Did Leonardo da Vinci create a nude Mona Lisa – and if so, who was the model?

The Louvre thinks the great Renaissance master might be behind the charcoal sketch known as the Monna Vanna, and the sitter might not be a woman

Leonardo da Vinci’s studio was a fun place. When they weren’t playing music and trying on clothes, he and his young assistants – among them the good-looking pickpocket Salaì – enjoyed making rude jokes. For that is what the Monna Vanna is. This charcoal drawing of a naked woman, a nude version of the Mona Lisa posed just like his renowned portrait, goes on exhibition in Paris later this year for Leonardo’s 500th anniversary. The Louvre has detected Leonardo’s own hand in it – evidence of his subversive sense of humour.

The Mona Lisa, which Leonardo worked on obsessively for years and kept with him until his death in 1519, is a painting of veiled ambiguities. Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the Florentine woman who posed for it, wears a diaphanous silk headcovering almost too thin to see, and subtle mysteries resonate from her shadowed eyes to the distant riverscape. The Monna Vanna (it translates as “vain woman”) is a blunt travesty preserving Leonardo’s own sly interpretation of his masterpiece.

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