That Mona Lisa Strangeness in her Smile
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise, France. Photo: Mark Playle.
Not only is her smile strange, just about everything about her is.
To begin with, Leonardo did not give this, or any of his paintings, a title. He simply said it is his portrait of a Florentine lady.
If it is Mona (Madonna/Mrs) Lisa del Giocondo, as she never saw the finished portrait and as there are no known images of her, it's not known if it is a likeness.
No-one knows for a fact who commissioned it or where in Florence the lady sat for Leonardo.
It's not even known if his dissection of the muscles around the mouth of a cadaver to see how lips work was done before or during his work on the painting.
How many artists in his peer group went to that length to get it right?
It may be that the lady's smile owes as much to Leonardo’s scalpel as to his brush.
Have you ever wondered how he achieved the translucent effect on Mona Lisa's skin?
I have.
For this portrait, he chose a small* panel of fine grained poplar wood from the tree which grows all over his native Lombardy.
There wasn't anything Leonardo didn't know about wood or anything else for that matter.
He knew very well that it absorbs and releases moisture resulting in movement so why did he not use canvas?
It was too coarse for what he had in mind.
Which was?
His signature sfumato **
He bought lead oxide litharge, a red powder by-product of silver refining, which he heated and mixed with linseed oil to make a pearly white thick primer to cover imperfections in the wood panel.
He wanted a base which would reflect light.
Not only was the result a smooth, silky, honey like texture, it helped prevent warping.
The preparation was yet another of Leonardo's innovations.
Leonardo referred to “letargiro di piombo” (litharge of lead) in his Notebook, known now as the Codus Arundel.
X-ray diffraction on the painting revealed traces of lead carbonate hydroxide ***
This wasn’t just chemistry, a word not coined until much later, it was genius in action.
He probably sketched the composition in charcoal or chalk before a monochrome underpainting.
Then came another stroke of genius.
Although Leonardo did not know the word which came much later, he used what is now known as sfumato instinctively.
The painting is a masterclass in patience. Odd for a man who usually had so little.
Leonardo applied dozens of ultra-thin translucent glazes.
Each layer, barely visible to the naked eye, gives Mona Lisa's skin a soft, smoky realism.
Glazes need long drying times between applications. Combine that fact with his perfectionism and you have a masterpiece which evolved organically.
He may have used his fingers or palms to blend areas. He often did.
Painters completed portraits in weeks. Leonardo worked on his Florentine lady from 1503 until he died in Amboise in 1519.
As for her missing eyebrows, it was fashionable for society women to have them shaved or plucked to achieve a youthful, elongated, supposedly intelligent forehead but he may have left them out deliberately to create mystery.
Perhaps he just didn't like eyebrows.
Or, of course, they may have faded or been accidentally removed during cleaning.
Who knows?
Despite the thick undercoat, not long after Leonardo began the portrait, sometime between 1503 and 1517 when he noticed it, the panel developed a double curvature, a slight vertical and horizontal distortion.
It might have happened because either the panel was unframed or very loosely framed which allowed it to warp.
If it was 1517, it was when Leonardo was living in Amboise, in Château Clos Lucé.
How cool was that?
It turns out that the curvature was no bad thing.
Why?
This genius who created optical illusions for Francis I knew it made the portrait almost three dimensional.
The curvature made Mona Lisa's smile part of her mystique.
Shifting light reflections result in slight distortions to the curved surface of the paint making her more lifelike. Depending on where you are when you look at her, tiny changes in the curvature of the mouth affect how we interpret her mood, how we perceive her expression.
For my part, she looks maternal, calm, mature, serene.
She reminds me of my own mother whose smile was a mixture of humour and affection.
If it is Lisa, when she sat for Leonardo, she was twenty four, the mother of three boys.
If she looks older, mothers of boys age overnight. I did.
My mother had five boys as did Lisa in the end.
After the curvature, the now famous four inch crack appeared.
It goes through the panel from the top edge down toward Mona Lisa's forehead.
Thanks to Leonardo's meticulous prepping of the panel and his painstaking application of layers and layers of paint and glazes, the crack is not visible from the front.
Researchers say it must have happened between between 1515 (just after the double curvature appeared) and 1550.
If it was 1515 Leonardo would have discovered it when he lived in Château Clos Lucé.
Another how cool is that?
It was caused by the natural consequence of humidity fluctuations.
Again, he would not have been in the least bit surprised. He had, after all, brought her from Rome over the Alps to Amboise.
Leonardo's greatest wish was for artistic immortality.
Mission Accomplished.
* Approximately 31 x 21 inches (79cm x 53.5cm)
** A painting technique that gives the subject imprecise contours by means of glazes with a smooth and transparent texture .
*** Lead carbonate hydroxide. Known as PbO after 1800 and plumbonacrite in 2012
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art). Photography by Mark.
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