But the two portraits mentioned by Fra Nuvolaria, what became of them? Müntz declares: 'What they were is unknown.'[1] Surely this seems incredible in the light of Vasari's record, and, though they are supposed to have completely disappeared, I think they are as traceable as is the Saint Anne. Let us see what the first great Art historian, Vasari, says about them; but, unfortunately, he is not always quite accurate about details. His description of the St. Anne includes features of the Paris Picture, as well as the London Cartoon, showing that his informant had seen both.[2] Then he distinctly states:—
- 'This Cartoon was subsequently taken to France. Leonardo then painted the portrait of Ginevra, the wife of Amerigo Benci, a most beautiful thing, and abandoned the Commission (the St. Anne) entrusted to him by the Servite Monks, who once more confided it to Filippino. . . . For Francesco del Giocondo, Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, but after loitering[3] over it for four years, he finally left it unfinished. This work is now in the possession of King Francis I and is at Fontainebleau.'
This statement, written fifty years later, corroborates Fra Nuvolaria's to the effect that the St. Anne and two portraits were painted simultaneously. Yet Vasari could not have seen Fra Nuvolaria's letter.
But here we have the two portraits distinctly specified by Vasari as being—the Benci and the Mona Lisa—painted at the same time as Leonardo was drawing the cartoon of the St. Anne; but he was quite wrong in describing one as that of the wife of Amerigo Benci, since that lady died in 1473, nearly thirty years previously.[4] The second, Vasari states, was the Mona Lisa, which
8
- ↑ Müntz (vol. 2, p. 124).
- ↑ Müntz says: 'When Leonardo returned to Milan to reside there, he naturally carried his cartoon—perhaps his two cartoons—with him.' (Vol. 2, p. 125.)
- ↑ Vasari's 'Lives of the Most Eminent Painters,' etc. (vol. 2, p. 316). Edited by E. H. and E. W. Blashfield and A. A. Hopkins. Vasari's word is 'penatovi,' which Mr. Gaston D. C. de Vere, in the latest edition published this year of Vasari's 'lives,' translates as ' toiling.' Müntz translated it as ' assiduous labour.'
- ↑ Müntz draws attention to this error in his life of Leonardo (vol. 2, p. 159). That Leonardo did paint a portrait of Ginevra Benci, as Vasari states, may be true. Müntz says: 'Of late years a learned critic of Tuscan Art, Signor Ridolfi, has questioned Vasari's statement upon the following grounds. Ginevra di Amerigo Benci was born in 1457, she married Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini in 1473, and died the same year. Leonardo, then, must have painted her picture before he went to Milan, and not after his return to Florence. He painted her, in fact, as Vasari asserts, while she was still a child, ' quando era una fanciulla e bellissima' (vol. 2, p. 159). De Piles, in his short biographical sketch to his translation of Leonardo's 'Treatise on Painting,' published in Paris in 1716, describes it as a portrait of her daughter: 'et celui de la fille d'Americ Bencis c'etoit une jeune enfant, d'une beaute1 charmants, cette Flore qui a un air si noble et si gracieux, fut achevée en ce temps la, elle est aujourd'hui a Paris.' This is wrong, for the daughter would be twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old in 1501.
