Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (17 page)
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Authors: Albert Jack
It later transpired that as Robert Maxwell left for the Canary Islands he had also been told he was under investigation by the police for war crimes connected to the revelation about shooting that unarmed mayor in 1945. In March 2001, it was revealed under the Freedom of Information Act that weeks before he died detectives had started questioning members of Maxwell's former platoon but had yet to find any witnesses to the shooting. The former lieutenant was advised six months before his death that he faced a possible sentence of life imprisonment if found guilty. The Metropolitan Police file notes: “The reported circumstances of the shooting gave rise to an allegation of War Crimes. To some extent, the reporting of the shooting incident was confirmed by Mr. Maxwell in an interview he gave in 1988 to the journalist Brian Walden on 30th October 1988.” Quite clearly there had been two shootings: by boasting of his wartime exploits, Maxwell had shot himself straight in the foot.
Following his death, Maxwell's body was released to the Israeli authorities, who performed a second autopsy, revealing that the injuries to the body were not consistent with falling off a yacht and that he “had probably been murdered.” He was then afforded the honor of a Mount of Olives funeral, the resting place of Israel's most respected heroes. During the service, televised worldwide, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, cryptically announced that Maxwell “had done more for Israel than can today be said.” A remark that could simply be seen as a nod toward his fund-raising efforts for the Israeli secret service—or rather more.
Before the dust had, quite literally, settled on Maxwell's grave, calls of foul play could be heard. Maxwell's own daughter, Ghislaine, announced on television that his death had “not been an accident.” Others insisted he had committed suicide to escape the shame of his collapsing empire, not to mention the jail sentence that would certainly have followed if he had been found guilty of fraud. But his life insurance company quickly paid out a thumping PS20 million, indicating that they, at least, were certain Maxwell had not jumped. So, if his insurers had apparently ruled out suicide (and it was very much in their interests, after all, to prove that he had taken his own life), only two options are left to consider. Did Robert Maxwell have a heart attack and fall overboard, or was he murdered by the Israeli secret service? There is a further suggestion—put forward by those ever-busy conspiracy theorists—that Maxwell did not die but quietly slipped away from his problems, leaving another poor soul in the water to be found, misidentified, and then buried on the Mount of Olives.
Either way, his death was followed by a series of revelations about his controversial business methods, and accusations were made with impunity. It began to emerge that Maxwell had used PS1 billion from his companies’ pension funds in order to service his debt liability and fund his flamboyant lifestyle. MCC filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992 and Maxwell's two sons, Ian and Kevin, were declared the world's largest bankrupts, with debts in excess of PS400 million. In 1995 they were charged with fraud but were acquitted in 1996. No doubt neither man was too impressed with his father's legacy.
Perhaps the final word should come from Lady Coutts, whose husband had rescued Maxwell all those years earlier. After dinner at Headington Hill Hall, Maxwell's country house and business headquarters near Oxford, the newspaperman was bidding his guests goodbye in some of the nine languages he, by then, boasted he could speak. When it came to Lady Coutts, she deliberately spoke to him in a language Maxwell had no knowledge of, Swahili:
“Kwaheri ashante sana sitaki kukuona tena,”
which means, “Goodbye and thank you very much. Now I never wish to see you again.” And fortunately for her, she never did.
behind that famous smile, and where is her
portrait now? (Clue: it's not in the Louvre.)
The debate about the identity of the model for the
Mona Lisa
, with her enigmatic smile, has raged for more than five hundred years. The bigger question, however, is not so much
who
is the real Mona Lisa, but
where
she is.
Today Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) might have been a society portrait photographer, his job capturing images of the rich and famous for a healthy fee. Back in the fifteenth century, this work was both time-consuming and painstaking: it meant setting up the easel and mixing the oils, and daubing away at just one painting for many months at a time. For Leonardo it proved a lucrative day job, however, leaving him with enough time to concentrate on his other passions—engineering, sculpture, music, to name but a few—and inventing tanks and helicopters five hundred years before anyone else. And by the time he was in his early forties, he was a successful portraitist, receiving commissions from a number of wealthy families.
Then, aged forty-eight, he started work on the painting for which, besides
The Last Supper
, he is best remembered: a half-length portrait of a woman in dark clothing set against an imaginary landscape. Unusually for portraits of the time, she gazes directly out of the painting at the viewer, that famous smile playing on her lips. There has been much speculation over the years as to the identity of Leonardo's muse. Giorgio Vasari, in his
Lives of the Artists
(1550), wrote that in 1499, Leonardo had been commissioned by Francesco di Zanobi del Giocondo, a wealthy merchant, to paint his new wife, twenty years his junior. Her name was Madonna Lisa del Giocondo,
madonna
being the equivalent in Italian for “madam” (or “my lady”) and sometimes shortened to Mona—hence “Mona Lisa” (or “Madam Lisa”).
Mona Lisa del Giocondo sat for Leonardo da Vinci between 1500 and 1505, and there is speculation that they became lovers. But this cannot be true, or at least it would have been unlikely, because—well, let me put it as delicately as I can— Leonardo was not that way inclined. He even once wrote: “The act of coitus and the members that serve it are so hideous that, if it were not for the beauty of faces, the human species would lose all its humanity.” In 1505, Leonardo left Florence and presented Francesco with the portrait of his wife. The painting was unfinished, and Leonardo regarded it as a “work in progress,” continuing to work on it whenever he returned to Florence.
A year before, in 1504, the artist Raphael is reported to have paid a visit to Leonardo's studio in Florence, where he made a sketch of the painting. This sketch depicts Mona Lisa sitting between two ornate Grecian columns, which do not appear in the painting as it can be seen today, hanging in the Louvre.
Mona Lisa del Giocondo was born in 1479, and would have been about twenty-one when Leonardo started to paint her. However, as most experts agree, the lady in the portrait appears to be older by at least ten years, perhaps even fifteen. So, what can have happened? Did Leonardo later paint out the columns and then make his subject appear rather older, or—extraordinary as this may sound—could the French have the wrong painting?
Important evidence can be found in the archives of Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona. In 1516, Leonardo had been appointed “First Painter” to the new French king, Francis I. The cardinal visited the artist the following year and his secretary recorded their conversation. De Beatis specifically noted that the cardinal was shown three paintings:
Virgin and Child with St. Anne, St. John the Baptist
, and the “portrait of a certain lady from Florence, painted from life at the instance of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici.” Some researchers believe that Giuliano had fallen in love with Mona Lisa and had commissioned Leonardo to paint her for him. But this is a little difficult to believe when one considers how, these days, it would be hard enough trying to snap a digital image of another man's wife and keep it hidden from your own, let alone setting up with easel and oils and persuading the young lady in question to sit and be painted for months on end.
And, what's more, Giuliano—brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent and co-ruler of Florence with him—was murdered in the cathedral in Florence by the Pazzis, the rival family to the Medicis, in 1478. Mona Lisa del Giocondo, his purported lover, wasn't born until the following year.
Thus it appears that the portrait Leonardo took to France with him, and which remains there to this day, is not of our Mona after all. The subject of the painting is now believed to be Giuliano's real lover, Costanza d'Avalos, a happy-go-lucky girl with such a light and friendly nature that she became known as “the smiling one”—or
la gioconda
in Italian—and that is how the painting transported to France is better known throughout continental Europe.
The similarity between Costanza's nickname and the surname del Giocondo, of the real Mona Lisa, is an obvious source of the confusion at the heart of the mystery. Then, it was discovered that in Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's book on painting, architecture, and sculpture (his
Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scultura ed architettura
, published in 1584), the historian refers to both the
Mona Lisa
and
La Gioconda
, suggesting that Leonardo did not change his painting by removing the pillars and making Mona Lisa look older, because there were in fact two pictures. Of these only one found its way into the hands of the French, and that one is neither of Mona Lisa nor called
Mona Lisa.
Lomazzo dedicated his book to the Grand Duke of Savoy, a known expert on the work of Leonardo da Vinci, making it highly unlikely he was mistaken.
More recently, an inventory taken in 1520 by Giacomo, one of Leonardo's disciples, has been discovered, listing the “work” (the
Mona Lisa
, by implication) as still being in Leonardo's personal collection at the time of his death (perhaps returned to him by Francesco for him to finish?), and subsequently recording that the painting in the hands of the French royal family at Fontainebleau was called
La Gioconda
(“The Smiling One”). Which confirms that the painting Napoleon later had in his bedchamber in the Tuileries in 1804, and which was subsequently transferred to the Louvre in 1805, is not the
Mona Lisa
but
La Gioconda.
So what became of the real
Mona Lisa
, complete with Grecian pillars and younger subject? It turns out that the painting remained in Italy for over two centuries until it was bought by an English nobleman, who hung the work at his manor house in Somerset without realizing the importance or significance of the painting. It is possible he didn't even know that the portrait was by Leonardo da Vinci, as the artist is unlikely to have signed the unfinished picture. Then Hugh Blaker, a London art dealer, discovered the piece in 1914 and was able to buy it for only a few guineas. He took the painting back to his studio in Isleworth, London, and thereafter the painting became known throughout the art world, rather unromantically, as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, which, no doubt, would have pleased the Florentine Mona Lisa no end.
Now that the real
Mona Lisa
had been identified, the final piece of evidence revolves around the question of which of the pictures is finished. Vasari, in his
Lives of the Artists
, states that “Leonardo worked on the
Mona Lisa
for four years and then left it unfinished,” which is correct, but also that “the painting is now in the possession of Francis, King of France, at Fontainebleau.” Here he was mistaken: the portrait in the Louvre certainly looks as if Leonardo had completed it, unless he intended to cheer her up a little at some point in the future. But then Vasari gives a description of the unfinished
Mona Lisa:
The eyes had the luster and watery sheen that is always seen in real life and, around them, were those touches of red and the lashes that cannot be represented without the greatest of subtlety. The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, seemed to be alive. The opening of the mouth, united by the red of the lips to the flesh tones, seemed not to be colored but to be living flesh.
Now, I'm no art expert, but that doesn't sound like the picture in Paris to me. Is her mouth open, for instance? And there are also no eyelashes or eyebrows on the figure in the Louvre painting. Giorgio Vasari was born on July 30, 1511, and he was only six years old when Leonardo took his paintings to Paris, meaning he must have been describing the portrait given to Francesco del Giocondo in 1505 (and possibly returned to the artist later for finishing), and not the portrait in Paris. And as the art dealer Hugh Blaker later confirmed, this description perfectly matches the unfinished painting he bought in Bath. Other experts clearly agreed as, in 1962, a Swiss syndicate led by the art collector Dr. Henry F. Pulitzer bought the painting for millions of pounds.
So it appears that there are, after all, two enigmatically “Smiling Ones” in the world: the Costanza d'Avalos
La Gioconda
hanging in the Louvre in Paris that has bedecked more tea towels, calendars, and biscuit tins than any other painting in the world, and the wonderful, un finished Mona Lisa
Gioconda
that used to hang in Isleworth, London, and is now safely stored in the vault of a Swiss bank as part of the Pulitzer collection, treated with the respect she deserves. After all, she was a respectable Florentine lady married to a popular merchant and not the tawdry mistress of a gangster murdered in a turf war five hundred years ago. Still, we must allow the French their tourist attraction, especially as they cut the heads off their others some time ago.