Mona Lisa

From the WSJ story.

the Mona Lisa is, technically speaking, a very great work of art. But is that really obvious? Well, it would be if we could still see the thing. Unfortunately, like the dollar bill and the American flag, it has assumed a pall of such impenetrable familiarity that we no longer see it at all.

But if ever you succeed in seeing the painting as people saw it in centuries past, you will discover something astounding: The Mona Lisa looks entirely different from what we have been led to believe. To many observers, this is the one supreme masterpiece, the unarguable bedrock of our visual culture, the painterly equivalent of the Parthenon, Chartres and the Taj Mahal. In fact, it is anything but that. It is a mysterious, shifting, elusive thing, and it was that very ambiguity that so confounded and compelled the attention of all who saw it in the past.


From the web.














Like most of the portraits of this period, and like most of Leonardo’s portraits, the Mona Lisa is a half-length of a seated woman (it is just possible to make out the arm of the chair in which she sits.) The face is an odd compromise between the general and the particular. Representing Leonardo’s preoccupation with anatomy, the face expresses unparalleled naturalism, yet it remains largely an androgynous type, one that recurs in Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rock” and in his depiction of St. John.

After the eye has accounted for such generalizing impulses, suddenly it is drawn to the incongruous perspectival and anatomical perfection of the hands and midriff, which are angled away from the picture plane. Those hands embody the scientific naturalism that began among the Lombard Herbalists of the late 14th century and would be revived, a century after Leonardo, in Caravaggio and his followers.

From the Louvre.