The immortality of the “Mona Lisa”

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There is no doubt about which is the most famous and even the most popular picture in the world. Millions of people take pictures "with her" in Paris every year, she is the subject of countless artistic variations and caricatures, she is probably the only picture whose copies are exhibited in the most prestigious museums in the world. At the same time, it causes indifference, astonishment and resistance, awakens conspiracy theories... Some people think that it is overrated, that there are much better paintings in the Louvre itself, or that it is boring and even ugly. Regardless of value judgments, there are various theories about its history, theft and possible meaning. What, then, is the immortality of the "Mona Lisa" (whether each of us liked it or not)?

REAL, EARLY PORTRAIT

The commission for the portrait probably dates back to 1503, so the story goes back in time, which makes it less than reliable – Italian archives, unfortunately, are nothing like English ones – and potentially extra exciting. Not all the characters in the story are familiar to us, nor do we know enough about them, let alone the objects.

The main actor is known to everyone, but it is hard to believe that he is a human being, let alone to say with certainty what kind of person he was and why he did something. At the time he started working on this portrait, he was fifty-one years old, which was a serious age for that time. In a career spanning over thirty-five years, he participated in or completed fifteen paintings (if that many), because he was involved in botany, anatomy, geology, hydrology, aeronautics, was a sculptor, an architect, a musician, an inventor of musical instruments, a director of court entertainments, a military engineer... For many people, he is at the top of the list of people who could have descended from aliens or learned from them.

But it's the beginning of the 16th century, and Leonardo is an illegitimate child, and even he practically lives as a servant who paints for money. As the voice beats him not to finish what he started, he doesn't have much money. Among the commissions he accepts, one comes (presumably!) from the Florentine silk merchant Gioconda (belonging to the Girardelli family), whose notary is none other than Leonardo's father - to paint a portrait of his twenty-four-year-old wife, Lisa ("Mona" is short for "Madonna," madame).

Unlike many others, it seems that Leonardo did finish this portrait (although Vasari claims otherwise) and, by all accounts, delivered it. Now we're just getting started with the mysteries, since it's not the one you're thinking of (and the one you might have stood in line for at the Paris museum). Namely, in 1504, an exceptionally talented young painter, a native of Urbino, moved to Florence, who, being an orphan, grew up in Peruđin's workshop. The following centuries will know him by the nickname "Il Divino", but Raphael exists Raphael by, like a sponge, absorbing the best of Leonardo and Michelangelo (he will later "spy" on the work on the vault of the Sistine Chapel). Just one of the things he did in that learning process was a sketch of the "Mona Lisa" that he drew over Leonardo's shoulder. And, as you may have guessed, that sketch is dramatically different from this well-known image. The composition is different, there are elements that are missing from it, and we know from the scientific analyzes carried out in the Louvre that it was never "cut" or copied. It is also noticeable that the portrait shows a woman younger than she is in the painting in Paris.

The "real" or "earlier" picture is today in England and is called the "Isleworth Mona Lisa". We know that it was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it has not yet been confirmed where it was until then. Now it belongs to a group of people who jointly bought it from Pulitzer's widow, and it is very rare to see it at exhibitions. Scientists are still analyzing and debating it.

THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT HARMONY

But then what is it in the Louvre? To begin with, it is the story of an artist's search for perfect beauty. We know that Leonardo, wherever he moves, carries a small wooden board and every now and then, until his hand fails due to numerous strokes, he repairs the version of the "Mona Lisa" which, according to legend, will hang on the wall of his bedroom when he dies in 1519 (again, some claim that François I bought it a year earlier).

We are talking about a period of ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years. Why would a man, even with the most varied interests that do not allow him to devote himself to just one project, work on a painting for so long, especially when its dimensions are so large that the impressionists would paint two or three of them a day? Leonardo uses the smallest, finest brush to apply barely noticeable layers of paint, thin enough to easily correct and change even the tiniest details. Just look carefully at how he painted his hands or his hair: it seems as if the next moment it will come to life.

This is necessary for him because, working on this picture, he invents a new artistic genre. Showing the eyes and lips of the wife of a Florentine merchant, Leonardo paints her inner life. We look at the surface, but he shows us the inside; we look at the painted skin, it presents us with a portrait of the soul. Countless touches of the brush allowed him to depict a face for which it is impossible to determine what it actually expresses (a similar artistic procedure in Shakespeare Greenblatt calls "strategic opacity" - deliberately, it is planned to be unclear why Hamlet postpones revenge, Lear shares the kingdom, Othello and Desdemona do not travel to Cyprus on the same ship, so that the reader is "drawn" into their inner world). The longer we look at Mona Lisa's face, the less we understand what this woman feels and thinks; the less clear it is to us, the harder it is for us to stop looking at her and wondering - will she smile, will she cry, is this barely visible smile seductive, is she suffering because of the loss of someone or something important... It can be anything and it doesn't have to mean anything.

There is, of course, more than that. "Mona Lisa" is Leonardo's attempt to achieve absolute subtlety. "Peek into every corner" and you won't find any rough expression, any too sharp line or color disharmony anywhere. There is no such refinement anywhere in nature, and the question is whether it exists in art, or even in imagination.

As for the colors themselves, we have a few problems with them. In the image that we all know, they are perfectly blended, everything is in almost pastel tones, in soft gradients and often with hard-to-notice boundaries among countless shades of blue, green and brown. The landscape in the background is the best example of Leonardo's mastery in conjuring a kind of gentle haze, or rare smoke, which makes each individual element merge with the rest, as if it were more a dream than a landscape. However, we must be careful with all impressions and conclusions. More than five hundred years have passed, and even the greatest experts cannot determine with certainty how different the colors we perceive today are from those once seen by the author himself.

That Leonardo is a genius painter must be clear to anyone who has observed the perfect proportions on such a complex composition as "The Last Supper". The "geometry" of this portrait is no less amazing. On the one hand, the elements of her face and torso are in proportions that correspond to the golden ratio, and on the other, the perspectives are extremely complex - one "frames" her elbows with a point above the crown, the other refers to the fact that the right shoulder is placed "deeper" than the left, the third on the famous background. Computer illustrations of both are easy to find on the Internet, but it is difficult to understand how a human hand painted them without the help of any devices.

MUSEUM FOR THE SAKE OF A PICTURE

Over the centuries, there have been various theories about who is actually in the picture. An unusual resemblance to a drawing that is thought to be a self-portrait was discovered in it, it was thought that it was actually Leonardo's favorite student, to whom the painting was bequeathed and who some believe was his secret lover, numerous noblewomen who may have posed for this particular painting are listed. It is almost certain that we will never know the exact answer.

Closer in time to us, at the beginning of the 20th century (1911), the "Mona Lisa" disappears and the police need almost three years to discover the thief and return the painting. Interestingly, the thief wanted to return the painting to Italy, as an act of patriotism, but did not take the other two paintings by Leonardo or the masterpieces by Raphael, Caravaggio and countless other Italian painters. Also, the skeptics claimed that another version was returned and that it was only the theft that made the painting famous throughout the world.

A detail that perfectly illustrates that glory is the fact that such a magnificent museum as Madrid's Prado has a copy of the "Mona Lisa" on permanent display, which was most likely painted by one of the students in parallel with Leonardo (and Raphael?), and I don't remember ever seeing a copy of a painting displayed in a museum. That painting, by the way, is so bad (like the one in the central museum in Oslo, which was probably created about one hundred and fifty years later), that it additionally emphasizes all the subtlety and complexity of the original.

Leonardo supposedly dies in the arms of the French king, in the castle he had made available to him, and is buried as, as we would say today, a French citizen. "Mona Lisa" from the Louvre can serve as an incentive for practically everyone: if the best painting for an unattainable genius is the last one, the one he worked on even in his old age, no one has the right to make excuses and give up.

"His personal Mona Lisa", from which he never parted, according to the will belongs to one of the students and the king has to buy it back. Although he initially wanted her for himself, he founded the most famous art museum in the world around her and because of her. It's not entirely fair to the countless masterpieces that the Louvre is full of, but there's no doubt what's historically its first and still-today focal point.

And all this because of the obsession of a genius with a visual portrait of one's inner world and (probably unintentionally) founding the genre of psychological depiction, both in painting and perhaps in all other forms of art.

The author is a psychologist

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