in any other way. But to acquiesce in such a conclusion one should be endowed with a credulity to be found nowhere outside the realms of Utopia.
No, Leonardo never lost these five pictures. The two portraits seen by Fra Nuvolaria were the two versions of the Mona Lisa; one of which went to the sitter's husband, Francesco del Giocondo, before 1506, and remained in his possession until his death in 1528, when the turbulent times had already set in for Florence which ended in the famous siege in 1530. Is it surprising that in the terrible con fusion and distraction of such a catastrophe, the unfinished Mona Lisa portrait should have been completely lost sight of and have passed for many years into oblivion? When discovered, it may naturally have been treated as a copy, since Vasari, the first writer on the subject, presumed there was but the one version, the finished —though he described it as unfinished from what he had heard in Florence—picture that had gone into the collection of Francis I. Whereas the Mona Lisa that did go into the King's collection was the other unfinished version that had remained on with the master, with the unfinished St. Anne, and they were both finished at Cloux. The two pictures of 'two of our ladies' referred to in Leonardo's draft letters in 1511, and described by him as 'of different sizes,' were far more likely to have been these two unfinished pictures, than two finished paintings lost later by Leonardo, who, we have seen, never lost a picture. The 'Florentine Lady' shown to the Cardinal of Aragon at Cloux must have been this second Mona Lisa, finished, and shown with the all but finished St. Anne, and the St. John, that had been also painted here at Cloux, all three of which passed later into the collection of Francis I and are now in the Louvre. This is quite a simple and probable solution of the mystery surrounding the supposed five lost pictures.
In conclusion, I cannot help referring to the strange fact that most of Leonardo's biographers have treated so cavalierly and indifferently the most important contemporary evidence we have in the life of the master, to wit: the Nuvolaria letters; the Raphael study from the Mona Lisa; the famous interview at Cloux; and the very significant passage in his will; while they have nearly all seized, with journalistic alacrity, upon the illusive and sensational item of the price supposed to have been paid by Francis I for the Mona Lisa now in the Louvre.
I think, however, I may fairly claim to have shown: that on the evidence of Fra Nuvolaria two Mona Lisas could have been com menced by Leonardo in Florence in 1501, and that this was so is proved by the contingent circumstances and evidence I have pro-
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