What's the Deal with the Mona Lisa?

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. 
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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 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Other Mona Lisa, also 1503-1505, painted by Da Vinci's assistant or workshop students alongside him.