The Mona Lisa Echo

Leading the news on this morning's Radio Nacional de España bulletin was an item much more uplifting than the usual recitals of violence, disaster and unemployment. Madrid's Prado Museum has announced that it has on its walls a Mona Lisa - La Gioconda in Spanish - painted at the same time, between 1503-06, as Leonardo da Vinci was painting the original Mona Lisa, the iconic portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant.

This announcement is, understandably, of huge interest to the Spanish, at a time when everything seems to be going wrong for them. The story has fascination for everyone who has fallen under the spell of Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile as she gazes from the walls of the Louvre, now sadly rather hidden behind layers of bullet-proof protection. There have been a number of copies of this famous painting which are distributed around the world. However, the discovery of the Prado "twin" is full of interesting insights, although the experts are trying to play down the public excitement.

La Gioconda at the Prado, (courtesy of the Prado Museum)

This twin portrait, of very similar dimensions to the Louvre version, has actually belonged to the Prado Museum for a long time; it was first recorded in 1666 as part of the Royal Collection. However, as has now been discovered, it was then considered an interesting but unexciting portrait, mainly because the figure was set in a black background as can be seen in the image above prior to restoration.. It was also thought to have been painted on an oak panel, which implied that an artist working in the Low Country (today's Holland and Belgium) painted it. Florentine artists used poplar or walnut panels for their paintings.

However, the spur for further investigation was an upcoming exhibition about Sainte Anne, Leonardo's last great painting,opening in March at the Louvre. The Prado experts first found that the wooden panel was indeed walnut, which meant that it was painted in Florence. Then infrared reflectography revealed that there was a landscape painted behind the lady, which echoed the landscape behind the Louvre's Mona Lisa. The removal of the black background confirmed a luminous Tuscan landscape, with the river Adda, a favourite of Leonardo. Crisper and with no sfumato, the scene helps confirm details on Leonardo's version. Apparently, the black ground was added about two centuries after the painting was executed, probably following current fashion.

A detail of the nearly conserved Leonardo da Vinci pupil's take of the Mona Lisa. The Prado has yet to finish conservation work on the whole painting. Photograph: Museo Nacional del Pradio

Not only is the background a luminous echo of the original, but the lady herself has a few interesting details which supplement those of the Louvre's Mona Lisa. Eyebrows, a frilly dress neckline, a sheer veil draped across her left shoulder and elbow, and even clearer details of the spindles of the chair in which the lady is seated - these are seen as clarifying details. All this information has led to the conclusion that this version of the Mona Lisa was painted at the same time that Leonardo da Vinci was working on his portrait of Lisa Gherardini, but that he himself did not work on this copy. Possibly the two paintings were done side by side, using the same model, maybe as a teaching exercise or maybe to duplicate a good painting for money. Indeed, Leonardo still possessed his portrait of Lisa Gherardini at his death, so he did not give the work to her husband, despite it being commissioned to celebrate the birth of her second child.

There are three names being mentioned in the press - the Spanish are talking of Francesco Melzi, a star apprentice from 1506 in Leonardo's studio, or else Andrea Salai, who joined Leonardo in 1490 and became a favoured pupil and possibly his lover. The Italians are talking of contemporaneous documents talking of a Fernando Spagnolo who was working with Leonardo in 1505 on the huge mural, the Batalla de Anghiari.

Whoever created this portrait of a young, vibrant woman in her twenties, it is intimately linked to Leonardo da Vinci and his iconic Mona Lisa.

It would, I am sure, amuse and interest Leonardo to know that over 500 years later, these two paintings are to be reunited temporarily at the Louvre later this year.

More about Self-portraits

When I was writing recently about art being a form of self-portrait, a record of where each artist is in time and space and outlook in life, I remembered another statement, this time by Leonardo daVinci. He said, "Every painter paints himself. Painters seem to paint their own faces and make paintings that seem directly involved with their own life. " Indeed, there has been much speculation about many of Leonardo's portraits using his own features, such as this video of Siegfried Woldhek talking about his search for Leonardo's self-portraits. This image is the most famed, done between 1512-15 in red chalk, when Leonardo was in his sixties, a drawing in the Royal Library of Turin.

Self-Portrait, Leonardo da Vinci, 1512-15 in red chalk drawing (Image courtesy of the Royal Library of Turin)

The urge to record one's own existence, one's presence, has been with us humans since time immemorial. This form of saying "I exist, I am present", in visual fashion, is testimony to mankind's sense of community, of shared characteristics that are more important than their differences, at least at some moments in our history. One of the most amazing collections of human representations is apparently becoming better known and understood in recent years - the GwionGwion rock paintings in the Kimberly area in N.W. Australia. Not only are these rock paintings probably more than 40,000 years old, but they tell of human life and adventures in stunning, elegant fashion.

Tassel Bradshaw (Gwion Gwion) figures wearing ornate costumes

Bradshaw figure, ( courtesy of the Bradshaw Foundation).

As examples of artwork that reveals the artist's own experience, in "self-portraiture" style, there is a red rock painting of a boat, the earliest known in history, that tells of man's migration to Australia via a four-man canoe on the Gwion Gwion rocks.

Bradshaw boat people, 40,000 years ago

There is also another long panorama of four-legged, antlered animals that the artist had evidently seen during the migration from SE Asia. There are no such animals, now or in early times, in Australia.

Gwion Gwion (Bradshaw) paintings on a rock wall.

Gwion Gwion cave paintings in the Kimberely

This huge collection of rock paintings, in hostile, difficult and remote terrain is an astounding example of man recording existence, beliefs, and ceremonies from very early times that one author, Jo Lennan, describes as "a forgotten Eden". The name, Gwion Gwion, comes from a bird's name. The Aboriginal people recount that this bird pecked the rock with such force that its blood sprang forth and it used its bloodied beak and feather to delineate the elegant, dainty figures. Indeed, it is thought by today's experts that these long-ago artists actually used quills to make the fine lines on the rocks. The actual dates of these early artists' work are still being determined, because the pigments used to draw have become part of the rocks themselves, and carbon dating doesn't work, especially in the tropics where its limits of dating go back +-40,000 years. Nonetheless, apparently on top of one drawing, there is a fossilised mud wasp's nest, and optical luminescence (which dates when something last saw the light of the sun) allowed a date of about 17,500 years for the drawing. This means that these artists were telling of themselves and their world at the same time as their long-distant colleagues were painting the wonderful images of their immediate universe on the cave walls in Lascaux, France.

What marvels we all inherit when such artists create "self-portraits" of their personal worlds.