Mystery

Leonardo da Vinci, Florentine painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, naturalist, writer, was one of the wisest and most universal of men. This spring and summer, to celebrate the sooth anniversary of his birth, a few remaining fruits of Leonardo's vast labors are being exhibited in England, France, Italy and the U.S. .

Leonardo's name conjures up a heavy-browed, sad, hawk-eyed man, with a straight nose, mouth firm to the point of cruelty, and a flowing silver beard. In contrast to that awesome image of masculine rigor, it also recalls the dark, soft femininity of his most famed creation--the Mono. Lisa. This painting, which hangs in the Louvre, is probably as well known as any in existence--though few admirers pretend to grasp it fully. A portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, it has been the subject of a towering stack of critical works. Summarizing the comments of the centuries, Johns Hopkins Professor George Boas once concluded, simply and truly, that each age sees the Mono, Lisa in a new way.

Subtlety & Superiority. One critic who saw nothing strange about the Mono, Lisa was the 16th century's Giorgio Vasari, who praised the painting for its naturalism. "In this head," Vasari wrote, "every peculiarity that could be depicted by the utmost subtlety of the pencil has been faithfully reproduced . . . Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping someone constantly near her, to ... amuse her, to the end that she might continue cheerful."

The romance-minded commentators of the i gth century found the lady less cheerful than beguiling. Theophile Gautier wrote that her "sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned up at the corners, in the violet shadows, mocks you with so much gentleness, grace and superiority, that you feel suddenly intimidated, like a schoolboy before a duchess."

Mother & Mankind. Walter Pater tried to pierce her veils with a poetic sigh: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times . . . and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

In the science-minded 20th century, Sigmund Freud applied psychoanalytical guesswork to the problem. He decided that the Mona Lisa was actually an idealization of Leonardo's own mother.

Through the growing darkness of the little panel wherein she holds court, Mona Lisa keeps smiling silently on mankind. In illuminating one by one her amber facets, the critics have only succeeded in making her more dazzlingly mysterious.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.