Page:Monograph on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1915).pdf/13

 to the order of her husband. Hence I maintain that one of the portraits seen was a Mona Lisa, since there is not the slightest particle of evidence to the contrary. But what was the second portrait? Vasari tells us, fifty years later, that at this very time Leonardo produced the St. Anne and the Mona Lisa portrait, as well as the portrait of another lady in Florence, but as it is proved that this lady died thirty years previously, it could not possibly have been her portrait. As Leonardo, however, almost invariably commenced two versions of each of his works, which he rarely finished, I maintain the second portrait seen in 1501 was a second version of the Mona Lisa. In 1505 Raphael saw the Mona Lisa in Florence, and made, for his own purpose, a study of it which now hangs in the Louvre. The St. Anne and a Mona Lisa are also to-day in the possession of the Louvre authorities. But this Louvre Mona Lisa, I prove conclusively, cannot be the one from which Raphael drew his study, and this shows there must have been another version, which Raphael saw and studied, and it was this version that went unfinished to Madonna Lisa's husband, who had commissioned it from the master. Again at Cloux in France in 1517, some eighteen months before his death, Leonardo showed the Cardinal of Aragon the St. Anne and the portrait of a Florentine lady, which he described as painted to the order of Guiliano de' Medici. This portrait is also supposed to have been lost, because of Leonardo's description, but I think I have proved pretty clearly that it could have been none other than the Mona Lisa now in the Louvre with the St. Anne. Hence, the theory expounded in this monograph is that the two portraits seen in Florence in 1501 were two versions of the Mona Lisa, one of which went unfinished in 1505-1506 to the sitter's husband, who had ordered it; the other, unfinished, in company with the St. Anne, unfinished, remained on with Leonardo and he took them both to France, where they were finished, at Cloux, and shown to the Cardinal of Aragon. They subsequently were acquired by Francis I, went into his collection, and later still passed on to the Louvre, where they now are. This theory is supported, as will be seen by numerous facts and items of circumstantial evidence that it would be very difficult to rebut.

The Painting now known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa was so covered with dirt and varnish that all its intrinsic beauties were completely hidden, and thus it came into the possession of the present owner. It represented but a dark, dismal, uninteresting portrait of Madonna Lisa Giocondo, and it had long been assumed to be a copy, until it was thoroughly cleaned, when it was, at once, revealed as the genuine work of Leonardo da Vinci. It had been in the one family for