The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (64 page)

In the twentieth century some biologists wondered whether perhaps genes do not mutate at random but in some way that is useful to the organism. But this theory was disproved by the study of bacteria, which showed that genes always mutate at random. At least, healthy and well-nourished bacteria mutate at random, And that is as one would expect. Why should they want to change if they are comfortable and well fed?

But in the late 1980s Dr John Cairns of Harvard decided to study starving bacteria and concluded that some of them
could
deliberately mutate to utilize a new food source. His results have been confirmed by Professor Barry Hall at the University of Rochester, New York. When he deliberately starved his bacteria of an amino acid essential to their survival, some of them mutated so they could manufacture the missing acid, until whole colonies of the mutated bacteria came into existence. It seems, then, that Lamarck was probably right after all. As, incidentally, was Samuel Butler, who objected to Darwin on precisely these grounds (see chapter 23).

But even on a more down-to-earth level, the rigidly Darwinian view is questionable. We all know that efforts made by parents
can
be passed on to their children – that, for example, parents who have educated themselves can pass on their love of learning to their children. The truth is – as Kurtén recognizes – that the brain has a huge
dormant capacity
, which can be awakened by the right stimuli. Man had developed a “modern size” brain long before he had books and music and philosophy to put in it.

Kurtén also recognizes this when he says that our ancestors may have come down from the trees not because there was no longer enough food in the
forests but because they were excited by the
possibilities
of the wide savannahs. Again, he is recognizing an evolutionary force, a craving for adventure, for a fuller and richer mode of existence.
Not from the Apes
is devoted to the thesis that man’s uniqueness may date back as far as thirty-five million years, when our lineage split off from that of our cousins the apes. In the beginning, that split may have been due to natural selection and survival of the fittest. But in the past half million years or so – perhaps far longer than that – the evolutionary urge seems to have acquired its own momentum, so that even a convinced Darwinian like Sir Julian Huxley (grandson of T. H. Huxley) can state that man has finally become “the managing director of evolution”.

We can see, then, that the whole Missing Link controversy was based on simple misunderstanding. Darwin appeared to be saying that man is merely a more intelligent ape and that his intelligence developed by chance. That clearly implies that individual effort counts for nothing. We struggle because we
have
to struggle; that is part of the rat race. But our “higher aspirations” are so much nonsense. We are mere apes.

Human evolution proves the contrary. Man has become an evolutionary animal, an animal who
expects
to change. Striving has become his second nature – a striving based upon his intense romanticism, the same romanticism that made the Greeks romanticize Helen of Troy, that made the troubadours romanticize their chosen “lady”, that made Malory romanticize Queen Guinevere and Isolde. And there is every reason to expect our evolution to continue. The dormant capacity that changed Dartian man into modern man lies inside our heads. The brain developed through social intercourse and cooperation, but its excess size meant
dormant capacity.
In other words,
Homo sapiens
developed a modern brain but had very little use for it.

Brain physiologists tell us that, in spite of science, philosophy, art, and technology, modern man still only uses one-fifth of his brain capacity. When he learns to use the other four-fifths, there is every reason to believe that he will be as different from modern man as you and I are from our australopithecine ancestors.

36

Where is the Mona Lisa?

The answer to the above question may seem self-evident: in the Louvre. But the matter is not quite as straightforward as it looks.

The Mona Lisa is better known on the continent of Europe as “La Gioconda”, or the smiling woman – the word means the same as the old English “jocund”. It was painted, as everyone knows, by the great Italian artist Leonardo, who was born in the little town of Vinci, near Florence, in 1452. Mona Lisa (Mona is short for Madonna) was a young married woman who was about twenty-four when Leonardo met her. She was the wife of a man twenty years her senior, the wealthy Francesco del Giocondo, and when Leonardo started to paint her around 1500 she had just lost a child. Leonardo’s biographer Vasari says that her husband had to hire jesters and musicians to make her smile during the early sittings.

For some reason Leonardo became obsessed with her, and went on painting her for several years, always dissatisfied with his work. This has given rise to stories that he was in love with her, and even that she became his mistress; but this seems unlikely. Leonardo was homosexual, and took a poor view of sex, writing with Swiftian disgust: “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 its humanity”. Yet there was something about Madonna Lisa that made him strive to capture her expression for at least six years – possibly more. His biographer Antonia Vallentin says she fascinated him more than any other woman he met in his life. He gave the unfinished portrait to Mona Lisa’s husband when he left Florence in 1505, but still continued to work on it at intervals when he returned.

In his
Lives of the Painters
, Giorgio Vasari says that Leonardo worked at the Mona Lisa for four years and left it unfinished. “This work is now in the possession of Francis, king of France, at Fontainebleau . . .” And
this, we assume, is the famous portrait now in the Louvre. Yet this raises a puzzling question. Leonardo gave the portrait to the man who had commissioned it, Mona Lisa’s husband, in 1505, and a mere forty or so years later, when Vasari was writing, it is in the possession of Francis I of France. Surely the Giacondo family would not part with a masterpiece so easily? Besides, the Louvre picture is quite obviously finished . . .

There is another interesting clue. In 1584 a historian of art, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, published a book on painting, sculpture and architecture, in which he refers to “the Gioconda
and
the Mona Lisa”, as if they were two seperate paintings. The book is dedicated to Don Carlos Emanuele, the Grand Duke of Savoy, who was a great admirer of Leonardo – so it hardly seems likely that this was a slip of the pen . . .

Two
Giocondas? Then where is the other one? And, more important,
who
is this second Gioconda?

The answer to the first question is, oddly enough: in the Louvre. The world-famous painting, which has been reproduced more often than any other painting in history, is almost certainly not the Mona Lisa that we have been talking about.

Then where
is
the painting of the woman who so obsessed Leonardo that he could not finish her portrait? There is evidence to show that this original Mona Lisa was brought from Italy in the mid-eighteenth century, and went into the stately home of a nobleman in Somerset. Just before the First World War it was discovered by the art connoisseur Hugh Blaker in Bath, and he picked it up for a few guineas, and took it to his studio in Isleworth. Hence it became known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa. It was bigger than the Louvre painting, and – more important – was unfinished; the background has only been lightly touched in. Blaker was much impressed by it. The girl was younger and prettier than the Louvre Mona Lisa. And Blaker felt that this new Mona Lisa corresponded much more closely to Vasari’s description than the Louvre painting. Vasari rhapsodized about its delicate realism:

Sir Kenneth Clark, quoting this passage in his book on Leonardo, asks: “Who would recognise the submarine goddess of the Louvre”? To which Blaker would have replied: “Ah, precisely”. But the description
does
fit the Isleworth Mona Lisa.

There is another point that seems to establish beyond all doubt that Blaker’s picture is Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The painter Raphael saw it in Leonardo’s studio about 1504, and later made a sketch of it. This sketch shows two Grecian columns on either side – columns that can be found in the Isleworth Mona Lisa, but not in the Louvre painting.

Blaker believes that the Isleworth Mona Lisa is a far more beautiful work, and many art experts have agreed with him. It is true that the Louvre painting has many admirers; Walter Pater wrote a celebrated “purple passage” about it in
The Renaissance
beginning “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times . . .”, and W. B. Yeats thought this so beautiful that he divided it into lines of free verse and printed it as a poem in his
Oxford Book of Modern Verse
. On the other hand, the connoisseur Bernard Berenson wrote about it: “What I really saw in the figure of Mona Lisa was the estranging image of woman beyond the reach of my sympathy or the ken of my interest . . . watchful, sly, secure, with a smile of anticipated satisfaction and a pervading air of hostile superiority . . .” He felt the beauty of the Louvre Mona Lisa had been sacrificed to technique. No one could say this of the far more fresh and lively Isleworth Mona Lisa.

But if the lady in the Louvre is not Leonardo’s Lisa del Giocondo, then who is she? Here the most important clue is to be found in a document by Antonio Beatis, secretary to the Cardinal of Aragon. When Leonardo went to the court of Francis I in 1517 he was visited by the cardinal, and the secretary noted down the conversation. The cardinal was shown works by Leonardo, including St John, the Madonna with St Anne, and “the portrait of a certain Florentine lady, painted from life at the instance of the late Magnifico Giuliano de Medici . . .”

In her biography of Leonardo, Antonia Vallentin speculates that this work
was
the Mona Lisa, and asks: “Did Giuliano [de Medici] love Mona Lisa in her girlhood . . . did he think with longing of her now she was married to Messer del Giocondo, and had he commissioned Leonardo to paint her portrait”? But this delightful romantic bubble is shattered by a mere consideration of dates. Giuliano de Medici, brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, master of Florence, was murdered in Florence cathedral in 1478. The plotters – mostly rival bankers – hoped to kill Lorenzo too, but Lorenzo was too quick for them. All this happened in the year before Mona Lisa was born.

Then who
was
the lady that Leonardo painted at the orders of Giuliano de Medici? Almost certainly the answer is Costanza d’Avalos, Giuliano’s mistress, a lady of such pleasant disposition that she was known as “the smiling one” – la Gioconda . . .

And so it would seem that the painting in the Louvre has been labelled “the Mona Lisa” by a simple misunderstanding. Its subject is obviously a woman in her thirties not, like Mona Lisa del Giocondo, in her twenties. Leonardo took it with him to France, and it went into the collection of Francis I, and eventually into the Louvre. The unfinished Mona Lisa stayed in Italy, was brought to England, and was purchased by Hugh Blaker in 1914. In 1962 it was purchased for some vast but undisclosed sum – undoubtedly amounting to millions – by a Swiss syndicate headed by the art-collector Dr Henry F. Pulitzer, and Pulitzer has since written a short book,
Where is the Mona Lisa?
, setting out the claims of his own painting to be that of Madonna Lisa del Giocondo. Pulitzer’s contention is simple. There are two Giocondas – for Madonna Lisa had a perfect right to call herself by her husband’s name, with a feminine ending. But there is only one Mona Lisa. And that is not in the Louvre but in London.

37

“The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World”

The Voynich Manuscript

It was in 1912 that an American dealer in rare books, Wilfred Voynich, heard of a mysterious work that had been discovered in an old chest in the Jesuit school of Mondragone, in Frascati, Italy, and succeeded in buying it for an undisclosed sum. It was an octavo volume, six by nine inches, with 204 pages; it had originally another 28 pages, but these are lost. It is written in cipher, which at first glance looks like ordinary medieval writing. And the pages are covered with strange little drawings of female nudes, astronomical diagrams, and all kinds of strange plants in many colours.

There was a letter accompanying the manuscript, dated 19 August 1666, and written by Joannes Marcus Marci, the rector of Prague University. It was addressed to the famous Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher – remembered today mainly for some interesting experiments in animal hypnosis – and stated that the book had been bought for 600 ducats by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Prague. Kircher was an expert on cryptography, having published a book on the subject in 1663, in which he claimed to have solved the riddle of hieroglyphics. This in itself may be taken to indicate that Kircher was inclined to indulge in wishful thinking, since we know that it would be another century and a half before Champollion succeeded in reading hieroglyphics. Kircher had apparently already attempted to decipher a few pages of the book, sent to him by its previous owner, who had devoted his whole life to trying to decode it. Now he sent him the whole manuscript.