Did Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa nude? I may have just solved this centuries-old mystery Mona Lisa

ITightened security after the latest robbery has made the queues at the Louvre slower, but on this very wet winter morning, no one is complaining. After all, the Mona Lisa is waiting inside for all those tourists who have come from all over the world. Leonardo da Vinci’s Woman – wrapped in dark cloth and silk, smiling enigmatically as she sits before a landscape of rocks, roads and water – attracts crowds like no other painting. But if the Mona Lisa was able to attract such attention fully clothed, what would the waiting lines be like if she were naked?

Oddly enough, this is not just amusing speculation, because that was the case in 18th century Britain. An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave emancipated Georgians the opportunity to hang “Goconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits on a chair with her hands crossed in front of a faded view of distant rock formations. She smiles mysteriously, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. But there is one major difference. She is naked from the waist up.

The print has a caption saying that this is a replica of a Leonardo da Vinci painting that hangs “in the gallery at Houghton”. Today, Houghton Hall in Norfolk displays contemporary art on its lawns, but at the time it was best known for oil paintings collected by its owner, Britain’s first and most corrupt Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Houghton’s collection was cataloged by his son Horace, then 26, who apparently believed his father’s ‘Gioconda’, on which this engraving was based, to be the actual Mona Lisa: ‘Joconda, Smith’s wife, was considered the most beautiful woman of her time: she had been the mistress of Francis I, King of France; by Leonardo da Vinci. She often sat half-naked, with Music, for several hours together, for him to paint her.’ he.”

This picture of the King of France’s mistress standing for hours “half-naked” while musicians played is an interesting twist on the first account we have of the Mona Lisa, published by the Florentine architect and artist Giorgio Vasari in 1550. To elicit that smile, Vasari says, Leonardo “always used, in painting her portrait, figures to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her playful.” If she’s only half dressed, she’ll need plenty of distractions.

You won’t find a naked Joconda in Houghton today. In 1779, Walpole’s art collection was sold to Catherine the Great, and today it hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The nude Mona Lisa is no longer attributed to Leonardo but to one of his unnamed 16th-century followers. However, if the work was by a Leonardo imitator, was there a nude Mona Lisa that he copied? If there was, why did Leonardo paint it and for whom? It’s one of the most interesting and entertaining mysteries in art – and I think I may have solved it.

First, we have to go to the Loire region, where Leonardo spent his final years as a French royal artist. And here the artist himself left a wonderful idea. In October 1517, he received visitors to his palace: Cardinal Luigi of Aragon and the cleric Antonio de Beatis. Leonardo—“the most distinguished painter of our time,” according to De Beatis’ chronicles—showed them three paintings, all of which today hang in the Louvre. Two were religious: John the Baptist and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. The other was “a certain Florentine woman depicted from life at the request of the late great Giuliano de’ Medici.”

It is generally accepted that they should be displayed on the Louvre Mona Lisa. But Leonardo seems to have told them the truth: this Mona Lisa was not painted for Giuliano de’ Medici (and despite Horace Walpole’s conceptions, it is certainly not for the King of France).

A document at the University of Heidelberg proves that this painting was begun in Florence in 1503, about 14 years before it was seen by visitors to the palace. It was a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo, just as Vasari wrote (hence its various alternative names, La Gioconda/Giocondi/Giocondi/Gioconda). Mona is short for Monna, which was the polite way to address a married woman in Renaissance Florence. Lisa, being middle class, would be addressed as Mona Lisa.

So why did Leonardo mention Giuliano de’ Medici, the youngest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the de facto ruler of the Republic of Florence? He certainly didn’t paint Giuliano’s cloaked Mona Lisa — but perhaps Leonardo was telling the truth of some sort. He may have painted the nude version for nobles.

On 24 September 1513, Leonardo left Milan, then his base, for Rome, bound for the Belvedere of the papal palace where he was given a studio by Giuliano de’ Medici, whose older brother had just become pope. It was an opportunity for Leonardo to live elegantly and paint in the city where Michelangelo and Raphael worked.

The Pope did not entrust him with the frescoes, but Leonardo may have done something more intimate for Giuliano. In a chateau in Chantilly, just north of Paris, there is a mysterious “animation” – the term given to a large-scale preparatory drawing that he would push chalk through to make a mark on a canvas. This cartoon, dating from 1514-1516, depicts the same nude model that appeared in Houghton’s painting and contains unmistakable allusions to the Mona Lisa. After technical analysis, the Louvre announced in 2017 that there was strong evidence that this painting had been executed, at least partially, with his left hand.

This claim becomes even more convincing if you look carefully, especially at the curtains which have their free and endless overtones. The woman, her upper body bare, is sitting on a wooden chair with her left forearm horizontal and upside down to the viewer just like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Likewise, she also placed her right hand on her left wrist. Even the spread and shading of her fingers are identical. The Mona Lisa’s hands may not be the focus of her fame today, but in Renaissance Italy their elegant position was widely imitated.

The artist who painted Chantilly’s nude does not merely imitate all of this, but repeats it completely. This would be easy – if you had access to Leonardo’s studio, or if you were already Leonardo. The Mona Lisa was with him in Rome, just as it will be in France. He never gave it to Lisa’s husband. Its size – just 77cm x 53cm – made it easy to transport during his turbulent travels. One of the reasons he probably did not think of this picture as a picture of the Mona Lisa, when he was talking to his visitors in the Loire, is that it was no longer one: he had added so many touches over the years, changing the original picture, that in his mind it became someone else, his dream.

So the creator of Hutton’s painting must have worked from a Chantilly drawing, or from a nude based on it. In other words, it seems very likely that Leonardo, perhaps with the help of his pupils, painted this nude Mona Lisa.

But is there more evidence? I think I’ve found an important piece of evidence hanging in plain sight in Rome’s Barberini Palace: a “half-nude” portrait of the young Leonardo-admiring artist Raphael. The Rome in which Leonardo lived was characterized by lavish pleasure, and its star was the handsome Raphael. Raphael and his team were creating a sensual hot bath for the papal palace, decorating it with frescoes. Raphael also decorated the banqueting palace of the pope’s banker, Agostino Chigi. Vasari claims that when Raphael was painting frescoes there, he asked his mistress to live with him. It is assumed that his early death was due to sexual exhaustion.

Around 1520, Raphael depicted a young woman sitting in a garden with her shirt raised. She smiles sideways as she holds a sheer piece of silk over her stomach. Her chest and arms are bare, except for a blue armband that says in gold letters: “Rafael Urbino.” The painting is known as La Fornarina, The Baker’s Daughter, after the legend that the father of Raphael’s girlfriend was a baker..

When I was checking out the decadent delights of Renaissance Rome recently, I realized with a shock that this work is essentially a nude Mona Lisa. That little smile mimics Leonardo’s masterpiece. She sits quietly, her eyes and nose clearly defined like Leonardo’s model, and she wears silk as transparent as the veil covering Mona Lisa’s head. Francesco del Giocondo was a silk merchant, which may have been why Leonardo draped them in this material, while also being fascinated by the visual possibilities. Both women are “half-naked,” in Horace Walpole’s words, sitting with their clothes around them, removed.

The similarities are too close to coincidence. Raphael is an impeccable artist but not as creative as Leonardo. Instead, he learned from his older father, and imitated the Mona Lisa ever since he saw her in early Florence around 1504. This gentlemanly socialite had visited Leonardo at the Belvedere and seen his latest stunning idea, the nude Mona Lisa. Did Leonardo draw it as he painted it? The painting owned by Robert Walpole is clearly based on the Chantilly drawing but adds a rocky blue landscape, a scene typical of Leonardo’s late works. The rock formations have the same pale blue shade as the mountains in the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.

The nude Mona Lisa was a grenade thrown into the Renaissance. It immediately radicalized the way artists paint objects. The bold Fornarina of the conservative Raphael published this revolution. The model who posed in La Fornarina also posed nude for Raphael’s chief assistant, Giulio Romano, whose art mixes classicism with what might be called pornography: he created a visual sex guide called I Modi (“Methods”) showing 16 positions for lovemaking. Titian and Correggio took up the challenge of painting sensual nudes.

A number of Leonardo’s paintings have been lost, especially those that shocked religious people. They include the erotic Leda and the Swan, which is believed to have been destroyed by a member of the French royal family. Leonardo painted this painting of a woman and her swan lover in early 16th-century Florence, shortly after he began painting the Mona Lisa. Surviving drawings and copies suggest that it was outrageous and erotic: one, at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, depicts a swan placing a wing around the voluptuous Leda as she whispered in her ear or stimulated her.

If Leonardo had created such sublime eroticism as he was working on the Mona Lisa around 1504, it is not surprising to believe that he created a nude version as well. He boasted in his notebooks that while a poet could only describe his patroness’s lover, a painter could bring her to life—and the “lover judge” would favor the picture every time. He even happily recounts how a man once returned a painting he had made of the Virgin Mary because it filled him with sinful thoughts.

Giuliano de’ Medici, Leonardo’s patron, married in early 1515. My hypothesis is that Leonardo, as a souvenir, photographed a nude mistress that Giuliano would have to give up, and seated her in the exact position of the Mona Lisa. The painter, Leonardo insisted, “can place before the lover a true picture of his lover, making him often kiss him and talk to him.”

If Leonardo did indeed paint the nude Mona Lisa, it tells us something extraordinary about the world’s most famous painting and its maker. It seems that the artist was able to joke about what we now call the “iconic” nature of his work. It is sometimes assumed that the Mona Lisa’s fame is a recent cultural phenomenon, sparked by an early 20th-century theft, copying of Duchamp and Warhol, and mass reproduction. This is not true. He was iconic the moment he was first seen: artists saw him as unparalleled.

Leonardo was so confident in this uniqueness that he felt able to emulate it with a naked copy. He was smarter than us. Although he did not know that people in the 21st century would line up in the rain to see his masterpiece, he did know that it was the finished painting. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is a vision of artistic perfection, whether clothed or naked.