667. The Mystery of the Mona Lisa

Summary

The Rest Is History – Episode 667: The Mystery of the Mona Lisa
Date: May 6, 2026
Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook

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Episode Overview

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook embark on a deep and entertaining exploration of the world’s most famous painting: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. This episode traces the enigmatic portrait’s origins, the myriad myths and theories that have surrounded it for centuries, its fluctuating reputation through history, and the seismic cultural events that propelled it to international superstardom. The hosts dissect competing theories about the model’s identity, the painting's astonishing journey, and why its fame continues to dwarf that of any other artwork. With characteristic wit, literary flourishes, and an impressive range of historical detail, Tom and Dominic render the Mona Lisa’s story every bit as captivating as the painting itself.

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1. Why the Mona Lisa Is "The" Iconic Painting (03:01–07:47)

• Setting the Stage with Walter Pater’s Prose: Dominic reads a lush passage by Victorian art critic Walter Pater, which famously immortalized the painting’s sense of mystery and allure.

  • “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…” (03:01 – Dominic quoting Pater)

• Tom's Initial Take:

  • Tom admits to once taking the Mona Lisa for granted, noting that overexposure had “anesthetized” him to its beauty (05:44).
  • The painting’s continuous failed attempts at reproduction help explain its fame, as its unique quality, described as "sfumato," defies copying.

• The Rise to Ubiquity:

  • The piece did not become truly famous until photography (by the 1880s) made its image easily reproducible, thus spreading the "Mona Lisa effect" worldwide (06:28–07:47).

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2. Dissecting the Painting's Mystique (07:47–12:35)

• Unremarkable at First Glance?

  • Dominic suggests that the Mona Lisa initially appears less nuanced than, say, Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
    • "At first glance...there’s nothing remarkable about it” (07:47 – Dominic)

• Tom’s Guided Visual Analysis:

  • Walks through the painting’s physical features—Lisa’s pose, pale face, lack of eyebrows, mysterious smile, and the fantastical, barren landscape behind—noting the unusual technique of "sfumato" or "smokiness."

• The Smile and Its Mysteries:

  • The hosts agree her expression’s ambiguity is crucial to her enduring fascination (09:23–11:32).
  • Cites Martin Kemp’s brilliant description of "sfumato": “the paradox of a precisely rendered indefiniteness.” (10:57 – Tom quoting Kemp)
  • Hegel on Mona Lisa: "Nowhere is there any harsh or sharp line. Transition is everywhere. Light and shadow shine into one another…” (11:33 – Tom quoting Hegel)

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3. Theories, Symbols, and Why We Care (12:35–14:40)

• Psychoanalyzing the Smile:

  • Dominic: "It’s the weak smile of someone who's heard a joke about the Kaiser a thousand times." (12:35)

• Symbol, Code, or Con?

  • Tom details the painting’s shift, post-19th-century, into the realm of conspiracy, hidden codes, and the “sacred feminine” as peddled in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (13:15).

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4. Origins: Who, When, and Why? (14:40–26:31)

• Is It Famous Purely Because of the Mystery?

  • The hosts debate whether the painting’s myth eclipses its aesthetic value (14:40–15:04).

• Known Facts and Debates

  • The artist’s identity is certain—Leonardo da Vinci.
    • Dominic corrects a common misconception: “Da Vinci is not his surname. Da Vinci just means from Vinci…” (16:39)
  • Tom recounts Leonardo’s biography: his rise, Florentine roots, polymathic skills, and reputation for not finishing commissions (17:00–24:40).

• Timeline of Creation

  • The Mona Lisa was begun during or shortly after Leonardo’s return to Florence—sometime between 1503 and possibly as late as 1512 (24:54–25:19).

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5. Who Was Mona Lisa? The Identity Debate (26:31–42:06)

• Primary Candidate: Lisa Gherardini, Wife of Francesco del Giocondo

  • The earliest surviving identification is by Giorgio Vasari, stating “Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Mona Lisa.” (25:59–26:31)
  • Extensive background provided on Lisa and her “upwardly mobile” husband (28:35–33:11).
    • Tom: “Lisa is from an ancient Tuscan family that ranked as one of the original founders of the Florentine republic. So a tremendous aristocratic pedigree.”

• Alternate Theories

  • Some suggest it’s a generic woman, a mistress (Pacifica Brandano), the renowned Isabella d’Este, or various other notorious figures. (34:41–36:42)
  • Speculation that the painting might not be of a real person at all, but an idealized fusion of attributes.

• Freud’s "Mother" Theory & Other Curiosities

  • Freud said the smile was inspired by Leonardo’s mother (37:00–37:13).
  • Another theory proposes Leonardo’s male apprentice and presumed lover, Salai, as the model—based on supposed facial similarities (37:26–38:16).
  • Other wild ideas include the Mona Lisa being a self-portrait of Leonardo, or an androgynous symbol, as in Dan Brown’s symbology: “her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da Vinci’s little secret.” (40:22 – Tom quoting ‘Robert Langdon’)

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6. The Evidence Breakthrough: Who She Really Was (42:06–45:59)

• Bombshell Discovery (42:06–44:11)

  • In 2005, a marginal note by Florentine chancellery clerk Agostino Vespucci was discovered, directly linking Leonardo to “the head of Lisa del Giocondo” in October 1503.
    • “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…” (43:47 – Tom quoting Vespucci’s note)
  • This confirms Leonardo painted Lisa Gherardini; the painting was begun in 1503.

• Implications

  • Demythologizes the portrait: it’s a “proud businessman’s wife,” not a muse, lover, or symbol (44:12–45:59).
  • Raises new questions—why did Leonardo not deliver the commission or receive payment? Speculations: he wanted to keep it as a calling card, a masterpiece he couldn’t part with, or an unfinished work.

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7. Reception at the Time and Inheritance (47:05–52:10)

• Initial Reception Among Contemporaries

  • Even then, the painting’s innovative pose, sfumato, and ambiguous smile made it a marvel, inspiring fellow artists such as Raphael (47:05–47:29).

• How It Became French Property

  • Leonardo died in France, where King Francis I acquired the Mona Lisa, making it part of the French royal collection (48:09–49:22).

• Relative Obscurity for Centuries

  • From the 17th to early 19th centuries, the painting was not especially revered—sometimes hung in minor corridors, not listed among the top treasures of Versailles or the Louvre (49:51–50:44).

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8. From Royal Possession to Global Fame (51:09–56:41)

• Shift After the French Revolution

  • With the Louvre opened to the public, the Mona Lisa became accessible but still wasn’t considered the museum’s crown jewel—valued less than works by Raphael or Titian as late as 1852 (52:10–52:39).

• The Power of Romanticism

  • In the 19th century, changing tastes—worship of genius, love of the mysterious and incomplete—helped elevate Leonardo’s reputation as the archetype of a “universal genius,” and by association, the Mona Lisa as the “universal woman” (53:11–54:41).
  • Literary figures such as Theophile Gautier and Jules Michelet ramp up the mythos: “She is always there, smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers…” (55:44-56:41).

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9. The Heist That Sealed Her Iconic Status (56:41–62:21)

• Theft from the Louvre (1911–1913)
  • In August 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian nationalist working as a decorator at the Louvre.
  • The world is transfixed by the story—huge crowds come to see the empty frame (57:06–62:21).
  • The painting is recovered from Florence and paraded, cementing its superstar status. It is now universally "she" rather than "it".

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10. The Modern Era: Icon, Parody, and Tourism (62:21–67:42)

• Post-Theft Fame

  • Mona Lisa becomes the destination at the Louvre and a byword for high culture—yet also increasingly seen as "middlebrow" or “Classic FM of art.”
    • “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.” (63:37 – Dominic)

• Parody and Mass Reproduction

  • Marcel Duchamp parodies the painting with “L.H.O.O.Q.” postcard, giving her a moustache and a bawdy French title (64:38–64:54).
  • Andy Warhol’s replication and her international tours (America in 1963, Japan in 1974) turbocharge her global celebrity.

• Ultimate Tourist Destination

  • Dedicated rooms, vast security, and ongoing plans—Macron’s ‘Grand Projet’—to give the Mona Lisa an exclusive, underground gallery by 2031. (66:19–66:49)
  • Tom: “…an otherwise entirely obscure Florentine woman is so astronomically insanely famous.” (67:41)

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11. Ending Reflections (67:42–68:09)

• Dominic: Remains a skeptic about the painting’s artistic merit but concedes the story is “fascinating.”
• Tom: Argues there’s an “infinite” capacity for interpretation—every generation finds something new.
  • “I think the more I trace the history… the more you can see that… it is kind of infinite in the ways that it can be interpreted and seen.” (67:49 – Tom)

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Notable Quotes

• “She is older than the rocks among which she sits. Like the vampire…”
  — Walter Pater, read by Dominic (03:01)

• “It’s a painting that is a lot more interesting than I thought. I think basically I’ve kind of been anesthetized to its beauty.”
  — Tom (05:44)

• “The paradox of a precisely rendered indefiniteness.”
  — Martin Kemp, quoted by Tom (10:57)

• “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.”
  — Tom on the Vespucci marginalia (42:51)

• “Not a portrait of Leonardo in drag, not his mother, not the sacred feminine… we can set the commissioning of the Mona Lisa absolutely in the context of daily life in Florence.”
  — Tom (44:46)

• “She is always there, smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers.”
  — Gautier, quoted by Tom (55:44)

• “It’s a classic FM of art.”
  — Tom (63:49)

• “Such an interesting story. And yet I have to say, I find it quite an unbelievably uninteresting painting. But it is a fascinating story.”
  — Dominic (67:42)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:01 – Walter Pater’s famous prose/setting the theme.
• 07:47 – Why the painting seems unremarkable at first glance.
• 10:57 – Sfumato and the mystery of the smile explained.
• 16:39 – Clarifying Leonardo’s name (not “da Vinci”).
• 25:59 – Vasari’s identification of the sitter as Lisa Gherardini.
• 32:09 – The convent scandal involving Lisa’s daughter.
• 42:06 – The Vespucci evidence solving the identity mystery.
• 47:05 – Raphael and contemporaries’ reactions to the painting.
• 49:51 – The painting’s low status among French royals.
• 52:39 – 19th-century valuation in the Louvre.
• 56:41 – The 1911 theft that made Mona Lisa world famous.
• 64:38 – Duchamp’s parody; modern art’s embrace and parody.
• 66:49 – Macron’s “New Renaissance,” plans for Mona Lisa’s own gallery.

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In Summary

Tom and Dominic peel back the layers of myth, scholarship, nationalism, and pop-culture reinterpretation that make the Mona Lisa an unparalleled global icon. They reveal how her fame is a complex product of changing values, new technologies, cultural movements, crime, and—only partly—Leonardo’s original artistry. Whether a “timeless femme fatale” or, as the hosts mischievously propose, a “Classic FM of art,” the Mona Lisa remains a bottomless source of cultural fascination.

Transcript

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 moulded 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 spirit, ambition and imaginative loves. The return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. 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 trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. And as Leda was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as St. Anne the mother of Mary. And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments 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 femme fatale. A woman into whom is poured certainly, according to Walter Pater, every woman who has ever existed. Beautiful, mysterious, exotic, erotic and dangerous. Well, I say a woman. He'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. Are you a fan?

[Tom Holland]

Well, I've always taken it so for granted that I wouldn't really have called myself a fan. Its fame is, and of itself such a fascinating thing that that's what prompted me to think that this might be a good topic for the rest is history. But having plunged into the deep waters of the Mona Lisa's history and explored the rocks that are older than time among which he sits, I am now definitely a F, yes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, tremendous.

[Tom Holland]

It's a painting that is a lot more interesting than, than I had thought. I mean, I think basically I've kind of been anesthetized 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 a painting, don't you? But it's, 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, of English literature. He wrote that in 1869, back when he wrote that the Mona Lisa was not remotely as 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 of clear boundaries. But there's a quality to the Mona Lisa which seems to defy reproduction. It's actually very, very hard to reproduce. And this wasn't for want of trying. People have been trying 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's, it, you know, it doesn't get its essence at all. Then they, in going 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 kind of 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 recognisable painting. I would say there's no doubt about it at all. It is the most recognisable painting that has ever been in the whole of history.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And yet at first glance, well, I mean, 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 is History Club miniseries in law are coming. A painting like Las Meninas by Balafquez 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.

[Tom Holland]

Before we get into that, we should just describe it for the three people, perhaps in the world who've never seen it. So there's something distinctive about her pose. Distinctive, certainly when. When. When it was painted. So she's kind of sitting in profile, but she's. 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, kind of. 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 jewellery, 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 we'll be coming to that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, people go on about that, but, I mean, I don't even think it really is much of a smile. If someone looked at me like that and said, I'm smiling at you, I'd be like, are you really?

[Tom Holland]

That is part of the mystery, is 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 a kind of human physical presence. There's a winding road and there's an arched bridge crossing a river.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Tom, I commend you for this because you made me look at the painting already in a new way. I've never even noticed the background, to be honest with you.

[Tom Holland]

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 famato, as smoky. And the effect of this is brilliantly described by certainly the leading British expert on the Mona Lisa, who is Martin Kemp, who isn't the bassist from Spandau Ballet. Not him. I think he's the professor of art at Oxford or something, you know, you're an Oxford doctorate.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he actually is the same person.

[Tom Holland]

So Martin Kempe describes the effect of sfumato as being the paradox of a precisely rendered indefiniteness. So it's, it's not precise. I mean, there's a sense of kind of. 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 Hegel. And he was lecturing in the 1820s on the Renaissance.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Great Hegel in the show.

[Tom Holland]

Great to have Hegel back. So he wrote, here is evident a supreme rounding. Nowhere is there 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 there 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?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

See, to me, you know, I recognise that smile straight away. It's the weak smile of somebody who's heard a joke about the Kaiser a thousand times. And it's thinking, I should never have come to this. Rest is history get together. This is awful.

[Tom Holland]

Well, you see, there is the power of the sfumato, 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 notion of her as, you know, a 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 lurk just beyond human comprehension. And this is an idea that, of course, is still going incredibly strong. And friend of the show, Dan Brown. Yeah, he's notoriously all over it. So in the Da Vinci Code, the Mona Lisa, he says, embodies the sacred feminine. And in the, in the, in, in the plot of the Da Vinci Code, the Mona Lisa is in the, the Louvre behind its stained glass window. And a clue is found written in blood on this stained glass window. And even though the, the Mona Lisa 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's 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 kind of codes and ancient mysteries.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 murk 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?

[Tom Holland]

I mean, I think that is the big question. And let's come to that later so we'll, we'll kind of explore what it is that has made the Mona Lisa as famous as it is. And I think it's really interesting because it, it tells us a lot about the, of how conceptions of culture have evolved over the centuries, and particularly perhaps in the 20th century. Your second question. I mean, 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 kind of pretty basic questions that have been furiously debated for centuries and centuries and centuries.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But not unusual questions. No, tomorrow, not unusual questions. I mean, these are the questions that people ask about all kinds of Renaissance paintings, don't they?

[Tom Holland]

Absolutely.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You know, who painted it, why, when, where, who's the sitter, all of that kind of thing.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

However, there is one thing that we absolutely do know about the painting and that of course is the identity of the person who painted it. And even Dan Brown gets that right because it's there in the title of his book. It's Leonardo.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Although he gets the name wrong. He gets the name wrong because Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci. I mean, I can't believe there are 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. Like if Dan, if Dan Brown wrote a book about you and he called it the From Salisbury code. Yeah, exactly.

[Tom Holland]

So Leonardo da Vinci, we know that he paints it and he of course is one of the great figures of European culture. An 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. He works in his workshop, he qualifies as a master, and he is recognized even in Florence, which is a city. I mean, it's the archetype of a great center of culture, Renaissance Florence, as a man of really stupefying talent. And what strikes people as stupefying 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 elites in Florence at the time, which, Dominic we've, we've done a series on. And this is the Medici and specifically Lorenzo the Magnificent, the, the guy who serves in the popular imagination as the archetype of The Florentine patrons of great art.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Lorenzo took him up, didn't he, and used him as, among other things, as a. As a kind of ambassador and. But also as a kind of gift. So he sends him to Ludovico Schwarzer, who's the Duke of Milan. Florence's relations with Milan enormously important in this period. And Schwarzer, who's a patron of the arts himself, is very taken with Leonardo, doesn't he? And Leonardo basically ends up working for Schwarzer for about almost 20 years. 18 years.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, 18 years in all. So by 1500, Leonardo is returning from. From Milan via Venice to Florence. He's done pretty well for himself in Milan, so he's. He's famous as. As a great painter. He's. 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 Sforza's young mistress, Cecilia Gallerani. And she is shown rather coyly, kind of fondling an ermine. Yeah, and Tabby's favorite picture, I think.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think so, yeah. She loves fondling and ermine.

[Tom Holland]

But the.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The other thing about Leonardo is that he's. 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, defences and things like this. I mean, your claim about him being a polymath is well borne out by all this.

[Tom 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 canals and everything. Absolutely. And that essentially is why Swartzer loved him. I mean, the ability to paint his mistress fondling and ermine 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 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 center of Florence for a year.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So.

[Tom Holland]

So Leonardo, you know, he's. He's done well for himself.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But what did you say this was? 1500. So 1500. 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 Savonarola. 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. Schwarz 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 adrift, doesn't it? He needs a new patron because he doesn't have the military, he doesn't have Schwarzer.

[Tom 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 Giorgio Vasari, 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. They need to turn it into artillery to try and stop the French. 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 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 is 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. So that, you know, that adds a certain quality of mystery to it.

[Dominic 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.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So that's in 1502 through the, to the early months of 1503.

[Dominic 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.

[Tom 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.

[Dominic 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.

[Tom 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, if we estimate that the amount of space that Vasari gives to an artist is a reflection of how much he is steam sea artist, then Michelangelo's number one, then Raphael, then Giotto, much earlier painter of course, and then Leonardo. So Leonardo is number four, pretty good podium.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean one of them is not getting a medal.

[Tom Holland]

Leonardo not Quite podiuming there, is he? He's just missed bronze.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom 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 Ma Donna 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 Gioconda, 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. Giacondo La Gioconda. But Gioconda and Giocond, they mean in Italian and French respectively, kind of happy, cheerful, joyous. And Vasari implies in his life of Leonardo that Leonardo leaned into this punishment 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.

[Dominic 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?

[Tom 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 her husband? What's going on there?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, he's literally called Mr. Happy, but isn't he?

[Tom Holland]

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. 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 Giocondo himself then expands into silks, into money lending and into sugar. So this is the, the early days of the Atlantic sugar economy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

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 showing her teeth. And that's one of the clues to

[Dominic Sandbrook]

the mystery of the smile that's really trying too hard. But this is a very familiar Florentine journey. You start like the Medici did, you make money in one thing, then you move into, I mean, 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 a lot of his money into land, doesn't he? So especially now that the war has 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.

[Tom Holland]

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 Gherardini, because Lisa Gherardini 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, is not a good businessman. He's running short of money, he needs money. And so he essentially sells Lisa to Francesco and, you know, it's, it, 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, will end up outliving him. And I think that although the, 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, she 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 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And that's what they do with camilla. And in 1512, four men, including, madly, a brother of the Cardinal of Pavia, are 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. 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. 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 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,

[Tom 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. A kind of jaw dropping thought. Wow.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. And he keeps. Seems to have kept the painting with him until he died. We've got that landscape, which is. 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

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 Medici rule. And he's essentially the kind of the autocrat of Florence between 1513 and 1516. Why does anyone think that the Mona Lisa might be this, 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 Renaiss. 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 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.

[Dominic 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 they're Dolomites at all.

[Tom 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That is exactly what I thought when I. 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.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, well, let's continue with some slightly more exotic ones. So Sigmund Freud, guess who he thinks,

[Dominic Sandbrook]

amaze me and tell me that it's not his mother.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Sometimes a smile is just a smile, Sigmund.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Hold on, Salai's a bloke.

[Tom Holland]

Salai's a bloke, yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay, that's a. This is a stretch.

[Tom Holland]

So Salai is, you know, he. 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 Vincenti. 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. 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 in your head while you're doing it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right, yeah. Good luck doing that in the Louvre.

[Tom Holland]

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 Vecchetti has. He's kind of. He's very much on that groove because he wanted to go to the site where Lisa Gherardini 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 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 Schwarz 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 the, 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 symbologist Robert Langdon. And he proposes that the Mona Lisa is an androgynous fusion of the Egyptian God Amon. 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 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. Secret Da Vinci again. And the reason for Mona Lisa's knowing smile. God.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You know who says 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.

[Tom Holland]

So are you convinced by any of those?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 is Leonardo da Vinci's.

[Tom Holland]

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. 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Crikey, 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 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.

[Tom 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 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. 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 Apelles. 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. 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 is now contracted to decorate. And then he dates it. 1503, October.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Whoa.

[Tom Holland]

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 Schleichter, 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, Vasari was absolutely right. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of Francesco del Gioconda's wife, Lisa Gherardini. 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. And we can even work out who might have introduced Leonardo to Francesco, because Leonardo's father, Ser Piero, was Francesco's lawyer. And so I think that this clearly, in a sense, demythologises 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, there are lots of questions on 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 Gcondo family?

[Tom 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. 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. 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.

[Dominic 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 thought this is special.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So Raphael is in Florence at the time when Leonard 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 Florence, he's not even in Italy. He is in France, at Amboise on 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, Francois 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 Mohammed bin Salman, the strong man of Saudi Arabia, paid an obscene amount of money for the Salvator Mundi, this painting that has been attributed to Leonardo. There are, you know, 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 the First. 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 XIII actually gives it away. 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 gonna 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.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, it's such a shame because Simona Lisa could have ended up in London.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

See, I think if it had ended up in London, maybe it wouldn't have been such a big deal.

[Tom Holland]

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. 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 are put on display at the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris for the delectation of invited visitors. So 110 paintings. The Mona Lisa is not one of those 110 paintings. So it's not even top hundred.

[Dominic 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?

[Tom Holland]

That is because Renaissance painting goes out of fashion. There isn't a category of Renaissance painting at that point. And Leonardo's lustre has dimmed. The posthumous reputation of Leonardo is also bound up with the kind of. The decline in the value of the Mona Lisa.

[Dominic 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? Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

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. 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 kind of the.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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, another Raphael at 600,000 francs. So by those criteria, the Mona Lisa is still relatively a minnow.

[Tom Holland]

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. 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. 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 fainting 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 around. 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 Walter Pater is all about, Romantics have a massive thing for. For predatory females, for. For fame fatale, as they come to be called. And there's a brilliant book which was published way back in 1933, which covers this. It's called the Romantic Agony, translated into English, it's by an Italian critic called Mario Pras, 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 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 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, it, 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, two writers in particular, and the first is Theophile Gautier, who was a poet, a novelist, a critic, and he is the guy who, before Pater, 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 Gauthier, 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

People are projecting an awful lot onto Mona Lisa, aren't they? But, 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, say it's a dominator. Is that too strong? A dominatrix?

[Tom 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 parlors 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 Mon 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 21st 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. 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. 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 Clouseau 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. And Apollinaire and a friend of his who is an up and coming Spanish painter resident in Paris at the time, called Pablo Picass 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. 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 Uffizi, 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, he's, he's Italian and he's doing this for patriotic reasons. So the antique dealer arranges to meet him. And Leonardo duly arrives from Paris. And Jerry and the head curator from the Uffizi ask to see the Mona Lisa. He kind of pulls the Mona Lisa out from his suitcase, unwraps it. The head curator of the Uffizi 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 Peruggia. 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. 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 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 Uffizi. So this was his motivation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And there's no reason to doubt that he was genuinely suffused with kind of nationalist enthusiasm, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

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, both of them, 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 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

She becomes the embodiment of middlebrow 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 that wall, you kind of think, you don't really know much about art.

[Tom Holland]

Don't you not think, yeah, it's a classic FM of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of art.

[Tom Holland]

But this in turn, of course, I mean, it only 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 and he calls it in English, uses the. 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?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's a tremendous example of French humour. L, H, O O Q in French is L a chaux au que, which means she is basically, she's hot in the arse, she's hot in the behind. So tremendous banter there from Marcel Duchamp.

[Tom Holland]

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. 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. 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 9 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, it now has its own dedicated room, it's got its own kind of, 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, of gather around the Mona Lisa. And so the plan now, this is part of President Macron's kind of Napoleonist ambitions, his grand projer. His is going to be his kind of final legacy project. And he's called it the New Renaissance. So the Mona Lisa is going to be moved to an underground gallery. 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, in 2031. So Lisa Gherardini 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Such an interesting story. And yet I have to say, I find it quite an unbelievably uninteresting painting. But it is a fascinating story.

[Tom Holland]

I think the more I, 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 the mainly. So anyway, that does not in any way diminish the story, which is fascinating. Tom. Merci beaucoup. And arrived at Bye bye.