ineffably calm, steady gaze from the beautiful eyes, and the sweet, sad, forced smile, speak to you from the canvas, not of coquettishness, not of cunning, not of intrigue, but of that calm resignation born of deep sorrow, which appeals and touches the human heart, and which represents all that is great, heroic, and ennobling in life, and all that Leonardo so much admired. There is not a breath of suspicion that this genius of the ages was ever specially attracted in the vigour of his manhood by any member of the opposite sex. He admired everything beautiful in nature, in art, in man, woman and child, and we have no right to assume that in his closing years he would have been so allured by the leer of a woman as to perpetuate it for all time on his immortal canvas. This is yet another reason for believing that the Isleworth Mona Lisa is the portrait painted for the Giocondos. But whether it be or not, from the evidence I have produced, I believe there were two versions of the Mona Lisa painted—the second of which now hangs in the Louvre.
In view of the alleged loss and complete disappearance of five of Leonardo's pictures, namely, the two portraits seen by Fra Nuvolaria, the two pictures of 'two of our ladies' mentioned in the drafts of his letters, and the 'Florentine Lady' shown by him to the Cardinal of Aragon at Cloux, it is essential here to point out that Leonardo personally never lost a single picture nor a single drawing. All his pictures that were really lost can be traced to other hands after they had left the master's. But there is no trace of these five. Even some of his earliest drawings are still to the fore, in spite of the fact that they were so little valued after Melzi's death that they were left uncared for in the attic of the house of his relative, Dr. Orazio Melzi, at Vaprio,[1] and it is surprising under the circumstances that so many were saved. Of these drawings we have his landscape, in the Uffizi, dated 1473, in his own handwriting, when he was only twenty-one years old; the John the Baptist silverpoint study, 1476,[2] at Windsor; Mr. Bernhard Berenson, in his great work, 'The Drawings of the Florentine Masters,' gives the second pen sketch as 1478, 'representing the bust of an old man in profile to right and Facing him the head of a youth,' now in the Uffizi; another, the sketch of a man that was hanged in Florence
42
- ↑ 'Lelio Gavardi di Asola, tutor to the Melzi family, got thirteen volumes of Leonardo's manuscripts, and on his return to Milan offered to return them to Dr. Melzi, who, astonished at his solicitude, pave him them, informing him at the same time that "there were many other drawings by Leonardo lying uncared for in the attics of his villa at Vaprio."'. 'Leonardo's Note-books,' p. 30, McCurdy.
- ↑ Dr. Thiis (p. 40).
