2Dogs Art Space - Akashi (明石）- Japan - Research Centre

The Davidson Hypothesis (t₀ → t₀ + D) proposes that artists cannot act on the present directly, but respond to reality after a structural delay—where perception becomes action. Two Dogs Art Space serves as its laboratory, showing that while we share one yard, we inhabit offset realities. Art thus emerges from perceptual structure, not chronology, establishing a new epistemology in studio praxis. “In short, I examine the delay through which perception crystallizes into artwork.”

Saturday, 10 January 2026

Rethinking the “Nude Mona Lisa” Through the Lens of Delay

Rethinking the “Nude Mona Lisa” Through the Lens of Delay

Peter Davidson

Did Leonardo da Vinci paint a nude Mona Lisa? I may have just solved this centuries-old mystery

A Response to Jonathan Jones (The Guardian)

Winter evening, Seto Inland Sea, Japan

Introduction

Jonathan Jones’s exploration of the so‑called “Nude Mona Lisa”—the Houghton Nude, the Chantilly cartoon, and their relationship to Leonardo’s late practice—opens a door that extends far beyond mere attribution. Jones assembles the material clues: the left‑handed hatching of the Chantilly drawing, the studio‑level execution of the Houghton painting, and the circulation of ideas between Leonardo, his assistants, and Raphael.
What Jones frames as a "centuries-old mystery" of authorship, I understand as evidence of the Sovereign Space of Delay: the perceptual interval in which Leonardo’s conceptual energy, having reached saturation, becomes distributed across the shared pulse of the studio.

1. The Scintillation vs. the Surface

Jones identifies the Chantilly cartoon as the "foundational clue," noting that technical analysis suggests it was "at least partly by Leonardo, done with the left hand." This is precisely where the perceptual event occurs. In my praxis, this drawing is the Prescience—the moment when Leonardo’s conceptual energy is at its highest voltage.
The left‑handed hatching is not merely technical evidence; it is the trace of what I call the Scintillation, the instant when perception outruns execution. Jones observes that the artist of the cartoon "replicates [the pose] perfectly," a feat easy only "if you actually were Leonardo." The subsequent oil versions—including the Houghton/Hermitage painting—are what I call Technical Residue. They mark the moment when Leonardo’s intensity enters the collective delay of the studio. His students did not merely imitate; they inhabited his pulse.

2. The Non‑Chronological Link: A Compressed Field

Jones reminds us that the Mona Lisa accompanied Leonardo to Rome between 1513 and 1516. He notes that the artist "never gave it to Lisa’s husband," and that the work's small size "made it easy to transport on his restless sojourns." This fact collapses the conventional timeline. In the studio, the 1503 portrait and the 1514 nude reimagining are not separated by a decade but exist in a compressed perceptual field.
The Axiom: Scale and time are compressed in the Space of Delay.
The monumental hands of the nude figure—which Jones highlights as having "unmistakable allusions to the Mona Lisa"—are records of reconstruction. The nude is not "later" than the clothed version; it is parallel.

3. The “Decadent” Pulse: A Shared Epistemology

Jones’s comparison with Raphael’s La Fornarina is vital. He suggests the nude Mona Lisa was "a grenade chucked into the Renaissance" that "radicalized the way artists painted bodies." This demonstrates that the Space of Delay was porous. Raphael, visiting Leonardo in the Belvedere, did not merely copy a motif; he caught the afterglow of the Scintillation. His painting becomes a secondary record of the perceptual interval—the space between the eye and the panel—that defined Roman production. The nude Mona Lisa belongs to a plural epistemology, where ideas circulate not as static images, but as pulses.

Conclusion: The Attribution of the Lag

The essential question is not "Who held the brush?" but "Whose Delay is this?" Jones concludes that Leonardo "was so confident of that uniqueness he felt able to travesty it with a naked version." I would go further: the Nude Mona Lisa is the physical residue of Leonardo’s late‑period perception—a perceptual event completed through the hands of those who shared his rhythm. The Houghton painting is a delayed trace of the most significant perceptual mind in Western art.
In the Space of Delay, time dissolves. Whether it is a masterwork or a small nectarine held within this interval, the subject acquires monumental weight. The mundane becomes eternal through the mark of the lag.
Inspired by Jonathan Jones, “Did Leonardo da Vinci paint a nude Mona Lisa?” (The Guardian, January 2026). Link to article