667. The Mystery of the Mona Lisa

250 years.

Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements,

aspiration and action, and a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the House of Wessex, the family of Alfred the Great, and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England.

“Yeah, it's great story isn't it's on great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody.”

So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism, they're brought into the alliances, they're brought into managing power, they're brought into course at managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership, and of course we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyds to be ready when you

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of hope and ambition, you can see Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyds to help make their

dreams a reality. Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026, hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit little cell by cell

“of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”

Set it for a moment, beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and molded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece.

The lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age, with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borges. She is older than the rocks among which she sits, like the vampire. She has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave, and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her, and traffic for strange webs with eastern

merchants. As leader was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as St. Anne, the mother of Mary, and all this has been her, but as the sound of liars and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy, with which it has molded the changing linearments, and tinged the eyelids, and hands. So that was the Victorian art critic, Walter Pater, in very Victorian prose, and he

was describing one of the most celebrated women who's ever existed, her face familiar to probably not millions of people, but hundreds of millions, if not billions, a woman who's often regarded as the ultimate fam Fatal, a woman into whom is poured, well certainly according to Walter Pater, every woman who has ever existed, beautiful, mysterious, exotic, erotic, and dangerous. Well, I say a woman who's describing actually a painting of a woman, a painting which

is surely the most well-known painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, Tom, the Mona Lisa, you a fan?

Well, I've always taken it, say, for granted, that I wouldn't really have called myself

a fan.

“Its fame is an of itself such a fascinating thing, that that's what prompted me to think”

that this might be a good topic for the rest of history, but having plunged into the deep waters of the Mona Lisa's history and explored the rocks that are all of the time among which she sits. I am now definitely a fan. Yes.

Oh, tremendous. It's a painting that is a lot more interesting than I had thought. I mean, I think I've kind of been a niece of the ties to its beauty, and I guess that's true of lots of people. You kind of see it as a fridge magnet rather than as painting, don't you?

But it is fascinating, and one of the reasons for its fame is actually that passage that you read. It's one of the most kind of famous passages of purple prose in the whole of English literature. He wrote that in 1869, but when he wrote that, the Mona Lisa was not remotely a famous as it is today, and the reason for that is that the paintings that had cut through in

the Victorian period were those that were very easily copied, so paintings with kind

It's actually very, very hard to reproduce, and this wasn't for one to try, and people

have been trying to capture the essence of this extraordinary painting right from the beginning. So, there's a famous copy of it in the Prado, which was done while the Mona Lisa had only just been painted, but it doesn't get its essence at all, then they go into the 18th into the 19th century, they try and do it with copper plate prints, then of course, photographs,

but even photographers apparently to begin with struggled to capture the Mona Lisa in their photographs, because the technology just wasn't up to reproducing it, and it's only by the 1880s, that photography has evolved technologically enough to allow for accurate photographs of the Mona Lisa to be reproduced on a mass scale. And as a result of that, of course, the image of the Mona Lisa gets spread across Europe,

“across the world, and I think it is, I mean, you said, maybe it's the most recognizable”

painting I would say, there's no doubt about it at all, it is the most recognizable painting that has ever been in the whole of history.

And yet, at first glance, well, as you say, at first glance, you barely notice it because

it's ubiquitous, so you don't really think anything of it, it's part of the furniture, but when you look at it, there's nothing remarkable about it, there's nothing exceptional about it, compared with, for example, some of the paintings that you did on the rest of history club, many series of law are coming, a painting like Las Manines, by Belafgeth, is much more, you know, appears much more nuanced, much more layered, much more sophisticated,

the Mona Lisa is just a woman sitting on a balcony looking out at you, what's so special do you think about this that makes it hard to reproduce?

“Before we get into that, we should just describe it for the three people, perhaps, in”

the world, you haven't seen it.

So there's something distinctive about her pose, distinctive certainly when it was painted. So she's kind of sitting in profile, but her torso has turned around so that her face is almost staring into the eyes of the person who is standing in front of the painting. Her face is pale, she's got brown eyes, she's got quite full cheeks, she's certainly not thin, she has no eyebrows, she has long, delicately curling hair, but this is covered by an

almost translucent veil, she has a very plain dark dress, she has no jewelry, no adornments of any kind, and of course the most famous thing about her expression, probably the most famous thing about the entire painting, is her smile and will be coming to that. Yeah, people go on about that, but I mean, I don't even think it really is much of a smile of someone, you look to me like that and said I'm smiling, you know, I feel like are you?

Really? That is part of the mysteries that people respond to the smile in many different ways, but just before we come to that, the one thing about the painting that is overtly fantastical is the landscape against which the Mona Lisa is set, so this is a landscape that's very barren, it's kind of wild, it's tortured, you have jagged mountains, rocks, lakes, and

the only signs of kind of human fiscal presence, there's a winding road and there's an art bridge crossing, crossing a river. Tom, I commend you for this because you may be looking at the painting already in a new way,

“I've never even noticed the background to be honest with that, that's what I mean.”

Okay, so if you're looking at it, the striking thing about the quality of the paint, and I think this is the reason why it is so difficult to reproduce, isn't the subject, it's the way in which this woman and the landscape have been painted, because there's a very distinctive quality to it, and it's traditionally described as fomato as smoky, and the effect of this is brilliantly described by, certainly the bleeding British expert on the Mona Lisa, who

is Martin Kempe, who isn't the basis from Spatau Valley, not him, I think he's the professor of Oxford or something, you know, you're a Oxford doctorate, yeah, he actually is the same person, so Martin Kempe describes the effect as fomato as being the paradox of a precisely rendered indefiniteness, so it's not precise, I mean, there's a sense of kind of smokiness to it.

Now how do you render indefiniteness precisely, this is the kind of question that already by the beginning of the 19th century was puzzling German idealist philosophers, so let's quote the most famous German idealist philosopher who is Hagle, and he was lecturing in

So he wrote, here is evident as supreme rounding, nowhere is that any harsh or sharp line transition is everywhere, light and shadow are not effective as purely direct light and shadow, but they both shine into one another, just as an inner force works throughout an external thing, now what that means in practical terms for the impact of this portrait of Mona Lisa is that the corners of her eyes and of her mouth are blurred, it's hard to

get an exact sense of what they actually look like, and as we've mentioned, there are no visible eyebrows, and this makes it difficult to read her expression, and you've already touched on the most famous puzzle, is a smile at all, if it is a smile, is she looking happy, is she looking sad, is it a knowing smile, is it a modest smile, is this the smile of a florentine matron, or is it the smile of a vampire who is older than the rocks, among

which she sits? So to me, you know, I recognize that smile straight away, it's the weak smile of somebody

who's heard a joke about the Kaiser, a thousand times, it's, I was thinking I should never

have come to this rest of history together, this is awful, well you see there is the power of the Smato, because each person will see in the smile what he or she, what they

“fear, or perhaps desire who knows, but certainly this is where I think Walter Pater is coming”

in with his nation of hers, you know, I kind of timeless infinite vampiric figure. The fact that there is a mystery to her, that her smile is something elusive and enigmatic and potentially tantalizing, and it's this that really since the 19th century has made the Mona Lisa seem almost a sinister figure in the imaginings of many people, and the painting to be something that contains codes, clues, directions to something that seems to

let just beyond human comprehension, and this is an idea that of course is still going incredibly strong, and friend of the show Dan Brown, he's notoriously all over it, so in the Da Vinci code, the Mona Lisa, he says, embodies the sacred feminine, and in the plot of it, she code, the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre behind its stained glass window, and a clue is found written in blood on this stained glass window, and even though the Mona Lisa, it

actually doesn't feature very prominently in the plot of the Da Vinci code when they came to make a film, and they wanted a poster, it's the Mona Lisa that is on the poster, of course, and obviously the reason for why the Mona Lisa is on the film poster is because it's the world most famous painting, and one of the reasons that it's the world's most famous painting is precisely because it seems so full of mystery, a painting suited to a film about codes

and ancient mysteries. So two obvious questions then, so first of all, is it only famous

because of the mystery, rather than because of any other quality, and secondly, what actually behind all the stuff about the mystery and the merc and the smokiness, what actually do we know about it? So let's take the first one, is it so famous purely because of this sort of

“the questions rather than because of any innate quality? I mean, I think that is the big question,”

and let's come to that later, so we'll kind of explore what it is that has made the Mona Lisa as famous it is, and I think it's really interesting because it tells us a lot about the history of how conceptions of culture have evolved over the centuries, and particularly perhaps in the

20th century, your second question, let's assume the Mona Lisa isn't a portrait of a vampire,

then who is it, a portrait of, when was the painting begun, when was it finished, I mean, was it ever finished, and these are all pretty basic questions that have been fearlessly debated for centuries and centuries and centuries. But not unusual questions, no Tom, not unusual questions, I mean, these are the questions that people ask about all kinds of Renaissance paintings, don't they? Absolutely, you know, who painted it, why, when, where, who's the sitter, or are that kind of thing?

“Yeah, and I think that the intensity of the controversy that seems to lie around these questions”

when it comes to the Mona Lisa is actually just another marker of how incredibly famous it is, because every art historian, everybody who aspires to be an art historian knows that if you come up with a new theory about the Mona Lisa, you'll immediately get it into the newspapers, so there's a kind of incentive there to come up, often with quite mad theories. Yeah, however, there is one thing that we absolutely do know about the painting and that, of course,

because it's there in the title of his book, it's Leonardo. Although he gets the name wrong,

he gets the name wrong, because Leonardo da Vinci, da Vinci, I mean, I can't believe there any listeners who don't know this, da Vinci is not his surname, da Vinci just means from Vinci, which is where he was born. Da Vinci, if da Vinci is a book about you, and he called it, "The From Soulsbury Code." Yeah, exactly. So Leonardo da Vinci, we know that he paints it, and he, of course, is one of the great figures of European culture and extraordinary man,

“I think, entirely deserving of his own series on the rest of history in due course. But for now,”

let's zoom in on one particular moment in that extraordinary life of his and it is

April 1500, and we are in Florence, which is Leonardo's native city. This is almost certainly

where he'd been born 48 years before, and he is the illegitimate son of a Florentine Notary, Sir Piero Da Vinci, who came from the small town of Vinci, which is about 20 miles west of Florence, so hence the name, and Leonardo right from the beginning, everyone recognizes that he is an astonishing talent. So he gets apprenticed very early to a famous Florentine artist, works in his workshop, he qualifies as a master, and he is recognised even in Florence, which is a city,

I mean, it's the archetype of a great centre of culture, Renaissance Florence, as a man of really stupeifying talent, and what strikes people as stupeifying about him,

“isn't necessarily his talent as an artist, I think he is rated slightly below his younger”

contemporaries, Michelangelo, and Raphael on that score, but the sheer range of his interests, so he's a complete polymath, he's not just a painter, he's also a would-be engineer, he's a natural philosopher, there is no limit to the things that he's interested in, and this of course makes him an object of great interest to the cultural elite's influence at the time, which Dominic, we've done a series on, and this is the Medici, and specifically Lorenzo, the magnificent,

the guy who serves in the popular imagination as the archetype of the Florentine patrons of great art. Lorenzo took him up, didn't he, and used him as, among other things, as a kind of ambassador, and but also as a kind of gift, so he sends him to Ludovico Schwarz who's the Duke of Milan, Florence's relations with Milan enormously important in this period, and Schwarz, who's a patron of the arts himself,

is very taken with Leonardo, doesn't he? Leonardo basically ends up working for Schwarz, for about

almost 20 years, 18 years, 18 years in all, so by 1500 Leonardo is returning from Milan via Venice to Florence. He's done pretty well for himself in Milan, so he's famous as a great painter, he's done this mural the last supper, very important in the Da Vinci code, very important also in the history of Western art, and two very innovative portraits of women, and one of these portrays Ludovico Schwarz's young mistress, Chichilia Gallerani, and she is shown rather coily

“kind of fondling an urban, and Tabby's favourite picture, I think, so she loves fondling an urban,”

but the other thing about Leonardo is that he's got a utilitarian value as well as an aesthetic one, hasn't he, because he's also designing all kinds of, I mean, obviously he's designing all his mad stuff like parachutes and helicopters, tanks, but he's designing kind of hydraulic projects and stuff, and city works, and all these kinds of things, and fortifications, and defenses, and things like this, I mean, you're claim about him being a polymath, he's well born out by all this.

I gather the kind of the mad stuff, so the tanks and the helicopters, it's unlikely any of them would have worked, even had the technology been available to make them work, but the fortifications and the canals and everything, absolutely, and that essentially is why sports are loved him. I mean, the ability to paint his mistress fondling an urban was a kind of an advantage, but it's the engineering that really makes Leonardo's fortune.

And he returns to Florence pretty well off, so he's four months before he arrives in Florence, he sends a very large sum of money about 600 buckets to a Florentine bank, so he'll have something they're waiting for him when he returns to Florence, and just to give people a sense of how much that is, 20 buckets will rent you a very nice house in the Central Florence for a year, so Leonardo, he's done well for himself.

But what did you say this was 1500, so 1500, by the time he comes back,

the vanities, and seven a roller. The Mediterranean actually being kicked out of Florence, seven a.m., and Florence has a republic again, and the biggest development, one of the great developments in medieval Italian or early modern Italian history, the French invasion of 1494, has thrown Italy into total tumult. Schwartz has been kicked out in Milan, the French have been rampaging through the Italian peninsula, and they are the big power brokers now, and basically Leonardo,

that leaves Leonardo a bit of drift, doesn't it? He needs a new patron, because he doesn't have the

“minute she doesn't have Schwartz. Yeah, so that's why he's left Milan as he says Schwartz has been kicked”

out, but the problem is that even though he's a very big name, I mean he's famous across Italy, he does also bring a certain amount of baggage with him, so in particular he has a reputation for

never finishing projects, so George Eversari, who will write the first biography of Leonardo,

famously says of Leonardo, that he started many things and never finished them, and the most notorious example of this had happened in Milan, which was a massive, a question monument to the far though of Ludovico Esfortza. That ends up being aborted when the French invade Italy, because the Milanese need the bronze that was going to be used for the mold, they need to turn it into artillery to try and stop the French, it doesn't work. And when the French Occupy Milan,

they shoot up the great clay model of this question statue that Leonardo had made, so there's nothing left of it, and this cast a slight shadow over his reputation, so there's a story that when Michelangelo is younger than Leonardo and should probably be showing him respect, when Michelangelo meets Leonardo, he scoffs at him and says that the casting of the bronze had been beyond Leonardo's

“technological abilities, and I think that this is a kind of a reproach that he has to bear however”

unfairly. There's also the problem that he hasn't actually done that many paintings, while he was in Florence, and the most famous painting the last supper, I mean this isn't readily accessible for anyone from Florence, and it's probably already starting to fade, because Leonardo's experimented with mad kinds of paints, so he's actively looking for commissions and not just to make money, but also I think is a way of advertising what he can do as an artist, because every painting

will be able to serve him as a kind of calling card, and so the first two years that he's

back in Florence, we know from his records that he is taking on a lot of work, he's doing a taking a lot of commissions, these commissions do not include the Mona Lisa, because as I say we have detail records, the Mona Lisa isn't mentioned in them, and in fact it is a part of the mystery of

“the painting that the Mona Lisa isn't mentioned in any of Leonardo's surviving drawings, any of his”

surviving notebooks, so that adds a certain quality of mystery to it. So he goes on, he works, I mean unbelievably, one day we'll do a series on the Borges, and he works for Cesare Borges, doesn't he? That's chief engineer, so making tanks and helicopters for the Borges, so that's in 5002 through to the early months of 5003. And then 5003, the spring of 5003, he is back in Florence, some critics and biographers think this is the point when he did the Mona Lisa, others like Kenneth

Clark, he did the great civilisation BBC series at the end of the 60s, he thought it might have been a year later, 5004 or possibly even a later date, that's when he does the Mona Lisa. Yeah, so this is a debate that again has been running and running, so it's 5003 to perhaps 1511, 1512, this is the kind of the range of dates. But the bigger question which I suppose is allied to that is who is the person in the picture? And I mean the name Mona Lisa, it's later,

I mean it becomes popularised in the 19th century, but it's first coined in what the 5040s

by George Eversari, who I've already mentioned in his great book The Lives of the Artists, the great biographer of Renaissance Italy. Yeah, so kind of 160 portrait sketches of the artist of the age. The Sorry's great hero is Michelangelo, but he does give Leonardo a decent write-up. And so if we estimate that the amount of space that Pissari gives to an artist is a reflection of how much he esteems the artist, then Michelangelo is number one, then Raphael, then Jotto,

much earlier painter of course, and then Leonardo, so Leonardo is number four, pretty good podium. I mean one of them, one of them is one of them is not getting a medal. Leonardo not quite podiuming there is he's he's just Miss Bronze. Yeah. So this is what Fassari has to say, he mentions the Mona Lisa explicitly. He writes, Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of the wife

it's the Mona Lisa properly, but it gives us the name, and Mona Lisa it's Ma Donna Lisa, so my lady Lisa.

“But that sentence also gives us the name that he's used in Italy and in France, so in Italy it's”

like Giaconda in France, it's L'Hèconde. And there's a pun there, so it's the feminine form of Lisa's husband's name, so essentially it's kind of Mrs Giacondo, L'Hèconde, but Giaconda and Giaconde, they mean in Italian and French, respectively kind of happy, cheerful, joyous. And Fassari implies in his life of Leonardo, that Leonardo leaned into this pun and that Mona Lisa's smile was key to his vision of the painting right from the very start. So Fassari writes, while he was

painting Mona Lisa, who was a very beautiful woman, he had her constantly entertained by singers,

musicians and gestures, so that she would be merry and not look melancholic as portraits often do. As a result, in this painting of Leonardo's, there was a smile so enchanting that it was more divine than human, and those who saw it marveled to find it so similar to that of the living original.

“I mean, I think again, there's a tribute in the smile with more jolly than the painting deserves.”

Anyway, that anecdote may not even be true, right? Possibly, but possibly not, because when Fassari wrote up that anecdote, he was living in Florence at just a short distance from the Jiacondo family home, at a time when Mona Lisa was still alive, so it is perfectly possible that he got that directly from La Jiacondo's mouth. I mean, we can't know, but it's possible, I would say. So who is our husband, what's going on there? I mean, he's literally called Mr. Happy,

but it's not his name. Well, as well he should be, because Francesco del Jiacondo is doing very well for himself, so he's very ambitious, he's very upwardly mobile and he's becoming incredibly rich. He's of humble background, his grandfather had begun as an artisan in the barrel-making business, and he ends up running an entire barrel-making empire. Then Francesco's father had moved on from the barrel-making into textiles, which is the obvious place that you go for kind of high end products,

much more money to be made, and Jiacondo himself then expands into silks, into money lending, and into sugar. So this is the early days of the Atlantic sugar economy, and it has been thought that perhaps Mona Lisa had access to lots of sugar and her teeth rotted, and this is why she's not sharing her teeth. That's one of the clues to the mystery of the smile. That's really trying to add. But this is a very familiar Florentine journey. You start, like the Medici did, you make money in one

thing, then you move into textiles, wool is what Florentine money is based on, and then you move into banking, or money lending, or whatever, and you diversify. So what Francesco was doing is absolutely standard, and then he does the standard thing, which is that he invests all of his money into land, doesn't he? So especially now that the war is broken out with the French, and Italy is absolutely being ravaged and ripped apart, it makes sense to invest in property and in land,

because that is the safest possible bet. And of course what you also do, and this is a timeless story, I mean we see it so much in English history as well, is that if you are socially mobile from a humble background, you invest in an upper class wife, and this is what Francesco does by marrying Lisa Gerardini, because Lisa Gerardini is from an ancient Tuscan family that ranked as one of the original founders of the Florentine Republic, so tremendous aristocratic

pedigree. It is obviously a bit embarrassing for Lisa that she has to marry the grandson of a barrel maker, but her father is not a good businessman, he's running short of money, he needs money, and so he essentially sells Lisa to Francesco, and it's a good marriage. So Lisa is 15 when she

marries Francesco, Francesco is 30, and she is his second wife, and as we've heard we'll end up

“out living him. And I think that although the context for the marriage is a mercenary one,”

it seems to have been a relatively successful marriage, so Francesco keeps his side of the bargain by becoming fabulously rich, and Lisa sticks to hers by having lots of children, and she has six in all, four of them survive, infancy, and she also brings up a son of Francesco's by his first wife, and again, their relationship seems to have been very good, all the evidence points to the fact

and it's focused on Lisa's daughter Camilla, who the year before so in 1511, had become a none

at the age of 12, so I think that's quite early, but it's a way but essentially avoiding having to pay a dowry for her, so you either marry her off or you park her in a nunnery, and that's what they do with Camilla. And in 1512, four men, including Madly, a brother of the Cardinal of Pavia, a reported to have climbed up a ladder into the convent where Camilla was installed, and two nuns it is said were waiting for them, and the intruders, I quote, "touched the breasts of the said nuns,

and there was apparently lots of fondling and groping, and Camilla is said to have been one of these two nuns, and the four men were found guilty, but the two nuns were absolved, so a whiff of scandal,

“but perhaps no more than that." But apart from that, Lisa's life is pretty un-eventful, isn't it?”

So, as you said, Francesco 15 years a senior, he dies in 1537, and in his will, he says she is his beloved noble spirit, a faithful wife. She lives to a pretty good age, for the time, 70, shares her dies about 12 or 13 years later, we don't know exactly, when, and that's all we know,

that's all we know of this character. Which is amazing, because if she is the person

in the Mona Lisa, then her face has a claim to be the most famous face of anyone who has lifted the whole of history, which is a kind of jaw-dropping thought. Wow, yeah, but is she the woman? Because there are some critics who say this is not the woman, she may not have existed at all, this may be a fictional person, this may be a kind of just a generic embodiment of a female beauty, or of, you know, a feminine, elegance and grace or whatever, because, for example, there is no record

of Leonardo having been paid by anybody for this painting, right? And if he had done it for a rich patron, you would assume he would have been paid and he would have kept the receipt. Yeah, and he keeps seems to have kept the painting with him until he died. We've got that landscape, which is not a realistic landscape, it's not a landscape that anyone can identify. So, is this fantastical background painted in that way because it's appropriate to a woman who also

is invented? And we do know from his notebooks that Leonardo was very interested in the, the kind of the notion of their being ideal beauty, is the Mona Lisa, not a real person at all. But what if she's a real

“person? I think that certainly for the past 200 years, there's been a feeling that the Mona Lisa”

is a bit boring. I mean, she's just the wife of an Italian businessman. Yeah, couldn't she be someone slightly more interesting? So, there've been various candidates. So, one of them is a woman called Pacifica Blandano. And she was the mistress of the son of Lorenzo that was an innocent, a guy called Giuliano de Medici. And he ends up returning to Florence, reestablishing Medici rule, and he's essentially the kind of the autocratic Florence between 1513 and 1516. Why does anyone

think that the Mona Lisa might be this, this woman Pacifica Blandano? There's actually quite a good reason, it's because the only person that we know of who saw the Mona Lisa in the lifetime of Leonardo and described it in writing, he claimed that the painting had been commissioned by Giuliano. And if so, then wouldn't it be his mistress? Hmm. Then there's another much more famous woman who has identified with the Mona Lisa. And this is Isabella Deste, who was the marquee's of

Mantua. And she's the most famous, the most celebrated female patron of the arts in the Renaissance.

And again, there are there are reasons for thinking that it might be her. So, she was always

imploring Leonardo to paint her portrait. Leonardo actually went to Mantua and made sketches off her. We've said that the backdrop to the Mona Lisa, the landscape, is fantastical, assuming that it is and assuming that it is actually a portrait of somewhere in Italy. It might be the dollar mites. I mean, much more like to be the dollar mites than Tuscany. And Mantua is quite near the dollar mites. And also, in the painting, she's seated on a chair with an armrest and the armrest

“apparently is often used to symbolize a ruler. I think the way that you're narrating that,”

suggests to me that you absolutely do not believe it. I mean, it doesn't look like the dollar mites at all. I think that there is a slight quality of people not wanting to believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. And it would be much more fun if it was the Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marleau or someone. That is exactly what I thought when I when you started to down this line. I thought

groping desperately for something exotic. Okay, well, let's continue with some slightly more exotic

“ones. So, Sigmund Freud, you guessed who he thinks about lesbians. And he's me and tell me that”

it's not his mother. It is his mother. So, Freud suggested that the smile of his famous smile was inspired by Leonardo's childhood memories of his mother's smile. Sometimes the smile is just a smile, Sigmund. Sometimes. Another very popular theory recently is that it's this guy Salai, who was Leonardo's apprentice, his friend worked in his workshop and was almost certainly his lover. Hold on, Salai is a bloke. Salai is a bloke. Yep. Okay, that's a this is a stretch.

So, Salai is, you know, he serves Leonardo as a model for his painting of John the Baptist, which is in the Louvre together with the Mona Lisa. He provides the model for a sketch of an angel. And the idea that the Mona Lisa might be another portrait of Salai was proposed 15 years ago by an Italian art historian called Sylvano Vincenti. The reason that he

“advances this is that Vincenti says that the Mona Lisa's facial features do resemble those of Salai”

and you can see them if you compare it to Leonardo's painting of John the Baptist. Also, he says that you can see the letter S in the Mona Lisa's eyes if you look very closely and squint and stand on your head while you're doing it. Right. Yeah, good luck doing that in the Louvre. And we compared it to Shakespeare. There was a guy who wanted to dig up Shakespeare's body to prove that it wasn't actually Shakespeare and he's kind of, he's very much on that groove,

because he wanted to go to the site where Lisa Galadini had been buried and to dig her up and to find a skull, use it to reconstruct her features and thereby prove that she couldn't have been the sitter in the Mona Lisa. Then two final theories, just before we come to the break,

one theory is the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Leonardo himself and this was first suggested back

in 1913 by a French painter called Maurice Vaix and he argued that the lower half of the face is female but the upper half is Leonardo's and in 1987 an American artist called Lillianch Forts made a famous computer mashup of the Mona Lisa with the self-portrait of Leonardo, they've kind of famous one, it's presumed to be self-portrait, we don't know for sure, but it's the one where he kind of looks like Gandalf, he's got the long white hair and that, you know,

they match up pretty well and can kind of see how perhaps there's a hint there of them having the same facial features. And then finally we have a theory that's been proposed by top Symbolicist Robert Langdon and he proposes that the Mona Lisa is an adrogenous fusion of the Egyptian god Ammon, so a M-O-N, an anagram of Mona, and the goddess Isis, aka Lisa, so Mona Lisa, it's all there and Robert Langdon, of course, is the hero of Dan Brown's Da Vinci code and this is what Dan Brown

has, Langdon say, gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look adrogenous but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female and that's my friends is Da Vinci's little secret,

“Da Vinci again and the reason for Mona Lisa's knowing smile. Do you know who says this, Tom Hanks?”

Tom Hanks says it in the film, a person who's been on the rest of history and had no shame about his involvement in that film. So are you convinced by any of those? No, of course, I mean, I have to say Tom, I think the way you've set it up suggests to me that it's none of these people, because you've said it with a degree of skepticism. I mean, it's definitely not that bloke who's a bloke. I think that's a definite note and I also don't think it's half of it as Leonardo da Vinci's face.

Okay, however, what is undoubtedly the case is throughout the 20th century, it was generally accepted by art historians that absolutely certainty about the identity of the Mona Lisa was impossible. So I will quote Donald Sassoon, who is the author of the definitive history of the Mona Lisa, I've drawn a lot on his book for this episode. And at the end of his book, he declares himself agnostic as to who the painting portrays it, quote him. My conclusion is that

the evidence is too scanty for us to arrive at any firm identification. We shall never know

not that this will stop people from trying, and of course he's quite right, people do continue to try. He then added this reflection. There is always the remote possibility that some new evidence will be unearthed. And do you know Dominic? Do you know listeners? He was not wrong because four years later after Donald Sassoon wrote that in 2005, exactly such a piece of new evidence was

Mona Lisa had been. And more than that, it specifies pretty precisely exactly when Leonardo had

“begun painting it. Cranky, what a bombshell. Ladies and gentlemen, do not go away. We will return”

after the break with these stunning revelations. Welcome back everybody to the rest of this history, I am waiting with Bated Breath to find out who the Mona Lisa really was and when the great painting was painted. Tom, you promised us an absolute bombshell. I hope you're going to deliver. Okay, so let's go to the foreign-time chance already in October 1503 where a clock in the chance already is reading an edition of the letters of the great Raymond Orator Cicero. This is guy called Agostino Vespucci,

he's very clever, very well-connected man. So he's a humanist scholar and of course humanist scholars all they do at this point is Reed Cicero. Yeah. He's an assistant to Niccolo Machiavelli, famous author of political treatises and he is a professional associate of Leonardo because he's

“one of the administrators who just recently have signed a contract with Leonardo to paint the”

great council hall in Florence with a spectacular battle scene, an illustration of a great Florentine victory. And as he's reading this book, this guy Vespucci comes across a reference in one of Cicero's letters to a famous Greek painter called Appelle's. As Cicero describes Appelle's as someone who had completed with the most polished art, the head and bust of Venus, but left the other part of her body in Coate. Vespucci is very struck by this and he

reaches for Appelle and he makes a note in the margin and he writes Appelle's the painter. That is what Leonardo eventually does in all his pictures. As in the head of Lisa, Dell Giacondo and Anne, the mother of Mary. We will see what he will do in the hall of the great council, which he is now contracted to decorate and then he dates it 50-03 October. Whoa. So a massive, massive bombshell. Freud is wrong. Dr. Robert Langdon is wrong.

I mean, everyone who thought it wasn't the Mona Lisa is wrong. And so a huge shout out to Dr. Armin Schlechter, who is a librarian in the university library in Heidelberg and he made the discovery in 2005 and just to list what it proves to make it clear. Vespucci was absolutely right. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of Francesco Dell Giacondo's wife, Lisa Gerdini. Leonardo began the painting in 50-03 which makes perfect sense because as we said, in 50-02, he'd been off in Rome working as chief

engineer for Chaser and Borger and in 50-04, of course he's going to start work on this great battle scene in the front-end time council hall. We also know that Lisa had just given birth to

her second son and so you can imagine that that might be a cause of celebration, something that

her husband might want to mark by commissioning a portrait. And we can even work out who might have introduced Leonardo to Francesco, because Leonardo's father, Sir Pierro, was Francesco's

“lawyer. And so I think that this clearly in a sense demathologizes the Mona Lisa. It's not a portrait”

of Leonardo in drag. It's not his mother. It's not the sacred feminine. We can set the commissioning off the Mona Lisa absolutely in the context of daily life in Florence. These kind of networks of social relations that made the city run, you know, family proud, businessmen, commissions, lawyers, all of this. So on one level, there's no mystery. However, yeah, there were lots of questions on that, because for example, if we did this as a commission, why does he not hand

at over and get paid for it? Why does he give it to the Jacondo family? Yeah, I mean, that's a massive question. So, I mean, various answers to that question have been suggested. Maybe the chance to use it as a calling card, as an advertisement for his talents, it ends up being worth more to him than the fee he would have got from Francesco. Maybe he can't bear to finish it. So,

Vasari and his biography says that Leonardo never finished it. Or maybe, you know, it does have

some special meaning for him. Maybe he does see it as his great masterpiece. Maybe he just can't bear to be separated from it. And it's certainly the case that right from the beginning, it is viewed by everyone who sees it as a really revolutionary painting. So, the pose of its sitter,

to make it seem to people who come and see it really kind of thrilling, really innovative.

“So, that really surprised me, because as a Mona Lisa skeptic as it were, I'd always assumed”

that the aesthetic value of it was, as it were, projected onto it later. Once it became famous, people said, "Oh, it's obviously brilliant blah, blah, blah, blah." People probably didn't think it was bringing to the time. But you're telling me that's wrong, and even at the time, for example, other Renaissance painters thought this is special. Yeah, Raphael is in France at the time when Leonardo is painting it. He comes and sees it and he's blown away by it and it's a patently

a massive influence on Raphael's painting. And this distinctive pose that the Mona Lisa has, it's very widely copied so much so that that pose comes to be called the Giaconda. So, it's that famous. And by the end of his life, Leonardo has become a tourist attraction in his own right, and having the chance to see the Mona Lisa is a part of the package when people come and visit Leonardo, they want to see this painting. Now, when Leonardo dies, he's not actually in France,

he's not even in Italy. He is in France, on Boise, on the Loire. He dies there on the second

of May 1519, and the story is that he dies in the arms of the French king, François Premier, François the first, because Leonardo had gone to the court of François the first in 1516. And he goes there partly because there are just no patrons worthy of his status who are willing to employ him in Italy, and partly because François the first really, really wants him, and is willing to pay anything. And it actually reminds me a bit of the way in which Muhammad

bin Salman, the strong man of Saudi Arabia, paid an obscene amount of money for the Salvata Mundi, this painting that has been attributed to Leonardo. There are, you know, there are plenty of people who think it isn't Leonardo, but it's now gone to Saudi Arabia rather than the way that Leonardo went to the court of François the first. And when Leonardo dies, François the first makes sure to buy the Mona Lisa and the result of this is that the painting is going to end up becoming

part of the cultural patrimony, not of Italy, but of France, and this is crucial for its future

history. So it's become part of French tradition, but in the next couple of centuries, the French don't make a huge amount of it, do they? So for example in 1625, Louis the 13th actually gives it a way. Well, he agrees to give it a way to the Duke of Buckingham with his famously long legs, great favourites of James the First, basically Buckingham is going to give him a whole

“bin and I think addition, and it's actually Louis courtiers who say hold on. This is actually quite”

a good painting, don't give it away. Yeah, it's such a shame because the Mona Lisa could have ended up in London. See, I think if it hadn't ended up in London, maybe it wouldn't have been such a big deal. I think you're absolutely right, but it is your right that kind of for two centuries after Leonardo's death, the painting does go into it clips. So it's not showcased. It's not a great treasure of the French King. In 1695, it gets moved to Versailles, but it's put in a pretty obscure corridor. I mean,

it's not something that most people would notice. And then in 1750, there's a very clear demonstration of how the Mona Lisa is rated because 110 of the best paintings in the Royal Collection at Versailles. I put on display at the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris, for the deletation of invited visitors. So 110 paintings, the Mona Lisa is not one of those 110 paintings. So it's not even top 100. So that complicates things because you said right at the beginning, oh, people thought it was

amazing right from the start, but obviously now there's a period where people don't think it's amazing, and something changes doesn't it? That is because Renaissance painting goes out of fashion. There isn't a category of Renaissance painting at that point. And Leonardo's Luster has dimmed. The posthumous reputation of Leonardo is also bound up with the decline in the value of

“the Mona Lisa. So what's changed? What changes and when? Is it the wake of the French Revolution?”

It's always the French Revolution, isn't it? Yeah, French Revolution is crucial because,

of course, suddenly these paintings are not stuffed away in the Royal Palace. They are being brought out for the people to admire and enjoy. And the revolutionaries set up a great new museum in the Louvre and the Mona Lisa is moved there. It is briefly transferred Napoleon's bedroom, along with the load of other paintings. So it's in Napoleon's bedroom from 1800 up to when he becomes Emperor in 1804. And the Mona Lisa then goes back to the Louvre. And from that point on,

the Mona Lisa is on public display in the world's largest and most prestigious museum. You know,

for it to start ascending the list to go up, you know, towards the kind of the the top of the

“pops. But slower process than you would think. So 1852, there was a list drawn up a sort of estimate”

of all the artworks in the Louvre and they they ranked their value, didn't they? And the Mona Lisa was ranked at 90,000 francs. But there's a painting by Titian at 150,000, there's one by Raphael at 400,000 francs and another Raphael at 600,000 francs. So by those criteria, the Mona Lisa is still a relatively amino. Yeah, but then progressively over the course of the 19th century, the Mona Lisa starts to benefit from really quite profound changes in cultural and

intellectual tastes. And I guess that the most influential of those is romanticism. You know,

it's a very broad brush word, but let's use it as a shorthand. So it's shorthand for the

worship of genius, admiration for works of art that have a sense of mystery, perhaps of

“incompletion about them. And of course, a fascination with wild and sublime landscapes,”

romantic, love a wild and sublime landscape. And all of this massively helps to inflate the reputation of Leonardo, who over the course of the 19th century starts to be seen as not just a genius, but the supreme genius of as we will see what comes to be called the Renaissance. And the reason for this is precisely the range of things that he does. You know, he's a painter, he leaves lots of his paintings unfinished, romantic love that, but he's also someone who's interested in mountains and tanks and

fetuses and swans and eyeballs and everything. It's just everything. And so he, you know, romantic love that. And so he comes to be seen as a universal genius. And if he's a universal genius, then what can the Mona Lisa be, but a universal woman? So in other words, the fading of Leonardo, the establishment of Leonardo as the archetype of a great genius, is the absolutely necessary precondition for the fading of the Mona Lisa as the greatest painting of all times.

They'd quote Donald Sassun, "The Mona Lisa acquired its special status because of its association

“with Leonardo, not the other way round." So I think Leonardo as supreme genius, that is one crucial”

influence on the inflation of the Mona Lisa's reputation. The other one, and this is what water painter is all about, "Romantic's have a massive thing for for predatory females, for for Fama Fatal," as they come to be called. And there's a brilliant book which was published way back in 1933, which covers this, to call the romantic agony translated into English, it's by an Italian critic called Mario Pras. And he writes brilliantly about, however, the course of the 19th century,

male artists and writers become obsessed with a very distinctive vision of female beauty, and quote Pras, "tainted with pain, corruption, and death." And Pras writes about how, by the end of the 19th century, this beauty had become illumined with the smile of the Giaconda, and this is where water paint comes in. He's a massive, massive influence on the English-speaking world, that passage that you read. I mean, it may seem kind of, you know, purple to us. But it determines

how people in English-speaking world see the Mona Lisa for generations and generations. But the guys who really go big on this are unsurprisingly, since they own it, are the French. So I'll cite two writers in particular, and the first is Teofield Gutier, who was a poet, a novelist, a critic, and he is the guy who, before Peter, establishes Mona Lisa as not just as an archetype of beauty, but as an eternal archetype of beauty. Someone who has essentially existed since the beginning of time,

she's older than Egypt, she's older than Greece, older than Rome. So to quote Gutier,

she is always there smiling with sensuality mocking her numerous lovers, so a bit like Cleopatra

there, who Cleopatra was supposed to sleep with men and then kill them. She has the supreme countenance of a woman, sure that she will remain beautiful forever and certain to be greater than the ideal of poets and artists. So again, perhaps the hit there of the vampire, someone who is always beautiful, feeding off the blood of her prey. People are projecting an awful lot onto Mona Lisa, aren't they? But I mean, another example, the historian Jean Michele, to raise an enormous

history of the French Revolution, the first historian to use the word Renaissance, by the way, or at least to take it back up from Vassari and to popularise it. And Michele goes even further,

Well, he can read where he's at about her. This canvas attracts me,

“revokes me, consumes me, and I go to her in spite of myself as the birth of the snake.”

But you can see, I mean, this is all kind of very exciting for people in Victorian parlours, reading this kind of thing. And of course, as the 19th century goes on, towards the 20th century,

photography for the first time is starting to be equal to the challenge of capturing the image of

the Mona Lisa. So by the end of the 19th century, you've got all this purple prose about vampires and snakes and things. And for the first time, you have images of the Mona Lisa that are very easy to reproduce and so people can actually look at it without having to go to the Louvre and kind of see it in the flesh as it were. And I would say that by the beginning of the 20th century, the Mona Lisa's probably the most famous painting in the Louvre, probably one of the the most

“famous paintings in the world. It's kind of had a very meteoric rise, but there's one final thing”

that's needed to complete its ascent to the absolute top of the echelon. And this happens on the 21st August 1911. And what happens puts the Mona Lisa on the front page of newspapers around the world. So 21st August 1911, it's a Monday and the Louvre shut for cleaning. While it's shut, people walk through the room in which the Mona Lisa is kept and they find that it's gone. There is only the empathy frame in which it had been contained and there is complete outrage

the director of Francis Museums is sacked. The petty Parisia, which at the time was the world's largest circulation newspaper, splashed the painting on the front page together with the brilliantly course that comment, well, at least we still have the frame. The news goes around Paris, around France, around the world, huge crowds, kind of descend on the Louvre, go to look at where the painting had been much larger crowds than had ever assembled when the Mona Lisa was actually

in situ. And there's a desperate kind of inspector Cluso type, a suit of the of the painting,

which is always raking up ludicrous suspects. So one of them is the famous poet Guillaume,

Apolleneir, who is arrested and Apolleneir and a friend of his who is an up and coming Spanish painter resident in Paris at the time called Pablo Picasso, actually end up on trial, both Apolleneir and Picasso are acquitted. It's a suggestion of how this crime is not only inflating the reputation of the Mona Lisa, but is also kind of rubbing up against artists and poets and painters who are

“the cutting edge of the avant-garde, which I think is another part of why the Mona Lisa suddenly”

comes to seem much more interesting to people than it had previously done. However, the police seem helpless, a year passes, there are no leads and by 1913, so that's a couple of years after the theft, the Mona Lisa is removed from the catalogue of the Louvre, it's basically in a mission of

defeat, you know, this painting has gone, we're never going to get it back. But then, as dramatically

as it had vanished, the Mona Lisa reappears, and it reappears because, in Florence, where of course, the Mona Lisa had originally been painted, an antique dealer called Alfredo Jerry, gets a letter which has been signed Leonardo, and in this letter Leonardo says that he wants to hand over the Mona Lisa to the infancy, the great gallery in Florence, and he hints that he wants to do this for patriotic reasons. He doesn't also say that he wants 500,000 dearer to cover his expenses,

but he's going very big on the fact that he's Italian and he's doing this for patriotic reasons. So the antique dealer arranges to meet him and Leonardo, Julia arrives from Paris and Jerry and the head curator from the infancy, asked to see the Mona Lisa, he kind of pulls the Mona Lisa out from his suitcase on wraps it, the head curator of the infancy inspects it, it's clear it is indeed the Mona Lisa and so they have the thief arrested. And he turns out to be a guy called Benchenzo

Perugia, and he was an Italian painter decorator who had been working in the Louvre painting the walls on the faithful Monday that the painting was stolen and he seized his chance, and he just lifted it out from his frame, hidden the under his coat, walked off across the courtyard of the Louvre, he kind of waved at a guard and gone out through the door and that was that and he kept it for a year and a half hidden under his bed and you know his motivation which he holds to

he thought it should be in Florence and one of the reasons why he's so outraged is he thought

“that Napoleon had stolen it from the infancy, so this was his motivation. And there's no reason to”

doubt that he was genuinely suffused with going nationalist enthusiasm as well as that.

The problem is he turns out to be really boring, you know people had wanted a master criminal,

a kind of gentleman cracksman and he's not at all and because he does not become the focus of media attention which he might otherwise have done, instead the star is Mona Lisa and what the previously the painting had been called it. It's from this point on that the Mona Lisa starts to be feminized. The Mona Lisa is she, she is coming back to Paris, she is returning to the Louvre, she is being put back in her frame and when she is put back in her frame in the Louvre, she sits

from that point on as the absolute symbol, the absolute embodiment of high art, of high culture, with capital letters and from that point on the reputation of the Mona Lisa as the embodiment of the Renaissance, of Western art, of art, full stock is absolutely secure although it does have the kind of paradoxical effect that now the Mona Lisa is the icon of high art, of course enthusiasts of high art start to turn against it and to say oh it's a bit vulgar, it's a bit trashy,

it. She becomes the embodiment of middle-brow art enthusiasts, doesn't she? I mean isn't that the you know, if somebody if you're a student and you go in and somebody's got a print of the Mona

“Lisa on their wall, you kind of think you don't really know much about art. Do you know what I think?”

Yeah it's a classic airfare of art, but this in turn of course I mean only feels her further resent into the stratosphere of fame and you can see it operating in all kinds of ways so because she's famous because people are meant to take her seriously and kind of offer her a basence, of course she starts to be parodied and the most famous of these parodies is done in 1919 so only you know a few years after her abduction and returned and this is done by the artist

Marcel Duchamp who's also very keen on your rhinals and he gets a postcard of the Mona Lisa and he draws a moustache and a go-tion it and he calls it in English uses the the letters L H O O Q but Dominic with your mastery of French don't I just explain to people what that means in French it's a tremendous example of French humour L H O O Q in French is L A Shoe O Q which means she

is basically she's hot in the arse she's hot in the bind so tremendous banter there from

Marcel Duchamp outrage and consternation and of course the scandal just further amplifies the Mona Lisa's fame and then of course there's mastery production so the more scope for reproducing the Mona Lisa the more she's reproduced and it's really telling that in 1963 she is the first painting to be reproduced by Andy Warhol I mean that's the true measure of fame and Warhol have been inspired to do it by the fact that in 1963 the Mona Lisa had come to America a kind of diplomatic gift

from the gold Kennedy and so that makes the Mona Lisa even more famous in America then in 1974 it visits Japan and that kind of lights the fuse on Japanese enthusiasm for going to the Louvre and taking photographs with the Mona Lisa and I would say that it's not an exaggeration that now the Mona Lisa ranks not just as the archetype of high art but kind of as the ultimate global icon of tourism I mean it's the one object in the world probably the tourists the

mass of tourists want to see more than anything else I mean it is the single most popular object held by any museum in the world and the Louvre is the most visited museum you have nine

“million people going there yeah and I think according to surveys more than half of those people”

say that they're going specifically to see the Mona Lisa so it now has its own dedicated room it's got its own kind of crowd management procedures it's got its own security arrangements but it's still kind of messing up the ability of the Louvre to present all its other paintings because the

the curators in the Louvre have always insisted that the Mona Lisa be presented as a Renaissance

painting so alongside other Renaissance paintings and the effect is that people just you know they rush past all the other Renaissance paintings including Leonardo's picture of John the Baptist and they all kind of gather around the Mona Lisa and say the plan now this is part of President Macron's kind of Napoleonist ambitions his Grand Projé is going to be his kind of final legacy project and he's called it the new Renaissance he's so the Mona Lisa is going to be moved to an underground

it and that is scheduled to open in 2031 so Lisa Gerardini will end up having a very own suite of

“rooms in the most visited museum in the world and I think but I love it but another wise entirely”

obscure Florentine woman is so astronomically insanely famous such an interesting story and yet

I have to say I find it quite an unbelievably uninteresting painting but it is a fascinating story

“I think the more I trace the history of how it's come to be famous and the many ways in which”

it's been understood the more you can see that that all these everything that people have seen

in it is kind of there I mean it's it is kind of infinite in the ways that it can be interpreted

“and seen and that might not be true of other paintings I think the story is so interesting”

and it's such an interesting case study in art history and art criticism but frankly as a painting I can think of hundreds of paintings that rather look at than the Mona Lisa anyway that does not in any way diminish the story which is fascinating Tom Missy Boku and I'll leave it at G. Bye bye