Who’s in the Mysterious Consortium That Owns a Supposed Younger Version of the ‘Mona Lisa’? A New Lawsuit Aims to Find Out

An ownership dispute is heating up over a version of
the Mona Lisa that is widely believed to be by
the hand of Leonardo da Vinci.

An international consortium jointly owns the painting, but now
the heirs of a man who bought a quarter share in it are suing to
find out the painting’s whereabouts and the identities of its other
anonymous owners in order to regain control of their interest in
the work.

The consortium established the Mona
Lisa Foundation in Switzerland a decade ago to research
and promote the painting, which is known as the Isleworth
Mona Lisa. But when the heirs’ lawyer, Giovanni Protti,
reached out to the foundation, “we got no answer from them other
than ‘we don’t know where the painting is; we don’t know who the
owners are; we are just researchers doing attribution work,’”
he told artnet News.

In order to identify the people who control the Isleworth
Mona Lisa, Protti and his partner, Chris Marinello, of
Art Recovery International in London,
turned to the infamous Panama Papers, a cache
of 11.5 million leaked documents related to offshore financial
transactions.

“Through the Panama Papers, we got some information about the
real owners of the painting,” Protti said. “They are very
well-known figures in the art world. We assume they own the
painting through offshore companies in tax havens.” Protti declined
to reveal the suspected owners’ identities, but says they will come
out in court.

In addition to the dispute over the painting’s ownership, there
is also the matter of its authorship. Although the Mona Lisa
Foundation has worked for years to prove that the second work is
also by Leonardo’s hand—and some studies in peer-reviewed journals
make that case—others remain unconvinced. Leonardo expert
Martin Kemp, for instance, has been outspoken in his belief that
the work, which is said to depict a younger version of
the Mona Lisa, is not by the Renaissance master, but
a copy.

When he reviewed the Mona Lisa Foundation’s research on the
painting in the book Mona Lisa: Leonardo’s
Earlier Version, Kemp wrote on his blog, “The piles
of unstable hypotheses, stacked one on another, would not be
acceptable from an undergraduate.”

The family that Protti and Marinello represent, who wish to
remain anonymous, allegedly inherited their share of the
Isleworth Mona Lisa from Leland Gilbert, a porcelain
manufacturer. He had purchased a stake in the work from the British
art historian Henry Pulitzer, whose 1966 book Where
Is the Mona Lisa? introduced the heretofore unknown copy of
the masterpiece to the world.

Pulitzer left his majority share in the work to his partner
Elizabeth Meyer, who died in 2008. That’s when the international
consortium entered the picture, forming the Mona Lisa Foundation to
try and prove the painting’s authorship.

“Our clients had a very close relationship with the painting and
Elizabeth Meyer,” Protti said. “The trouble started after her
death.”

The Mona Lisa Foundation did not respond to inquiries from
artnet News, but a representative of the foundation, Markus Frey,
told the Art Newspaper
that the claim from Gilbert’s heirs was “ill-founded and has no
merit.”

Since 1975, the painting has spent most of its time locked away
in a Swiss bank vault, emerging in 2014 for a show in Singapore,
and later in Shanghai in 2016. Last month, it returned to public
view in Europe for the first time in decades when it went on
display at the Palazzo Bastogi, from June 8 to July 30.

A hearing has been scheduled for September 8 in Italian civil
court. The Gilbert heirs hope it will provide an opportunity to
learn how the painting was imported to Italy for the exhibition,
and to try to keep it from being exported. “What we ask the court
is to keep the painting here in Italy,” Protti said. “Our clients
would like to make sure that the painting does not go back in the
vault for another 40 years, because it’s important to the
public. They want the public to know and to be able to see
this painting.”

“When you own a painting like this, you are a custodian of a
treasure that is the property of humanity,” he added. “The owners
have a huge responsibility.”

The post Who’s in the Mysterious Consortium That Owns a
Supposed Younger Version of the ‘Mona Lisa’? A New Lawsuit Aims to
Find Out appeared first on artnet News.