Page:Monograph on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1915).pdf/50

 completely justified Leonardo's declaration to the Cardinal. Whereas, if the picture shown at Cloux were the unfinished Mona Lisa, painted, also in 1500, to the order of Giocondo—the sitter's husband—then Leonardo was guilty of making a precise, deliberate, voluntary, and wantonly false assertion to the Cardinal, for which there was neither justification nor necessity. Of course, there is one alternative, and that is that Leonardo, or Melzi, deliberately, and ' with malice aforethought,' destroyed the Florentine Lady portrait in the quiet, secluded home at Cloux, so as to leave no trace of it, a proceeding I do not feel qualified to deal with. It could not have been stolen from the quiet retreat, or the world would have heard more about the stolen 'Florentine Lady' than it has of, even, the Louvre Mona Lisa. Yet what are we asked to believe from Leonardo's biographers, but that out of three pictures shown at Cloux, two of them went into the King's collection, while the third completely disappeared, although the painter's own description of it as a ' Florentine Lady' exactly fits the Mona Lisa that now hangs with the other two in the Louvre; while all the time there is not the minutest particle of evidence to prove that the 'Florentine Lady' is not the Mona Lisa now in the Louvre.

Again, Monsieur Andre Charles Coppier, the French art critic, is so convinced and so positive that the 'Florentine Lady' portrait, shown to the Cardinal of Aragon at Cloux, is the portrait now in the Louvre, known as La Joconde or the Mona Lisa, that he contributed an article of eight pages which appeared in the well-known French art journal, 'Les Arts,' for January, 1914, advancing a new, but absolutely false, theory on the subject. M. Coppier freely and justly criticises and ridicules Vasari's statements about the eyebrows and eyelashes, and the alleged four years' labour spent by Leonardo on the portrait. He calls Vasari a 'great bragger' and 'the inventor of the legend of Mona Lisa,' and then goes so far as to try and prove that Vasari invented the legend that Francesco del Giocondo ordered the portrait of his wife, and denies that Leonardo ever painted her! He says the picture of the Florentine Lady now in the Louvre (known as the Mona Lisa for close upon four centuries) was not painted until after 1512, and consequently could not be the wife of Giocondo. He entirely overlooks Raphael's study of the picture drawn before 1505, which is proof positive that Leonardo did paint the Mona Lisa before that date. He states:—


 * 'For, we have on the subject of this famous painting, but one single contemporary declaration coming as it does direct from Da Vinci himself, who, on showing