Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is considered the most famous painting in existence, and as such it has been surrounded by a lot of controversy and conspiracy. With the last one suggesting that an earlier portrait and underpaintings lie hidden underneath the surface of Leonardo’s most celebrated artwork.
There have always been competing theories about who the portrait depicts, with the widely accepted one that the subject of the painting is the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, who commissioned the portrait to commemorate the birth of the couple’s second son in 1502 and which Da Vinci painted sometimes between that year and 1517. Lisa Gherardini, or Lisa del Giocondo, from whose family name derives the Italian name for the painting “La Gioconda.”
Other theories suggest the painting’s inspiration ranging from Princess Isabella of Naples, through Leonardo’s mother to his male assistant and possible lover known as Salaí.
The French scientist Pascal Cotte, who reported that have spent 10 years in analysing the painting using the technology of reflective light, claims that have discovered hidden paintings beneath the surface of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece – one of which is likely to be the real portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. And in addition to a second seated figure, Cotte’s analysis uncovered the shadow outline of yet another figure with a larger head and nose, bigger hands but smaller lips and a Madonna-style image with an etched pearl headdress.
Most art critics are sceptical on the found of the Mona Lisa underpainting, as it is perfectly common for an artist to overprint an image as it is for a client who has commissioned that artist to ask for changes. Yet, the underpaintings are reported very different from the Mona Lisa we all know and most of all none having the emblematic smile which has enchanted the world for the last 500 years.
As some art critics and general audience agree, the depicted woman is not particularly beautiful and the painting itself is not special in terms of composition and colour, but it is the smile that grabs us all.
And it was all about the smile when the term Mona Lisa entered the English vocabulary in the 19th century to refer to a woman having an enigmatic smile or expression.
But when comes to the masterpiece of art, literally critics popularised it before the art critics did. With the first written reference coming from 1841, from The Poetical Works of the Irish Thomas Moore: “Some Mona Lisa, on whose eyes A painter for whole years might gaze.”
In 1896, the English critic Walter Pater described the smile of the Gioconda as: “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it.”
1911 saw the Mona Lisa been stolen from the Louvre by a museum’s employee who walked out with the most famous painting hidden under his coat; but, hopefully, 2016 would not see the inspiring mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile been stolen.
