Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1914 — MONA LISA’S STORY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MONA LISA’S STORY

Return to Paris Recalls Long Misunderstood History. Salomon Relnach, a French Searchar for the Truth,JTefla of Hta Efforts to Learn the Facts of Re- , markable Portrait. :<Pwris. —The unprecedented enthusiasm over the return of the Mona Use to Paris takes us back to the days of her first arrival. 400 years and mote ago. Vincenzo Terugia, the Italian artartizan, who abducted her from the Louvre in' 1911 to “give her back” to Florence, is completely mistaken in hte facts. Mona Lisa was always a Paris resident At the moment wh4h Perugia imagines her to have been “stolen” from Italy “by Napoleon,” she had not been living in Italy for 300 years. Mona Lisa was brought to Paris-by her father, Leonardo da Vinci, who sold her to King Franeis I. for $40,000 of our money—a terrific price in those days. , When first exhibited in the palace of the Louvre 400 years ago there was a rush of all the notables of Paris to see her, comparable only to the present pvation of return. Leonardo was the star guest of the French king, more run after and admired in Paris than in his native Italian city; and he could sell every scrap of his works. In his baggage when he came to France he brought the Mona Lisa. I “Why does she smile so sadly?” asked the French king. Leonardo never tdld him. Yet he knew why. . - ... 1 . __ Why does Mona Lisa smile so sadly? ’ftere at last is her true pathetic history. Now is the time to tell it.- Mona Lisa' has too loiig been misunderstod. “During 400 years past,” says Paul Leprieur, curator of the Louvre paintings, who went to Italy and brought her back, “during 400 years past Mona Lisa has addled the wits of those who

have talked about her after having looked too long upon her.” “Four centuries Is rather much," replies Salomon Relnach. This Salomon Relnach is the very typ- of the exact archaelogist -He will not permit geniuses to create facts, and is the enemy of wind and flapdoodle, breaking in on fofty theories with a marriage or death certificate. He is curator of the St. Germain museum, a remarkably distinguished man. perfectly well knowh In America. And Salomon Relnach pricked the bubble of all this wind about Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci took four year*

<lsOl-1604) to pain the wife of hia friend, Francesco del Glocondo; and, so far from being In lbve with her or she with him, he dropped both portrait and fritter again and again, on a moment’s notice, to go on pleasure or business trips. Relnach is a terrible man. He chases a date through a hundred manuscripts until he trees it Leonardo quit Florence in 1499, to return only in 160 j. In 1502 he traveled in Uhmbria as- architect of Valentine Borgia. He returned to Florence In 1503, went on a x pleasure jaunt to Venice in 1505, returned and went to Milan in 15Q6. That, Is not four years of loving contemplation, is It? The truth is, that Leonardo, painted the portrait gratis for his friend, the husband dropping in when business called. It bears every mark of such a non-pald, purely friendship portrait—to the last, in which the-painter sells it to a third party. Salomon Relnach has found It We know the melancholy of Mona Lisa. Married in 1495, she hgd no children uptil 1499. • Then came a little daughter.

Salomon Relnacn remembered that once a librarian of Florence communicated to Muntz, the great French art historian, an extract from the ancient “Libre del Mortl” —records of deaths In Florence. By this it appears that on June 1, 1501, the little daughter (flanciulla) of Francesco del Glocondo and his wife Mona Lisa was buried from the church of Santa Maria Novella. Why, the very coßtume of Mona Lisa in the picture is heavy mourning! You see now. Her smile is a constrained smile, the best she can do to please the kindly painter who has paid singers, musicians and buffoons to entertain her.