where the varnish has worn thin.The picture is exceptionally well preserved. Of course somecolour has faded from the cheeks, and even from the mouth,although that is pink enough. But there are only two areasof restoration. One of these, obvious in reproduction, is thelower hand (the lady's right hand), which is entirely re-

painted; there is also a certain amount of restoration in theleft hand, although some of its original beauty is still per-ceptible. The other areas of restoration are in two smalloblong patches where the eyebrows should have been. Thissuggests most strongly that Vasari's information was correct.The eyebrows really were drawn hair by hair, put in whenthe paint surface was dry; and so, on the first cleaning, theyvanished. The fine edge of the lady's veil nearly disappeared

3 My thanks are due to Professor Pedretti for drawing my attention to theengraving which for some reason was omitted from the first edition in Italian,a vacant space being left for it, and was inserted in the edition in Frenchpublished in the same year. This edition is extremely rare, and I am gratefulto the Elmer Beit Library for supplying me with a photograph.

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MONA LISA

at the same time. This cleaning must have taken placeafter Vasari's informant had seen the picture, i.e. after 1550,but before Cassiano dal Pozzo saw it in 1625. As Cassianosays that the varnish had darkened, and describes her dressas black or the colour of a dark lion, the cleaning must havebeen done at least sixty years earlier. While on these technicalmatters, I may add that the cracquelure of the Mona Lisa

is very similar to that of the Belle Firronniere, and not at alllike the finer cracquelure of the St John or that of the ChristChild in the St Anne, the first part of that picture to bepainted.

Finally the head, with which one imagines oneself tohave been fairly familiar, seems to produce a vibration oflife which is really quite alarming. The old Vasarian phrase,'This is not art but life itself' comes back to one's mind;and, although our next thought is 'What kind of life?',the fact that any painter created such a disturbingly livingpresence is miraculous and goes some way to justify theold criteria.

This quality of inner life is lacking even in faithful copiesand, as soon as an imitator takes any liberties with the pose,the whole character of Leonardo's perfect creation is lost.A curious and inexplicable example is the so-called nudeMona Lisa, of which the best known example is a cartoonat Chantilly. This used to be claimed as Leonardo's originalcartoon, heavily re-touched, but I feel certain that it is thework of an imitator. It is hard to imagine anyone in Leonar-do's immediate circle giving the head a slight inclinationand a different direction, changes which have completelydestroyed the Mona Lisa's self-contained authority. Thehead has a look of Sodoma or Peruzzi, and this cartooncould have been executed in Rome long after Leonardo's

departure. The original was probably executed in Milanand seems to have been popular, for copies of it were made

byMilanese artists. But Leonardo

evidentlytook one version

with him to France, where it served as the basis for numerous

pictures of ladies of the French court in their baths. Strangethat these frivolous objets de luxe should derive from the solemnand mysterious Mona Lisa, but a satisfying formal inventionwill provide a limitless number of variations.

It could be argued that the fame of the Mona Lisa wasa by-product of the romantic movement, in particular ofthe romantic addiction to the femme fatale, La Belle Damesans Merci, whose longest and most confusing emanation isin Coleridge's Christabel. The Mona Lisa re-entered the

popular consciousness on this ticket. From having been toall critics from Vasari to Ftlibien a masterpiece of realismand finish, she became an embodiment of the mysterious.

The process took quite a long time. In fact it was not till1859 that Thdophile Gautier wrote the first romanticdescription of the Mona Lisa: 'Beneath the form expressedone feels a thought that is vague, infinite, inexpressible.One is moved, troubled, images already seen pass beforeone's eyes, voices whose notes seem familiar whispers . . .repressed desires, hopes that drive one to despair stirpainfully'. There, for the first time, is our own, our veryown, Mona Lisa: but Gautier was a thoroughbred romanticand he has not been able to escape from that favouriteimage of the romantic movement, the femme fatale. Hespeaks of desires, those overwhelming desires that drivemen to despair. Well, the Mona Lisa certainly does not

exert her fascination in this manner. I cannot believethat she has ever aroused desire in anyone, although shehas often aroused repulsion. Only ten years later a far moreperceptive description of her character appeared in WalterPater's essay on Leonardo da Vinci. It was first published in1869, and reprinted in 1873 in the volume entitled TheRennaissance. The passage was once so famous that it would

have been unnecessary for me to quote it to you. Fifty yearsago we all knew it by heart. W. B. Yeats thought it the begin-ning of modern poetry in England, and quoted it, choppedup into short lines, as the first poem in his Oxford Book ofModern Verse, saying 'Only by printing it in vers libres canone show its revolutionary importance.' I will read it toyou not as if it were a prose poem, but for what it is: apiece of criticism that is not only deeply imaginative, butremarkably precise. The allusions are not, as Yeats believed,the result of rhythmic necessity, but of an almost uncannyinsight into Leonardo's picture. Pater, of course, acceptsVasari's statement that it is a portrait, but he immediatelysees how inadequate this word is.'From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of

his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we mightfancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld atlast.

What was the relationship of a living Florentine to thiscreature of his thought? By what strange affinities had the dreamand the person grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together?'

Then comes the description:

'The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, isexpressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had cometo desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the worldare come", and the eyelids are a little weary.

It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, thedeposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic

reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one ofthose white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, andhow would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soulwith all its maladies has passed.

All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched andmoulded there, in that which they have of power to refine andmake expressive the outward form; the animalism of Greece, thelust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritualambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world,the sins of the Borgias.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like thevampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secretsof the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps theirfallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs withEastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen ofTroy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this hasbeen to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only inthe delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments,and tinged the eyelids and the hands.'

One could have done without the sins of the Borgias,which are something left over from Victor Hugo, and showsless than Pater's usual insight. But otherwise what marvel-lous precision. Did Pater really know that the Mona Lisawas being painted at the same time as the Leda and theSt Anne? Or was he simply thinking of the two mothers, oneof carnal, the other of spiritual perfection? Can one add aword to 'beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh,

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MONA LISA

Berenson except it from his general anathema, indicatesthat it was done in Florence and not in Milan. In its warmand moving acceptance of the female principle it is alone inhis later works, and for a minute we seem to breathe the sameair. But not for long, for the St Anne's head is not so differentfrom that of the St John, and her gesture is the same. It is anindication that something very strange is going on outside

the range of human understanding. What is going on upthere? You don't know, I don't know, and after 1505Leonardo came to realize that he didn't know. Somebodymust have the secret.

I may seem to have chosen a long and devious path toreturn to the subject of my lecture. How much simpler if Icould have followed those earlier critics who saw in her onlya masterpiece of realism and of pictorial skill. But that wouldbe to close one's mind to events. A masterpiece of realismdoes not dislocate the traffic in Fifth Avenue, or cause ariot in the National Gallery of Washington. Nobody feels

compelled to paint a moustache on the upper lip of HeleneFourment. There are millions of people who know thename of only one picture - the Mona Lisa. This is not simplydue to an accident of accumulated publicity. It means thatthis strange image strikes at the subconscious with a forcethat is extremely rare in an individual work of art. Ancient

symbols come from the subconscious and continue to touchit. Mona Lisa is a new creation that has the magical powerof a very ancient one. She is older than the rocks amongwhich she sits. What has given her this power?

Leonardo had no physical attachment to women; but as

part of the creative process they obsessed him. They horrified

him; but so did nature. Rocks, which by their fossils provedthat life had existed on the earth long before the appearanceof man; water, logical in its structure, ruthless in its opera-tion, capable of wiping out the human race. Air, rain, fire,

plants: all equally irrepressible.And at the centre of these

forces of nature, partaking to some extent of their processes,their flux and reflux, their momentum, was the figure ofwoman.4 She became the symbol of all that was alien tohim and yet had some magic power.

Leonardo the scientist cannot be separated from Leonardothe magician; in his notes, no less than in his drawings, the

two are constantly melting into one another. He passes in asentence from observation to fantasy; and as he grows lessconfident in science the magician is in the ascendant. TheMona Lisa is the magician's cat, a familiar, who is none theless perfectly detached, and whose smile is the smile ofderision.

And yet this theory may be too simple. Leonardo was

surely one of the most complex men who have ever lived.Combined with his curiosity about nature and his horrorat nature's power, there was his extraordinary tendernesstowards living things. The only record of his character to be

printed in his lifetime says how he will not eat any meatnor hurt any living thing. Such tenderness in physical actioncan well be combined with intellectual detachment or even

repulsion; and as his eye actually rested on the Mona Lisa'scheek, and his hand began to record the passage of light,it was the tenderness that prevailed.

Finally, we come back to the word used by the firstman whose record of the Mona Lisa has come down to us:de Beatis. Perfectissimo. The Mona Lisa is indeed the supremeexample of perfection. A belief in the concept of perfectionis a kind of religion; philosophically it may be one of the fewindisputable arguments that man has within him somethingof the divine. Since perfection is so far out of reach, menhave sought to achieve it by exclusion, so that it has becomeassociated, even in such a great artist as Polykleitos, with a

rejection, or at least a narrowing of experience. In theMona Lisa Leonardo has achieved perfection throughinclusion. His insatiable curiosity, his restless leaps from one

subject to another, have been harmonized in a single work.The science, the pictorial skill, the obsession with nature, the

psychological insight are all there, and so perfectly balancedthat at first we are hardly aware of them. As we watch thiswatchful predator, and inspect this being who so confidently

inspects us,we

forgetall our

misgivingsin admiration of

perfect mastery.

4 Perhaps a pregnant woman, as has been argued very forcibly by ProfessorKenneth Keele in an article in the Journal of the History of Medicine and AlliedSciences [1959], Vol. XIV, No.2.

PETER WILLIS

F r o m D e s e r t t E d e n C h a r l e s Bridgeman s C a p i t a l S t r o k e *

'WHAT was once a Desert is now an Eden', wrote Sir William

Chambers, introducing his Plans, Elevations, Sections, and

Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew of I763.Chambers's transformation of Kew was typical of the radical

changes undergone by many estates in England during the

eighteenth century, as the formal style of London and Wisewas succeeded by that of the English landscape garden.One of the most strenuous advocates of le jardin anglais wasHorace Walpole, who printed The History of the Modern Tastein Gardening n i77I, although he did not allow it to appearuntil 1780 when it came out as part of the fourth volume of

his Anecdotes of Painting in England.1 The hero of Walpole'sHistory was William Kent. He it was who 'leaped the fence,

* This article is based on material from my forthcoming book Charles Bridgemanand the English Landscape Garden o by published by Messrs A. Zwemmer, Ltd.1 For details of editions see ISABEL W. U. CHASE: Horace Walpole: Gardenist.

An edition of Walpole's 'The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening' with anestimate of Walpole's contribution o landscape rchitecture, rinceton, N.J. [19431,pp.xvii, xix-xxix.

In the 3rd edition of the History, dated 1785 and printed at Strawberry Hill,Walpole's text appeared side-by-side with a French translation of it by theDuc de Nivernois et d'Onziois (Jules Louis Henri Barbon Mazarini Mancini)entitled Essai sur l'art des ardins modernes.... As the Duc de Nivernois's title

150







2. Head and shoulders of Mona Lisa illustrated in French translation ofLeonardo's Treatise on Painting, published 1651. Engraving afterLeonardo da Vinci.

3. Portrait of Maddalena Doni, by Raphael. 1504. Pen and ink. (Mus6e duLouvre.)

4. Detail from Madonna with St Anne, by Leonardo da Vinci. (Mus6e duLouvre.)

5. Detail from Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci. (Mus6e du Louvre.)

4. 5

.i? -: ? ; 7L







i. Detail from Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci. (Musee du Louvre.)

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