GENEVA — A younger vision of Leonardo da Vinci's “Mona Lisa” will be presented in Geneva on Thursday with the suggestion that it is the original version of what has been called the world's most famous painting.
The Swiss-based Mona Lisa Foundation organizing the event said on Wednesday that detailed research during three decades strongly indicates that it is an earlier portrayal by the Italian genius of “the lady with the mystic smile.” “We have investigated this painting from every relevant angle, and the accumulated information all points to it being an earlier version of the Giaconda in the Louvre,” said foundation member and art historian Stanley Feldman.
In Italy and France, the one recognized Leonardo “Mona Lisa” is known as “La Giaconda” or “La Joconde” after Lisa Gherardini, wife of early 16th-century Italian nobleman Francesco del Giacondo who commissioned a portrait of her.
The Irish-born Feldman and his brother David, long involved in the art world, said historical evidence, critical comparison and scientific examination using the most modern techniques supported their view on what it really is.
Cautiously backing the “two versions” thesis — which if proven would create a major sensation in the art world — are leading Italian Leonardo specialist Alessandro Vezzosi, another foundation member, and U.S.-based expert Carlo Pedretti.
Other experts on the artist who bestrode the European cultural world from the late 15th century until his death in a French chateau on the Loire at 67 in 1519, are strongly skeptical.
In a 300-page illustrated volume to be issued by the foundation on Thursday, Vezzosi, director of the Leonardo museum in the artist's hometown of Vinci in central Italy, calls on the critics to keep an open mind.
The book, “Mona Lisa-Leonardo's Earlier Version,” “will permit an unbiased judgement of the claim of this painting to be the earlier portrait of a young Mona Lisa, much younger than that of the Louvre,” Vezzosi writes.
But in comments printed last weekend in a London newspaper, Oxford University professor Martin Kemp argued that the Geneva portrait is probably a copy of the Paris version by an unknown painter who simply chose to make the subject younger.
“So much is wrong,” said Kemp, a world-recognized authority on Leonardo, pointing to the fact — among others — that the foundation's portrait is painted on canvas and not on wood, the artist's preferred medium.
