 The Last Time I Showed Up at Midnight, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2015 Finders, Keepers: Disposable Art A couple of years ago, I received a cryptic DM asking about a painting I’d made in 2015 called The Last Time I Showed Up at Midnight. The inquirer wanted me to verify that I was the artist, and wondered what I could tell him about the painting, including how much it cost. Artists receive numerous messages from scammers with elaborate flattery of their passion, originality, and skill, with requests to show available inventory so they can select the perfect, expensive present as a surprise for their wife to celebrate an upcoming wedding anniversary. This run-up is usually followed by some complicated reasons why they can’t use the regular online shopping cart and checkout with their credit cards. This didn’t seem like that, but I wasn’t sure what the man was getting at as he tiptoed delicately around the subject. This particular painting was one of my urban expressionist abstract works in the spirit of the city streets, suggesting peeling billboards and layers of orange and lavender with graffiti and texture. It had been exhibited several year’s before at the Steam Whistle Brewing Gallery in Toronto’s entertainment district, and from there it had sold to a new home. I told the gentleman that the work was not available but he persisted in asking about its value. I told him that it sold at the time for $800 Canadian dollars but that similar works today would cost $1400. I wondered where he had seen the painting. It had been reproduced in a glossy magazine but it was local to Toronto and he was writing from New York State. So I asked him where he had seen the painting. It took some cajoling on my part to get to the bottom of the mystery. The man sent me a snapshot of the painting leaning against his wall. At first he claimed vaguely to have “come across this work.” Finally, he confessed what it was he had not wanted to tell me. He sheepishly told me he had found the artwork sticking out of a garbage dumpster. He was walking his dog when he saw a painting peeking at him from the refuse. He was intrigued by the unusual colour palette and the energy of the piece. He thought it was “really special” and was afraid to tell me because, naturally, it would be upsetting and offensive to find out someone had thrown my art into the trash. Of course I was a stranger to the man and he could not know the delight I take in life’s absurdities. “If someone could afford $800 to buy original art and throw it away when they redecorated, I hope they buy a lot more,” I wrote back. “Keep it coming.” No doubt the man had hoped for something a little more lucrative than a Luzajic, perhaps an abstract expressionist painting from a big name with a big price tag. But he seemed pleased that I did not want the artwork back. “Finders, keepers,” I wrote, telling him to enjoy the find that started his original art collection, and the story that went with it. It was another milestone in my trajectory as an artist. I had now joined the ranks, if at the bottom rung, of painters whose work had been a discarded treasure, discovered later and rescued from a thrift store, yard sale, or in the bins awaiting the city dump.  Tres Personajes, by Rufino Tamayo (Mexico) 1970 A parallel story took place in 2003, when New Yorker Elizabeth Gibson was taking her morning walk on the Upper West Side. Sitting beside a dumpster was an intriguing canvas with abstract figures in hazy reds and purples. “I wouldn't say it was beautiful. It was just so powerful. It had like an other-worldly power,” she told Voice of America. “It was just like a mystery, what was it doing in the trash?” Gibson took the painting home and hung it on her wall. She didn’t see any identifying markers and so her efforts to find out who created the work and how it ended up on the streets of New York were quickly thwarted. But in the years ahead, she felt the work was full of important stories that she needed to dig for. She said the work was “radiating energy” and told her, “Find out about me.” Gibson began approaching friends who knew more about art history, watching TV shows about art, and investigating lost and stolen artworks. Finally, four years later, she made a breakthrough on the Antiques Roadshow website, where a segment on their show in the archives featured the work hanging in her living room. It described the lost Rufino Tamayo painting as a “missing masterpiece.” Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage from Oaxaca. He was a tween when his mother died of TB, and moved to Mexico City to work at his aunt’s fruit stand. She enrolled him in the National School of Plastic Arts, where he absorbed Cubist and Fauvist influences while infusing these styles with individualized indigenismo. He went on to work at the Department of Ethnographic Drawings, and then began painting murals alongside “the big three” muralists of Mexico, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Sisqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. Tamayo shared Diego Rivera’s interest in the importance of pre-Columbian history, artifacts, and art, and in celebrating and promoting the heritage and contributions of Indigenous people as a vital backbone of Mexicanidad, or Mexican identity. However, he did not fit in with the popular political ideas of his revolutionary circle. He did not believe that art should be in service to the state, and he did not believe the communist revolution was good for Mexico. Tamayo felt that artists should be free to express themselves as individuals. Knowing that these beliefs carried considerable risk, he laid low and tried to avoid ruffling feathers, painting murals focused on interesting limited colour palettes, shapes, and themes from Indigenous folklore, rather than the communist propaganda that his peers were creating on behalf of the Revolution. Ultimately, he felt it was best to leave for New York. He lived and worked in and out of New York, Mexico, and Paris for the rest of his career. He experimented with naïve, semi-abstract, tonalist, softly cubist works that defy easy categorization, evocative paintings that seem to draw from ancient dreams of Mexico, from storybooks and legends, while still appearing contemporary today. Tamayo’s years in New York increased his visibility and international appreciation of his painting. He mentored other artists, including abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, whose soak technique canvases use similar tones and palettes. Ultimately, Tamayo returned to Mexico to build the Rufino Tamayo Museo in his hometown of Oaxaca. He is today considered one of the most important artists in Mexican history. The painting that Gibson found propped casually beside the dumpster was a 1970 creation by Tamayo, Tres Personajes. It belonged to a collector in Texas. When he and his wife were in the process of moving, the painting disappeared from their storage locker. No one had ever been apprehended for the theft and the trail had long gone cold. Gibson had the artwork authenticated, and then returned the Tamayo to the collector’s widow. The artwork was valued at just over a million dollars. The woman decided to sell the piece on Sotheby’s and granted Gibson a finder’s fee and a cut of the commission.  Still from Global News segment on Norval Morrisseau artwork found in a recycling bin. In 2019, artist Frederick Roesner was running errands in British Columbia when he saw the unmistakable Woodland painting style of Norval Morrisseau on a partially unwrapped panel in a recycling bin. He hauled the package home and unwrapped an artwork by Canada’s most beloved First Nations painter. Anishnaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was born in northern Ontario. Merging traditional Indigenous themes of shamanic life, folklore, animals, and visionary revelations with the new brightly coloured synthetic acrylic paints on the market, Morrisseau invented the School of Woodland art, an important artistic movement among Native Canadians. Morrisseau was the son of a Medicine Man and Knowledge Keeper, and a Catholic mother, and he painted a syncretic blend of stories from both traditions. A survivor of the Canadian residential school system, he quit school at the age of ten and worked instead with his elders, fishing, trapping, and picking wild berries. He became very sick when he was 19. In Anishnaabe traditions, giving a new name to a person who is dying can renew their energy and save their lives. Norval was renamed Copper Thunderbird, after his vision of turning into a bird. His spectacular six-part work in bright orange, Man Changing into a Thunderbird, tells the story, and is on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Norval’s groundbreaking work has met with various controversies. His decision to share the stories and imagery from the shamanic beliefs and practices of his lineage with people outside of the First Nations was completely taboo among his people. But Norval believed firmly that unity and reconciliation depended on this opening. Indigenous art in general and Norval’s art in particular is incredibly popular with Canadian audiences from all of our diverse backgrounds, so in demand that forgers created a veritable industry copying and selling his paintings as originals. The forgery racket became so entrenched and widespread that even national museums have purchased and displayed the fake works. Ringleader David Voss began the fraud in 1995, hiring young Indigenous artists to copy Morrisseau’s works, producing over 5000 fake Norvals and paying off authenticators to help flood the markets. He was recently convicted and sentenced, receiving only five years in prison for a financial crime that was a much more profound assault on Indigenous culture and Morrisseau’s legacy. At a time when this large-scale hoax was hitting the airwaves, whoever recycled Return to the Homeland, a three-panelled Morrisseau painting, may have assumed they had a fake. But it wasn’t one of the duds. The masterpiece is valued at over a million dollars. Roesner has so far turned down major purchase offers. His goal is to have the work preserved and displayed at the National Gallery of Canada.  Christ Mocked, by Giovanni Cinabue (Florence) 1280 In 2019, during a routine house clearance of an elderly resident in France, a small religious painting that had long been hanging over the kitchen hotplate was moved to the trash. The tenant assumed it was a cheap print that had been there forever. It was time for a change. Thankfully, the cleaners thought twice about the disposal and rescued the work from demise and anonymity. Turned out, the painting was a priceless devotional panel from a diptych by Florentine master Giovanni Cimabue, dating back to 1280 AD. The egg tempera and gold leaf on poplar painting sold at auction for 24 million pounds. The painting was moved to the Louvre.  Detail from undated, untitled Yves Tanguy artwork. In 2020, a traveller inadvertently left his precious cargo at a Dusseldorf airport. It was a surrealist painting by Yves Tanguy. Frantic, the man contacted the police as soon as he arrived in Tel Aviv. The police contacted the sanitation company who combed the recycling dumpsters and eventually rescued the work.  Portrait of Dr. Felix Rey, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1889 A portrait of Doctor Felix Rey was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in thanks for treating his injured ear after the artist sliced part of it off in the legendary episode of passion and tragic psychosis. Dr. Rey and his mother received the 1889 portrait with thanks, but they deemed the artwork “hideous” and “ridiculous,” not able to understand Van Gogh’s unusual and still unappreciated genius of style. The good doctor’s mother used the painting to patch up a hole in the backyard chicken coop. Over ten years later, an admirer of the artist came to the house in search of the portrait and found it still protecting the chickens from the elements. He rescued the work and turned it over to some local art dealers.
While driving down a highway in 2021, a man took a break at a roadside rest stop near Ohrenbach in Germany. He saw two paintings in the dumpster and took them with him. As they appeared to be quite old, he stopped in Cologne to turn them in to the police. Authorities ascertained that one was a 17th century painting of a Dutch boy by master Samuel van Hoogstraten, and the other, dated to 1665, was a self-portrait by Pietro Bellotti. So far, the question of how they ended up in the rest stop trash has not been answered.  Hockey painting by Edward Menges, posted in Dumpster Archeology on Facebook. In 2017, a dumpster diver was hunting for treasures near St. Louis, Missouri, when he found fourteen paintings by a local artist, Edward Menges. The works included hockey and football paintings and some landscapes. By chance, while the urban explorer was gathering the art for rescue, a woman came with a basket of recycling, and when he asked her if she knew anything about the works, it turned out she was the artist’s widow. An art teacher who loved painting, Menges had struggled with dementia and passed away at the age of 96. He was a prolific painter and his widow didn’t know what to do with all of his remaining work. The discovery led to a moderate revival of interest in the painter’s work, which was known locally in St. Louis.  Knight, Death and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, modern day Germany) 1513 When Englishman Mat Winter was eleven, he was already interested in antiques and liked to ride his bike to the local Cranbook dump to look for interesting junk. A woman was tossing out a carload of old stuff and he picked up an interesting picture. He added the drawing to his collection at home and it stayed there for more than a decade. When Winter was older, he took a closer look at his belongings and decided the print looked old and real and took it to experts to investigate. Turned out the work was an original print of a 1513 engraving, Knight, Death and the Devil, by Albrecht Durer, a German Renaissance master.  Banks of the River Seine, by Pierre Auguste Renoir (France) 1879 A bargain shopper bought an old painting at a flea market for seven bucks because she wanted to reuse the ornate frame. At home, aiming to trash the landscape, the work looked older than she had first thought and she took it to an auction house to see if she could earn a few bucks. The work turned out to be Banks of the River Seine, by none other than Renoir, a painting that had been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. It was returned to its owner.  Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio (Italy) 1607 A forgotten Caravaggio was discovered in a French attic when the tenant decided to do a major spring cleaning. One of two known versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted in 1607, the work had been missing for centuries. Experts spent several years authenticating the work. They valued the find at 171 million dollars.  Found drawing by Egon Schiele (Austria) before 1918 A shopper looking for housewares at Habitat for Humanity found a crayon sketch of a nude in a stack of old prints. The drawing was by Egon Schiele, the controversial Austrian master who died at the tender age of 28 from the Spanish flu, along with his wife and unborn child.  Original painting by David Bowie (USA) 1997 In North Bay, Ontario, a lucky thrifter picked up a small expressionist-style painting from a donation centre for five bucks. It was a loose and jejune work in a palette of white, turquoise, and rust, but the buyer felt curious about its subject and more curious that the painter shared a name with David Bowie, the legendary singer and performer. To his surprise, he had purchased an original artwork made by David Bowie in 1997. It was authenticated and sold for more than 100 thousand dollars. The journey of a painting is often a fascinating layer in the art story. Writers who love art most often look to the subject presented in the work, or to the beliefs and biography of the artist who made the work. But often, the trajectory of the art object itself holds all kinds of secrets and scandals. Art has been forged, stolen, looted, lost, burned, flooded, and attacked. It has ended up with eccentric collectors, passed on to other interesting personalities, fought over, and misplaced. Art has been hung on palace walls, played its part in museum scandals and high stake auctions, assumed to be haunted, traded on the black markets, and yes, retrieved from garbage dumpsters. While it’s not likely you’ll be the next one destined to uncover a Jackson Pollock or other million dollar painting at Value Village, it’s possible. You never know what you’ll find. Lorette C. Luzajic
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 Mona Lisa, by Leonardo Da Vinci (Italy) 1503-1506, possibly retouched in 1517 What’s the Deal with the Mona Lisa? It’s the world’s most famous painting, instantly recognizable to just about everyone. Lisa perches in paint from her five-century old platform, unassuming, almost dull, in drab brown garments, unadorned. But she watches you approach her with that direct, penetrating gaze, that knowing half-smile, turning the tables of who’s looking at who. Her expression is almost sly. Everyone who describes her refers to that look as enigmatic. My Lady Lisa is Lisa Gherardini, or La Giocanda, referencing her husband’s surname, which translates to “the happy one.” Her home was once a family farm near Florence, but today she is entombed in oil pigments on poplar wood at the illustrious Louvre Museum of Paris. She was insured in the 60s for 100 million dollars, at least a billion dollars today, making her the world’s most valuable artwork. The Mona Lisa has commanded a tremendous amount of passion and ire. In a recent incident, climate activists drenched her in tomato soup, protesting an unsustainable food system. In 2022, a man disguised himself as a woman in a wheelchair and smeared her with cake, throwing roses at onlookers as he was dragged out by security. There was an acid attack in 1956 that caused serious damage to the canvas, and someone else threw rocks at her that same year. There are other Mona Lisas, too. Various versions showed up from students studying the master, Leonardo Da Vinci, over the years. I encountered the Prado Mona Lisa unexpectedly while wandering the esteemed hallways of Madrid’s museum. Long considered an unimportant copy, experts uncovered a matching landscape backdrop under dark faded paint during restoration and declared that the painting happened in Da Vinci’s workshop, live, under his instruction. A few bravely contend that this version is superior to the teacher’s. But experts say this is a practical matter from our contemporary perspective: the Mona we have come to love has been eroded by time. The Prado one, by contrast, was painted on walnut rather than poplar, a more stable surface that helped preserve the condition of the art. Perhaps you are like me, unimpressed, unmoved by Mona, perplexed by Lisa’s fame. Is the Mona Lisa overrated? The man who captured her was a master artist, to be sure, a polymath, an architect, engineer, scientist, and sculptor. He gave us essential ideas on art, anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, and palaeontology. He was the epitome of the “Renaissance man” and indeed, is credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. But Da Vinci's other artworks, including The Last Supper, is far more complex and critical to the story of western art. Even other portraits, like the Lady with Ermine, seem much more interesting. Salvator Mundi, lost for two centuries, recently sold for half a billion dollars, the most expensive work ever sold at public auction. Too, there are countless portraits by other artists that I find more compelling. Augustus John’s spitfire Marchesa leaps out of the canvas to demand our attention. Lavinia Fontana’s Bianca degli Utili Maselli and her six children and dog is impossibly intricate and ornate, requiring breathtaking technical skill. What gives? What’s the deal with the Mona Lisa? The Mona Lisa is not the world’s best painting- she’s the most famous. That distinction is crucial to note. It’s a painting that went viral before the age of the Internet Instagram influencer. Perhaps she, and her maker, did nothing much to earn her renown. Certainly Da Vinci changed the world, but it was not his intention that this humble work among his genius output is the one he is remembered by. And Lisa, virtuous, plain/pretty enough wife of a wealthy merchant, might long be obscured in the shadows of time if things had gone differently, along with countless other portraits of wives of merchants in a vast array of paintings through the centuries. Mona Lisa is famous for being famous. John Lichfield described the painting in The Independent as “the best known, most visited, the most written about, most sung about and the most parodied work of art in the world.” Defenders of Mona cite Da Vinci’s role more generally as a genius who brought art and science together, a deep thinker whose curiosity about how things work influenced everything we know. This is indisputable. "Da Vinci invented the airplane!" they point out, in the 15th century. Indeed, his 500 sketches on aerodynamics and flying machines, accompanied by 35 thousand words on the subject, provided fascinating and prophetic concepts for man’s eventual foray into flight. Detractors note that Lisa is among the least of the great man’s contributions. Defenders point to Da Vinci’s pioneering use of sfumato (from the Italian word fumo, meaning to smoke or evaporate.) Sfumato is a painting technique that does away with harsh outlines, softening transitions between colours and tones. The edges of Lisa’s eyes and body fade out, or “vanish in smoke.” This technique, popular in Renaissance painting, especially with the Leonardeschi, artists who followed in their master’s footsteps, was based on Da Vinci’s studies on optics and human vision. To achieve the effect, he used dozens of translucent layers of glaze to blur harsh lines, then smudged them with his fingertips, creating a luminous, soft quality that mimics the way we see depth and dimensions. Fair enough, but again, the technique was not limited to this particular artwork, and was arguably not as dramatic as other technical inventions in art history. The use of a landscape background was also somewhat novel and became quite trendy in Renaissance portraits. And the waist up portraiture was a new path, too, but not unique to this painting or to this artist. A question that arises from this specific argument might be, so what? Another convincing argument against this painting is that it did not depict a major event, personality, narrative, moral consideration, or concept that reflects on the important questions of the human soul. While the artist himself spent the whole of his life puzzling out how things work and what that means for the big picture, this specific piece was merely a paid commission from a Florentine silk merchant, work that put pennies in Da Vinci’s coffer that helped him carry out more essential projects and discoveries. But the painting does say a great deal about the human story after all. The facts that created the Mona Lisa’s curious fame are incidental, and speak to the story of our tastes, perceptions of beauty and importance, and appetite for scandal. Everything that made the Mona Lisa famous happened long after her painter was dead and buried. And what a rollicking adventure it has been. The painting lived at the Palace of Fountainbleu in France, moving to the Palace of Versailles. During the French Revolution, it went on display at the Louvre, and has been there ever since, save for a brief tryst in the bedroom of Napolean at the Tuileries Palace and another stint off site for protection during the Franco-Prussian war of 1871. A brief premonition of Mona madness bubbled up around 1860 when some writers were smitten with romantic views on the subject. Poet Théophile Gautier called Lisa a "sphinx of beauty" and opined that her expression was “vague, infinite, inexpressible.” He attributed to her, “repressed desires, hopes that drive one to despair.” English essayist Walter Pater suggested she was "older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.” While valued by the French intelligentsia as a vital example of Renaissance painting, a crucial era of art and human development in history, the work held little interest beyond the intellectual circles. This all changed in 1911 thanks to a man named Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian nationalist and labourer who was an employee at the Louvre. Peruggia had helped construct the glass case protecting the painting. He believed that Da Vinci’s work belonged to its Italian homeland, not to France, a situation he meant to correct. During visiting hours, he discreetly unmoored the painting, concealing himself with the precious cargo under his overcoat in a broom closet until after-hours, when he and Mona Lisa walked out of the museum after closing. He took her home and she resided for two years in his humble apartment and no one was the wiser during that time. Meanwhile, back at the Louvre, staff were initially unruffled. It was assumed that Mona Lisa was ready for her closeup and that the artwork had been removed for photographing. But as it became clear that there were no such plans in place, the Louvre closed down for a week to investigate her mysterious disappearance. With little to go on, authorities turned their attention to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who held radical, hostile beliefs in opposition to the Louvre. He was a vocal critic of the museum’s security. Apollinaire had previously threatened to burn down the Louvre, so he was as good as any leads they had for a suspect. The poet and his modernist circle viewed museums like the Louvre as graveyards rather than guardians for art, stuffy institutions that championed tradition over bold innovation and took resources and attention away from living and future painters in favour of dead art. Imprisoned for a week and accused of stealing La Gioconda, investigators discovered that Apollinaire had indeed stolen artifacts from the Louvre, a few years before, Iberian statues that he had sold to his friend Pablo Picasso to pass on. Seeing a way out of his predicament, Apollinaire passed the buck and blamed Picasso for the theft of the enigmatic lady. Picasso knew nothing about the heist, of course, preoccupied as he was with chasing living skirts and inventing cubism, and eventually, reluctantly, both suspects were dismissed. Ultimately, Peruggia “returned” the painting to Italy’s Uffizi Museum, where it was displayed for just two weeks before being repatriated to its place at the Louvre. Peruggia was imprisoned for six months for his crime, for which he went from nameless to heroic patriot of Italy’s history. The public at large had never shown interest in Da Vinci’s portrait and most had never heard of it until now. But a whiff of scandal and controversy works wonders for publicity, and now everyone and their uncles wanted to know more about Mona Lisa. The identity of the portrait as Lisa Gherardini Giocondo was recorded by Giorgio Vasari way back in 1550, but in the decades following the art’s theft, a frenzy of new theories abounded as to the identity of the sitter. Was she Isabella of Aragon, Cecilia Gallerani, Costanza d’Avalos, the Ducess of Francaville, Isabella d’Este, Pacific Brandino, Isabela Gualanda, Caterina Sforza, to name a few possibilities? Or, was she a drag queen or genderblend figure, a hidden portrait of Da Vinci’s male assistant and perhaps lover, disguised as a woman? Or was she a self-portrait of Da Vinci himself, portrayed in the feminine? “The Mona Lisa is androgynous—half man and half woman,” declared Silvano Vinceti, head of the National Committee for Cultural Heritage. If the identity of the sitter was never really in question, well, then, there were plenty of other secrets at hand to decipher. The same National Committee for Cultural Heritage speculated that there were hidden symbols embedded and obscured under the paint, including the letters L, V, C, E and B, and a faint 72. Could these codes shed light on the model or the maker? Probably not, say other experts, who attribute these finds to pareidolia, better known as finding castles in clouds, the psychological tendency to see meaningful patterns and pictures that were unintentional. The secret codes are, according to most, nothing more than natural patterns in the cracking paint. Other, more interesting discoveries have come to light under the ongoing scrutiny of the portrait. Lisa’s unadorned appearance and lack of eyelashes and eyebrows have added enormously to her cryptic appearance. As it turns out, she had the same fashionably plucked sparse brows of other Italian women of her status, which had been obscured by the Nair of time and damage during ongoing care and restorations. There was also a dainty necklace that Da Vinci had thought better of and painted over. This was true to the fashion of the times, when it was not befitting to matrons to flaunt their wealth. Married Italian women were expected to project severe modesty, and only wore their jewelry for a year or so after they were married. After the theft, public fascination in the Mona Lisa grew continuously, snowballing along the way. While Eugene Bataille had satirized her already in 1883, showing the figure smoking a pipe, caricatures abounded after the 1911 heist made her a household name. Marcel Duchamp got the ball rolling in 1919 by adding a goatee. Salvador Dali made his contribution to the perception of Mona’s androgyny by turning the iconic work into a self-portrait in 1954, with manly hands and his instantly recognizable twirly, wispy moustache. Writer Dan Brown turned her into divinity in his wildly popular thriller series, The Da Vinci Code, suggesting the Italian words for “m’lady” were actually an anagram for occult secrets and the name of the Egyptian gods Amon and Isis. Today, this humble portrait draws 80% of the Louvre’s massive foot traffic, attracting some ten million visitors a year and up to 30 thousand every day. Museum guests wait on average two hours for thirty seconds of quality time with her in a crowded room. It’s not on my bucket list. La Giaconda does not know what has become of her. She does not know that her face is familiar to the masses far and wide, the face that launched a million mousepads and coffee cups made in China, or the Mona Lisa Smile, the most tepid of all chick flicks in film history. She does not know that she got Picasso arrested, and that she was subsequently insured for a cool billion. She is blissfully unaware that her unremarkable face has been immortalized in muddy tenebrism. From her unintended reign on the Louvre wall, she has watched the world unfolding. And until the termites that take us all out in the end ultimately obscure her, there she will remain, watching us watching her. Lorette C. Luzajic  Just half a minute to catch a glimpse of her in 2015. Bramfab, CC BY-SA 4.0  The Other Mona Lisa, also 1503-1505, painted by Da Vinci's assistant or workshop students alongside him. |
Lorette C. LuzajicLooking at art and learning about it has been my lifelong passion, and it fuels everything I do: art creation, publishing, writing, and teaching. Visit this blog for occasional essays and musings on visual art. 
Learn more about artists, art history, and writer's craft with Lorette at The Ekphrastic Academy. Fun, informative, and affordable seminars and classes on zoom.
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