Is Isleworth Mona Lisa Leonardo’s prequel to his famous portrait?

Is the Isleworth Mona Lisa, a portrait of the younger Mona Lisa, actually the painting Leonardo da Vinci created?

The Daily Mail reported in its online edition Monday that art experts will this week claim that Leonardo da Vinci completed a version of the Mona Lisa some 10 years before the famous painting.

The Isleworth Mona Lisa is nearly similar with the painting which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris in size, model and background.

One typical feature of the presumed to be an earlier version is that the model looks a little younger than that in the work in the Louvre.

The Isleworth Mona Lisa was found shortly before World War I and it was purchased by British fine arts collector Hugh Blaker. The work moved to his atelier in Isleworth, London, and has been named after the small town.

The foundation, which owns the work, plans to prove that the Isleworth Mona Lisa is the work by Da Vinci. Prof. Alessandro Vezzosi, who has set up his own art museum in Vinci, and Prof. Carlo Pedretti of the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at the University of California will join in proving that the art was painted by Da Vinci.

The Mona Lisa Foundation has claimed that the “Isleworth Mona Lisa”was the portrait Da Vinci painted about 10 years before the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

The foundation plans to put forward “historical, comparative and scientific evidence” that will prove once and for all that the painting is by the Italian renaissance artist.

Not a few art experts have claimed that the work is not by Da Vinci.

Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford disputes this. “So much is wrong,” he told The Sunday Times. “The dress, the hair and background landscape. This one is also painted on canvas, which Leonardo rarely did.”

Like the majority of his works, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is in fact painted on wood.

And while the lady in the Isleworth Mona Lisa does appear to be a younger version of the model in the more famous painting, Kemp said this did not prove the two were produced by Leonardo da Vinci.

“She might look younger but this is probably because the copyist, and I believe it is a copy done a few years after the Mona Lisa, just painted it that way,” added Kemp.