Book Review: Mona Lisa Turns 500

NEW YORK, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- When Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" reaches 500 years of age next year, the Louvre in Paris will give the painting its own exhibition gallery, the only art work ever accorded such an honor by the museum.

That "Mona Lisa" is the world's most popular work of art is indisputable. An international poll taken a few years ago rated it No. 1 with the public by a vote of 85 percent, with Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" coming in a poor second with 3 percent. But it was not always so.

When da Vinci painted in 1503 a plain Florentine housewife and mother of three, Lisa del Giocondo's, wife of a well-to-do merchant, his contemporaries -- including Raphael -- considered it a masterpiece, but not superior to some of the master's other portraits of more beautiful women, particularly "La Belle Ferronniere," also in the Louvre.

It wasn't until French writers began to romanticize the picture 150 years ago that the Mona Lisa craze was born.

The transformation of the small oil on a poplar wood panel into an art icon of global proportions is the subject of a very readable and fascinating new book, "Becoming Mona Lisa," by English historian Donald Sassoon (Harcourt, 337 pages, $30). Sassoon writes that the idea of examining how a product of "high culture" became an object of popular consumption occurred to him while researching the history of cultural markets.

It was about that time that the cover of the New Yorker magazine carried a picture of Monica Lewinsky of White House infamy as the Mona Lisa, one of the many times Lisa del Giocondo's image has been used for social and political satire. The image also has been used to advertise cosmetics, false teeth, toothpaste, chocolate, condoms, champagne, coffee, cigars, olives, wigs, motorcycles and scores of other products.

The secret of Mona Lisa's popularity seems to be her half smile, almost always referred to by writers as "enigmatic." As Nat King Cole asked in the song he wrote about her, "Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa/ Or is this the way to hide a broken heart?"

Strangely enough, the smile was never a subject for analysis until French novelist Theophile Gautier made reference to it in an 1855 review of a play, "La Joconde," whose title referred to Mona Lisa's aka in the French vernacular based on her Italian nickname, "La Gioconda" (The Cheerful One).

"La Joconde!" Gautier wrote. "The name makes me think immediately of this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously in da Vinci's painting, and who seems to pose a yet unresolved riddle to the admiring centuries. ... She is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers ..."

These lovers were said by other writers of purple prose to have included da Vinci himself, a fable that inspired a verse play by the young Jules Verne. But there is overriding evidence that the artist was homosexually inclined, charged but not found guilty of sodomy when he was 24, and never linked romantically to a woman.

Another theory, with roots in the portrait's feeling of androgyny, claims that it is a self-portrait in drag.

As long ago as 1913, painter Maurice Vieuille claimed the lower half of Mona Lisa's face was that of a woman and the upper half a man. In 1986, Lilian Schwarz, a computer-art scientist working for Bell Laboratories claimed she had proved "conclusively" that Mona Lisa was the portrait of the young da Vinci. Sassoon repeats the claim without supporting it.

We do know that da Vinci was so fond of the portrait that he took it France with him when he went into the employ of King Francis I and that "Mona Lisa" became a part of the royal collection, adorning rooms of various palaces lived in by the Bourbons until it was transferred to the new museum at the Louvre in 1793, when the monarchy was abolished.

It has remained there since, inventoried as No. 799, except for four years when Napoleon borrowed it for his bedroom, and for another short span (1911-1913) when it was stolen by an Italian decorator who worked at the Louvre. After it was recovered under a hotel bed in Italy (the hotel instantly renamed itself La Gioconda), it was restored to the museum and placed in a closely guarded bullet-proof glass container, removed only for a trip to the Washington in 1963 and to Tokyo in 1974 for reasons of diplomacy.

Needless to say, the theft provided repeated front-page reportage and enhanced the painting's fame to the extent that some people visit the Louvre only to see "Mona Lisa," ignoring all the museum's other treasures. If you can't travel to Paris, the world is full of reproductions of the work in books, on postcards, as engravings, and on the stamps of 14 countries. The painting's French fan club collects Mona Lisa cartoons.

A few of these playful parodies on the Mona Lisa image are famous in their own right, notably Marcel Duchamp's 1919 photographic copy of the work with painted-on moustaches. Political cartoonists have mona-lised such personalities in the news as Joseph Stalin (that enigmatic smile?), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Tony Blair. Andy Warhol immortalized Mona Lisa in one of this multi-image silk screen paintings titled "Thirty Are Better Than One."

Mona Lisa's fame is based on reasons other than accumulated publicity, Sassoon points out. By reason of her three-quarter pose with the head facing the viewer directly, she occupies a commanding position, and her serene smile and intense glance places her in a position superior to the viewer. Though small in size, the picture is monumental and painted with a sense of texture and depth.

Unfortunately for future generations, this woman of mystery gazes out through veils of old varnish that are darkening with age and even now defy restorers.

"No curator -- so far -- has wanted to run the risk of winding up in history as the person who wiped the smile off the Mona Lisa's face," Sassoon comments.

Still unanswered is why Mona Lisa is smiling? Perhaps Giorgio Vasari, the art historian who wrote the first commentary on the painting in 1550, was factual in reporting that da Vinci hired musicians, clowns and other performers to entertain Lisa del Giocondo while he painted her. Perhaps she is smiling because she has stretched her Warholian 15 minutes of fame into 500 years. Perhaps she is smiling at us.