A painting claimed to be an earlier version of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been unveiled to the public in Singapore
Photo: Reuters
An "earlier version" of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has gone on public display for the first time in Singapore.
Researchers into the provenance of a painting dubbed the "Early Mona Lisa" reported that they had identified an English noble who probably bought it in Italy in the late 18th century and a country house where it was found in 1911.
A Swiss foundation holding it have argued that Leonardo painted it before the version that sits in the Paris Louvre.
"We feel these latest discoveries and new scientific analysis leave little doubt that it is Leonardo's work," said David Feldman, a Geneva-based auctioneer and vice-president of the Zurich Mona Lisa Foundation.
"The vast majority of experts now either agree with us or accept that there is a strong case for our thesis," he said.
However, according to the BBC, at least one expert has refuted the claims. Professor Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University and the author of several books on Leonardo, said: "The fact it's being shown in Singapore and is not getting an outing in a serious art museum [or] gallery is significant in itself.
"Leonardo's landscapes always seethed with a sense of life. It's inert.
"The drapery is inert, and what Leonardo did was he could always give the sense that even something static like drapery had a life to it, a vitality and an inherent movement in it, and this is a heavy-handed, static picture."
The painting shows what appears to be a younger Lisa del Giocondo, the Florentine merchant's wife who is the subject of the masterpiece in the Louvre, in front of a different background.
According to scientific tests, it's possible that he began working on this earlier version in 1503, roughly 10 years before the Mona Lisa, but it remained unfinished.
The earlier version, which is mentioned in several accounts from the early 16th century, came to light in modern times when British art dealer and collector Hugh Blaker found it in 1911 in a country house in southwest England.
Blaker, who owned the painting for many years and made several unsuccessful efforts to have it authenticated, never identified the house or the previous owners, and his diaries of the key years have gone missing.
A team of researchers say they have traced a work titled "La Joconde" loaned to an art exhibition in the town of Yeovil in 1856 and sold to a silver dealer two years later.
Working back from there, they say they found a document declaring that a young Somerset noble, James Marwood, owned a painting by Leonardo known as "La Joconde" that he had probably bought on a visit to Italy around the 1780s.
The team also established an implicit link to another local noble family who had a deep interest in Renaissance art and lived in Montacute House, today a major tourist attraction.
The researchers say Blaker's brief references to the house where he found the work indicate that it was Montacute, whose owners by 1911 had fallen on hard times and had begun to secretly sell their possessions.
The artwork will be on show until February at the Arts House in Singapore's Old Chambers of Parliament, before touring Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Australia.