Word: vasari
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...picture the world has come to know as the Mona Lisa would be ended by a few facts about the fat-cheeked woman sitting smugly against the sea-green setting of winding water and oddly spired landscape.* Forty years after Leonardo's death a painter-journalist named Giorgio Vasari told the world that that woman had been Madonna Lisa, third wife of a Neapolitan named Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo. Of Lisa little is known. Last week Dr. Raymond S. Stites, professor of art and esthetics at Antioch College, ended a twelve-year job of checking Vasari...
Professor Stites found that Vasari had credited his choice of Lisa to a manuscript by an anonymous Florentine who, in fact, does not mention a Leonardo portrait of Lisa. On the other hand, he found a profile study of Isabella by Leonardo in Vienna's Imperial Museum and another in Leonardo's signet ring in the royal archives in Mantua. His difficulty was that the Mona Lisa is nearly full-face, but he thought he saw similarities. Probing on, he found a Leonardo statue in Berlin whose profile strongly resembles the known Isabella profiles. Seen full-face, this...