Mona Lisa d'Isleworth

The same woman, the same famous pose, yet she looks younger here. For more than a century, this canvas has divided the art world over one question: whose hand painted it?

The story behind the painting

The Isleworth Mona Lisa is an early sixteenth-century oil on canvas showing the same sitter as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Lisa del Giocondo, but depicted at a younger age. It is thought to have travelled from Italy to England in the 1780s. It came into public view in 1913, when the English connoisseur Hugh Blaker acquired it shortly after its sale from Montacute House, where it was believed to have hung for over a century. Its unofficial name comes from Blaker's studio in Isleworth, West London. From the 1910s onward, various experts and the collectors who owned it have argued that its main elements are by Leonardo himself, as an earlier version of the Mona Lisa. Others firmly disagree, and the question of authorship remains open.

What to look for

The painting presents a woman in the familiar Mona Lisa pose, and its documented subjects include the sky and mountains behind her, echoing the landscape setting of the Louvre portrait. The clearest difference the sources stress is age: the sitter appears younger here than in the Paris picture. It is also painted on canvas rather than wood. In 1914 the critic Paul George Konody found her features 'far more pleasing and beautiful than in the Louvre version'. Much of the debate has centred on the face itself. In 1988 the physicist John F. Asmus, who had studied the Louvre Mona Lisa for laser restoration, published a computer image-processing study concluding that the brushwork of the face matched that of the Louvre face, a finding he repeated in 2016. Look at the face, then, as the place where scholars have looked hardest.

Meaning and intent

The meaning of this painting is bound up with the argument about it. Supporters see an earlier Mona Lisa, which would suggest Leonardo returned to the same sitter at different moments. Art historian Jean-Pierre Isbouts has endorsed Leonardo's involvement, and an independent 2015 academic article attributed it to him on stylistic grounds. Martin Kemp, by contrast, rejects the idea that Leonardo painted any part, and other doubters attribute it to the Leonardeschi, the workshop of assistants and pupils who made copies of the Mona Lisa, perhaps, in Walter Isaacson's phrase, with an occasional helping hand from the master. Curator Luke Syson has cautioned that science is only one of several factors in judging authorship. The picture thus raises a larger question: how do we decide what makes a work truly by a great artist?

Legacy

Since its appearance in 1913, the Isleworth Mona Lisa has remained one of the most discussed attributions in Renaissance art. Konody wrote in 1914 that early reports full of errors had turned scepticism into 'hostile incredulity', yet still judged it largely the master's work, and several Italian experts in the 1920s agreed. Later opinion has been divided: in 2012 The Guardian described the art world as split, and in 2013 Reuters reported that it was dismissed by some experts but had also won support. In 2010 The Mona Lisa Foundation was established to investigate whether it was painted partly by Leonardo as an earlier version of the Louvre portrait. Whatever its final verdict, the painting keeps alive our fascination with the world's most famous smile and with the mysteries of how it came to be.