Desecrating Leonardo

 Annamaria on Monday

Suppose I told you that the owner of drawing by Picasso decided to erase a section and pencil in his own idea of what it should look like.  Or that a curator of a collection  of Van Gogh masterpieces decided to hack off parts of a couple of them, perhaps because they would better fit in the wall space available. Dreadful, right?  With these images in mind, you will understand why I am incredulous after learning that over the centuries people have had the AUDACITY to mess around with works by one of the greatest, certainly one of the most famous artists who ever lived: Leonardo da Vinci.

Unbelievable, right?  Stick around.

Let's begin with an early work: his Annunciation, which now hangs in the Uffizi.

The wings on the angel Gabriel in that painting have always struck me as weird looking.  But, I thought, this is one of Leonardo's earliest works.  Still.those clunky appendages don't look as if they would be at all helpful to a creature who could fly.  And we all know Leonardo's obsession with flight.  He was also a keen observer of the natural world, particularly fixated on how to use birds' wings as a design for a machine humans might use to to fly. And the wings in that painting bear little or no resemblance to what Leonardo saw in nature.

  

I found the truth in further research.learning this, from Kenneth Clark's critical biography Leonardo Da Vinci:  "...we notice that the angel's wing has been lengthened to canonical proportions by a very crude over painting, and hangs like a brown smear above the enchanting landscape to the left. The original short wings were directly painted from the wings of a bird, and fit the angels shoulders with convincing naturalism."  Sir Kenneth goes on to report that the originals were more like the ones we can still see in the Annunciation of Lorenzo di Credi, also in the Uffizi. 

At some point, some bozo wielding a lethal paintbrush decided to change what was there.  He thought he knew better than Leonardo?  It boggles my mind.

That idiot was not alone. Here is an even worse travesty.  It involves Leonardo's Ginevra di Benci, now in the National Gallery in Washington.  

It is still a masterpiece, no doubt about that.  But one of the things Leonardo would certainly have noticed about the woman he painted was her remarkable hands, which were so beautiful that two poets wrote poems about them.

    Fact is Leonardo did not leave them out.  There are lots of clues that tell us the real story.  On the reverse side of the painting, there is the upper half of a wreath  that circles a juniper sprig (Ginevra is the Italian word for juniper) and the words "Beauty adorns virtue."  The bottom half of the wreath is not there..  

  

Back to Kenneth Clark: "we can guess by its unusual shape that the picture has been cut at the bottom,… We can calculate that the amount cut off must have been at least 9 cm, which would give it the classical proportion of 3 to 4.… That the fingers of her right hand would have been touching the lower laces of her bodice.  In the picture these laces are in fact, repainted. Unfortunately, we can tell from the back that the bottom of the picture has been damaged and a new piece has been added, so that an x-ray would not reveal the vanished fingers."

As if that were not astonishing enough, there is good evidence that those hands were truly remarkably beautiful.  Scholars believe that Leonardo's drawing, now at Windsor Castle, was his study for that part of the painting that some nincompoop decided to chop off.  I weep.

The last of my reporting today concerns the possibility that the criminal busybodies may have tampered with the most famous painting in the world. 

We have all seen this image many, many times,  It has become so familiar that, perhaps it lost some of its magic for you.  Please put that aside and take another look.

The Mona Lisa deserves its fame.  Its riveting quality comes from the expressiveness of that face.  Those assessing eyes look right at us.  Are they about to twinkle with delight or turn accusing and full of hate?  Is that smile about to turn into a grin?  Or a sneer?  Is she about to laugh with the delight at what she sees?  Or shout "off with their heads."  

The last time I was in the Louvre, there was a long line of visitors waiting their turn, not really to see her it seemed, but to take a selfie with her.  That day, her impenetrable  demeanor seemed to me more complex and appropriate than ever.  She was amused by their antics.  And smugly pleased with her fame.  But on the cusp of ordering the gendarmes to drag away the lot of them and lock them up.  I felt in league with her that day.

Is it remotely imaginable that anyone would take a saw to such a brilliant, unmatchable, monumental treasure?

Here is a copy, made by a lesser painter.  It shows us something missing from the one we know so well.

For many decades, the greatest experts in the world were sure that that someone had sawed off the columns you see above:

• In 1943, the formidable Kenneth Clark said that the copy above was true, in the sense that the original showed the lady sitting on loggia.
• In 1959, Richard Friedenthal - a renowned German art historian declared that 10 centimeters had been cut off the sides of the painting in the Louvre.
• This opinion was confirmed by an Italian art historian in 1973, a Frenchman in 1992, and another Italian in 2000    

But then 39 experts examined the painting in October of 2004, when it was being reframed.  Once it was taken out of its frame, they found that the original wooden panel on which Leonardo painted had been cut slightly, but only on the edges where there had never been any paint. The experts said "… this trimming clearly involved the bare wood and not the paint layer…"

So what we have seen all these years is actually what Leonardo wanted us to see, 

Unable to leave the lady alone, art historians are now positing that Leonardo painted two Mona Lisas, one with columns and one without.  They site what looks somewhat like the remnants of columns, barely visible where the imagined "Earlier Mona Lisa" did have columns.  The painter, Raphael is said to have copied a cartoon (not a funny drawing, but Leonardo's sketch of the painting he intended to paint).  But no one has ever seen such a drawing by Leonardo.  Only Raphael's take off of it.

Did Leonardo paint that larger version and then a few years later the one we know?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I imagine, given the look on her face, that Leonardo - known to have been a practical joker and inventor of mind games - might have put those vague touches there just to play with our minds.

A kind of echo of the look in those eyes.  And that smile.

ENIGMATIC!!! 

True Crime: The Kidnapping of Lisa La Gioconda

Annamaria on Monday

On 21 August 1911, Lisa Gherardini was kidnapped from her Paris home.  She was not missed until twenty-four hours later.  Then, despite frantic efforts by the Paris Prefecture of Police and La Sûreté and a world-wide hunt for her abductor, with her picture blazoned over front pages of newspapers everywhere, nothing was heard of her whereabouts until December of 1913.  Here is the photo that the police used to try to locate her:

 

Lisa, nicknamed Mona, was already famous before she disappeared.  Once the dragnet went out to try to find her, hers became the most famous face on the planet.

Lisa was, as her name indicates, Italian—yet she was ensconced in the Louvre when she disappeared.  Leonardo da Vinci, unable to part with her and give her to her husband Francesco del Giocondo, a wealthy Florentine silk merchant, took her with him to France around 1517.  After Leonardo’s death, she lived in splendor with King Louis XIV.  Louis XV didn’t much like her looks, so he relegated her to the office of one of his minions.  She went to live in the new art museum in the Louvre in 1797.

Once her disappearance was noticed on 22 August 1911, a hue and cry went up from the citizenry of Paris.  How could the administration of the Louvre have been so careless as to lose her?  And how could the Paris police and the French National Criminal Investigations Department be so clueless when it came to getting her back?   Some wags posited that the disappearance was a set-up—to boost attendance at the museum.  Had that been the case, it would have worked.  As it happened, people lined up to get in to see the empty wall where the painting had hung.

Jokes circulated: The Eiffel Tower will be next to be taken.  Cancan girls danced dressed as topless Mona Lisas.

Directors and investigators lost their jobs.

Despite every stone being turned, every vehicle being searched, every museum employee being investigated, the trail went cold.

Little did the flics know that the lady was ensconced for the next two years just a few blocks from her former home, in the humble apartment of Vincenzo (ne’ Pietro) Peruggia, who had worked at the Louvre as a carpenter.

He kept the painting hidden for two years, at which point he contacted a Florentine antiquarian art dealer—Alfredo Geri—and the Director of the Uffizi—Giovanni Poggi.  He told them that he (mistakenly) believed that the masterpiece had—as so many others had—been looted by Napoleon.   He claimed to have taken it because it was Italian and belonged in Italy.  He wanted the government to give him a reward for his patriotic caper.  Those Florentine gentlemen, handling the delicate situation with great aplomb and cleverness, got Peruggia to turn the painting over to them.  Once he went back to his hotel room, he was arrested.

Then the Hotel Tripoli-Italia, now the Hotel La Gioconda

In the course of Peruggia's trial, the story of how he managed the theft emerged.  Dressed in the typical white smock of a museum skilled worker, he entered on a Sunday and hid in a storage room overnight.  The next day, when the museum was closed and only staff members were about, he took the picture into a stairwell and removed it from the protective box in which it had been displayed.    The Mona Lisa is painted, as many Renaissance works were, on a board.  He took it out of its frame, wrapped it in his smock, and for all intents and purposes, walked out of the building with it under his arm.

Once the director of the Uffizi had authenticated it, he declared that it would be returned to France.  Mona Lisa made a triumphal tour of her true homeland before she went back to her place in the Louvre.

Peruggia, because of his patriotic claims, got off with a light sentence of one year and fifteen days.  He served seven months.

These are the facts as far as I can tell.  There is a lot of other conjecture about the affair, but I take it with a grain of salt.  Especially, the long article in the May 2009 edition of Vanity Fair—a first serial printing of a chapter of a book, The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.  For one thing, those authors—throughout their recounting of the story—misspelled Peruggia’s name.

Some authors say that it was this theft that made the Mona Lisa the most famous painted work of art in the world.  Art historians, though, say that it is a surpassingly wonderful work.

The last time I saw it, I was appalled by how it is treated as a celebrity, rather than as a work of genius.  Camera flashes are going off, several a second, right in poor Lisa’s face.  Ugh!  On top of which, another Leonardo masterpiece, his The Virgin of the Rocks hangs nearby, and none of the philistines that are taking selfies with Mona even give it glance.  Here it is.

If you show up in the Louvre, of course you should try to see Mona in person.  But spend a few minutes with this one too.