Mona Lisa copy - Kemp speaks
February 23 2012
From The Art Newspaper:
Martin Kemp, from Oxford University, is one of the top Leonardo specialists, and he has not yet seen the restored Prado copy, although he has studied high-quality images. His initial impression, he told The Art Newspaper, is that “the head is very pretty, but speaks of a careful pedantry which only hints at Leonardo’s melting ambiguity”.
Kemp suggests that “the details of the hair and dress are based on close observation of Leonardo, but exhibit a certain niggling exactitude that comes from careful emulation”. The sketchiness of the landscape “seems to speak of a different artist from that responsible for the head.”
Kemp's observations seem entirely sensible to me. And I still can't see why one of the greatest artist's in the world would go to the trouble of having a copy made painstakingly alongside the original, only for it to end up looking like 'careful pedantry'. Surely, Leonardo's pupils were better than this.
