Page:Monograph on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1915).pdf/30

 temerity to suggest that it was not painted for him and that the painter sold it direct to the French King. With the exception of McCurdy, they are all agreed that the price paid for the picture was 4,000 gold crowns, equal to about £ 1,800, which Müntz magnifies into 8,000. Yet will it be believed that there is no contemporaneous authority whatsoever for this price of 4,000 gold crowns. Neither Vasari, Lomazzo, nor the anonymous biographer (edited by Milanesi) of that period, ever mentions the price paid for it; each is satisfied with stating that the picture was then (1568-1590) in the collection of Francis I, but say nothing about how he acquired it. This price was first mentioned by Pere Dan in 1642, whose sole authority for it was gossip, to which he gave credit 120 years after the transaction. To come to hard facts, none of his biographers—nor any one else—knew, or knows, the price or the circumstances of the acquisition of this picture by Francis I. M. Salomon Reinach, the ablest modern critic on Da Vinci and his period, points out this fact in the 'Revue Archeologique' (November-December, 19 13), of which he is joint Editor, and as it is a most valuable contribution to the subject, I do not hesitate to quote it in full. It was written on the recent recovery of the Louvre Mona Lisa.


 * 'Peruggia,' he writes, ' under the pretence that he was avenging the wrong done to his country by Napoleon, stole the Mona Lisa, whereupon the journalists, in a spirit of emulation, recalled the fact that this picture was purchased by Francis I at the cost of 12,000 francs of our money. This assertion is founded on the gossip picked up by Pere Dan in 1642. In reality, the subject is veiled in complete obscurity. To start with, it is not proved that when the Cardinal of Aragon visited Leonardo at the Chateau at Cloux in 1517, the portrait of a woman that the painter showed him, " painted to the order of Julien de' Medici," was La Jaconde. For if this were certain, one could but conclude either of two things, as says M. Seymour de Ricci: (1) that Leonardo, after having painted the Mistresses of Ludovico de Moro, painted the portrait of a favourite of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, or (2) that the unfinished portrait left by the sitter's husband on Leonardo's hands was purchased from him by the King in France, or was acquired by him from Melzi his legatee, or that it was confiscated by virtue of the numerous rights of escheat or forfeit which the Kings of France held over the properties of strangers