The Mona Lisa

Rosina Quaicoe

Comp I@9:30

Mrs. Smith

11/6/2016

The Mona Lisa

     Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been celebrated in the past, and today it is the most famous painting in the world. The question is what really led up to the magic spell this painting of the fourteenth-century has cast on the millions of people who are so fond of it? How powerful is the artistic ingenuity of the portrait’s painter that the prominence of his work of art which had died so many times in the past, had always come back to life? The painting today gathers more fame than any other painting in the world either of the past or present. So what features defined the Mona Lisa to this extent of fame? The characteristics which made Leonardo’s painting the Mona Lisa the most famous in his generation and today are the techniques he used, the smile and the glamor which has grown over the years.

       The fourteenth-century painting has survived throughout generations to this day, a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, which has been in the possessions of monarchs, suffered theft, neglect and vandalism, but is still amazing. Leonardo worked on it starting from 1503 to the 1507. It had taken him four years to get this perfection of art, the lively portrait of Lisa Gheradini. The woman was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, an affluent merchant in Italy (Gurstein 41). The Mona Lisa was a work of art of one of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance; Italians called the painting La Giocondo in relation to Lisa’s husband name, and so that was what it was referred to in the nineteenth-century. This work of Leonardo was so perfect when he had finished working on it that his contemporaries copied the Mona Lisa pose, a pose that became known as the “Giocondo pose.” Among the most renowned artists who were the first to embrace the pose was Raphael (Gurstein 41).

    Throughout Europe painters made deductions of the portrait itself and through this appreciated Leonardo’s genius (Gurstein 41). The Mona Lisa became popular. Francois I was the first monarch to have had it in his possession somewhere in the 1530’s. He had kept it in his private and accessible collections. This kept the Mona Lisa in seclusion, shut out of public recognition for almost a hundred years. The painting had come back to glory in the seventeenth-century in the same Fontatinebleau where it was denied glory, after a writer’s word of praise about the painting.

      Napoleon had claimed the painting after the French revolution for a few years and had hung it in the Tuilress of his bedroom. King Henry IV also harbored the painting. The painting’s possession by these rulers snatched it from the public eye in a way that even when it appeared, it had less recognition, but after it was stolen by a patriot Italian decorator who worked at the Museum Louvre where the painting was kept, probably in the name of retrieving Italy’s lost glory, it came into the limelight. The painting also suffered vandalism, from the throw of a heavy porcelain at it by a Russian tourist to a stone throw by an Argentinian and to an acid attack by one other tourist. These scenarios had also played roles in projecting the Mona Lisa to its eminence today aside the painting’s great features, which set it apart from the works of other great artists there have ever been.

     The technique used in painting the Mona Lisa, the glazing technique, helped Leonardo in his achievement of the amazing(smoky) shading but his control over the thickness of the glaze was one factor that made the painting more remarkable (Ball 694 ). “The Mona Lisa is a portrait of a flesh-and-blood. This perfect image as Walter Pater, an English essayist states is a symbol of modern art (Gurstein 43). In a quest to find more about the technique Leonardo had employed in painting this awesome piece of art, some researchers from the Center for Research and Restoration of French Museums, Phillipe Walter and his staff experimented on the Mona Lisa. The outcome of the research proved a staggeringly fine control of glaze thickness. They also concluded that Leonardo had applied what is now in today’s art known to be the X- ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a non-invasive technique through those sacrosanct flesh tone of the Mona Lisa. Phillipe and his crew compared six other paintings of Leonardo’s to trace composition and thickness. They have found out how the layers of the Mona Lisa varied from light to shadow (Ball 964).

     A further look beyond the figure is the landscape. There appears a connection between both. As Pater demonstrated in his essay on the painting, when discussing the metaphoric interaction between the figure and the landscape. He said about the figure as “a circle of fantastic rocks” meaning what surrounds the woman in the portrait and which appears “besides the waters” which is “older than the rocks among which she sits” (Smith 184). The landscape which is a panel rising on the other hand matches every contour of the figure  from her cheek bone to the stream of her hair and also to the veil coming down to her left breast. Leonardo has achieved this quality in his work through his usage of the sfumato (smoky) shading, technique which involves the glazing technique, where a transparent paint is used over an opaque one. Fifteenth-century European oil painters like Jan van Eyck developed this style, but in applying this technique, Leonardo did it very well leaving out obscure details (Ball 694).

      Phillipe and his colleagues again deduced that Leonardo instead of using a brush might have used his fingertips just like van Eyck. There was no art of portraiture in the artist’s generation which typically required an elaboration to the degree seen in the Mona Lisa, whether with or without landscape background (Sandrock and Wright 197). I will say indirectly not even Leonardo’s contemporaries like Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravagio and Poussin, no matter how good they were never explored art like he did.

     Moreover, the Mona Lisa has a captivating smile that draws viewers to love it; a smile full of mystery. A smile so beautiful that throughout the centuries has touched the hearts of many. I have not come close to the painting but pictures of the original and copies are a delight to look at in commercials, magazines, books, and on the television. I smile back anytime I see that mystic smile. When looking at the Mona Lisa, it feels like looking at a real human. Anyone who looks at it get so much into it trying to know what is behind that smile. “It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by part master as with it germinal principle, the unfathomable smile always a touch of something sinister in it which plays all over Leonardo’s work.”