Book Review: Mona Lisa - A Life Discovered

Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered

by Dianne Hales

Simon & Schuster, 2014The saddest fact of the modern art world is also its most open scandal: it's not really possible anymore for an ordinary person to walk into the Louvre and actually see Leonardo da Vinci's signature masterpiece the Mona Lisa. This is true even though seeing the Mona Lisa is the sole goal of most of the ten million people who visit the Louvre every year – in fact, it's true because of those people (not for the first time in such contexts, Noel Coward's sublime song “Why Do the Wrong People Travel” comes to mind). All day every day there are ten solid ranks of gawkers taking blurry cellphone photos of their own reflections in the plate-thick protective case around the painting, the front ranks being mercilessly jostled, the back ranks getting jiggly shots of the tonsured bald spots of half a dozen junketing Michiganders in front of them. And at the heart of it all, the world's most famous painting looks almost embarrassed; there's more than enough gentle irony in La Gioconda's legendary half-smirk to encompass the fact that those ten million people are first subjecting themselves to a crappy experience and then calling it sublime.That famous painting is the subject of Dianne Hales's new book Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, and as the subtitle suggests, she's interested in more than the painting itself – she spends some time retailing the latest historical thinking about the identity of Leonardo's iconic sitter. Many theories of that identity have been put forward over the centuries, ranging from the, shall we say, fanciful (including my personal favorite, that the thing is a self-portrait) to the very likely, which mark the sitter down as una donna vera, a real woman, one Lisa Gherardini, the wife of prosperous Florentine merchant Francesco del Gioncondo. Hales tells as much of Lisa Giocondo's life story as can be reliably known, but this would be a poor excuse for a Mona Lisa book if it stopped there; the narrative expands liberally to include swaths of Florentine history and culture (“If Florence reared its sons to be as fierce and fearless as its mascot lions,” Hales tells us, “its daughters were groomed to be as elegant as its other state symbol – the lily, the epitome of the attributes that the city most valued in a woman: grace, purity, and beauty”) and rises to a very spirited pitch when descibing the maestro himself:

Nothing about this artist and architect, musician and mathematician, scientist and sculptor, engineer and inventor, anatomist and author, geologist and botanist, was ever ordinary. The consummate Renaissance man sketched, designed, painted, and sculpted like no one else. He looked like no one else, with carefully curled locks in his youth and a prophet's chest-long beard in age. He wrote like no one else, in his inimitable “mirror script” that filled thousands of pages. He rode like a champion, so strong that a biographer claimed he could bend a horseshoe with his hands.

Hales intersperses the historical portions of her book with frequent personal asides. For every two parts art history in these pages, there's one part Mona & Me, which always runs the risk of making the 'me' look slightly ridiculous, especially if it's done – as Hales often does – in tandem with some of her more free-wheeling reconstructions of Lisa Gherardini's life and times:

As I stroll through Florence's historic centro, I imagine young Lisa dwarfed by its rusticated walls and mammoth palazzo doors, high and wide enough for horse and carriage. Like other Florentines, she would have learned to tell time by church bells – so many and so loud that the town enforced a strict schedule for their ringing. As she ventured into the jostling in the crowds, Lisa might have wrinkled her nose at the urban scents of horse dung, mixed with straw, seldom-washed bodies, and stale blood from butchers' shops.

That reconstruction of Lisa Gherardini's life is of course only the beginning of the story of the Mona Lisa, and Hales follows that story long after painter and subject are dead, follows it through the centuries of private and public ownership until it found its current home in the Louvre behind protective barriers and guards. And the story famously remains dramatic even after it should have become as static as the afterlife of any other great work of art – specifically the stunning theft of the Mona Lisa on August 22, 1911. “When the Louvre reopened on August 29, grieving Parisians lined up to view the blank space, which Le Figaro described as 'an enormous, horrific, gaping void,'” Hales writes. “Visitors left flowers and wept.”The standard narrative of events has it that the painting was recovered in the dingy little apartment of one of the hapless thieves in November of 1913 and has stood ever since under tripled and quadrupled safeguards, leaving only very rarely (as in its much-publicized 1962 visit to John F. Kennedy's White House) and drawing its millions of visitors every year. As for the outlandish possibility that the Gioconda on display for all those visitors might be at a meticulous fake crafted during the two years of the painting's disappearance? Pfah! Only conspiracy-theorists would go down that particular rabbit hole.