had remained on in the possession of the painter, why set a limit of four years and declare it was then unfinished? Moreover, why should Vasari say the work was unfinished while it was still in Leonardo's hands, or if he kept it with him for five, six, or seven years, why stipulate that it was unfinished after four years? But this period of four years just brings us to the year 1505, in which Leonardo took a journey to Rome,[1] and it is only reasonable to assume that before departing for the capital, he would have given the picture, unfinished though it were, to his friend[2] Giocondo, for whom he had painted it as a great favour, and whose wife had gone to the trouble of giving him several sittings. Moreover, would not Giocondo have been anxious to get his wife's portrait; would not the wife herself have been even more so, and would they both not have induced the painter to give it to them, had he shown any hesitation to hand over the portrait they had commissioned?
Then again, for what reason would Vasari have volunteered a deliberate lie by stating that the portrait was unfinished if it were not so? There was nothing to be gained by any one or anything in making such a false statement, and it must have been a fact, not a fiction, related to him by some one who knew. Vasari had never seen the painting—nor the painter—when he wrote his book; the Louvre version had long been in France in the King's collection, as he stated, 'at Fontainebleau.' He had never been in France, and he was only four years old when Leonardo left Italy, and seven years old when he died. Moreover, had he known at the time that he was writing his life of Leonardo, that the Mona Lisa, then hanging in the King's collection at Fontainebleau, was one of the most highly finished[3] pictures in that collection, he would not have made himself ridiculous to posterity by describing it as unfinished. He must have got his information in Florence, and from some one who was well acquainted with Leonardo from 1500 to 1506; for, strange to say, Vasari does not deal with the life of the master
13
- ↑ 'The first interruption of his work was his journey to Rome in 1505.' Rosenberg's Monograph (p. 112).
- ↑ 'Her husband was Leonardo's most devoted friend. It was only for friendship that he would have undertaken to paint her, for he could have obtained orders without number if he had been willing to work for money. Even Louis XII could not obtain a portrait from him.' 'The Midsummer of Italian Art,' by F. R. Stearns, New York, 1895.
- ↑ 'What must have been the perfection of the ideal that floated in the master's brain, if he held such a finished masterpiece to be incomplete?' (Müntz, vol. 2, p. 158.) 'We do not understand how Leonardo, the restless, reckless seeker after truth, could say also of this work that it was unfinished.' (Rosenberg, p. 115.) 'Of all his pictures it is carried farthest in degree of finish, and Vasari 's statement as to its incompleteness can only mean that Leonardo was still unsatisfied, that he never gave it what were designedly the last touches.' (McCurdy's 'Life of Leonardo,' p. 114.)
