The Scandalous Mona Lisa Twin You Weren’t Supposed to See | Art Explained

We all think we know the Mona Lisa. We have seen her countless times. She is the untouchable icon in the Louvre, safely secured behind thick bulletproof glass, shielded from the hordes of tourists. She is the virtuous face of art history, prim and proper, with that famous smile. And if we are honest, we have almost grown sick of seeing her on mugs, t-shirts and fridge magnets. Yet this image of the well-behaved saint is only half the truth. What if I told you there is a second version? One that very few people know about. She has the same piercing gaze, the exact same mysterious smile, the same iconic positioning of her hands. But she isn't wearing Florentine fabrics. She is completely nude. And this is where the story gets interesting, because this image actually exists. In fact, there are several versions of it. It isn't a modern forgery. It is a twin, an exposed sister of the famous Mona Lisa. She is called the Mona Vana or La Joconde Nude, the nude Mona Lisa. For a long time, art historians dismissed her as a mere curiosity or a workshop parody. They thought some student had just played a prank. But in recent years, something has happened that is making the art world sweat. Technological examinations conducted by experts at the French Centre of Research and Restoration of Museums have shown that we are not dealing with a joke here. The traces lead directly back into the inner sanctum of the Renaissance, into the studio of Leonardo da Vinci. We have to ask ourselves, why does this image exist? Why would one of humanity's greatest geniuses, or at least his inner circle, create a nude version of his absolute masterpiece? Was it about money? Eroticism? Or is there something entirely different behind it? We aren't looking at the polite lady in the Louvre today. In this video, we are dedicating ourselves to the Mona Vana. And we will see that this image is the key to understanding Leonardo da Vinci, not as the old man with a long white beard, but as a radical thinker who crossed boundaries. And we need to talk about the man who was likely the reason for all of this. A man Leonardo called his little devil. The little devil. To understand this enigmatic image, we must say goodbye to the ideal that Leonardo da Vinci was a solitary genius sitting in an ivory tower. His studio was a vibrant, chaotic place. And in the center of the storm stood a Gian Giacomo Cabrotti, better known as Salai. This resulted in one of the most fascinating and complicated relationships in art history. Salai was no ordinary student. He was 10 years old when he entered Leonardo's household in 1490. And he was anything but a model child. Leonardo, who usually filled his notebooks with brilliant inventions and anatomical sketches, kept a ledger on this boy like a resigned accountant. He called him a thief, a liar, stubborn and a glutton. That is not a loving description. That is a litany of sins. And Leonardo had good reasons for it. Just months after his arrival at the studio, the 10-year-old stole a valuable silver point stylus from another student. Silver points were expensive professional tools back then. But Salai didn't use it to draw. He likely sold it to buy sweets. But it didn't stop at candy. This boy's greed runs like a red thread through the records. Once, Leonardo had set money aside to buy the boy clothes. He wanted to get him trousers, a doublet and shirts. What did Salai do? He stole the four lire straight out of Leonardo's purse. Another time, he stole a piece of Turkish leather that Leonardo had actually bought for himself to have boots made and swapped it for any seed confections. Finally, Leonardo gave him a nickname that would go down in history. Salai. It derives from a character in the then-famous epic poem Morgante by Luigi Pulci. In this poem, of which Leonardo famously owned a copy, there is a little devil named Salai. Leonardo chose this name quite deliberately because for him the boy was exactly that. A fascinating but exhausting little devil. Yet, and this is the crucial point for our story, Leonardo didn't kick him out. On the contrary, this long list of transgressions didn't lead to an eviction but to an inseparable bond that lasted almost 30 years. Leonardo spoiled him. He bought him expensive clothes such as a cloak with silver brocade and repeatedly paid off his debts. Why does one do such a thing? Modern research assumes that Salai provided a diversion in Leonardo's eyes. The wild, untamable element that fascinated the master's rational mind. And naturally, eroticism played a role. Salai was a beautiful young man with curly hair in whom Leonardo, according to historical sources, took great pleasure. He was Leonardo's model, his muse, and his confidant. If you look at Leonardo's Saint John the Baptist or the Bacchus in the Louvre, you are looking into the face of Salai. That mocking smile, the magnificent curls, the androgynous aura. And there is an explicitly erotic drawing called Angelo Incarnato, the angel incarnate, which shows a nude youth with an erection. And this youth, too, bears Salai's features. So, if Salai modeled for angels and saints, the step to the Mona Vana is not that far. Because Salai wasn't just a model, he also picked up the brush himself. For a long time he was considered untalented. But newer research shows that he was quite competent. He took Leonardo's ideas and multiplied them. And it is exactly here, in this dynamic between the genius master and the beautiful thieving student, that we must look for the origin of the nude Mona Lisa. Master and student. But then, something stands out that irritates many viewers. Look at the arms and shoulders of the Mona Vana. They look muscular, almost athletic. This robustness has often been described as masculine. While the Mona Lisa in the Louvre seems much more reserved and her body disappears under masses of fabric, the Mona Vana is a celebration of flesh. And that is exactly why the French experts placed the Chantilly cartoon, the preparatory drawing, under the microscope. They wanted to know, is this just a clumsy imitation? The result was sensational. They found evidence of the so-called Spolvero technique. This is where the contours of a drawing are perforated with a needle to transfer them onto a canvas or wooden board using charcoal dust. The cartoon in Chantilly has exactly these holes. But the incredible part is this. If you overlay these outlines onto Mona Lisa in the Louvre, you see striking similarities. The position of the hands is almost identical. The French scientist Pascal Cotte also found such Spolvero dots under the paint layers of the real Mona Lisa. This means the Mona Vana didn't just appear out of nowhere. It is based on the same blueprint as the most famous painting in the world. They may have even been developed in parallel. And it gets even better, even if it initially seems like a contradiction. On the cartoon in Chantilly, researchers found hatching on the face that runs from top right to bottom left, the typical mark of a right-hander. This would actually argue against Leonardo, who was left-handed. But for the crucial contours and corrections, they then discovered the typical marks of a left-hander. This points to a fascinating division in labor. A talented student, very likely Salai, laid down the shading. But the master, Leonardo, took up the stylus himself to correct the forms and give the face the perfect expression. We are dealing with an intellectual construct. The masculine muscles combined with the feminine breast is not a mistake of a bad painter. It is intentional. It is a fusion. Leonardo could have done the study on Salai's body and then feminized him in the painting. Salai stood model for the nude Mona Lisa. That is the theory in the room. A mixture of everything that fascinated Leonardo. The significance. Why do something like that? Why take an icon of bourgeois respectability and strip her naked? There are three theories that help us look inside the heads of Renaissance people. First, money and eroticism. The Renaissance wasn't just a time of high art but also the beginning of a private collecting culture. Rich men set up small private rooms, so-called studioli. You could almost say the man cave of the Renaissance. And for these rooms you needed art that wasn't meant for the church. Pictures for the bedroom. The Mona Vanna caters to male preferences much more directly than the reserved Mona Lisa. She offers intimacy. Salai, ever the businessman, knew this. In his estate a painting was listed that was described as a picture of a semi-nude woman and valued at 25 scudi. That was only a quarter of the value of the Mona Lisa but still a lot of money for such a picture. Second, the insider joke. Leonardo was known for his sense of the grotesque. David Brown of the National Gallery suspects the Mona Vanna might be a body parody. Imagine the situation in the studio. The little devil Salai takes the pose of the respectable merchant's wife, burying his chest in the process. Perhaps the breasts were added artificially or supplemented in the painting. And everybody is amused by this breach of etiquette. It would be a deconstruction of the stiff bourgeois world through the exuberance of the artist's workshop. But then there's the third more profound level. Philosophy. Leonardo was not a pornographer. He was a thinker. In the philosophy of Neoplatonism there was the idea of two kinds of love. That sounds like a heavy philosophy lecture now but it really means just one thing. There is celestial love and terrestrial love. The celestial stands for spirit and virtue. That would be the colossal Mona Lisa. And the terrestrial stands for nature and physical beauty. That would be the nude Mona Vanna. For Leonardo nature was the supreme teacher. Nudity for him was perhaps not dirty but the naked truth, the nuda veritas. It is quite possible that the two pictures were conceived as a pair, like two sides of a coin. The social mask we wear when we are dressed and the natural creatures we are when we let the covers fall. The new perspective. So what does this mean for us the next time we see the Mona Lisa, whether in the Louvre or on a postcard? The Mona Lisa often seems unapproachable. She has frozen into an icon. But through the existence of the Mona Vanna and the wild story of Salai she gets her humanity back. Suddenly we don't just see the perfect masterpiece. We see the studio, we see the dust, the charcoal sticks, the laughter and perhaps also the suggestive tension between master and student. Salai stayed with Leonardo until the end, even if he ran to Milan before Leonardo's death. Salai's own end by the way was as wild as his life. He died violently in 1524, likely from a gunshot wound. Exactly how it happened is unclear. A rock star exit for the little devil of the renaissance. But he left us proof. In his inventory the name La Joconde appears for the first time for the famous painting of the Mona Lisa. And right next to it the picture of the semi-nude. He owned them both, the saint and the nude. The Mona Vanna is far more than just a footnote. It is the missing link that shows us Leonardo da Vinci was free from the prudishness of later centuries. He sought the divine in the carnal and perfection in the androgynous. Art is not always just serious and holy. Sometimes it's a game, sometimes a provocation. And almost always there is a second version of the story just waiting to be discovered. And perhaps the Mona Lisa's smile is so mysterious precisely because she knows her naked sister is out there somewhere telling the whole story. And that's why it's art.