The Mona Lisa Vanishes by Nicholas Day

Author:Nicholas Day [Day, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

WHY THIS PAINTING?

Leonardo writes a little bit of everything in his notebooks—Latin verbs, bad jokes, grocery lists. But in all the notebooks, there’s nothing about the Mona Lisa.

Nothing. No contract, no sketches, no correspondence. Nothing about why he agreed to do the painting. Nothing about what he was trying to do with the painting.

Nothing at all.

We know the Mona Lisa shouldn’t have existed. Its existence is an improbable series of improbable events. But we know little about how it defied those odds—how it came to be.

We do know that Lisa sat for her portrait somewhere in Florence. She likely sat for a few days, but it could have been weeks. People said later that there were musicians in the room to entertain Lisa, to make her smile. But people like to make up stories about famous paintings, and the musician story is a good story. In the long history of the Mona Lisa, people will make up a lot of good stories, and they will often make the mistake of believing them.

Instead of answers, we have questions. Why did Leonardo take so long to paint the portrait? Some scholars claim he never finished it. Why did he become obsessed with perfecting it? It was his least remarkable commission—no job seemed less promising. Why did he focus all his skill and imagination on this diminutive portrait of a wife and mother?

To answer these questions, all we have is the Mona Lisa itself. It is stubbornly silent. Its eyes follow you around the room, but its mouth never moves.

If we look closely, though, we can see something new. We can look past its fame and see how strange the painting is.

On her wooden board, Lisa Gherardini is no longer in Italy. She’s been transplanted into some science-fiction world, where there are no humans or any signs of any humans, except a random bridge. Far below her, mountains rise and streams flow, but this isn’t the Italian countryside. It isn’t anywhere people live. It’s strange even by the standards of strange Renaissance backgrounds.

Now look at Lisa herself. Her face turns toward the viewer, but her body faces away, as if she’s just turned—as if she’s still turning. This makes her look in motion, like she wasn’t expecting to be in this painting at all. Her hands face us, but they’re empty; she holds nothing. That’s strange. In Renaissance art, paintings are littered with things standing in for other things. Everything is symbolic. There’s nothing symbolic in the Mona Lisa, because there’s nothing there to symbolize anything. Lisa wears plain clothing and no jewelry, and that’s strange too. Florentine men and women knew how to dress: even their everyday clothing was extravagant. But Leonardo puts Lisa in as ordinary an outfit as possible. She doesn’t even look important enough to be in a painting.

But she acts like she belongs there. She’s not shy or meek. She makes eye contact. This is exactly how Florentine women are taught not to behave, and it is also how Leonardo himself taught not to paint them.

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