The Mona Lisa: Painting beyond Portraiture
Martin Kemp
The Mona Lisa is an extraordinary painting; so much so that the small portrait of a bourgeois Florentine woman has been the subject of many myths and conspiracy theories. But Leonardo da Vinci expert Martin Kemp is keen to emphasise the very ordinary circumstances of the portrait’s commission and the sitter’s life.
Over the course of his career, Kemp has debunked many of the myths the iconic painting has given rise to and has helped to identify the people instrumental to its creation. But he also argues that the painting became more than ‘just a small portrait’ for Leonardo: the artist poured all he knew about science and the poetry of painting into the commission. How did this work change the way artists painted portraits for centuries afterwards?
The legends, myths and projections into the Mona Lisa are both a blessing and a curse. They’re a blessing because it means that people engage with this picture in very diverse ways. It’s also a curse in that you get people who are insistent on finding something extraordinary in the Mona Lisa.
And one of the jobs I’ve been trying to do in my research is to say: this is a real picture, made by real people, in a real place and a real time.
We now know a lot about Mona Lisa and its circumstances, some documents known and some new. We know definitively that the picture was underway in 1503. Leonardo is back in Florence from Milan where he’d spent 18-19 years. He is re-establishing himself, and along the way he also undertakes this small portrait of Francesco del Giocondo’s wife: Lisa del Giocondo.
Now Lisa comes from the Garradini family, these are old gentry, they had a good name, but really had no money. Francesco del Giocondo, who she marries at the age of fifteen, is quite different. He’s new money. One of the puzzling things about Mona Lisa is that he got involved with it at all. Why on earth did he take on this portrait of a bourgeois woman, even her husband wasn’t someone of great power. Leonardo’s young father is a rising lawyer in Florence, and he acted for Francesco del Giocondo.
You can imagine Leonardo’s father meeting Francesco, Lisa’s husband, Francesco, and just saying ‘Well, come on, it’s only a small picture, he could do it quite quickly’, and, anyway, for some reason he took it on. And Leonardo got engaged with this in a way that neither he nor anybody else could imagine.
It’s very nice to get this very closely textured sense of these people who are meeting each other, know each other, have relationships. These are ordinary people, they’re not legends, they’re not myths: they are like you and me.
In the Renaissance the words ‘science’ and ‘art’ meant different things, but here was a sense that painting is a craft, and Leonardo and some of his predecessors were saying it’s about the imitation of nature, we have to understand the rules of nature, we have to understand anatomy and optics and so on. This is a ‘scienza’, it’s a science. So, there’s this wonderful lateral thinking. And he couldn’t settle on one thing without thinking of something else.
Now if he was working on a painting and thinking about how hair falls and curls, he suddenly thinks about water and turbulence. He’s the greatest thinker by analogy, I think, that’s ever lived. Mona Lisa is a hymn to what I’ve called ‘the optics of uncertainty’. There’s no edges. We think we see an edge, we look at the mouth, we look at the eyes, we even look at the side of the face, there’s no definite edges in that. He employs the device called sfumato.
Sfumato becomes a signature style. The idea is that it’s indefinite, it’s smoky, it’s blurred. And it’s a way of drawing a spectator in, of teasing you, of making you think you’re seeing more than you are. It’s all ambiguous, and he says at one point: ‘The eye never knows the edge of any body’. So, you can never be absolutely certain where an edge is. You think of Mona Lisa in that context, the we strive to see it as being definite – the definite smile, definite look in the eyes, but Leonardo’s teasing us and it’s psychological and optical at the same time.
Scientific analysis shows that underneath the present painting there is a more orthodox portrait. And over the years it underwent this great evolution, and it became something into which he poured an enormous amount, for some reason he found it was a wonderful vehicle for what he knew about painting. It makes the transition from being a functional image to being a great declaration, in a way, almost a manifesto of what Leonardo thought painting could do.
Leonardo regarded painting as an expression of science, but he also looked at and loved the idea of the ‘fantasia’ of poetry. He has Dante and Petrarch in his library, and the poets from the Milanese court write about his pictures, so there’s a very strong interplay. The ‘beloved lady’ in the poems in always out of reach. She’s idealised to the point where she’s not available for our rather ragged desires. She becomes literally ‘on a pedestal’. And Leonardo is deeply affected by that. And the Mona Lisa is really the first portrait that rivals poetry in that respect.
The standard Renaissance portraits are women in profile, and if they do look they don’t smile, whereas Leonardo’s ‘beloved lady’ Lisa looks at us and smiles. That’s very, very naughty, very daring, but it’s a great tease; an ideal vision of the Beloved Lady as in the Renaissance poetry.
If you think of the great succession of portraitists, Velasquez, Rembrandt and so on, that aspiration to reveal somebody’s soul, that ambition, really was established by Leonardo. Mona Lisa reworked what we thought portraiture was about. The portrait continues to communicate, and still has that enormous human charge. And art at the end of the day is about human beings communicating their imaginative interchange with their predecessors, and nobody does that more compellingly than Leonardo. So, he’s still talking to us today.
Archive
AP Archive
Alamy Stock Photo
Bridgeman Images
DACS
Footage Farm
Gemäldegalerie
Getty
Hermitage Museum
Library of Congress
Louvre Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The National Gallery, London
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pond5
Queriniana Civic Library of Brescia
The Royal Collection
SIPA Press
Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose
Shutterstock
Uffizi Gallery
Music
Original composition
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Full list of images shown:
L.H.O.O.Q.
Marcel Duchamp, 1919
© Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.
Bridgeman Images
The Mona Lisa (La Gioconda)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-1505
Louvre Museum
Coloured Woodcut view of Florence
Plate from p. LXXXVII, The Nuremberg Chronicle, Anton Korberger, 1493
Reproduction: Bas van Hout, 2017
Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci
Francesci Melzi, after 1510
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
Perspectival study for The Adoration of the Magi
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1481
Uffizi Gallery
The superficial anatomy of the shoulder and neck
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1510-1511
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
The bones of the foot, and the muscles of the neck
Leonardo da Vinci, 1510-1512
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
Cats, lions, and a dragon
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1513-1518
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
Head of Leda
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1504-1506
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
Studies of flowing water, with notes
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1510-13
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
Cartoon for The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1499-1500
The National Gallery
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Saint John the Baptist
Leonardo da Vinci, 1513-1516
Louvre Museum
© Musée du Louvre
The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right
Leonardo da Vinci, 1510-1513
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1951
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
La Colombina
Francesco Melzi or Leonardo da Vinci, c.1500-1520
Hermitage Museum
Image based on LAM analysis of Mona Lisa
© Pascal Cotte, 2015
SIPA Archive
Manuscript page with the beginning of Petrarch’s Canzone 323
Att. Antonio Grifo, c.1470
Queriniana Civic Library of Brescia
Portrait of Dante Alighieri
Attilio Roncaldier, 19th century
Bridgeman Images
Petrarch and Laura in a fresco in Arquà Petrarca
Unknown artist, 16th century
Digitized: Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose, 2007
(CC BY 2.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Portrait of a Woman
Filippo Lippi, c.1445
Gemäldegalerie
© Foto: Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Fotograf/in: Christoph Schmidt
(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
The Lady with a Fan
Diego Velázquez, c.1630-1650
Saskia van Uylenburgh, the Wife of the Artist
Rembrandt van Rijn, c.1634-1640
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The Virgin and Child with St Anne
Leonardo da Vinci, 1500-1513
Louvre Museum
© Musée du Louvre
- ‘A closer look at the Mona Lisa’, The Louvre
- ‘Mona Lisa – Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo’, The Louvre (collections online)
- Sal Khan and Dr. Beth Harris, ‘Leonardo, Mona Lisa‘, Smarthistory, 9 December 2015
- ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, Art UK
- ‘Mona Lisa: Painting by Leonardo da Vinci’, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Giuseppe Pallanti and Martin Kemp, Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
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