If you want praise of Leonardo daVinci’s
Mona Lisa as art, you can find it.
But what if you think it’s just….
fine?
What’s the cynic’s explanation for the
Mona Lisa?
Why is the Mona Lisa so, so famous?
Is it really that much better than da Vinci’s
Lady with Ermine?
That seems better.
There’s one more ermine.
But it’s Mona who is so famous that the
director of the Louvre, where Mona Lisa lives,
said 80% of their visitors are only there
to see that one painting.
If you don’t think Mona Lisa is famous just
because she’s somehow 10 times better than
every other painting, her story reveals something
more interesting, something
about how art breaks into wider culture.
And it might never have happened if the Mona
Lisa hadn’t disappeared.
Before Mona Lisa became a mass culture star,
before she vanished, one critic made her a
work of art worth taking.
And he was so over-the-top insanely in love
with the painting that he single-handedly
made it a masterpiece.
Walter Pater’s 1873 book, The Renaissance,
was key.
It came out more than 350 years after Leonardo
painted it, but it defined the painting for
Victorians.
That was key in an age when it was hard to
actually see the art.
So the words did the work.
Here is the epic semi-colon-stuffed paragraph
at the center of his ode to Mona Lisa.
Highlights?
“The animalism of Greece”
“She is older than the rocks among which
she sits.”
“Like the vampire, she has been dead many
times.”
This was the purplest prose of all time.
But people loved the stuff.
Oscar Wilde thought the essay’s writing
was great.
He praised “the musical of the mystical
prose.”
And every general interest profile of the
Louvre, from academic guidebooks to discussions
clubs in Paducah, used Pater’s words to
talk about Mona.
Other critics jumped on — Mona was a popular,
secular painting that they could analyze.
Unlike da Vinci’s Last Supper, they could
supply all the meaning.
But even at her peak, Mona Lisa was just art
world famous, not the most famous painting
of all time.
In 1907, a vandal at the Louvre targeted a
picture by Ingres not da Vinci.
And in 1910, amidst rumors of theft, papers
called Mona just the second most famous painting
in the Louvre, after Raphael's Sistina Madonna.
It took a real theft to take Mona from art
syllabus highlight to mass culture icon.
These are Vincenzo Peruggia’s fingerprints.
This is Vincenzo Peruggia’s mugshot.
He has one because on August 21, 1911, the
former Louvre worker lifted the Mona Lisa
off the wall and...took it home.
It took the Louvre a day to even notice, but
the media didn’t have as subdued of a reaction.
The painting went missing for two years, and
every time, the press — often quoting Pater
— called it the greatest portrait there
ever was.
They speculated that Mona’s smile had driven
the thief mad, they wrote art thief fan fiction,
and they constantly daydreamed about Mona
Lisa’s whereabouts.
Thousands went to the Louvre just to see empty
hooks hanging on the wall.
The robbery and manhunt were like a two year
ad campaign for the painting.
And because you couldn’t just Google “Mona
Lisa before it was stolen,” it was hard
for people to see the actual painting and
say, “What’s the big deal?”
When Peruggia was caught, he said his goal
was to bring Mona back to her native Italy.
By then, she was the most famous painting
in the world due, in part, to her absence.
Just as critics could smear prose on her blank
face, the press could hang a reputation on
those empty hooks in the wall.
When Mona Lisa was stolen, she left a masterpiece.
After her recovery and a two week tour in
Florence, she returned to the Louvre bigger
than just art.
She was a story and a legend
and prominently shown in every paper that
reported her recovery.
It was the big reveal after 2 years of suspense,
now with a story that merited Walter Pater’s
hyperbole.
From that point on, she attracted Presidential
speeches and parodies.
“Also come to pay homage to this great creation
of the civilization which we share.”
The momentum never stopped.
In the end, the cynic’s interpretation and
the gob-smacked critic’s interpretation
have something in common.
Mona Lisa isn’t a portrait, but a blank
face.
A place for critics to paint meaning, and
people to find mystery.
That’s why she was so famous — not because
of how she’s painted, but what we see in
her.
If that’s not art, then what is?
I found one 1909 description of the Mona Lisa
that seemed particularly prescient.
The writer said: “Even those whose first
expressions [sic] is ‘huh’ and proclaimed
frankly that they cannot see her beauty or
her interest find themselves disputing hotly
over both.”
That’s probably still the case today.
