At 507-Years-Old, 'Mona Lisa' Never Looked Younger

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http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/younger-mona-lisa-tk/57325/



Paging Dan Brown. After 35 years of research, a Swiss group is presenting what they say to be is an original version of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece. All kidding aside, the Mona Lisa Foundation, a Zurich-based foundation, is in Geneva presenting the "Isleworth Mona Lisa"—a painting they say predates da Vinci's Mona Lisa by about 12 years (around 1505) which was first found in 1913 and is supposedly Mona Lisa in her 20s. "So far, not one scientific test has been able to disprove that the painting is by Leonardo," said art historian Stanley Feldman, a foundation member in report by the AP. "We have investigated this painting from every relevant angle and the accumulated information all points to it being an earlier version of the Giaconda in the Louvre," Feldman told Reuters.

The presentation today has become a battle of da Vinci experts. In the foundation's corner, they have the backing of leading Italian Leonardo specialist Alessandro Vezzosi, and the U.S.-based expert Carlo Pedretti, reports Reuters, which adds that Oxford University professor and Leonardo authority Martin Kemp is totally against the painting--pointing to the fact that the portrait is painted on canvas while anyone who's a Leonardo expert would know that da Vinci's favorite medium is wood.

Feldman of course is having no part of it, and explains that because of the precise similarity between the two paintings, it had to be Leonardo, who apparently paints the same way every time (or a meticulous copycat):

"When we do a very elementary mathematical test, we have discovered that all of the elements of the two bodies — the two people, the two sitters — are in exactly the same place," Feldman told The Associated Press by phone. "It strikes us that in order for that to be so accurate, so meticulously exact, only the person who did one did the other ... It's an extraordinary revelation in itself, and we think it's valid."

[dipsydoodle]

1. First attempt was rejected

Seriously though - its thought to have taken Da Vinci anything up to 20 years or so do the painting which was of his girlfriend.

If you were to see the accepted version face to face in the Louvre then IMHO the most striking detail is actually the background scenery.

Some background here to the OP.

Shortly before World War I, English art collector Hugh Blaker discovered the painting in the home of a Somerset nobleman in whose family it had been for nearly 100 years. This discovery led to the conjecture that Leonardo painted two portraits of Lisa del Giocondo: the famous one in The Louvre, and the one discovered by Blaker, who bought the painting and took it to his studio in Isleworth, London, from which it takes its name.

According to Leonardo's early biographer Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo had started to paint Mona Lisa in 1503, but "left it unfinished". However, a fully finished painting of a "certain Florentine lady" surfaces again in 1517, shortly before Leonardo's death and in his private possession. The latter painting almost certainly is the same that now hangs in the Louvre. Based on this contradiction, supporters of the authenticity of the Isleworth Mona Lisa claim it to be the unfinished Mona Lisa, made at least partially by Leonardo and originally handed over to its commissioner, and the Louvre Mona Lisa a later version of it, made by Leonardo for his own use.

Also, according to Henry F. Pulitzer in his Where is the Mona Lisa?, Giovanni Lomazzo, an art historian, refers in his Trattato dell'arte della Pittura Scultura ed Architettura, published 1584, to "della Gioconda, e di Mona Lisa (the Gioconda, and the Mona Lisa)". La Gioconda is sometimes used as an alternative title of the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre; the reference implies that these were, in fact, two separate paintings. Pulitzer reproduces the critical page from Lomazzo's tract in his own book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isleworth_Mona_Lisa