EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Is the Mona Lisa Leonardo’s male lover?

“Groundless” grumped Pietro Marani, a Leonardo authority, about a new theory offered from outside his field. He was responding as academics do to the report of an Italian researcher, Silvano Vinceti, on how several of Leonardo’s works, including two paintings of St. John the Baptist, were based on Leonardo’s young male lover, Salai. Vinceti believes Salai was the model for all of them.¹ He is right about the similarities but wrong about the model.

Several months ago I reported in Leonardo’s Faces that St. John the Baptist and St. Anne (above) have identical features in separate paintings by Leonardo. Not just similar, but identical. Leonardo disguised the similarities by flipping and rotating the face, leaving one with eyes open, the other closed. The similarities which Vinceti has just seen are often present throughout an artist’s oeuvre. Indeed the features he sees in Salai are also present in Leonardo’s Self-portrait which Lillian Schwartz recognized in 1992 are present in the Mona Lisa.² These are the features of Leonardo himself whom Vasari and others reported was astonishingly handsome. Recognizing from the start – he may have learned it in Verrocchio’s studio – that every painter paints himself, Leonardo continued to paint himself no matter who the model was.

“The mind of a painter should be like a mirror”, he cryptically scrawled in mirror-writing. Abiding by that concept, the great visual poet only ever painted the inside of his own mind which, according to the traditional metaphor, is reflective and like a mirror. Yet he disguised this fundamental aspect of his work so well that today’s viewers are as blind as ever. The public take portraits at face value and think his poetry is in the style and brushstrokes. That’s like thinking the poetry of a great photographic portrait is in the aperture and focal length of the lens. Yet despite widespread mis-perception of his art from his own day to our own, a contemporary poet who knew Leonardo at the Court in Milan wrote:

“There is one nowadays who has so fixed
In his conception the image of himself
That when he wishes to paint someone else
He often paints not the subject but himself.

And not only his face, which is beautifully fair
According to himself, but in his supreme art
He forms with his brush his manners and his customs...”³

Does anyone ever listen?

1. Nick Squires, "Was Leonardo's young male lover his Mona Lisa muse?", Daily Telegraph, 3rd February 2011, p. 18

2. Lillian Schwartz, “The Art Historian’s Computer”, Scientific American 272, April 1995, pp. 106-11

 

3. Gasparo Visconti, I canzonieri per Beatrice d’Este e per Bianca Maria Sforza, ed. P. Bongrani, Milan, 1979, CLXVIII, pp. 117-8, cited in Frank Zöllner, “ ‘Ogni Pittore Dipinge Sé’: Leonardo da Vinci and ‘Automimesis’ ”, Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, ed. M. Winner (Weinheim: VCT Acta humanoria) 1992, p.147