Vintage View: Mona Lisa Smile
Last summer, feet a-throb on cruel, glorious parquet, make-up drooling from my chin, I beheld again Leonardo’s La Joconde.
Submerged behind several centimetres of bulletproof glass, she was cool as a Silvermint, gazing cross-eyed over the heads of a hundred Asian tourists distilling her essence through their mobile phones.
If you have not seen the Mona Lisa, let me tell you - considering her reputation the Florentine tease is relatively tiny, her thin, poplar board a mere 55cm by 77cm.
Staggering towards her, knees cramped by the ascent of 1,000 stone steps, this dirty little golden picture can be something of an ‘is that it’ moment.
Over 1,500 people an hour visit the collection of Italian masters in the Salle des États, where this feminine enigma has hung for 10, years since a feted move from a gloomy corridor elsewhere in the Louvre.
The writhing oily audience of Titians, Tintorettos, and Salvator Rosas around La Joconde barely get a second glance from sneakered visitors jostling for a prohibited, digital moment of devotion. This is the epicentre of a global industry written out in posters, coffee table books, pop art and fridge magnets.
The expression of Lisa del Giocondo of the Gherardini family (we think this is her) has puzzled us for over 500 years. She does not have any discernible surviving eyebrows, which immediately confuses as we search for a limiting horizon for those black eyes.
Leonardo deliberately ‘smoked’ the edges of the eyes and mouth- the expression almost seems to shiver in the light.
Is she smug, sexually stimulated, flirting with Leonardo? Did she have rotten teeth and was trying desperately to pinch them off with tight lips? Could she be Leonardo himself, committing the ultimate cultural prank?
The French terms for the woman seated in a rather architectural landscape, hands folded and eyes on us, is a play on ‘the amused woman.’
Based on the writings of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) she may have just delivered a son - very satisfying. We’re compelled by tradition to not only go and see her in when in Paris, but to be seen at least to be interested in the subject matter.
Why? Why does she matter in the wider opus of luminous Renaissance works, many of which feature far more beautiful and compelling women in the galleries across Europe? What makes her so popular?
Many theories have been penned as to why the Mona Lisa trips so lightly between high culture and pop’ culture, the most popular of these is Professor Donald Sassoon’s book Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting - Harper Collins (2009). He argues that the painting was in the right place in the right time or ‘location, location’ as Sassoon puts it.
La Joconda was part of the original collection when the Louvre opened as a public gallery, she played diplomat- touring to America and Japan. She speaks for herself as a work of art.
It’s exquisitely worked, melting with minute strokes into a dreamy, atmospheric portrait that’s set firmly in our ancient collective. Looking down into the imaginary countryside (gleaned from Italy) as if from above was a novel device.
In the early 16th century (she was painted between 1503-1506) that direct, confident stare out at us, the viewer, was revolutionary - emboldening and provocative for a picture of even an idealised woman, and one so modestly dressed.
Her right hand rests on her left - a classical sign for virtuousness in a woman. She’s only over exposed as an image - commercially ravaged in the last century and half.
Sassoon explains that she was seized up by a gang of French intelligentsia in Paris in the 1850s, as a cooked up illustration of a femme fatale. Not for any special reason, she was just there, hanging vulnerable in public view - soon the smile on her face had risen from serene to sensational.
Leonardo clearly rated the work as he kept it with him, possibly fidgeting with the finish until as late as 1517, by which time he had moved to France. The painting was the property of royalty, which really helps to lever a girl up the social ladder.
After Louis XVI was relieved of his head, for a time she watched quietly over the intimate romps in the apartments of Napoleon’s Josephine at the Palais des Tuilieries.
In 1911 the Mona Lisa was liberated from France by self-appointed Italian patriots who ripped it right off the wall of the Salon Carré. In 1913 she rested briefly in her spiritual home at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, before being returned to the Louvre.
This incident and other attempts on her safety, shot the painting to fame from relative obscurity in the back halls of the Louvre.
Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp, playing fast and loose with a French national treasure, alighted on the Mona Lisa, cheerfully applying a moustache, beard and including a lightly disguised rude message to her former dignity in his re-work L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).
This just added naughty fuel to the notion that the painting was a self-portrait by Leonardo.
The girl with the smile continued to raise passions, being hit with rocks, doused in acid, sprayed with red paint and deified as a sacred feminine by Dan Brown as part of his hilarious religious romp, The Da Vinci Code (2003).
Considering how the poor old thing has been knocked about from housewife to harlot, it’s comforting to stand with the Mona Lisa and to find that she actually exists as an original object, unchanged but for the yellowing of the spidery varnish over five centuries.
That’s what draws me off the hot pavements of the 1st arrondissement.
This painting and the Venetian Renaissance collection are well worth elbowing your way forward at high-tide.
Go late on a Wednesday or Friday (the Permanent Collection of the Louvre is open until 9.45pm) and she might for a moment have eyes for you alone.
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/marketing/assets/podcasts/2008/opinion-nov2808-audio.mp3
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