Anyone who has been to the Louvre - and who hasn't been, in these jet-travel times? - will be familiar with the crowds of tourists coagulated around a single small picture of a woman, with their cameras popping both in defiance of regulations and the obvious fact that almost any cheap postcard reproduction is better than a Polaroid. It is, indeed, probably the main reason why such people visit the museum, in spite of the enormous range and richness of its collections. They resemble the thousands, or millions, who visit Egypt each year, ritually view the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and are interested in nothing else except the size of their hotel bills.
A famous cartoon in the New Yorker showed a middle-aged American couple rushing into the Louvre and asking the guard: "Which way to the Mona Lisa? We're double-parked!" And Art Buchwald, still going strong today as a funny columnist, once described tongue-in-both-cheeks how he bettered a 20-year-old record by touring the museum in five minutes 19 seconds, taking in the Venus de Milo, The Victory of Samothrace and of course the Mona Lisa. ("Everyone knows the rest is junk.")
Just why Leonardo's supposed portrait of a merchant's wife in early 16th-century Florence should be so compelling, is a hard question to answer. One of the more obvious reasons is that Leonardo's personal legend is a compelling one in itself, plus the fact that finished works by him are so scarce. But in that case, why no comparable interest in the so-called La Belle FerroniΦre, hanging not far away in the Louvre? And just how many people fly to Cracow to see the Lady with an Ermine or hurry into the National Gallery in Washington to see the portrait of Ginevra de'Benci? Apart from a patina of accumulated historical notoriety, what special and even unique quality has the Mona Lisa, a smallish picture painted on a poplar-wood panel, to make it act as such a magnet? It is certainly an admirable work of its kind, yet Renaissance masterpieces fortunately are not so scarce. The work brings up all kinds of unanswered questions. For instance, is it really finished, or would Leonardo have gone on touching it up as he did with other works? Why the strange, rocky landscape, which bears no obvious relation to the little of what we know about the sitter? (In the Ginevra de'Benci portrait Leonardo has placed a juniper tree in the immediate background, as a kind of visual pun on her name.) And assuming the picture was commissioned by the lady's fairly wealthy husband, about 1503, why then did Leonardo not duly hand it over to him? Instead he kept it with him to the very end, when he died in voluntary exile in France, hence its presence in a French state collection. And above all, is the traditional identification with Monna (sic) Lisa del Gioconda (nΘe Gherardini) the correct one?
There are other possible identifications, including Isabella d'Este, the formidable Marquise of Mantua, who had pressurised Leonardo to paint her. He did, in fact, execute a fairly large and detailed chalk drawing ; this drawing, however, is in profile and though it does rather resemble the Mona Lisa, Isabella at that time was a middle-aged woman. The Mona Lisa, by contrast, looks about 25 years old. Incidentally she has no eyebrows, which may be due to damage or faulty restoration though it is equally possible that she had plucked them out, as was fashionable at the time.
Though the painting has been in France since it came into the possession of Leonardo's last patron and warm admirer, King Franτois I, it did not always excite the kind of eulogy which has become almost habitual in the last century and a half. In fact, there were long periods in which neither painters nor art scholars showed any special interest in Leonardo, and in the early 19th century Delacroix, for instance, paid him little attention. Yet its influence is undoubted, starting with Raphael who used the pose for his portrait of Maddalena Doni and also for the picture known as La Donna Velata. Immediately after Leonardo's death there was virtually a rash of imitations, including one in which the same enigmatic smile is grafted onto a half-length nude. Corot used the pose for his masterly La Femme α la Perle, so did certain of the Pre-Raphaelites in England, while 19th-century academic artists chose "Leonardo painting the Gioconda" as a titillating Salon subject, just as they represented Raphael painting his supposed mistress, La Fornarina.
However, much of the later mythology was undoubtedly hatched by Walter Pater in his famous essay, when he described her as being "older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave", etc, etc. Today this sounds like the merest clichΘs of Nineties Symbolism, yet the passage quickly became famous and as late as 1939 Yeats included it in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, printing it as vers libre. Pater had hit just the right note, at a time when the image of Woman as Spinx, temptress and destroyer had caught the imagination of European writers and artists.
The "Mona Lisa smile" became patented in the public imagination, even if it is scarcely more than a half-smile in reality (just as the so-called Laughing Cavalier is not laughing) and personally I cannot detect any enigma in it.
The final touch of notoriety was added shortly before the first World War, when the painting was stolen from the Louvre, causing national mourning ( plus a good deal of ridicule) in France, and a sensation in the rest of the world. The director of the national museums, who had been on holiday at the time of the theft, was dismissed from his post and a clean-up of security began. There were all sorts of rumours and suspects, and at one period Picasso and his poet-friend Apollinaire were grilled by the police, but eventually the thief turned out to be a semi-literate Italian painter-decorator, Vincenzo Peruggia, who had been working in the Louvre on a Monday, when it was closed to the public. He had simply taken the picture out of its frame, wrapped it in his coat and walked out with it. He was only caught, after many months, when he naively approached some leading dealers in Italy with the proposition that they should buy it directly from him.
The Mona Lisa has not only spawned a sizeable literature, it has furnished a ready-made icon for modern artists, from the time Marcel Duchamp gave it a moustache to recent Pop painters and the kinetic artist Yvaral. Donald Sassoon - who, like certain other stimulating writers on art, is not an art historian - has run down many odd and even grotesque examples of the painting's exaggerated fame over the years. However, he is on more dubious ground when he attempts to challenge the whole legend of Leonardo himself, and especially his credentials as a scientist and "universal man". Much of this overblown image is of course a product of the 19th century, when the cult of the original genius was at its height.
I am not at all qualified to discuss scientific matters, though it seems to be generally agreed at least that Leonardo was a poor and inadequate mathematician, a major handicap for someone who worked in engineering and civic schemes, as he did. However, there is still a significant body of opinion which rates him as an important precursor of many modern discoveries - in optics, in the study of flight, in anatomy and the structure of the eye, in geology, and in applied science, or technology. The science historian W. C. Dampier is one defender, and Michael White's recent book Leonardo: the First Scientist, while admittedly pop science, makes the case for him eloquently and in detail.
And whatever we may or may not think about the Mona Lisa and her dubious smile, there is an irreducible element of mysteriousness in his own character and life story. Probably Leonardo's illegitimate birth and virtual separation as a child from both his parents, his poor formal education and lack of any defined social place, the denunciations of him as a homosexual (then a capital offence), the popular suspicions which clung to his dissection of corpses (regarded as black magic), his religious scepticism and intellectual remoteness, made him secretive and withdrawn, a man apart. No doubt he was in many ways a man of his time, yet he stands outside it and we do not feel we "know" him personally, as we do for the most part with Michelangelo or Raphael or Titian. He was, in fact, a strange, obsessed, visionary individual, and it would be rather surprising if this strangeness did not flow into the small handful of paintings which he did actually finish.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic