Did Leonardo da Vinci paint a nude Mona Lisa? I may have just solved this centuries-old mystery | Mona Lisa
Increased security after the recent heist has made the queues at the Louvre even slower, yet on this rainswept, very wintry morning, no one grumbles. After all, the Mona Lisa is waiting inside for all these tourists who have come from the world over. Leonardo da Vinci’s woman – swathed in dark cloth and silk, smiling enigmatically as she sits in front of a landscape of rocks, road and water – draws crowds like no other painting. But if the Mona Lisa can attract such attention fully clothed, what would the queues be like if she was nude?
Strangely, this is not just amusing speculation – because in 18th-century Britain, she was. An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave libertine Georgians the opportunity to hang “Joconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits in a chair with her hands crossed in front of a fading view of distant rock formations. And, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, she smiles enigmatically. But there is one key difference. She is naked from the waist up.
Horace Walpole thought his father Robert, who was Britain’s first Prime Minister, had the actual Mona Lisa
The print has a caption saying this is a reproduction of the painting by “Lionardo da Vinci” that hangs “in the Gallery at Houghton”. Today, Houghton Hall in Norfolk stages contemporary art on its lawns, but back then it was famous for the oil paintings amassed by its owner, Britain’s first and most corrupt Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. The Houghton collection was catalogued by his son Horace, then 26, who apparently thought his father’s “Joconda”, on which this engraving was based, was the actual Mona Lisa: “The Joconda, a Smith’s Wife, reckon’d the handsomest Woman of her Time: She was Mistress to Francis I, King of France; by Lionardo da Vinci. She would often sit half naked, with Musick, for several Hours together, to be drawn by him.”
This image of the king of France’s lover posing for hours “half naked” while musicians played is an interesting twist on the first account we have of the Mona Lisa, published in 1550 by the Florentine architect and artist Giorgio Vasari. To elicit that smile, Vasari says, Leonardo “always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her merry”. Posing only half dressed, she would need plenty of distractions.
Global pulling power … visitors viewing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP
You won’t find the nude Joconda at Houghton today. In 1779, Walpole’s art collection was sold to Catherine the Great and today it hangs at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the nude Mona Lisa no longer attributed to Leonardo but to one of his unnamed 16th-century followers. Yet, if the work is by a Leonardo imitator, was there a nude Mona Lisa by him to imitate? And if there was, why did Leonardo paint it and for whom? It is one of the most tantalising, and entertaining, mysteries in art – and I think I may have solved it.
First, we need to go to the Loire, where Leonardo spent his final years as French royal artist. It was here that the artist himself left a fascinating clue. In October 1517, he had visitors to his chateau: Cardinal Luigi of Aragon and his cleric Antonio de Beatis. Leonardo – “the most outstanding painter of our day”, records De Beatis – showed them three paintings, all hanging today in the Louvre. Two were religious: John the Baptist and The Virgin and Child With St Anne. The other was “a certain Florentine woman portrayed from life at the request of the late Magnificent Giuliano de’ Medici”.
It is generally accepted that they were being shown the Louvre Mona Lisa. But they don’t seem to have been told the truth by Leonardo: this Mona Lisa was not painted for Giuliano de’ Medici (and despite Horace Walpole’s imaginings, certainly not for the king of France).
Leonardo added so many touches to the Mona Lisa that she had become in his mind someone else, his dream
A document in Heidelberg University proves this painting was begun in Florence in 1503, some 14 years before these chateau visitors saw it. It was a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of merchant Francesco del Giocondo, just as Vasari wrote (hence its various alternative names, La Gioconda/Gioconde/Joconde/Joconda). Mona is short for Monna, the polite way to address a married woman in Renaissance Florence. Lisa, being middle class, would be addressed as Mona Lisa.
So why did Leonardo mention Giuliano de’ Medici, the youngest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic? He certainly did not paint the clothed Mona Lisa for Giuliano – but maybe Leonardo was telling a truth of sorts. Perhaps he painted the naked version for the nobleman.
On 24 September 1513, Leonardo left Milan, then his base, for Rome, bound for the Belvedere in the papal palace where he was given a studio by Giuliano de’ Medici, whose older brother had just become pope. It was a chance for Leonardo to live in style and paint in the city where Michelangelo and Raphael were at work.
The pope didn’t trust him with frescoes, but Leonardo may have done something more intimate for Giuliano. In a chateau in Chantilly, just north of Paris, there is a mysterious “cartoon” – the term given to a full-scale preparatory drawing that would have chalk pushed through it to mark a canvas. This cartoon, dated 1514-16, portrays the same nude model featured in the Houghton painting and has unmistakable allusions to the Mona Lisa. After technical analysis, the Louvre announced in 2017 that there was strong evidence that it was at least partly by Leonardo, done with the left hand.
The claim becomes all the more convincing if you look hard, particularly at the drapery that has his free and infinite suggestiveness. The woman, whose upper body is naked, sits in a wooden chair with her left forearm horizontal, turned side-on to the viewer just like the Louvre’s Mona Lisa. Similarly, she has also placed her right hand over her left wrist. Even the spread and shading of her fingers is identical. The Mona Lisa’s hands may not be central to her fame today, but in Renaissance Italy their elegant positioning was widely imitated.
Unmistakable allusions … the nude Mona Lisa ‘cartoon’ at the Domaine de Chantilly, with her elegantly positioned hands. Photograph: Michel Urtado/AFP/Getty Images
The artist who drew the Chantilly nude doesn’t just emulate all that, but replicates it perfectly. This would be easy – if you had access to Leonardo’s studio, or if you actually were Leonardo. And the Mona Lisa was with him in Rome, just as it would be in France. He never gave it to Lisa’s husband. Its size – just 77cm by 53cm – made it easy to transport on his restless sojourns. One reason why he may have no longer have thought of this as a portrait of Mona Lisa, when he talked to his Loire visitors, is because it no longer was: he’d added so many touches over the years, transfiguring the original, that she’d become in his mind someone else, his dream.
So the creator of the Houghton painting must have worked from the Chantilly sketch, or from a nude painting based on it. In other words, it seems highly probable that Leonardo, perhaps helped by his pupils, painted this nude Mona Lisa.
But is there any more evidence? I believe I’ve found a crucial clue hanging in plain sight in the Barberini Palace in Rome: a “half-naked” portrait by Leonardo’s young admirer Raphael. The Rome in which Leonardo was living was lavishly hedonist, with handsome Raphael its star. Raphael and his team were creating a sensual heated bathroom for the papal palace, adorning it with frescoes. Raphael also decorated the party palace of the pope’s banker Agostino Chigi. Vasari claims that when Raphael was frescoing there, he required his mistress to live with him. His early death was supposedly caused by sexual exhaustion.
Around 1520, Raphael portrayed a young woman sitting in a garden with her top off. She smiles sideways as she holds a translucent piece of silk over her belly. Her breasts and arms are bare, except for a blue armband that says in gold letters: “Raphael of Urbino.” The painting is known as La Fornarina, The Baker’s Daughter, after a legend that Raphael’s girlfriend’s dad was a baker.
When I was investigating the decadent delights of high Renaissance Rome recently, I realised with a shock that this work is basically a nude Mona Lisa. That little smile echoes Leonardo’s masterpiece. She sits calmly, her eyes and nose as clearly defined as Leonardo’s model, sporting transparent silk like the veil that covers the Mona Lisa’s head. Francesco del Giocondo was a silk merchant and that may be why Leonardo draped her in the material, while also being enchanted by the optical possibilities. Both these “half naked” women, in Horace Walpole’s words, sit with their clothes around them, thrown off.
The nude Mona Lisa was a grenade chucked into the Renaissance – it radicalised the way artists painted bodies
The similarities are just too close for coincidence. Raphael is an impeccable artist but not as wildly original as Leonardo. Instead, he learned from his elder, imitating the Mona Lisa ever since he saw it in an early state in Florence around 1504. This gregarious, courtly artist would have visited Leonardo at the Belvedere and seen his latest stunning idea, the nude Mona Lisa. Did Leonardo paint it as well as sketch it? The painting owned by Robert Walpole is clearly based on the Chantilly drawing but adds a rocky blue landscape, one that’s typical of late Leonardo works. The rock formations have the same pale blue shade as the mountains in The Virgin and Child With St Anne.
The nude Mona Lisa was like a grenade chucked into the high Renaissance. It instantly radicalised the way artists painted bodies. The otherwise conservative Raphael’s bold Fornarina spread this revolution. The model who posed for La Fornarina also posed naked for Raphael’s chief assistant, Giulio Romano, whose art mixes classicism with what it’s fair to call pornography: he created a visual sex guide called I Modi (“The Ways”) that illustrates 16 love-making positions. Titian and Correggio took up the challenge to paint sensual nudes.
‘The similarities are just too close for coincidence’ … Raphael’s La Fornarina, or The Baker’s Daughter. Photograph: Marco Di Lauro/Associated Press
A number of paintings by Leonardo are lost, especially those that scandalised the devout. They include his erotic Leda and the Swan, believed to have been destroyed by a shocked French royal. This painting of a woman and her swan lover was created by Leonardo in early 16th-century Florence not long after he started the Mona Lisa. Surviving drawings and copies suggest it was outrageous and titillating: one, in Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, portrays the swan putting a wing around the voluptuous Leda as it whispers into, or stimulates, her ear.
If Leonardo was creating such sublime eroticism as he worked on the Mona Lisa around 1504, it’s no great leap to believe he created a nude version as well. In his notebooks, he boasts that while a poet can only describe a patron’s lover, the painter can bring her to life – and “the lovestruck judge” will prefer the picture every time. He even relates gleefully how a man once returned a painting he did of the Virgin Mary because it filled him with the wrong thoughts.
The Mona Lisa was ‘iconic’ the moment it was first seen – artists saw it as unequalled
Giuliano de’ Medici, Leonardo’s patron, got married in early 1515. My hypothesis is that, as a memento, Leonardo portrayed naked a mistress whom Giuliano would be forced to give up, sitting her in the exact pose of the Mona Lisa. For the painter, as Leonardo insisted, “can place before the lover a true likeness of the beloved, often making him kiss and speak to it”.
If Leonardo actually created a nude Mona Lisa, that tells us something extraordinary about the world’s most famous painting and its creator. The artist, it seems, was able to joke about what we now call the “iconic” nature of his work. It is sometimes assumed the fame of the Mona Lisa is a modern cultural phenomenon, sparked by an early 20th-century heist, Duchamp and Warhol’s versions and mass reproduction. That’s not true. It was iconic the moment it was first seen: artists saw it as unequalled.
Leonardo was so confident of that uniqueness he felt able to travesty it with a naked version. He was cleverer than us. While he can’t have know that, in the 21st century, people would queue in the rain to see his masterpiece, he did know it was the ultimate painting. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is a vision of artistic perfection, clothed or naked.
