Mona Lisa
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Mona Lisa receives some six million visitors a year. Reason enough to smile, maybe, but how did a small, rather dark sixteenth-century portrait acquire such unparalleled celebrity? It can't be Leonardo's sheer excellence, as other virtuoso works of his hang nearby, largely ignored. Nor the painting's famously seductive air – even if Napoleon was so captivated that he had the picture hung in his bedroom in the Tuileries, there are other, far sexier portraits in the Louvre. (Sadly, the nude version Leonardo apparently painted has been lost for centuries, and is known only from early copies). Instead, the answer to the mystery of the Mona Lisa fame lies in its own story.
“Mona Lisa” is, in fact, an English corruption of Monna Lisa – the sixteenth-century historian Giorgio Vasari's polite way of referring to madonna (my lady) Lisa Gherardini, the wife of one Francesco del Giocondo. It's from his surname that the Italians get their name for the painting, la Gioconda, and the French their la Joconde, and it may even explain the Mona Lisa's “smile”, as giocondo means “light-hearted” in Italian. Vasari, however, claimed Lisa smiled because Leonardo employed singers and jesters to keep her happy, while some modern critics have interpreted her half-and-half expression as symbolizing pleasure or Christian joy or firmness – in contrast with the opposing qualities represented by the darker, unsmiling half of her face.
In fact, it's not even certain that the Mona Lisa depics Monna Lisa. The portrait Vasari described (though he'd never actually seen it himself), had eyebrows where the hair “grows thickly in one place” (the Mona Lisa has none) and “parting lips” (she smiles, but her mouth is closed). What is at least certain is that the Mona Lisa turned up in the bathroom of Fontainebleau, which Henry IV decided to restore in the 1590s.It remained neglected by public and art historians alike until, after it had been hanging in the Louvre for almost seventy years, the poet and novelist Théophile Gautier turned his hand to a guidebook to the museum. He singled out the “adorable Joconde” for praise. “She is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. She has the serene countenance of a woman sure that she will remain beatiful forever.” A few years later, Gautier's erotic obsession had deepened , and the myth of the smile was given its finest articulation: “the sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned up at the corners in a violet penumbra, mocks the viewer with such sweetness, grace and superiority that we feel timid, like schoolboys in the presence of a duchess”.
In England, the painting was made famous by the prose stylist, Walter Pater, in 1869. According to him: “The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and hands.”
But the Mona Lisa only really hit the big time when she was stolen by an Italian security guard in August 1911. By the time she was recovered, in December 1913, her face had graced the pages of endless books and newspapers. Then, in 1919, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp bought a cheap postcard reproduction, coloured in a goatee beard and scrawled underneath “L.H.O.O.Q”, which spoken aloud in French comes out as "elle a chaud au cul" - which loosely translates as “she's got a hot ass”. Since then, celebrity has fed on itself, despite the complaints of art critics. Bernard Berenson, for example, decided she was “distastefully unlike the women I had hitherto known or dreamt of, a foreigner with a look I could not fathom, watchful, sly, secure, with a smile of anticipated satisfaction and a pervading air of hostile superiority”; Roberto Longhi claimed to prefer Renoir's women to this “wan fusspot”. Still, she now faces more flashguns every day than a well-dressed starlet on Oscar noght.
La Gioconde's fame has only swelled as a result of her bit-part appearance in Dan Brown's conspiracy thriller, The Da Vinci Code. For the record, “Mona Lisa” is not a coded reference to “Amon L'isa” - a supposed combination of the names of the ancient Egyptian fertility deities Amun and Isis – and she is not, therefore, a representation of the male-female “feminine divine”. After all, “Mona Lisa” is an English-language nickname for the painting that didn't exist in Leonardo's day. There may be more truth in the thriller's assertion that the Mona Lisa is a Leonardo self-portrait in drag. Or rather, the artist was known for painting androgynous-looking figures, and one art historian has suggested similarities in the facial proportions to a self-portrait sketch by Leonardo.
Visitors today are sometimes as unimpressed as Roberto Longhi, or Dan Brown's heroine Sophie Neveu, who finds the painting “too little” and “foggy”. The painting is indeed surprisingly small – 53x76cm (21x30”), to be exact – and very dark. Basically, it's filthy, and while most reproductions routinely “improve” the colours of the original, no art restorer has yet dared to propose actually working on the picture. Eventually, time may force the museum's hand, as the thin poplar panel that the image is painted on is reported to be slowly warping. A new, air-conditioned glass frame – designed, appropriately, by a Milanese firm – may help. Meanwhile, if you can struggle past the crowds, the patina of fame, the dirt of centuries and your own familiarity with the image, you might just discover a strange and beautiful painting.
