667. The Mystery of the Mona Lisa

19:35Dominic Sandbrook:and tabby's favorite picture i think i think so yeah she loves fondling an ermine but the uh the 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 hydraulics projects and stuff and city works and all these kinds of things and fortifications and defences and things like this. I mean, your claim about him being a polymath is well borne out by all this.

20:07Tom Holland:I gather that 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 and the canals and everything absolutely and that essentially is why Swartzer loved him I mean the the ability to paint his mistress fondling an ermine was was a kind of an advantage but it's the it's the engineering that really makes Leonardo's fortune and he returns to 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 ducats to a Florentine bank so he'll have something there waiting for him when he returns to Florence and just to give people a sense of how much that is 20 ducats will rent you a very nice house in the centre of Florence for a year so so Leonardo you know he's he's done well for himself but what did you say this was 1500 so

21:04Dominic Sandbrook:1500s by the time he comes back florence's golden age has passed they've been through the whole business with the bonfire the vanities and southern a roller the medici have actually been kicked out of florence haven't they and florence is a republic again and the biggest development you know one of the great developments in medieval italian or early modern italian history the french invasion of 1494 has thrown italy into total tumult schwarzer's been kicked out in milan the french which have been rampaging through the Italian peninsula, and they are the big power brokers now. And basically, Leonardo, that leaves Leonardo a bit adrift, doesn't it?

21:37Dominic Sandbrook:He needs a new patron because he doesn't have the military, he doesn't have Schwarzer.

21:41Tom Holland:Yeah, so that's why he's left Milan, as you say, Schwarzer's 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 um giorgio vasari um 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 equestrian monument to the father of ludovico sforza that ends up being aborted when the French invade Italy because the Milanese need the bronze that was going to be used for the mould.

22:31Tom Holland: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 equestrian statue that Leonardo had made. So there's nothing left of it. And this casts a slight shadow over his reputation. So there's a story that when Michelangelo, who was 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.

23:25Tom Holland:So he's actively looking for commissions and not just to make money, but also I think as 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 taking a lot of commissions. These commissions do not include the Mona Lisa because, as I say, we have detailed 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.

24:05Tom Holland:So that, you know, that adds a certain quality of mystery to it.

24:09Dominic Sandbrook:So he goes on. He works, I mean, unbelievably. One day we'll do a series on the Borgias and he works for Cesare Borgia, doesn't he, as chief engineer. so making tanks and helicopters for the Borgias

24:20Tom Holland:so that's in 1502 through to the early months of 1503

24:24Dominic Sandbrook:and then 1503 the spring of 1503 he is back in Florence some critics and biographers think this is the point when he did the Mona Lisa others like Kenneth Clark who did the great civilization BBC series at the end of the 60s he thought it might have been a year later 1504 so let's say 1503 1504 or possibly even a later date that's when he does the Mona Lisa.

24:49Tom Holland:Yeah, so this is a debate that again has been running and running and running. So it's 1503 to perhaps 1511, 1512. This is the kind of the range of dates.

24:59Dominic Sandbrook: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 popularized in the 19th century but it's first coined in what the 1540s by Giorgio Vasari, who you've already mentioned in his great book, The Lives of the Artists, the great biographer of Renaissance Italy.

25:23Tom Holland:Yeah. So kind of 160 portrait sketches of the artists of the age. Vasari'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 Vasari gives to an artist is a reflection of how much he esteems the artist, Then Michelangelo is number one. Then Raphael. Then Giotto. Much earlier painter, of course. And then Leonardo. So Leonardo is number four. Pretty good podium. I mean, one of them is not getting a medal. Leonardo not quite podiuming there, is he? He's just Miss Bronze.

26:00Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

26:01Tom Holland:So this is what Vasari has to say. He mentions the Mona Lisa explicitly. He writes, Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Mona Lisa so I mean there's one thing it's not the Mona Lisa it's the Mona Lisa properly but it gives us the name and Mona Lisa it's Madonna Lisa so my lady Lisa but that sentence also gives us the name that is used in Italy and in France so in Italy it's la giaconda in France it's la jaconde 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. Giocondo, la Gioconda. But Gioconda and Gioconde, they mean in Italian and French respectively, kind of happy, cheerful, joyous.

26:52Tom Holland:And Vasari 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 Vasari writes, while he was painting Mona Lisa, who was a very beautiful woman, He had her constantly entertained by singers, musicians and jesters 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.

27:27Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, I think, again, that's attributing the smile with more jollity than the painting deserves. Anyway, that anecdote may not even be true, right?

27:35Tom Holland:Possibly, but possibly not, because when Vasari wrote up that anecdote, he was living in Florence just a short distance from the Giocondo family home at a time when Mona Lisa was still alive. So it is perfectly possible that he got that directly from La Gioconda's mouth. I mean, we can't know, but it's possible, I would say. So who is she? Who's who's a husband? What's going on there? I mean, he's literally called Mr. Happy, but isn't he? Well, as well he should be because Francesco del Giocondo is doing very well for himself. So he's very ambitious. He's very upwardly mobile and he's becoming incredibly rich.

28:17Tom Holland: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. um then uh francesco's father had moved on from the barrel making um into textiles which is the obvious place that you go for kind of high-end products much more money to be made and giocondo himself then expands into silks into money lending and into sugar so this is the the early days of the atlantic sugar economy yeah yeah and it has been thought that perhaps um mona lisa had access to lots of sugar and her teeth rotted and this is why she's not showing her her teeth and that's one of the clues to the mystery of the smile that's really trying too hard but this is a very

29:07Dominic Sandbrook:familiar florentine journey you start uh like the mediter did you make money in one thing then you move into i mean textiles wool is what um 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 a lot 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

29:39Tom Holland: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 a 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.

30:24Tom Holland:He needs money. And so he essentially sells Lisa to Francesco. And, you know, 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 outliving 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.

31:08Tom Holland:And again, their relationship seems to have been very good. All the evidence points to the fact that she was a very kind and supportive stepmother. There is one scandal which erupts in 1512, and it's focused on Lisa's daughter, Camilla, who the year before, so in 1511, had become a nun at the age of 12. So, I mean, it's quite early, but it's a way essentially of 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 Madley, a brother of the cardinal of Pavia, are reported to have climbed up a ladder into the convent where Camilla was installed.

31:54Tom Holland: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. Yeah.

32:17Dominic Sandbrook:But apart from that, Lisa's life is pretty uneventful, isn't it? So as you said, Francesco, 15 years her 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. She says she 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.

32:41Tom Holland: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's lived in the whole of history, which is a kind of jaw-dropping thought.

32:55Dominic Sandbrook: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. And 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.

33:25Tom Holland:Yeah. And he 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 kind of the notion of there 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 Couldn't she be someone slightly more interesting So there have been various candidates So one of them is A woman called Pacifica Brandano And she was the mistress of The son of Lorenzo the Magnificent A guy called Giuliano de' Medici And he ends up returning to Florence, re-establishing Meditary Rule, and he's essentially the kind of the autocrat of Florence between 1513 and 1516.

34:36Tom Holland:Why does anyone think that the Mona Lisa might be this woman, Pacifica Brandano? 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. Then there's another much more famous woman who is identified with the Mona Lisa. And this is Isabella d 'Este, who was the Marquise of Mantua. And she's the most famous, the most celebrated female patron of the arts in the Renaissance. And again, there are reasons for thinking that it might be her.

35:17Tom Holland:So she was always imploring Leonardo to paint her portrait. Leonardo actually went to Mantua and made sketches of her. We've said that the backdrop to the Mona Lisa, the landscape, is fantastical. Assuming that it isn't, assuming that it is actually a portrait of somewhere in Italy, it might be the Dolomites. I mean, it's much more likely to be the Dolomites than Tuscany. And Mantua is quite near the Dolomites. 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.

35:56Dominic Sandbrook: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 Dolomites at all.

36:04Tom Holland: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 Marlowe or someone.

36:12Dominic Sandbrook:That is exactly what I thought when you started down this line. I thought this is exactly what it is people just do not want a humdrum explanation and they're groping desperately for something exotic.

36:22Tom Holland:Okay, well, let's continue with some slightly more exotic ones. So Sigmund Freud, guess who he thinks about Lisa is. Amaze me and tell me that it's not his mother. It is his mother. So Freud suggested that the smile, this famous smile, was inspired by Leonardo's childhood memories of his mother's smile. Sometimes a 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's a bloke? Salai's a bloke. Yeah.

36:59Dominic Sandbrook:Okay, this is a stretch.

37:02Tom Holland:So Salai, 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 Silvano Vincetti the reason that he advances this is that Vincetti 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 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 wasn't there who went who wanted to dig up shakespeare's body to prove that it wasn't actually shakespeare and vincetti has he's kind of he's very much on that groove because he wanted to go to the site um where lisa gerardini had been buried and to dig her up and to find her skull, use it to reconstruct her features and thereby prove that she couldn't have been the sitter in the Mona Lisa.

38:14Tom Holland: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 Vail. 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 Lillian Schwartz made a famous computer mashup of the Mona Lisa with the self-portrait of Leonardo, the 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 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 um a theory that's been proposed by top symbologist robert langdon um and he proposes that the mona lisa is an androgynous fusion of the egyptian god amun so a m o n an anagram of mona and the goddess isis aka lisa so mona lisa it's all there um and robert langdon of course is the hero of dan brown's da vinci code um and this is what dan brown has langdon say gentlemen not only does the face of mona lisa look androgynous but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female and that my friends is da vinci's little secret da vinci again and the reason for mona lisa's knowing smile god you know who says

39:52Dominic Sandbrook:this tom hanks tom hanks says it in the film a person who's been on the rest is history and 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 no and I also don't think it's half of it is Leonardo

40:17Tom Holland:da Vinci's face okay however what is undoubtedly the case is throughout the 20th century it was generally accepted by art historians that absolute 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. So to 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.

40:53Tom Holland: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 unearthed. And the brilliant thing about it, It conclusively proves who the woman portrayed in the Mona Lisa had been. And more than that, it specifies pretty precisely exactly when Leonardo had begun painting it.

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43:20Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back, everybody, to The Rest is 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.

43:34Tom Holland:Okay, so let's go to the Florentine Chancellery in October 1503, where a clerk in the chancellery is reading an edition of the letters of the great Roman orator Cicero. This is a guy called Agostino Vespucci. He's a very clever, very well-connected man. So he's a humanist scholar. And of course, humanist scholars, all they do at this point is read Cicero.

43:58Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

43:58Tom Holland:He's an assistant to Niccolò Machiavelli, famous author of political tratezes, 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 Apelles. And Cicero describes Apelles as someone who had completed with the most polished art the head and bust of Venus, but left the other part of her body inchoate.

44:43Tom Holland:Vespucci is very struck by this and he reaches for a pen and he makes a note in the margin and he writes, Apelles the painter. that is what leonardo da vinci does in all his pictures as in the head of lisa del giocondo and anne the mother of mary we will see what he will do in the hall of the great council which he has now contracted to decorate and then he dates it 1503 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.

45:25Tom Holland:And he made the discovery in 2005. And just to list what it proves, to make it clear, Vasari was absolutely right. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of Francesco del Gioconda's wife, Lisa Garrardini. Leonardo began the painting in 1503, which makes perfect sense, because as we said, in 1502, he'd been off in Rome working as chief engineer for Cesare Borgia. And in 1504, of course, he's going to start work on this great battle scene in the Florentine 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.

46:10Tom Holland:And we can even work out who might have introduced Leonardo to Francesco because Leonardo's father, Sir Piero, was Francesco's lawyer. And so I think that this clearly, in a sense, demythologizes 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 of the Mona Lisa absolutely in the context of daily life in Florence, these kind of networks of social relations that made the city run, family proud, businessmen, commissions, lawyers, all of this. So on one level, there's no mystery. However...

46:56Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, there are lots of questions, aren't there? Because for example, if he did this as a commission, why does he not hand it over and get paid for it? Why doesn't he give it to the Giacondo family?

47:07Tom Holland:Yeah, I mean, that is 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 in 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.

47:49Tom Holland:So the pose of its sitter, the lifelike quality of the portrait, the mysterious quality of the landscape, all of this combines to make it seem to people who come and see it really kind of thrilling, really innovative.

48:02Dominic Sandbrook:so that really surprises 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 but people probably didn't think it was brilliant at the time but you're telling me that's wrong and even at the time for example other renaissance painters

48:24Tom Holland:thought this is special yeah right so rafael is in florence 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 Gioconda 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 Florence.

49:03Tom Holland:He's not even in Italy. He is in France at Amboise-en-the-Loire. He dies there on the 2nd of May, 1519. And the story is that he dies in the arms of the French king, François Premier, Francis I, because Leonardo had gone to the court of Francis I 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 Francis I 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.

49:50Tom Holland:There are plenty of people who think it isn't a Leonardo, but it's now gone to Saudi Arabia rather in the way that Leonardo went to the court of Francis I. And when Leonardo dies, Francis I 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

50:20Dominic Sandbrook: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 XIII actually gives it away he well he agrees to give it away to the Duke of Buckingham with his famously long legs great favorites of James I basically buckingham's going to give him a holbein and i think a titian 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

50:49Tom Holland:such a shame because the mona lisa could have ended up in london see i think if it had ended up in london maybe it wouldn't have been such a big deal i think you're absolutely right but it is you're right that kind of for two centuries after leonardo's death the painting does go into eclipse so you know it's not showcased it's not a great treasure of the french king um in 1695 it 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 are put on display at the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris for the delectation of invited visitors.

51:34Tom Holland:So 110 paintings. The Mona Lisa is not one of those 110 paintings. So it's not even top 100.

51:41Dominic Sandbrook: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?

51:51Tom Holland: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.

52:05Dominic Sandbrook: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?

52:13Tom Holland:Yeah, French Revolution is crucial because, of course, suddenly, you know, these paintings are not stuffed away in a 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 to Napoleon's bedroom, along with a 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.

52:52Tom Holland:You know, Paris is the acknowledged capital of European high culture. and so it's in the right place now for it to start ascending the list to go up you know towards the

53:06Dominic Sandbrook:kind of the top of the pops but slower process than you would think so in 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, another Raphael at 600 ,000 francs. So by those criteria, the Mona Lisa is still relatively a minnow. Yeah.

53:37Tom Holland: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. Romantics 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 romantics love that but he's also someone who's interested in mountains and tanks and fetuses and swans and eyeballs and everything, just everything.

54:48Tom Holland:And so, you know, romantics 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 fating of Leonardo, the establishment of Leonardo as the archetype of a great genius is the absolutely necessary precondition for the fating of the Mona Lisa as the greatest painting of all time. So to quote Donald Sassoon, 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.

55:34The other one, and this is what Walter Pater is all

55:37Tom Holland:about romantics have a massive thing for for predatory females for for for femme fatale as they come to be called and there's a brilliant book which um was published way back in 1933 which covers this um it's called the romantic agony translated into english it's by an italian critic called mario praz and he writes brilliantly about how over the course of the 19th century male artists and writers become obsessed with a very distinctive vision of female beauty. And to quote Praz, tainted with pain, corruption and death. And Praz writes about how by the end of the 19th century, this beauty had become illumined with the smile of the geoconda.

56:23Tom Holland:And this is where Walter Pater 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 the English speaking world see the Mona Lisa for generations and generations. But the guys who really go big on this, unsurprisingly, since they own it, are the French. So I'll cite two writers in particular. And the first is Théophile Gautier, who was a poet, a novelist, a critic. And he is the guy who, before Peter, establishes Mona Lisa not just as an archetype of beauty, but as an eternal archetype of beauty.

57:04Tom Holland: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 Gautier, she is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. So a bit like Cleopatra there, who Cleopatra was supposed to to sleep with men and then kill them. She has the serene 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 hint there of the vampire, someone who is always beautiful, feeding off the blood of her prey.

57:38Dominic Sandbrook:People are projecting an awful lot onto Mona Lisa, aren't they? But I mean, another example, the historian Jules Michelet. She wrote 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 Vasari and to popularize it. And Michele goes even further, doesn't he? He basically says, you know, the Mona Lisa is a dominatrix. Is that too strong a dominatrix?

58:03Tom Holland:Well, you can read what he said about her. This canvas attracts me, revolts me, consumes me. And I go to her in spite of myself as the bird to 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.

58:47Tom Holland: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 is probably the most famous painting in the Louvre. probably one of 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 of August, 1911. And what happens puts the Mona Lisa on the front page of newspapers around the world. So 21st of August, 1911, it's a Monday and the Louvre is shut for cleaning.

59:32Tom Holland: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 empty frame in which it had been contained, and there is complete outrage. The director of France's museums is sacked. The Petit Parisien, which at the time was the world's largest circulation newspaper, splashed the painting on the front page together with the brilliantly caustic comment well at least we still have the frame um 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 pursuit of the of the painting which is always raking up ludicrous suspects so one of them is the famous poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who is arrested.

1:00:29Tom Holland:And Apollinaire 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 Apollinaire 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.

1:01:20Tom Holland:It's basically an admission of defeat. You know, this painting is 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 Geri 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 Offizzi, the great gallery in Florence, and he hints that he wants to do this for patriotic reasons. He does also say that he wants 500 ,000 lira 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.

1:02:04Tom Holland:So the antique dealer arranges to meet him and Leonardo, Julie arrives from Paris and Jerry and the head curator from the offizzi, asked to see the Mona Lisa. He kind of pulls the Mona Lisa out from his suitcase, unwraps it. The head curator of the offizzi 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 Vincenzo Perugia. And he was an Italian painter-decorator who had been working in the Louvre, painting the walls on the fateful Monday that the painting was stolen and he seized his chance. And he just lifted it out from his frame, hidden it under his coat, walked off across the courtyard of the Louvre.

1:02:52Tom Holland: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 his motivation, which he holds to throughout his subsequent trial, is that he was outraged that the Mona Lisa was in Paris. 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 Offizzi. So this was his motivation.

1:03:18Dominic Sandbrook:And there's no reason to doubt that he was genuinely suffused with nationalist enthusiasm, is that?

1:03:23Tom Holland:The problem is he turns out to be really boring. 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 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, both of them capital letters.

1:04:11And from that point on, the reputation of the Mona Lisa as the embodiment

1:04:16Tom Holland:of the Renaissance, of Western art, of art full stop, 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

1:04:34Dominic Sandbrook:it's she becomes the embodiment of middle brow art enthusiasm doesn't she i mean isn't that the you know 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 don't you not think yeah it's

1:04:47Tom Holland:classic fm of of art but this in turn of course i mean only um fuels her further ascent 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 obeisance 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 return and this is done by the artist Marcel Duchamp who's also very keen on urinals and he gets a postcard of the Mona Lisa and he draws a moustache and a goatee on it um and he calls it in english uses the um the letters l h o o q but dominic with your mastery of french do you want to just explain to people what that means in french

1:05:35Dominic Sandbrook:it's a tremendous example of french humor l h o o q in french is l h o q which means she is basically she's hot in the ass she's hot in the bind um so tremendous banter there from marcel

1:05:50Tom Holland:Duchamp. Outrage and consternation and of course the scandal just further amplifies the Mona Lisa's fame. Then of course there's mass reproduction 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 had been inspired to do it by the fact that in 1963, the Mona Lisa had come to America, a kind of diplomatic gift from De Gaulle to 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 of the Mona Lisa.

1:06:38Tom Holland: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, that 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 a year 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 uh the mona lisa and so the plan now this is part of uh president macron's kind of napoleonist ambitions his grand projet his uh is going to be his kind of final legacy project and he's called it the new renaissance um so the The Mona Lisa is going to be moved to an underground gallery.

1:08:07Tom Holland:It's going to be entirely exclusive to the Mona Lisa. There will be no other work of art inside it. And that is scheduled to open in 2031. So Lisa Gerardini will end up having her very own suite of rooms in the most visited museum in the world. And I think that I love it that an otherwise entirely obscure Florentine woman is so astronomically insanely famous. Such an interesting story.

1:08:40Dominic Sandbrook:And yet, I have to say, I find it quite an unbelievably uninteresting painting. But it is a fascinating story.

1:08:46Tom Holland: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

1:09:05Dominic Sandbrook: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 i'd rather look at than them only so anyway that does not in any way diminish the story which is fascinating tom merci beaucoup and arrivederci bye-bye

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