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Mr bean mona lisa6/13/2023 ![]() Pater proceeds to meditate on the Mona Lisa in such a singularly intense way that in 1936 the Irish poet William Butler Yeats found himself compelled to seize a sentence from Pater's description, break it up into free-verse lines, and install them as the opening poem in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which Yeats was then compiling. "We all know the face and hands of the figure," he observed in an article on Da Vinci in 1869, "in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea". The Victorian writer Walter Pater believed it was the "delicacy" with which her hands and eyelids are rendered that transfix and hypnotise us into believing that the work possesses preternatural power. Not everyone, however, has been content to locate the centre of Mona Lisa's magnetising mystique in her enigmatic grin. "For years I have grappled desperately with her smile," he is said to have written in the note he left behind. According to popular myth, Maspero, who allegedly ended his days by leaping from the window of his Paris hotel room, was driven to destructive distraction by the mute whispers of Mona Lisa's engrossingly gladsome lips. ![]() If legend is to be believed, the "treacherous attraction" of Mona Lisa's irresolvable smirk consumed too the soul of an aspiring French artist by the name of Luc Maspero. This so soft a look, but avid like the sea, devours". In 1854 he asserted that the subject's "smile is full of attraction, but it is the treacherous attraction of a sick soul that renders sickness. The 19th-Century French art critic Alfred Dumesnil confessed to finding the painting's paradox utterly paralysing. The mesmerising mystery of Mona Lisa's smile and how Leonardo magically leveraged it into creating "a thing more divine than human" and yet "not other than alive" would prove too intense for many to bear. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse." He concluded: "In this work of Leonardo, there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold, and it was held to be something marvellous, in that it was not other than alive." "The mouth with its opening and with its ends united by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face," Vasari observed in his celebrated Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, "seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh. A preoccupation principally with Mona Lisa's inscrutable smile is almost as old as the painting, and dates back at least to the reaction of the legendary Renaissance writer and historian Giorgio Vasari, who was born a few years after Da Vinci began work on the likeness. The tragedy of art's greatest supermodelįor centuries, our attention has largely been focused elsewhere in the small (77 x 53cm/30 x 21in) oil-on-poplar panel, which Da Vinci never fully finished and is thought to have continued to tinker with obsessively until his death in 1519 – as if the painting's endless emergence were the work itself. The secret toilet humour in a Titian painting Hiding in plain sight, it may also be the arrow that points the way to the work's deepest meanings. Yet how many of us have ever consciously noted the object in the painting that is closer to us than any other – the chair on which the mysterious woman sits? Never mind that the piece of furniture is the only thing that Leonardo's sitter grips in her hand (she's literally pointing at it with every finger she has), the chair must surely be the single most neglected aspect of the otherwise over-stared-at icon. Leonardo da Vinci's inexhaustible portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the 24-year-old mother of five and wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant who sat for the High Renaissance master in 1503, is doubtless the most famous work of art in the world. Another ubiquitous cultural image is the Mona Lisa. We've seen the sign whizz past us countless times without ever clocking its subliminal point. Take, for instance, the way the white space between the "E" and the "x" in the FedEx logo forms a big white arrow pointing forward. Some things are so obvious you never really notice them.
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