Update on the Mona Lisa

Prado Copy of the Mona Lisa

The Art Newspaper has a good update on the Mona Lisa and the early copy at the Prado.  Based upon the background image, it is being reported the Mona Lisa was actually painted a decade later that what was originally thought.  The Louvre dates the Mona Lisa to 1503-06, but the Prado copy reveals a background which was based upon a drawing done by Leonardo between 1510 and 1515.

Of course with the date change comes more complications and changes to what is known about Leonardo, such as his early and late styles, his clients and the amount of time it took him to complete his work.

The Art Newspaper reports

The link between the drawing and the landscape in the Madrid copy was spotted by the Prado’s technical specialist, Ana González Mozo. This emerged during an investigation of the background in the copy, which had been overpainted in black in the second half of the 18th century. The overpaint was removed earlier this year.

When the Prado copy was being studied, infrared images revealed that a section of the original design for the rocks beneath the paint surface had been based on a drawing now in the Royal Collection. Martin Clayton, the senior curator at the Windsor print room, dates the drawing to 1510-15 on stylistic grounds.

The Prado copy of the Mona Lisa was worked on side by side with the Louvre painting, so this connection has important implications for the dating of Leonardo’s original.

Louvre specialists went back to photographs taken of the original Mona Lisa in 2004. They realised that the design for part of the rocks on the right side in the Prado copy also appears in the underdrawing of the original, in a blurred form. This can just be made out in an emissiograph, an image made using an x-ray technique.

It is known that Leonardo had begun the Mona Lisa by 1503, since that year it was recorded in a note by a senior Florentine official, Agostino Vespucci. What remains controversial is the date of its completion.

The German scholar Frank Zöllner proposed “1506 and later (1510?)” in the 2011 edition of his Leonardo catalogue. Martin Kemp, from Oxford University, suggested 1516 in his 2004 book on Leonardo. When the Prado unveiled the conserved copy of the Mona Lisa on 21 February, it also gave 1516 for its version. It was in 1516 that Leonardo left Rome for France, to serve François I.

Source:The Art Newspaper