Stephen Bann, History of Art Dept., University of Bristol
Reproducing the Mona Lisa in Nineteenth-Century France
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa achieved a worldwide celebrity unmatched by any other painting in the course of the twentieth century. It has been plausibly suggested that this process was initiated by the episode in the first decade when the work was stolen from the Louvre by an Italian workman. Yet the history of the Mona Lisa’s reception over the nineteenth century indicates a hardly less dramatic rise from obscurity to what we would now call an iconic status. This was a process that undoubtedly began in France, where the work had been in the royal collection since the artist’s death, and did not finally emerge into the public domain until after the Revolution. It was a process hastened by the appearance of a French translation of Vasari in 1841, and notably by Théophile Gautier’s lyrical description first published in 1857. But the most substantial evidence for the Mona Lisa’s reception derives from the long sequence of prints after the original work which may well have begun only with Aubry-Lecomte’s lithograph in 1824. Not just the newly invented medium of lithography, but also traditional burin engraving, and ultimately photography were employed by artists to convey the special charm of Leonardo’s portrait.
In 1919, the noted French art historian Henri Focillon published an essay on ‘La Joconde et ses interprètes’, in which this history of reproductions was related to the development of what we would now term the ‘period eye’. For Focillon, ‘Romanticism and lithography popularized the Mona Lisa’. Yet Focillon took a partisan stance, openly admitting his preference for lithography and etching as reproductive media that had supposedly superseded the traditional techniques of engraving. This lecture attempts to redress the balance by looking at some of the continuing evidence for the impact of burin engraving, alongside that of the new media like lithography and photography. In particular, it retraces the extraordinary story of the lengthy genesis of an engraving by the Italian-born Luigi Calamatta, who took nearly thirty years to convert his drawing after the painting into a published print. A rare photograph after the work by Gustave Le Gray, and an unfinished (but published) print by Ferdinand Gaillard from the 1880s, are further evidence that these various media did not simply compete with one another in aiming at greater fidelity to the original. They were all involved in a complex process of aesthetic and cultural validation, which continued to operate even as Leonardo’s work was being transformed from a portrait painting into a myth.