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I prayed to the Virgin, but my prayers seemed to get no clear answer. . . . Then I pulled a staple from the wall, and with the point of it prised out one of the jewels, an amethyst. . . . I had spoken already to Gioconda.
Do you remember the Louvre scandal, the tiara which was admitted to be false, invented and manufactured by a modern artist? Here is the tiara of Saitapharnes, the real one, Beautrelet! Look, Beautrelet, look with all your eyes: here is the marvel of marvels, the supreme masterpiece, the work of no mortal brain; here is Leonardo's Gioconda, the real one!
We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be 'very fine. His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.
Thea sang an aria from 'Gioconda, some songs by Schumann which she had studied with Harsanyi, and the "TAK FOR DIT ROD," which Ottenburg liked. "That you must do again," he declared when they finished this song. "You did it much better the other day. You accented it more, like a dance or a galop. How did you do it?" Thea laughed, glancing sidewise at Mrs. Nathanmeyer.
France bought the picture; France has always owned and housed it; it still belongs to France. We call the "Mona Lisa" a portrait, and we have been told how La Gioconda sat for the picture, and how the artist invented ways of amusing her, by stories, recitations, the luring strain of hidden lutes, and strange flowers and rare pictures brought in as surprises to animate and cheer.
Even after long years the evil fate still persists, for in 1911 his "Gioconda" was stolen from the Louvre by madman or knave. On the left wall is Uccello's battle piece, No. 52, very like that in our National Gallery: rich and glorious as decoration, but quite bearing out Vasari's statement that Uccello could not draw horses.
There are several pictures by this master in the present exhibition; but you may look here in vain for the portrait of La Gioconda, which he employed four years in painting, and in which he has imitated nature so closely, that, as a well-known author has observed, "the eyes have all the lustre of life, the hairs of the eye brows and lids seem real, and even the pores of the skin are perceptible."
La Gioconda had forgotten to pack a cloak in the bundle; the night was snowing, with snow underfoot; and I had run past the quays before the fear struck me that, at so late an hour, the jewellers would have closed their shops. But in the street behind the Dogano I found one open, and the jeweller asked no questions.
The smile of the lost picture called "La Gioconda" is by fanciful people regarded as something very wonderful. It is really the clever portraiture of the habitual "leer" of a somewhat wearied sensual woman. It had a fascination for the great Leonardo, but no profound significance.
A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be found, of course, in Pater's passages on La Gioconda and Botticelli's Birth of Venus. But these belong to a different realm, in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless description.
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