La Joconde. Leonardo da Vinci
Portrait
of Mona Lisa (1479-1528), also known as La Gioconda, the wife of
Francesco del Giocondo; 1503-06 (150 Kb); Oil on wood, 77 x 53 cm (30 x 20 7/8
in); Musee du Louvre, Paris
This
figure of a woman, dressed in the Florentine fashion of her day and seated in a
visionary, mountainous landscape, is a remarkable instance of Leonardo's
sfumato technique of soft, heavily shaded modeling. The Mona Lisa's enigmatic
expression, which seems both alluring and aloof, has given the portrait
universal fame.
Reams
have been written about this small masterpiece by Leonardo, and the gentle
woman who is its subject has been adapted in turn as an aesthetic,
philosophical and advertising symbol, entering eventually into the irreverent
parodies of the Dada and Surrealist artists. The history of the panel has been
much discussed, although it remains in part uncertain. According to Vasari, the
subject is a young Florentine woman, Monna (or Mona) Lisa, who in 1495 married
the well-known figure, Francesco del Giocondo, and thus came to be known as
``La Gioconda''. The work should probably be dated during Leonardo's second
Florentine period, that is between 1503 and 1505. Leonardo himself loved the
portrait, so much so that he always carried it with him until eventually in
France it was sold to Franзois I, either by Leonardo or by Melzi.
From
the beginning it was greatly admired and much copied, and it came to be
considered the prototype of the Renaissance portrait. It became even more
famous in 1911, when it was stolen from the Salon Carrй in the Louvre, being
rediscovered in a hotel in Florence two years later. It is difficult to discuss
such a work briefly because of the complex stylistic motifs which are part of
it. In the essay ``On the perfect beauty of a woman'', by the 16th-century
writer Firenzuola, we learn that the slight opening of the lips at the corners
of the mouth was considered in that period a sign of elegance. Thus Mona Lisa
has that slight smile which enters into the gentle, delicate atmosphere
pervading the whole painting. To achieve this effect, Leonardo uses the sfumato
technique, a gradual dissolving of the forms themselves, continuous interaction
between light and shade and an uncertain sense of the time of day.
There
is another work of Leonardo's which is perhaps even more famous than The
Last Supper. It is the portrait of a Florentine lady whose name was
Lisa, Mona Lisa. A fame as great as that of Leonardo's Mona Lisa
is not an unmixed blessing for a work of art. We become so used to seeing it on
picture postcards, and even advertisements, that we find it difficult to see it
with fresh eyes as the painting by a real man portraying a real woman of flesh
and blood. But it is worth while to forget what we know, or believe we know,
about the picture, and to look at it as if we were the first people ever to set
eyes on it. What strikes us first is the amazing degree to which Lisa looks
alive. She really seems to look at us and to have a mind of her own. Like a
living being, she seems to change before our eyes and to look a little
different every time we come back to her. Even in photographs of the picture we
experience this strange effect, but in front of the original in the Louvre it
is almost uncanny. Sometimes she seems to mock at us, and then again we seem to
catch something like sadness in her smile. All this sounds rather mysterious,
and so it is; that is so often the effect of a great work of art. Nevertheless,
Leonardo certainly knew how he achieved this effect, and by what means. That
great observer of nature knew more about the way we use our eyes than anybody who
had ever lived before him. He had clearly seen a problem which the conquest of
nature had posed to artists - a problem no less intricate than the one of
combining correct drawing with a harmonious composition. The great works of the
Italian Quattrocento masters who followed the lead given by Masaccio have one
thing in common: their figures look somewhat hard and harsh, almost wooden. The
strange thing is that it clearly is not lack of patience or lack of knowledge
that is responsible for this effect. No one could be more patient in his
imitation of nature than Van Eyck; no one could know more about correct drawing
and perspective than Mantegna. And yet, for all the grandeur and impressiveness
of their representations of nature, their figures look more like statues than
living beings. The reason may be that the more conscientiously we copy a figure
line by line and detail by detail, the less we can imagine that it ever really
moved and breathed. It looks as if the painter had suddenly cast a spell over
it, and forced it to stand stock-still for evermore, like the people in The
Sleeping Beauty. Artists had tried various ways out of this difficulty.
Botticelli, for instance, had tried to emphasize in his pictures the waving
hair and the fluttering garments of his figures, to make them look less rigid
in outline. But only Leonardo found the true solution to the problem. The
painter must leave the beholder something to guess. If the outlines are not
quite so firmly drawn, if the form is left a little vague, as though
disappearing into a shadow, this impression of dryness and stiffness will be
avoided. This is Leonardo's famous invention which the Italians call sfumato-
the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form to merge with
another and always leave something to our imagination.
If
we now return to the Mona Lisa, we may understand something of its
mysterious effect. We see that Leonardo has used the means of his 'sfumato'
with the utmost deliberation. Everyone who has ever tried to draw or scribble a
face knows that what we call its expression rests mainly in two features: the
corners of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. Now it is precisely these
parts which Leonardo has left deliberately indistinct, by letting them merge
into a soft shadow. That is why we are never quite certain in what mood Mona
Lisa is really looking at us. Her expression always seems just to elude us. It
is not only vagueness, of course, which produces this effect. There is much
more behind it. Leonardo has done a very daring thing, which perhaps only a
painter of his consummate mastery could risk. If we look carefully at the
picture, we see that the two sides do not quite match. This is most obvious in
the fantastic dream landscape in the background. The horizon on the left side
seems to lie much lower than the one on the right. Consequently, when we focus
on the left side of the picture, the woman looks somehow taller or more erect
than if we focus on the right side. And her face, too, seems to change with
this change of position, because, even here, the two sides do not quite match.
But with all these sophisticated tricks, Leonardo might have produced a clever
piece of jugglery rather than a great work of art, had he not known exactly how
far he could go, and had he not counterbalanced his daring deviation from
nature by an almost miraculous rendering of the living flesh. Look at the way
in which he modelled the hand, or the sleeves with their minute folds. Leonardo
could be as painstaking as any of his forerunners in the patient observation of
nature. Only he was no longer merely the faithful servant of nature. Long ago,
in the distant past, people had looked at portraits with awe, because they had
thought that in preserving the likeness the artist could somehow preserve the
soul of the person he portrayed. Now the great scientist, Leonardo, had made
some of the dreams and fears of these first image-makers come true. He knew the
spell which would infuse life into the colors spread by his magic brush.
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