ITP 109: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

Date: 19-05-2002
Owning Institution: The Louvre
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

To mark National Smile Week, today’s choice of picture is Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of a smiling woman: the Mona Lisa or La Gioconde, as it is known in France. The painting’s French title is often mistakenly thought to allude to the sitter’s jocose aspect but in fact it simply refers to her name. She was, in real life, Mrs del Giocondo. As Leonardo’s first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, explained, the painter “undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Monna [sic] Lisa, his wife…”

Vasari clearly thought a lot of this painting, which he described in considerable detail in his life of Leonardo. He admired it above all for its lifelike quality, admittedly a cliché of Renaissance art criticism (as well as the origin of the modern idea that the measure of a good portrait is that the eyes follow you around the room) but on this occasion more than justified. Vasari also explained the sitter’s famously amused expression. Leonardo hired singers and jesters “who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits that they paint.”

Through the centuries, the young lady whom Vasari called “Monna Lisa” has had more than her fair share of admirers. No other woman in history could claim to have shared a bathroom with Francis I (her first owner, who is said to have hung her in the Appartement des Bains in his palace at Fontainebleau) as well as a bedroom with Napoleon (who appropriated her for his private quarters on seizing power). Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century historian, found himself almost overwhelmed by her siren-like charms. “The painting attracts me, calls me, invades me, absorbs me,” he wrote; “I go to it in spite of myself, as the bird goes to the serpent”. Michelet’s contemporary, the aesthete Walter Pater, established the popular nineteenth-century idea of her as a sinister temptress in his influential book The Renaissance: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and knows the secrets of the dead; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her…”

The subaqueous murk to which the writer poetically alluded was not part of Leonardo’s original conception, but dirt and discoloured varnish which no one has dared to remove for centuries. But even in its present filthy condition, displayed behind bulletproof glass and rendered almost inaccessible to undisturbed contemplation by the milling crowd which congregates daily before it in the Louvre, the painting remains uniquely fascinating. It is not necessary to share Pater’s erotically inflamed view of the Mona Lisa to sense that the picture is something more than a conventional portrait. It may have begun as a straightforward depiction of Mrs del Giocondo, but it became something more profound.The work contains, distilled within it, each of Leonardo’s principal innovations as a painter. His technique of modelling form almost exclusively through tonal values, which brought the new term of “chiaroscuro” into the language of art, is manifest in the palpitatingly alive face of the sitter. His mastery of human physiognomy is demonstrated in her sphinx-like smile, which gives her expression a vibrantly changeable quality (no painter had succeeded in conveying the effect, to quite this degree, before Leonardo). The landscape which stretches out behind her is a virtuoso demonstration of the artist’s understanding of “aerial” perspective, the gradual bluing of tones towards the horizon. The physical character of the world over which she presides, full of grand but twisted rock formations, seemingly in the throes of some elemental process of change, hints too at Leonardo’s considerable geological erudition.

Because Leonardo is generally regarded as the epitome of Renaissance man, his debts to older structures of belief are easily overlooked. He was for example still wedded to the ancient conception of the four elements; he had a strong habit of thinking in terms of analogies; and like thinkers for centuries before him, he believed strongly in the equivalence between human beings and the world, as microcosm and macrocosm. “In that man is composed of water, earth and fire,” he wrote in one of his notebooks, “his body is an analogue for the world: just as man has in himself bones, the supports and armatures of the flesh, the world has the rocks; just as man has in himself the lake of the blood, so the body of the earth has its oceanic seas.” The Mona Lisa is a visual demonstration of such ideas.Her subtle, bittersweet expression suggests that she knows that something else too links her to the greater world. As the mountains behind her heave and convulse, so too does her smile seem to tremble. The ceaseless flux of the natural world is mirrored by  changeable human nature. In the words of another Renaissance man, Montaigne, “There is no constant existence, neither of our own being, nor of objects. And we, and our judgement, and all mortal things, incessantly change, turn and pass away…” Mutability is all.