when Leonardo did write that he was painting two pictures of the Virgin in 1478, he wrote 'jeomicai le 2 vergini Marie.'[1]
Mrs. Heaton, in her life of Leonardo, p. 52, says:—
- 'The Mona Lisa has been supposed[2] to be one of the two to which Leonardo refers in his letter to Marshal de Chaumont. As, however, these pictures were clearly painted for the French King, it appears quite as likely that they were Madonna pictures as that they were portraits of Florentine beauties, especially as "Nostre Donne" is written with capitals' (sic).
I have taken the three sentences from Jean Paul Richter's very able work of Leonardo's manuscripts (which he copied faithfully from the originals), and I see no such capitals in it.
Then again, what became of these two pictures, which Leonardo himself refers to in these draft letters? Richter, in his life of the master (p. 95), says: 'There is no evidence to show that both or even one of these paintings became the property of Louis XII, nor can we identify them with the two undoubtedly genuine Madonnas by Leonardo in the Louvre.' Now might not these two pictures—'due quadri di due nostre donne de varie grandezze'—be the unfinished St. Anne and one of the portraits mentioned by Fra Nuvolaria in his letter of 1501, that which Vasari erroneously described as Ginevra Benci?[3]
Leonardo made a point of describing them as of different sizes, which is most significant, and would completely answer the description of the St. Anne and the second version of the Mona Lisa, the former being a large picture and the latter portrait, in comparison, a small one. It is incredible that the two portraits mentioned by Fra Nuvolaria, as well as the two pictures for Louis XII, which we are told were known to have existed, should have completely disappeared, leaving no trace behind them, and they are in no way accounted for in any of the records of Leonardo's life. But the riddle is at once solved if we accept the not only possible, but very feasible theory that the two pictures mentioned in these letters were the unfinished St. Anne and the unfinished second version of Mona Lisa, which remained together with Leonardo; and in 1511, when pressed by Louis XII for pictures, being then his salaried Court Painter, he resolved to finish them and give them to the King, and in his letter to Marshal Chaumont described them as 'due quadri di due nostre donne di varie grandezze.' But, as usual, he never sent them, and
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