I Mona Lisa Read online

  Natasha Solomons

  * * *

  I, MONA LISA

  Contents

  Prologue

  Florence, 1504

  Amboise, 1519

  Milan, 1523

  Fontainebleau, 1530

  Milan, 1507

  Rome, 1513

  Fontainebleau, 1594

  Fontainebleau, 1678

  Versailles, 1780

  Versailles, 1791

  Florence, 1515

  Alpine Pass, 1516

  Paris, 1911

  Florence, 1913

  Amboise 1517

  Amboise, 1518

  Paris, 1938

  Paris, 1939

  Aveyron, 1944

  Amboise, 1519

  Paris, Today

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Natasha Solomons is the author of five internationally bestselling novels, including Mr Rosenblum’s List, The Novel in the Viola, which was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and The Gallery of Vanished Husbands. Natasha lives in Dorset with her son, daughter and her husband, the children’s author, David Solomons with whom she also writes screenplays. Her novels have been translated into 17 languages. When not writing in the studio, Natasha can usually be found in her garden.

  Also by Natasha Solomons

  Mr Rosenblum’s List

  The Novel in the Viola

  The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

  The Song Collector

  House of Gold

  For my parents, Carol and Clive

  GALLERY GUIDE

  Renaissance Room

  Mona Lisa – Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting

  Leonardo da Vinci – Florentine inventor, polymath and painter of genius

  Salaì – Leonardo’s chief assistant at the bottega and also his lover

  Francesco Melzi also known as Cecco – another of Leonardo’s assistants, latterly his amanuensis, editor and collator of his manuscripts and Salaì’s bitter rival

  Lisa del Giocondo – a renowned Florentine beauty and the model for the Mona Lisa

  Francesco del Giocondo – a wealthy silk merchant and Lisa’s husband

  Niccolò Machiavelli – a politician, operator and occasional friend of Leonardo’s

  Raphael Santi – a young painter from Urbino and a confidant and admirer of Leonardo

  Michelangelo Buonarroti – sculptor, painter, grouch and adversary of Leonardo

  Leda – Queen of Sparta and Leonardo’s most magnificent and beautiful painting; friend of Mona’s

  Il Magnifico or Giuliano de’ Medici – of the legendary Medici family of Florence; powerful patron of Leonardo in Rome

  Pope Leo X – brother of Giuliano; passionate about food and music as well as God

  King Francis I – teenage King of France, latterly patron of Leonardo Da Vinci in France and the purchaser of Mona Lisa, Leda and other paintings

  La Cremona – the most famous courtesan in Milan, also a poet and the model for Leda

  French Galleries

  Room of the Sun King

  Louis XIV the Sun King – admirer of Mona Lisa, Leda, absolute monarch of France

  Queen Marie Thérèse – his pious Spanish queen

  Madame de Montespan – Louis’s official mistress and the mother of at least six of his children

  Françoise, Madame de Maintenon – the royal governess, and latterly the mistress who succeeded Madame de Montespan

  Revolutionary France

  Louis XVI – King of France

  Marie Antoinette – his extravagant wife; a woman of great passion and style

  Citizen Fragonard – exuberant Rococo painter beloved of Marie Antoinette, who fell out of favour after the Revolution

  Twentieth-Century Room

  Pablo Picasso – painter and friend of Mona Lisa

  Sigmund Freud – psychoanalyst and art lover

  Vincenzo Peruggia – thief and kidnapper of the Mona Lisa; Italian Nationalist

  Jacques Jaujard – brilliant chief curator of the Louvre during WW2; never seen without a cigarette

  Jeanne/ Agent Mozart – French Resistance agent, film star and Jaujard’s lover

  Prologue

  Louvre, Paris, Today

  In the beginning I listened in darkness. When I was new, I had no eyes and could not tell night from day. But I discovered that I liked the music – the brisk joy of the lira da braccio and the flute – and the raucous studio chatter. The tickle of the charcoal. The steady warmth of his fingertips, all nudging me into life, layer upon layer. I came into being, not all at once but like the build-up of smoke in a room, one wisp at a time. His breath against my cheek as his brush blew life into me. I swam into consciousness as if from the bottom of the deepest ocean, cool and black. I was aware of voices, like the grinding of the rocks against the waves. But I was always listening for his voice. He whispered to me. He willed me into being, coaxed me out of the poplar wood. Until then I was content in the dark. I did not yet know there was light.

  My face came first, edging into view against the spinning layers of white lead. He conjured me forth with tonal shadows and blocks of shading in dark washes. I was coated again and again with a layer of imprimitura, translucent as a butterfly’s wing. My skin was ghostly, not pink flesh, so he added a small portion of red lake and yellow and shaded me with burnt umber. My hands and dress and veil and hair were nothing but thoughts in charcoal, waiting to be. There were the first ink lines of the cartoon. The sharp point of the needle picked out my new contours, ready for the charcoal spolveri. His fingers massaged in the rubbing powder through the tiny holes in the paper. I was an outline, a mirror image upon wood. A collection of parts. Chin. Breasts. Finger. Nose. And with my new eyes I looked about me. The busyness of the day and the stillness of the night. I marvelled at it all. The stars flickered beyond the window lit like the studio candles – perhaps a celestial painter laboured, the Leonardo of the heavens, on a new constellation commissioned by the gods.

  While Leonardo was painting me, giving me shoulders and lips and creating the cascades of my hair and the translucence of my veil, he talked to me.

  ‘Painting is superior to music as it does not perish immediately after its creation. This song on the lute, although sweet, has already vanished and yet here you are.’

  I listened in rapture to these intimacies as something began to stir deep within me – the first seeds of love.

  At first, I used to gaze at Leonardo rapt and silent. Then one day he confided to me the secrets of the heavens, saying, ‘People believe there is a man on the moon, but there are only seas. Its surface is awash with saltwater.’

  I heard a voice speaking the question I wanted to ask.

  ‘There is truly no man on the moon?’ said the voice.

  Then, to my astonishment, I understood that this was my voice. I could speak. I did not know.

  Leonardo stared back at me, astounded. He leaned forward until his eye was level with mine. Stroked my lip with his brush.

  ‘Are you really there?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes. I am,’ I answered.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, studying me in wonder.

  I looked back at him and replied, ‘I am yours.’

  My Leonardo was many things – imaginativa, generous, fastidious – but he was not fast and, in the time it took to conjure me, he confided in me a great many more things. He conceived new worlds in a single leaf. There was only ever one Leonardo. And there was only one painting like me. The other pictures could be looked at but none of them could see. When I was young, and my paint fresh and my varnish uncracked, I was a revelation in white lead and imprimitura. No one painted in the same way after me. Or no one who was any good. The lacklustre, soft-cocked
, grey souls went on for half a century producing whey-faced Madonnas by the yard for altar panels in provincial churches. But after looking upon me, even the poets returned to the world with a sharpened tongue.

  Please understand that I am not the pretty bourgeois wife of a silk merchant. I am not Lisa del Giocondo. I can hear her now as she was then, her voice petulant and anxious. The rattle of her worries. The studio is stifling. Can the window not be opened? Lisa. Lisa. Her name is like a hiss of steam. Did I have to begin with her? To be made in the image of someone so ordinary. But as the brilliant lapis lazuli resplendent on a thousand Madonnas’ robes are mined from limestone, so was I cajoled from the unyielding and reluctant Lisa.

  For a short while, like mother and a foetus, she and I shared a soul. Then, I was not yet myself. The soft curl of Lisa’s hair, rubbed out. Drawn, anew. The first curve of her cheek. The shape of her skull. Leonardo’s thought and his intention. I was more Lisa and Leonardo than myself. But little by little, stroke by stroke, I became. My soul my own. I looked about me with my own curiosity. I saw the lemon trees glistening in their pots lining the loggia. The dust on their leaves. Perspiring musicians playing to keep Lisa smiling. To make me smile. And just like that, we were no longer the same, she and I. Praise the Madonna and all the saints in Heaven. My smile is not hers. It never was. She always needed the punchline to every joke explained. Poor, good, dutiful Lisa.

  Now, as I look out of my glass prison in the Louvre, it has been hundreds of years since I saw her last. She lies in her tomb, and I in my glass coffin. Most prisoners have committed a crime. Not I. A gilded palace, no matter how splendid or filled with silent treasures, is still a jail when one cannot leave. The visitors to the Louvre queue for hours and then gawp without seeing me. I am now a fixture in the travel guides and the package tours of Europe. I’ve become ill-tempered and full of black bile in my old age, but the manners of the tourists are despicable. They complain to one another how small I am, or that my smile is more of a grimace. Once, I used to jostle with hundreds of others in an undignified dormitory of pictures, half-forgotten except by those who came to seek me. Yet nowadays I am everywhere, so you no longer see me even when I am right before you. You all come here to linger in my presence, to pay homage for your allotted seconds, before you are hurried on by my jailors. Still you choose to record on your phones the moment of your not looking while your back is turned to me.

  Well, if you will not look at me at least do not search for the other Lisa. I am real. That is the secret. Frankly she isn’t worth the trouble. The pious, prattling wife of a vain and self-promoting merchant. She is dead. Her bones lost, dust in a convent. Listen instead to my history. My adventures are worth hearing. I have lived many lifetimes and been loved by emperors, kings and thieves. I have survived kidnap and assault. Revolution and two world wars. But this is also a love story. And the story of what we will do for those we love.

  From the very beginning I was his, for like Prometheus he breathed the fire of life into me. At first this held no fear for me, for I did not understand what I was, and that as a painting of wood and pigment I was different from a man of flesh and blood and bone. I did not know what it was to be mortal or that he must die. I only knew that I loved him, and that in time he must come to love me too. We were together many years and he confided in me his many secrets. His jealousies. The disquiet of his ambition.

  And in the end we made one another immortal, he and I. Yet now he is gone and I watch in silence, alone. The cell walls might be made of glass, but it is bulletproof, two centimetres thick and sealed from the outside world. I can hear almost nothing but muffled babble. No one troubles to speak to me any more. Even if I call out, no one listens.

  Listen now.

  Florence, 1504

  Winter

  At fifty-one Leonardo is still a handsome man. He wears a short, rose-coloured tunic and a cloak of deepest green velvet gifted to him by Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. In his tunic and his cloaks, Leonardo appears every inch the celebrated artist from Milan blown in amongst the conservative Republicans of Florence in their plain gowns and sensible haircuts. His beautiful curling hair is now streaked with grey and carefully styled, reaching down to the middle of his chest. The silver lends him an added air of gravitas. He visits the barber regularly and his cheeks are smooth. His eyes are like those of the birds he loves, an aquilone perhaps or a kite, observing every detail, dark windows thatched beneath thick brows. I watch those brows. They are the internal weathervanes of the studio. This morning, Zephyrus must be sending a warm wind as, to Leonardo’s delight and my dismay, Lisa del Giocondo arrives with her maid. I observe as the assistants stop grinding pigment to watch her, startled each time by her beauty. In between visits, even I forget her loveliness and am taken aback, until she frowns, irked, and the illusion of the mortal goddess is spoiled. She surveys with distaste the peeling magnificence of the Sala del Papa, and the stripped and scraped skins of kid goats and calves splayed across the tiles and benches; they are waxy translucent and ready cured for vellum. It’s clear to me Leonardo’s forgotten that she’s coming, but he is all charm and attention and sits her down in the best chair. I am resting upon my easel at the far side of the hall, where I have a good vantage, but Lisa is too busy fussing with her layers of shawls and does not notice me.

  ‘Dearest Leonardo, I brought you a present,’ she says, handing him a small package.

  He crouches beside her, apparently touched by the gesture.

  ‘Well,’ she smiles, ‘aren’t you going to open it?’

  Leonardo dutifully unpeels the paper to reveal a prayer book. He holds it up to the light and I perceive that every page is bedecked with crude and doom-laden woodcuts of sinners in torment. He stares at her in fond puzzlement and she clasps her hands tightly.

  ‘I worry about your eternal soul, maestro. Please, I beg of you, read it.’

  ‘If I read without belief, I’m not sure it will have the necessary effect, Madonna Lisa.’

  Her lip quivers.

  Leonardo bows. ‘I will study it carefully. If anyone can save my soul, I’m certain that it’s you.’

  I have no stomach and yet I feel sick to it. Leonardo’s soul does not need saving. He has his own unique faith. And if his soul ever needs saving, it will be me who does it and not Lisa del Giocondo, for all her piety. I am a painting that can see and hear: I have been touched by the divine. Even if, now and again, I’m also touched by earthlier arrows of loathing and disdain.

  ‘Salaì. Vin Santo. Biscuits.’ Leonardo stands, signalling to his chief assistant.

  Salaì. What can I say? He is a thief. Liar. Obstinate. Glutton. Yet, all this Leonardo forgives, because Salaì makes him laugh and he is beautiful. Beauty makes Leonardo overlook a great deal. This is true of both Salaì and Lisa. Salaì means ‘Little Devil’ and he is Leonardo’s perpetual favourite, with his long ringlets like a string of polished chestnuts, and his impish grin. He looks like an angel longing to discard his wings and misbehave. Darling Leonardo cannot resist. It is my task to watch Salaì closely, to try and limit the havoc the wretch can and does wreak on us all. I warn Leonardo again and again, but he hardly ever listens. He is in thrall to beauty.

  Lisa shivers. It is absurd. The studio is deliciously cool. The ceilings are high and the windows shaded. The oil paints react to extreme heat and Leonardo needs a steady, even light to draw. Lisa is never content.

  ‘May we have a fire lit?’

  ‘Of course, Madonna.’

  Servants bustle in an instant. Everyone wants to please Lisa. It’s tiresome. Even the flames in the grate burst in an instant, as if under her spell, daubing a rosy glow on her cheek. Leonardo leans forward, entranced. He signals for his brushes and his palette, determined to match my cheek to hers. To my satisfaction, the fire is built of damp logs and so begins to ooze smoke and poor Lisa coughs, covering her mouth and pearlescent teeth with a small white hand. Her eyes liquify with tears. Leonardo scrutinises every part of he
r face, unblinking in his fascination as though she is the Madonna herself.

  She glances around the studio, restless as a sparrow. The chatter is subdued, all laughter muffled. Even Salaì behaves. She’s searching for something. For me.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, as she spies me at last, her face stricken. ‘It still isn’t finished.’ Her exquisite nose wrinkles. ‘And it doesn’t look like me.’

  What she means is, she doesn’t like me. Which is fine. As I don’t like her either. Leonardo is far more diplomatic. He places a reassuring hand on hers. She recoils. He is not her husband, and she frets when he touches her.

  ‘A painting is visual poetry.’

  Lisa looks at him, puzzled.

  He tries again. ‘When I paint, I paint two things. I paint a man, or here, a woman. But I also paint a mind – my mind, my ideas. This portrait is not simply of you, but also of my mind and my ideas. That part of the picture will appear to you as stranger, as she is not you, but me.’

  And me, I think, but this is not the time to argue.

  Leonardo gestures to his assistants to set my easel before him and Lisa, and she examines me with strained dislike. He glances between us.

  ‘No one has created a painting like my Lisa before. She is Eve and not Eve, and the Virgin but also every woman. Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice and all Beloved Ladies. But she is also human, with tones of flesh. If you reach out and brush her cheek, you expect it to dimple. She is the lustre of life itself, filled with warmth. She’s enveloped in light and shade. She’s the legitimate daughter of nature and the kin of a god who speaks and breathes.’

  Lisa leans forward closer and closer until her eyelashes almost brush mine, straining to see what Leonardo sees, how he sees me. Each day, I look out at the world through the eyes he gave me, while the world winks back at me. Glimpsed through our eyes, the universe is a marvel.