The “Mona Lisa”: Case Closed

By: John Dorfman

March 2008

New York—Sometimes it takes an outsider to make a major art-historical discovery. In the depths of a German library, a manuscript expert has found a note scribbled in the margin of an old book that seems to settle, once and for all, one of the hoariest questions in the field: Who was the enigmatically smiling woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa"? Although the discovery was made more than two years ago, it was unknown to the public until this January.

Back in 2005, Armin Schlechter, a specialist in medieval literature and language at Heidelberg University, was combing through the university library’s holdings of incunabula (books from the infancy of printing, before 1501) for an exhibition. As he read lists of volumes that had once belonged to Italian humanists, he came across a 1477 copy of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares (Letters to friends) with annotations by Agostino Vespucci. Immediately, the canny scholar’s instincts alerted him to a possible da Vinci connection. "I became interested very quickly," Schlechter recalls, "because I saw it was an important thing. Vespucci was a noted man, a friend of Machiavelli, part of the circle of Florentine humanists and acquainted with da Vinci."

Vespucci’s handwritten note, dated October 1503, occurs next to a passage in which the Roman orator refers to the semi-legendary ancient Greek painter Apelles. The note asserts that da Vinci, like Apelles, was "perfect at painting the head and the upper part of the breast, but the rest didn’t interest him very much," explains Schlechter. The note also says that da Vinci was working on three paintings at the time: the "Battle of Anghiari" (a long-lost fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio), a Virgin and Child and a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. Here, Schlechter realized, is the first written reference to the "Mona Lisa." And the reason Vespucci cites it as an example of an Apelles-like technique, he says, is that "he saw the picture when it wasn’t finished yet. His description was perfect then, but later, of course, da Vinci worked on it again."

Of course, the identity of the sitter comes as no great shock, since art historians have long suspected that Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco Giocondo, was "Mona Lisa." But it was still a guess, since until now the earliest source was an account in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, written 50 years after the fact and based on hearsay. (Other candidates included Isabella of Aragon, the duchess of Francavilla and a Neapolitan woman named Isabella Gualanda.) But Schlechter’s discovery, being a contemporaneous eyewitness account by a close acquaintance of the artist, appears to settle the point. "There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman," Leipzig University art historian Frank Zöllner said recently on German radio. "One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary."

One alternative theory about the "Mona Lisa" was trumpeted on the front cover of Art & Antiques back in January 1987. Artist and computer graphics expert Lillian Schwartz claimed that "experimental computer-model juxtapositions" proved that the subject was none other than Leonardo himself, subtly disguised as a woman. At the time, National Gallery chief curator Sydney J. Freedberg dismissed Schwartz’s assertion as "absolute raging nonsense"—and on the principle that it’s never too late to run a correction, the editors of this magazine must admit that he was right.

As for Schlechter, the modest manuscripts man seems not to have minded the delay in publicity. "I published this in 2005, and this piece was exhibited," he says. "Nobody thought to make anything of it. It was by chance that this week the press was so very interested."