Mona Lisa by Dianne Hales

Author:Dianne Hales [Hales, Dianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Art, Biography, Non-Fiction
Goodreads: 18775443
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-08-05T05:00:00+00:00

Biographers suggest several possibilities for where Lisa might have posed for Leonardo. The artist could have begun his original sketch in his bottega at Santissima Annunziata, where he was living at the time. When he later moved to the Santa Maria Novella compound, Leonardo might have set up his three-legged easel there. Wherever he worked, Leonardo, obsessed with light, might have rigged up shades to filter the sun or, as he suggested in his advice to painters, taken advantage of cloudy or hazy days or the evocative glow of dusk.

Leonardo would have started by drawing his model with either chalk or pen on paper. Like other artists of the day, he could have completed a sketch in just a single sitting and transferred its outlines via pinpricks and chalk to a prepared wood panel. But in the earliest account of the portrait’s creation, Vasari describes a far more prolonged and complex process.

Leonardo, he recounts, hired performers “who played or sang, and continually jested, who would make [Lisa] remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to their portraits.” Many scholars deride this dramatic scenario, but Leonardo may have needed more than the usual amount of time with his model. The reason: He was attempting something that had never been done before.

“Leonardo wanted to portray the complex psychological life of a real person,” explains Monsignor Timothy Verdon, director of the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, who teaches a course on women in Renaissance art at Stanford University’s Florence program. “He may have wanted to see the play of different feelings and responses to different stimuli on her face. The emotions, the intelligence, the obvious wit that he captured are what makes Lisa’s face so alive and so fascinating to us.”

What about Lisa? What did she behold when she returned Leonardo’s penetrating stare? She would never have met anyone like him. Few people had. She doubtlessly knew the lofty reputation of the silver-maned painter who swept through the town in modish cloaks with boys as bewitching as angels in his wake. She would have appreciated the immense honor of the grand master’s prized attention to herself and her family. Like other Florentines, always proud of their grasp of cose dell’arte (things of art), she would have recognized the power of an artist of his stature to confer an eternity of fame on a model. But perhaps she would have dismissed this daunting possibility and thought of herself as simply a prosperous man’s wife posing for a portrait relatively few might ever view.

Sitting just so before Leonardo’s attentive gaze, Lisa may have sensed the qualities that made him appealing as a man as well as an artist: warmth, kindness, gentleness, a wisdom deeper than knowledge, a childlike playfulness that he would never outgrow. Perhaps, in the harmony that a shared focus breeds, the maestro and his muse forged such an intense connection that all else seemed to fall away in a moment suspended in time.

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