The Artwork Of The Week this week is the famous Mona Lisa, by Leonard da Vinci.
Mona Lisa or Lisa del Gioconda, 1503. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Oil paint on canvas, 2’6” by 1’9”. Currently housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The Mona Lisa is one of the most, if not the most, famous painting from the western world. Her likeness has achieved meme status through her presence in many cartoons and comedies, so the odds of someone not recognizing her is slim. The most famous details of the Mona Lisa are her coy smile and her missing eyebrows. The smile has an interesting explanation, while the eyebrows have a more…well, I guess it’s an interesting explanation as well.
Her smile is noteworthy in the context of Italian Renaissance portraiture. There were only so many reasons to commission a portrait: either you wanted something to symbolize your wealth and power, or you wanted something to celebrate your family. In the Italian Renaissance, most art patrons—that is, people who paid artists to make art—were men, so many portraits from the time period were of influential men and their families. Some men wanted portraits of them and their wives, so several pairs of partner portraits were commissioned by the upper class.
For now, we’re going to ignore the intricacies of Italian renaissance portraiture depicting the men, and focus solely on portraits of singular women. When a portrait of a woman was painted, the lady was usually depicted looking off to the side and in lavishly decorated clothing. We can argue that the nature of the clothing was determined by her status in society, but considering that many paintings were commissioned by the wealthy elite, we can agree on the clothing demonstrating vast wealth and prestige.
The looking-off-to-the-side part, though, is thought to be because a woman staring out at the viewer was needlessly confrontational. Men were always depicted looking directly out at the viewer, and since renaissance Italy was a patriarchal society, this made sense. The men were in charge and needed to command respect and establish themselves as the source of power, and their portraits reflected this idea. Women had to be more demure and deferent, thus the looking away. Nothing says, “I don’t know, you choose,” like lack of eye contact.
Why is this important? The woman in the Mona Lisa is staring directly out at the viewer. Her eyes are not downcast, they’re soft and making eye contact. Her coy smile suggests that she knows how unusual this behavior is, and that she will not look away. It’s a test of social interaction. Will the viewer call her on this breach of social order or will they uncomfortably stare back, inevitably being the first to look away?
Of course, the viewer would have to be the first one to look away because she is a painting, forever frozen in time, with gentle but unblinking eyes. Eyes under seemingly nonexistent eyebrows.
The eyebrows are there. I promise, they exist. They are very faint, partly because of the nature of oil paint and partly because the painting is dirty. Oil paint dries very slowly, and Leonardo was known for continuously adding details to painting as they dried, so while the eyebrows may have been stark and present in the very first paint layer, the successive layers have muddled the view enough that they seem invisible. Oil paint also gives painting an almost luminescent look in the right light, so catch the Mona Lisa at the wrong angle and all definition disappears. The Louvre also does not clean their art, so the layers of dirt from the years the painting has existed are still covering all the details. And since Leonardo did not wait between coats to let the paint dry, the paint ended up holding onto dirt stronger than it should have. Thanks, Leonardo.
Paintings by Leonardo’s students who copied the Mona Lisa show definitive eyebrows, so art historians are confident that the original’s eyebrows do exist. X-rays and tests of the painting show the “cartoon” underneath the paint having eyebrows, so they even existed in Leonardo’s preliminary sketches. But, unless science figures out how to clean dirt out of oil paint layers and the Louvre decides to clean the painting, we may never see the Mona Lisa’s actual eyebrows.
But, like the old M&M commercial with Santa, “They do exist!”
There is a lot to say about the Mona Lisa, so much that people write senior theses and doctoral dissertations on it, but this is a crash course on the quirky history behind her smile and her eyebrows. If you want to see a beautiful and quintessential example of an Italian Renaissance portrait of a woman, go look up Ginevra de Benci, also by Leonardo da Vinci.