Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain

Author:Antoine Laurain [Laurain, Antoine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2019-06-20T07:00:00+00:00

She smiles enigmatically against a background of lakes and mountains. She smiles, her small hands resting in front of her, and you almost want to look behind you to see who on earth she is smiling at like that. Apparently, the sky was originally blue and her skin a pearly pink, yet now she is haloed in a sort of greenish gold mist. A soft mist with which people now associate her. It is said that the reason the smiling woman acquired that hue is that Leonardo mixed too much varnish into his paint colours.

Bob looked at Lisa Gherardini, known as the Mona Lisa. She was not behind bulletproof glass back in 1954. Nor was she lit by LED lighting developed by Toshiba specially for her, or guarded by two attendants, making sure the thousands of tourists who came to see her did not get too close. She simply hung in the gallery among all the other paintings. And, remarkably, Bob was one of the only visitors to the beautiful Florentine that afternoon. It must have been a special day for copyists because in front of almost every picture in the gallery, there was an artist perched on a stool at their easel, working, palette in hand, to produce perfect life-size reproductions. The Mona Lisa was no exception. A woman in her fifties in a blue smock was concentrating on her painting. She must have been coming here for weeks because there was already some varnish on her unfinished canvas and many details that she had reproduced with meticulous care. In two or three months she would undoubtedly have a very creditable copy of La Gioconda. With the tip of her sable brush, the artist was working on the light and shadow of the mountains. She was completely absorbed in her work and was probably miles away from the Louvre in spirit, in an imaginary valley and on the balcony of a house that had never existed other than in the imagination of Leonardo. As Bob looked at the painting, he told himself that the Mona Lisa was not smiling at some unknown person behind him, she was smiling at him, Bob Brown from Milwaukee. She was smiling at him with gentle complicity as if she had a message for him that could only be passed on by telepathy. Her hands placed calmly one on top of the other could almost have been mistaken for Goldie’s. He had never noticed that before, although he and Goldie had looked together at the picture on the internet several times. You couldn’t really imagine the Mona Lisa’s hands rinsing beer glasses or carrying Bloody Marys on Sunday morning at the Why Not bar, and yet, they looked the same. Soft, with a wideish palm and long, slender fingers. Bob stood back. Yes, the Mona Lisa was definitely looking at him. And her eyes continued to follow him as he moved away.

Before coming to the most famous museum in the world, and regretting that

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