If you want to publicise a cause or gain infamy by vandalising a work of art, then you may as well pick on the most famous of all. When pumpkin soup was hurled at the bullet-proof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre at the weekend, pictures of the painting obscured by gobs of liquefied food duly appeared across the world. But why is the Mona Lisa so famous anyway? Here are 10 things you need to know about the most idolised painting on Earth.
Mona Who?
Leonardo da Vinci began his portrait of Monna Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine merchant, in 1503. “Monna”, short for Madonna, was a term of respect for women in Renaissance Florence. Leonardo had recently rejected overtures from Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, to paint her, and instead started this portrait of “Lady Lisa”, a middle-class Florentine woman. Perhaps he painted her because she simply fascinated him, or to celebrate his bourgeois merchant city.
The man who liked (painting) women
Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy as a young man and he never married, instead being close to his male pupils. Yet when it came to portraits he preferred women. The Mona Lisa is the last of a brilliant run of female portraits beginning with Ginevra de’ Benci in about 1475, in which he brings out female character, strength and freedom in ways no artist ever had before.
The comeback painting
Leonardo tried to give up oil painting completely in the years before the Mona Lisa. He’d always been a slow painter and spent much of his time doing scientific experiments instead. He told an emissary from Isabella d’Este he was too busy with maths to paint her. Then he served Cesare Borgia as a military engineer in his boldest attempt to leave art behind. It was on the rebound from this scary experience that he started the Mona Lisa in Florence.
Famous for 500 years
To the frustration of soup hurlers, the Mona Lisa smiles at the world from a secure vitrine fronted with powerfully reinforced glass, which reflects this painting’s unique celebrity status as well as previous crimes including its theft in 1911. Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp both paid homage to the Mona Lisa’s weird imprint in modern mass culture. No painting has ever rivalled this allure: but it is not just a modern phenomenon. As early as 1505, a woman called Maddelana Doni folded her hands in imitation of Lisa’s in a portrait by Raphael, reproducing with her pose what was already an icon.
Leonardo’s favourite
Maybe the Mona Lisa’s biggest fan was Leonardo himself, for he just couldn’t let it go. He never handed the work over to Lisa’s husband, who commissioned it, instead choosing to keep reworking the painting for years, adding new subtleties and mysteries. When he received visitors from Italy in the year before his death, in the chateau at Amboise that the French king had given him, Leonardo showed them the Mona Lisa – his lifelong love.
Anatomy of a Smile
Raphael’s early imitations of the Mona Lisa reproduce her pose but not her smile. Scientific imaging seems to confirm that Lisa del Giocondo did not originally smile. Leonardo spent a lot of his time in the 1500s dissecting corpses to draw the inner secrets of human anatomy – including facial muscles. His anatomical drawings of lips and notes on how they move suggest he developed the Mona Lisa’s smile to show how our faces physically work, adding golden skin and delicate lips over a knowledge of Lisa from the skull outward. This is the beautiful human machine.
Henry VIII’s idol
One early victim of the Mona Lisa’s smile was the serial wife killer and religious tyrant Henry VIII of England. After the (natural) death of his third queen, Jane Seymour, Henry sent his court artist Hans Holbein to Brussels to portray a potential bride, the 16-year-old Cristina of Denmark. In Holbein’s painting the already widowed Cristina is enveloped in black but she lights up the room with her smile. It’s oddly familiar. Holbein had seen the Mona Lisa and he emulates the most beguiling smile in art. Henry fell for the painting, declared himself in love and called for sweet music – but was it the Mona Lisa he really adored?
Hydraulic secrets
One of the most mysterious things in the Mona Lisa is the green, brown and blue ethereal landscape behind her. This puzzle is deliberate. Leonardo seems to want us to wonder where the road and bridge, jagged rocks, river and mountains are. He makes them both specific and vague, as if to tease us. In fact it’s fairly clear that he is alluding to the river Arno flowing through the hills of Tuscany, a landscape full of memories for him. At the time he started the Mona Lisa he was involved in an attempt to change the course of the Arno to destroy the economy of Florence’s enemy Pisa. Is this landscape an allusion to the scheme he’d concocted with Florentine military expert Niccolò Machiavelli?
Marcel and the Moustache
In 1919 the inventor of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and beard on a reproduction Mona Lisa, giving it the title L.H.O.O.Q., which, when read aloud, sounds like the French for “She’s got a hot arse”. The joke is more than a graffito. Lisa looks good with facial hair. Some people can’t resist the idea that she really is male, maybe concealing a portrait of Leonardo himself. Leonardo actually does mix “male” and “female” qualities in his faces, and the androgyny may be one of the reasons the Mona Lisa is so haunting.
Oh, mother!
Perhaps the deepest secret of the Mona Lisa isn’t about science or sexuality but the artist’s own infancy. The landscape in the background suggests the hills around Vinci, the Tuscan town where he was born in 1452, the illegitimate baby of a lawyer and a country girl called Caterina. He later had a stepmother but his biological mum remained a spectral figure floating in his memories of the Tuscan countryside – a bit like the Mona Lisa. Is this dream woman his personal idealised, long lost maternal figure, enthroned by his art, smiling at him benevolently, his own Madonna, a mother goddess?
