Isleworth Mona Lisa

Isleworth Mona Lisa
Year	Early sixteenth-century
Medium	Oil on canvas
Subject	Lisa Gherardini
Dimensions	84.5 cm × 64.5 cm (33.3 in × 25.4 in)
Location	Private collection, Switzerland

The Isleworth Mona Lisa is an early 16th-century oil on canvas painting depicting the same subject as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, though with the subject (Lisa del Giocondo) depicted as being a younger age.^[1] The painting is thought to have been brought from Italy to England in the 1780s,^[1] and came into public view in 1913 when the English connoisseur Hugh Blaker acquired it from a manor house in Somerset, where it was thought to have been hanging for over a century.^[2] The painting would eventually adopt its unofficial name of Isleworth Mona Lisa from Blaker's studio being in Isleworth, West London.^[3] Since the 1910s, experts in various fields, as well as the collectors who have acquired ownership of the painting, have asserted that the major elements of the painting are the work of Leonardo himself, as an earlier version of the Mona Lisa.^[4]

In 1914, art critic Paul George Konody criticized early reports of the painting, which contained errors that he believed caused skepticism about the painting to become "hostile incredulity", but Konody nonetheless found that the painting was clearly "very largely worked up by the master himself".^[5] Konody also found the painting to have features "far more pleasing and beautiful than in the Louvre version".^[5][6] A number of Italian experts in the 1920s echoed Konody's assessment of authorship by Leonardo at a time when the painting was more broadly examined.^[7] Much later authorities have made varying characterizations of the degree to which the painting can be ascribed to Leonardo; in 2012, The Guardian described the art world as being "split" over the question,^[8] and in 2013, Reuters said that it was "dismissed by some experts", but "also won support in the art world".^[9] Art historian Jean-Pierre Isbouts has endorsed Leonardo's involvement in painting the work, asserting that "24 of 27 recognised Leonardo scholars have agreed this is a Leonardo",^[10] while art historian Martin Kemp dismisses the proposition that Leonardo painted any part, and in 2012 described his contemporaries in the art world as being equivocal, or making "encouraging but noncommittal statements" on this point.^{[11][12][13][14][15]}

Kemp and others who doubt Leonardo's hand in the painting attribute it to the Leonardeschi, Leonardo's workshop, believing it to be one of a number of copies of the Mona Lisa produced by Leonardo's collaborators, assistants, and pupils, though, as Leonardo biographer Walter Isaacson expressed it, "perhaps with an occasional helping hand from the master".^[12] In 2010, The Mona Lisa Foundation was founded to investigate if the Isleworth Mona Lisa was painted in part by Leonardo,^[16][17] but as an earlier version of the Louvre Mona Lisa.^[18]

Differing views have been expressed on the relative weight to be given to scientific evidence versus connoisseurship. Physicist John F. Asmus, who pioneered laser-restoration techniques for Renaissance art, and who had previously examined the Mona Lisa in the Louvre for this purpose, published a computer image processing study in 1988 concluding that the brush strokes of the face in the painting were performed by the same artist responsible for the brush strokes of the face of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre,^[19][9] and replicated that finding in a 2016 study. However, curator Luke Syson has argued that science is "only ever one of several factors we'd use to assess the authenticity and authorship of a work of art".^[20] An independent 2015 academic journal article also attributed the work to Leonardo on stylistic grounds.^[21]