Leonardo da Vinci feud: The 'earlier' Mona Lisa mystery

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Leonardo da Vinci feud: The 'earlier' Mona Lisa mystery

By Peter Ball

 

The disputed painted hanging in the London flat of art dealer Henry Pulitzer in the 1960s / GILBERT FAMILY

 

A painting of the Mona Lisa hangs above a fireplace in a London flat in the 1960s. Is this picture not only by Leonardo da Vinci, but also an earlier version of the world famous portrait that hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris?

 

Some people are convinced it is, and more than 50 years later, a bitter battle has erupted over both the ownership of the picture and the evidence about who painted it.

 

The so-called "Earlier Mona Lisa" is at the heart of a mystery that involves Caribbean tax havens, Swiss bank vaults, a mysterious international consortium, and the Sherlock Holmes of the art world.

 

So is it genuine? Who are the rightful owners? And could the portrait at the centre of this Da Vinci Code-style mystery be worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

 

Full Story: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50046133

[Jack Mountain]

I have one as well...

[Tarteso]

4 hours ago, Jack Mountain said:

I have one as well...

That's possible. Silvano Vinceti the head of a research group called the National Committee for Cultural Heritage, said the portrait, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, is an “androgynous” amalgam of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy merchant from Tuscany, and Gian Giacomo Caprotti, better known by his nickname, Salai. ... “The Mona Lisa is androgynous – half man and half woman.

He claims that the Mona Lisa’s nose, forehead and smile are strikingly similar to other paintings by Leonardo which used Salai as a model, among them portraits of St John the Baptist and St Anne and an erotic drawing, The Incarnate Angel, which depicts a young man with an erection.

“The Mona Lisa is androgynous – half man and half woman. The painting was based on two models. The first was Lisa Gherardini and the second was Salai, Leonardo’s apprentice,” Mr Vinceti told The Telegraph.

Edited October 18, 2019 by Tarteso