Encourage Me: No Art

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.” (Leonardo da Vinci)

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world, and it brings more than 6 million admirers to the Louvre in Paris, France each year. Leonardo da Vinci painted oil paints on wood. The original painting size is 30 x 20 7/8 in (77 x 53 cm) and is owned by the Government of France.

The Mona Lisa’s background landscape seems unreal, but the bridge might be one that Leonardo knew. It is usually said to be Ponte Buriano in Tuscany, but in 2011 a researcher claimed that it depicts the Bobbio Bridge over the Trebbia, which was washed away in a 1472 flood.

Leonardo da Vinci worked on the painting for four years, and possibly at intervals after that. Strangely, he always took it with him when he travelled, and he never signed or dated it. The picture went with him when, towards the end of his life, he moved to France. It was sold to his last patron, King François I, and remained out of sight in the royal collection for almost 200 years. In 1799 Napoleon, then first consul of France came across the painting and commandeered it for his bedroom. It was only in 1804 that the Mona Lisa went on public display in the newly founded Louvre Museum.

Over the past century, it has been proposed that Mona Lisa could have been a noblewoman named Isabella d’Este, marquise of Mantua, or Costanza d’Avalos, duchess of Francavilla. Others have seen the face of a man Leonardo da Vinci himself, or the man who was for 20 years his assistant (and perhaps his lover), Gian Giacomo Caprotti. There is even a theory that the picture may have started out as a portrait from life but, over the years that Leonardo worked on it, evolved into an abstract vision of the ideal female.

These days, most experts agree that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini Del Giocondo, wife of a Florentine silk merchant named Francesco Del Giocondo (hence the name by which she is known in Italy and France, La Gioconda, or La Joconde). When she first sat for Leonardo da Vinci, in around 1503, she was about 24 years old.

Her contrapposto pose – the body angled away from the viewer, head turned forward – was widely admired and copied by Leonardo’s contemporaries. His sfumato technique, whereby sharp edges are blurred and shaded to create an uncannily lifelike effect, was seen as a brilliant technical innovation, very unlike the slightly frozen human figures of earlier, lesser painters.

Mona Lisa has often been scrutinized by medical experts, and she turns out to be a fascinating patient. In 2010 an Italian doctor looked at the apparent swelling around her eyes and diagnosed excess cholesterol in her poor diet. Other conditions ascribed to her include facial paralysis, deafness, even syphilis. More happily, it has been suggested that the inscrutable look of contentment on her face, as well as the coy placement of her hands, indicate that she is pregnant. Dentists have also had their say.

It has been suggested that her expression suggests bruxism, compulsive grinding of the teeth; or that the line of her top lip suggests that her front teeth are missing, which, along with the faintest hint of a scar on her lip, raises the troubling possibility that she was a victim of domestic violence from a dysfunctional marriage.

“What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.” (Abbas Kiarostami)[i]