Diagnosing a Smile

If Mona Lisa del Giocondo had had any idea of the lengths to which critics would go in trying to explain her enigmatic smile in Leonardo da Vinci's famed portrait, she might have split her sides laughing. For in 450 years the smile has been variously interpreted as sly and tender, coquettish and aloof, cruel and compassionate, seductive and supercilious. At Yale University last week an eminent British physician, visiting professor of the history of medicine, coolly swept aside all such adjectives and offered his own theory: the lady was smiling with "placid satisfaction" because she was pregnant.

To support this retrospective diagnosis, Dr. Kenneth D. Keele argued: "She sits well back in the chair, with her back supported . . . She is turned slightly to the right with what appears to be a heavy, slow movement. [She has] matronly outlines that would not be expected in a 24-year-old Florentine model, and there is a heavy, vertical falling of the dress into her lap, suggesting pregnancy." As for the artist's approach, Da Vinci is known to have been fascinated by the phenomena of creation and procreation. The portrait's primeval background, said Dr. Keele, represents the Creation. Coupling this conclusion with what he believes to have been La Gioconda's condition, he suggested that the painting might better be renamed Genesis.

One trouble with Dr. Keele's theory is that Mona Lisa del Giocondo, married at 16, had one child which died shortly before she began to pose for Da Vinci, and there is no clear record that she became pregnant during the four or five years that Da Vinci worked, on and off, at the portrait. Besides, the remarkably similar smile in another Da Vinci master piece cannot be explained the same way. The subject is John the Baptist.

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