La Gioconda
Re: What are you looking at?
Personally I don't think the Mona Lisa is the greatest painting ever... nor even Leonardo's greatest. I would probably have assigned that honor to his Last Supper... if it had survived more intact. As it is, I'd probably go with the Virgin of the Rocks...
... or the marvelous "cartoon" for the Virgin and Child, St. Anne, and the Infant John the Baptist:
Nevertheless, La Gioconda still resonates as a magical portrait... one that persists and inhabits the mind's eye... a rare achievement... but not the only one:
One might argue that few of the people portrayed in these paintings are attractive by today's standards... but that's irrelevant. Artists have always had the ability to create an image of beauty from a subject that might not be recognized as traditionally beautiful.
As for her smile...
... obviously there is more than one type of smile and quite certainly the smile of La Gioconda is not a smile of beaming joy. But no one has ever suggested as much. Mona Lisa's smile is commonly spoken of as "enigmatic"... "mysterious"... It is the slightest hint of a smile... the ironic, knowing smile of a woman who looks out at the audience... or perhaps even the artist... and smiles inwardly... knowingly... aware of something unknown to them... unknown to us.
"Good art tells a story"? Perhaps... but all art is not narrative. Indeed, the very notion that the best art is narrative in nature is quite dated... an idea rooted in the old notions of the hierarchy in art with the Histoire... the narrative historical or mythological painting stood unassailable at the top of the heap... and the lowly still life at the bottom. This notion began to unravel with Ingres, the Romantics, and Impressionism, and was finally laid to death by the Modernists. But even if the old idea were true... Oscar Wilde noted that "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." In other words, criticism says as much or more about the critic as it does about the artist or art work. The narrative found within a work of depends upon what the viewer brings to the table. While some see little that is special in the Mona Lisa, others have imagined a mysterious... even frightening... Sphinx-like figure sitting amidst an almost unearthly and haunted landscape. The entire painting is ethereal and atmospheric as if all were dissolving into the fog and shadows... into the mists of time. The landscape itself fascinates me as it is suggestive of nothing so much as the ink on silk paintings of the Chinese:
Walter Pater has written eloquently upon this painting... and Leonardo's work in his marvelously poetic book, The Renaissance... but I am most impressed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet to Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, which always strikes me more as an image of La Gioconda: Mother, is this the darkness of the end, The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminent Eternity?