Rochelle
Gurstein is the author of The Repeal of Reticence. This
article is reprinted with the permission of
The
New Republic.
__________________________
One of the
most extraordinary but least remarked upon features of painting
and sculptures is their persistence as actual, physical objects
from other times and places. When we come face-to-face with
Mona Lisa in the Louvre today, we are in the presence
of a portrait of a flesh-and-blood woman named Lisa Gheridini
(Monna being a contraction for mia donna, or "my lady"),
the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant named Francesco del
Giocondo (which is why the Italians have always called the painting
La Gioconda), painted in oil on wood between 1503 and 1507 by
Leonardo da Vinci, one of the three greatest masters of the
Renaissance. We rarely pause to reflect on how miraculous it
is that this object, this fragment of a world that disappeared
hundreds of years ago, continues to exist in present-day Paris.
Where other once-celebrated works of art also linger on as physical
entities into our own time - museums are brimming over with
statues and paintings of Venuses and Apollos, Madonnas and Christs,
by masters of ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque art - most of
them no longer speak to us, or we no longer know or care enough
about them to hear what they might still say. So even though
they occupy the same physical space as we do, they are hopelessly
stranded in their own time and place; the gap that has opened
up between their world and ours can no longer be bridged.
But not the Mona Lisa.
In starkest contrast to the fate of most art, it has transcended
such spatial and temporal limitations. This transcendence can
be measured quantitatively: the picture draws an astounding
5.5 million visitors to the Louvre each year. Such is its fame
that when visitors enter the gallery that is its home (and home,
too, to beautiful paintings by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto),
they find their path blocked by a crowd of fellow tourists who
angle with one another for the best viewing spot. The art lover
who longs to fall under the spell cast by the Mona Lisa's
legendary smile is inevitably pained to find the picture encased
in a bulletproof glass box, the glare of which makes viewing
an ordeal. He or she is surprised, even disappointed, by the
small scale of Leonardo's masterpiece, which measures a scant
twenty inches high and fourteen inches wide. As for the tourists
who rarely set foot in a museum but know that the Mona Lisa
is the most famous painting in the world and have been constantly
bombarded by reproductions of it in postcards, advertisements,
posters, T-shirts, and knickknacks, what do they see? Their
immediate reaction is fairly uniform: they take out their cameras
and start shooting. (Never mind that flash photography is expressly
forbidden by the Louvre. No guard dares enforce the rule.)
From the moment that
the Mona Lisa was first seen by Leonardo's contemporaries,
it has been an object of admiration and fascination. The most
important early commentator on the picture was Giorgio Vasari,
whose chapter on Leonardo in his celebrated Lives of the Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects (1568) established a tradition of
viewing the Mona Lisa. In one particular memorable paragraph,
Vasari praised above all else Leonardo's "divine"
skill, his unsurpassed ability to "imitate nature,"
which was held during the Renaissance to be the highest office
of art. Vasari, himself a painter, was enraptured by every aspect
of Leonardo's depiction of the beautiful face, describing in
lavish detail the eyes, the lashes, the brows, the skin, the
nose, the lips, the cheeks, and the "pit of the throat,"
which appears to "natural" that the viewer "cannot
but believe that he sees the beating of the pulses." Such
is the portrait's "perfection" that it makes even
"the boldest master tremble and astonishes all who behold
it, however well accustomed to the marvels of art." And
the smile, which Vasari described as "so sweet that while
looking at it one thinks it rather divine than human?"
He furnished a rather prosaic explanation: concerned that the
lady might become bored during long sittings, Leonardo hired
singers, musicians, and jesters to entertain her.
La Gioconda, as
the painting was known well into the nineteenth century (La
Jaconde in French), did not achieve fame only because Vasari,
the first and most influential art historian, was dazzled by
its extraordinary likeness to nature and wrote a beautiful (if
now historically questionable) paean to it. Almost immediately,
the distinctive pose of crossed hands and turning body became
an exemplar of portraiture. Indeed, it was imitated so often
by Leonardo's contemporaries that it came to be known as the
Gioconda pose, and among the most famous artists to employ it
was Raphael. His Portrait of Maddalena Doni (1505), Lady
with a Unicorn (1506), and La Muta (1507) all assume
the easy naturalness of La Gioconda and were painted
just after he had visited Florence and seen the work of Leonardo.
But it was not only the innovative composition that was widely
admired. Painters from all over Europe paid tribute to the perfection
of Leonardo's art by making copies and derivations to the portrait
itself. We know of 60 extant works painted before the eighteenth
century.
For close to one hundred
years after Vasari, however, the painting that astonished Leonardo's
contemporaries and set a new style in portraiture was seldom
mentioned by writers, and few engravings were in circulation.
This temporary neglect was most likely due to its location at
Fontainebleau, in the private and largely inaccessible collection
of Francois I, Leonardo's last patron, who had acquired the
painting sometime during the 1530s. It came back into public
attention in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a catalogue
of the works at Fontainebleau described the Mona Lisa
as "first in esteem, a marvel of painting." Throughout
the rest of the century, whenever the painting was discussed,
it continued to be lauded, following Vasari, for its startling
fidelity to nature. But during the eighteenth century its fortunes
again began to suffer as Louis XV dispersed the royal collection
to obscure places. The Mona Lisa was relegated to the
dark offices of the director des Batiments (the Keeper of the
Royal Buildings).
The painting was saved
from further obscurity only as a consequence of the French Revolution,
when it was moved to the newly formed Louvre Museum in 1797.
For a few years Napoleon claimed the Mona Lisa and hung
it in his bedroom in the Tuileries, but in 1804 the Louvre reclaimed
it and installed it in the Grande Galerie. Yet even in its new
public location Leonardo's portrait was largely overlooked or
mentioned only in passing. During the first half of the nineteenth
century, the works for which Leonardo was admired, even worshiped,
were The Last Supper, which was already in a state of
irreparable deterioration, and The Battle of Arghierei and the
equestrian statue executed for Lodovico Sforza, both of which
no longer existed.
How, then, did the Mona
Lisa come to occupy its unparalleled place in the pantheon
of Western art? The discovery of Leonardo the scientific genius,
coupled with the nascent myth of Leonardo the artistic genius
whose perfectionism prevented him from bringing but a few works
to completion, was the first crucial step in the artist's deification.
Early in the century, Goethe set the tone when he spoke rhapsodically
of Leonardo's "universal genius." But it remained
for literary men of the next generation, who were mesmerized
by a new Romantic image of women as femmes fatales, enticing
but dangerous, to apotheosize the Mona Lisa. Although
many writers associated with the art-for-art's sake movement
in France and England paid enthusiastic tribute to the painting,
Theophile Gautier and Walter Pater are now best known for launching
it on its modern path to what is now inelegantly called "iconicity."
They had left the aesthetic
universe of Vasari far behind. Appreciation for an artist's
gift for imitating nature, no matter how extraordinary, seemed
a rather paltry pleasure in the eyes of these highly refined
aesthetes, whose single aim in life was, in Pater's famous words,
"to burn always with (the) hard, gem-like flame, to maintain
(the) ecstasy" that came from impassioned engagement with
works of art. Such an elevated, if extravagant, ideal of art
demanded a new kind of criticism that would match, and even
surpass, the intensity of the impressions that a painting evoked
in the sensitive viewer, and the aesthetic critic responded
with ardent prose poems of his own. This kind of criticism amounted
to a kind of worship, an abdication of reason for feeling, a
surrender to the object of a cult; and it is no wonder that
proper Victorians thought such a view of art and criticism immoral
and irreligious. They were appalled by what they perceived as
its decadence.
But a younger generation
was inflamed with the desire to see whether they could experience
the kind of rapture described by Gautier and Pater before paintings
such as the Mona Lisa. And what did they see? Gautier
wrote of the "strange, almost magic charm which the portrait
of Mona Lisa has for even the least enthusiastic natures."
What was most "irresistible and intoxicating" was
the expression,
Wide, deep, velvety,
full of promises . . . the sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned
up at the corners in a violet penumbra, mocks the viewer with
such sweetness, grace and superiority that we feel timid, like
schoolboys in the presence of a duchess. So the head, with its
violet shadows, half-perceived as through a black gauze, makes
you dream for hours, and pursues you in memory like the motif
of a symphony . . . Repressed desire and desperate hopes struggle
painfully through a luminous shadow. And you discover that our
melancholy springs from the fact that the Joconde received,
three centuries ago, the confession of your love with the same
mocking smile that she still wears today.
As Roy McMullen observed
in his exhaustive study Mona Lisa in 1975, "This
is the world of Poe's tales, of Baudelaire's substitution of
one sensation for another, and of Wagnerians listening with
their heads in their hands."
The world of luxurious
aestheticism has long become alien to today's dulled sensibility,
just as the image of the Mona Lisa as mocking seductress
had become difficult to see for modern eyes, long accustomed
to graphic photographs and X-rated movies. (Though the ideal
of a solemn, mindless enthrallment in the presence of art survives,
in a degraded way, in today's rock audiences). But for viewers
of the second half of the nineteenth century, the lady really
was "irresistible and intoxicating," and writer after
writer tried to capture the exact nature of her spell. The most
influential attempt, at least in English, was Pater's, which
appeared in a chapter on Leonardo in his path-breaking book
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873).
In an incantatory paragraph,
Pater portrayed the Mona Lisa in language that eclipsed
Gautier's rhapsody and would relegate Vasari to history. Indeed,
this single passage so completely formed the imagination and
the vision of art lovers who read it that no one - from Oscar
Wilde to Bernard Berenson to Kenneth Clark - could speak of
the Mona Lisa without uttering in the same breath that
he, like everyone else of his generation, had committed Pater's
luminous words to memory. Pater was captivated by the "unfathomable
smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it;"
but as a classicist he imbued the image of the femme fatale
with a timeless aura, seeing in the portrait a "presence
. . . expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men
had come to desire." For Pater and for all those who knew
his words by heart, "strange thoughts and fantastic reveries
and exquisite passions" were "deposited cell by cell"
upon the beautiful flesh of Mona Lisa's face. The portrait
expressed nothing less than the incarnation of eternal womanhood:
All the thoughts and
experience of the world have etched and molded there, in that
which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward
form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism
of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative
loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.
Just as Pater's style
was a harbinger of modernity, so, too, was his vision of the
Mona Lisa, and he ended his fantastic reveries with the
statement that "Lady Lisa" was "the symbol of
the modern idea." Whereas a number of his contemporaries
took Pater to task for his overly subjective writing, accusing
him of using Leonardo's masterpiece as a mirror for his own
feverish imaginings, others, most famously Wilde in The Critic
as Artist" (1890), judged the passage as "criticism
of the highest kind" on the grounds that "it treats
the work of art simply as a starting point for a new creation."
While this sort of outrageous aestheticism is to be expected
from such a self-conscious provocateur as Wilde, he was on to
something far more serious when he continued: "It is the
beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings,
and makes it marvelous for us, and sets it in some new relation
to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives,
and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having
prayed for, we fear that we may receive."
Bringing the Mona
Lisa back to life by these highly aestheticized and erudite
means had an ironic outcome: Pater's rhapsodic vision, endlessly
repeated word for word in art criticism, novels, and poetry
of the day, quickly degenerated into a cliché and an
object of satire, and within a few decades it seemed thoroughly
dated. So it is no surprise that some sensitive souls began
to chafe under what they felt was Pater's increasingly tyrannical
hold on their imaginations. One response was Marcel Duchamp's
infamous drawing of a moustache and a goatee on a postcard of
the Mona Lisa with the obscene title (when read aloud
in French) L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), which made explicit the aesthete's
sublimated erotic longings. But for those who self-consciously
followed in Pater's way, Duchamp's iconoclasm was out of the
question. The connoisseur's inwardness and exquisite sensitivity
would never allow for such vulgarity. If the Mona Lisa were
to be repudiated, it would have to be on aesthetic grounds.
In Bernard Berenson's
reappraisal of Leonardo in 1916, we have a firsthand account
of the connoisseur's reckoning with Pater's Mona Lisa.
The essay begins with what had by then become a set piece, in
which Berenson recounts, how, as "a youthful aspirant for
artificial paradises," he spent "the hours of long
summer days trying to match what I really was seeing and feeling
with the famous passage of Walter Pater, that like so many of
my contemporaries, I had learned by heart." It is significant
that he describes Pater's influence in terms of the "powers
of a shaman" - "an affair of mesmerism, hypnoticism,
and suggestion" - for it sets the stage for his eventual
disenchantment that came with sustained looking at the picture:
"What I really saw in the figure of Mona Lisa was
the estranging image of a woman beyond the reach of my sympathies
or the ken of my interests, distastefully unlike the women,
I had hitherto known or dreamt of, a foreigner with a look I
could not fathom, watchful, sly, secure, with a smile of anticipated
satisfaction and a pervading air of hostile superiority."
Berenson confessed that
at first he tried to quell his doubts by forcing himself to
appreciate the many excellent formal qualities of the painting.
But in the end the very layering up of thoughts and feelings,
of mythological and symbolic associations introduced by Pater
- what Berenson called the "over-meanings" - led him
to depreciate the Mona Lisa. The many beautiful intimations
that for Wilde had made the portrait breathe again had a stifling
effect upon Berenson, who felt overwhelmed and distracted by
them. All the over-civilized hyperbole made the sought-after
experience of "ecstasy" - that "immediate, instantaneous,
and unearned act of grace" which he held to be the essence
of "the aesthetic moment" -impossible for Berenson.
He had made his name as a connoisseur of Italian "primitives,"
and had little sympathy with Leonardo, whose paintings appeared
excessively intellectual and mechanical to him.
What is more, Berenson
had come to appreciate art from other traditions, with unexpected
consequences: his aesthetic horizon was enormously expanded
at the same time that the enigmatic and bewitching qualities
of the Mona Lisa began to seem less and less unique.
So when Berenson gazed at Leonardo's masterpiece, he saw "nothing
in her expression that is not far more satisfactorily rendered
in Buddhist art," just as he could find "nothing in
the landscape that is not even more evocative and more magical
in Ma Uyan, in Li-Long-Men, in Hsai Kwei." A gap now opened
up between the new-style connoisseurs and the nineteenth-century
aesthetes that was almost as wide as the one that had separated
Pater's world from Vasari's world.
Whereas Pater's sensibility
was literary and associative in the extreme, Berenson's sensibility
was more visually acute and exacting, for he was entranced with
the sheer experience of looking. Berenson knew that "the
aesthetic moment' was the fruit of a "long and severe training,"
but he thought it was "unaware of what preceded it"
and was "completely isolated, not to be modified and not
to be qualified." (Today, following Kant, we call this
autonomous aesthetic experience.) Yet Berenson's sensibility,
because it disdained flights of imagination and reverie, did
not exercise the same powerful hold over art lovers as Pater's,
and it remained confined, at least initially, to a coterie of
connoisseurs and art historians. Still, that Berenson could,
as he put it, "expose and bring down" what had come
to be known as "the greatest achievement of artistic genius"
reveals the fragile nature of artistic fame, and especially
of fame wrought from the hypnotic effusions of an influential
writer. The status of any work of art, it turns out, is secure
only to the extent that it continues to speak directly to later
viewers.
The Mona Lisa
has somehow managed to do this. Even Freud was intrigued by
the famous smile, and tried to interpret it in his Leonardo
da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality (1910), which added
yet another associative dimensions, this time having to do with
the unconscious longings of the artist: the Mona Lisa's
smile was actually the mysterious smile possessed by Leonardo's
own mother. Throughout the twentieth century, the portrait continued
to fascinate art historians, writers, poets, artists, and spectators.
Indeed, by 1950 the Mona Lisa had been reproduced so often and
had acquired so many interpretive layers that E.H.Gombrich worried
aloud in The Story of Art whether anyone could still
see it with "fresh eyes." Gombrich advised his readers
"to forget what we know or believe we know about the picture
and look at it as if we were the first people to ever set eyes
on it."
And if this were possible,
what would we see? Gombrich presented the painting through Vasari's
eyes (without ever naming him): "What strikes us first
is the amazing degree to which Lisa looks alive." But when
it came to the smile, it was still Pater's vision that reverberated:
"Sometimes she seems to mock us, and then again we seem
to catch something like sadness in her smile." Except for
a few such remarks, however, Gombrich had no interest in evoking
lyrical associations. His account was concerned with formal
analysis and Leonardo's place in art history, the knowledge
of which would overcome the distance that separated works of
the Italian Renaissance from the uninformed modern viewer. But
even Gombrich could not resist closing with a tribute to the
portrait's aesthetic power: Leonardo "knew the spell which
would infuse life into the colors spread by his magic brush."
Fifty years later, in
a world flooded with ever more reproductions of the Mona
Lisa but sorely lacking in aesthetic sensibility - whether
of the Vasari, Pater, or Berenson kind - one wonders what the
tourists streaming into the Louvre need to forget in order to
see the painting with "fresh eyes." Perhaps something
about the smile or about the artist's repressed longings; but
if Donald Sassoon is right, they come to the painting not with
any particular aesthetic aspirations or expectations but rather
to gawk at a "celebrity" whose status is based exclusively
on the fact of its being well-known. After all, this is the
painting that traveled to the National Gallery in Washington
and then to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1963 and
was mobbed by more than 1.6 million people in two months, and
made another triumphal tour in 1974, first to the Tokyo National
Museum and then to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and was mobbed
again by an astounding two million more people. (In Tokyo, it
was estimated that each viewer got about ten seconds before
the painting).
Thus Sassoon is not exaggerating
when he describes the scene at the Louvre - crowds of fans,
flashing camera lights - as the kind of "commotion"
typically associated with "a renowned personality from
the world of cinema, television, fashion, or music, or a member
of a major royal household." It is the aim of his book
to understand this phenomenon. And the beginnings of this distinctly
modern way of seeing a work of art as a celebrity can be traced
back to 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the
Louvre. Sassoon finds this event so significant that he devotes
an entire chapter to it.
While the theft is largely
forgotten today, it generated enormous publicity at the time,
since mass-circulation newspapers, which were also a new phenomenon
of the early twentieth century, were always hungry for sensational
events and printed story after story about it. People who ordinarily
cared little for art were inundated both with countless images
of the painting and tales of its many legends, the enigmatic
smile always occupying center state. The publicity so excited
curiosity that when the Louvre re-opened after a week-long investigation,
thousands of people - many of whom had never before set foot
in a museum - stood on line to view the vacant space previously
filled by the Mona Lisa. For the first time in its career,
the painting left the rarefied air of royal collections, fine-art
engravings, and the refined imagination of aesthetes and entered
the world of entertainment: commemorative postcards, photographs,
cartoons, ballads, waltzes, silent films, music halls, and theaters
all took up, often with a good deal of humor, the Mona Lisa's
disappearance.
The painting's fame was
further enhanced two years later, when Leonardo Vicenza, a decorator-painter
and self avowed Italian patriot, attempted to sell it to a Florentine
antique dealer, leading to his arrest and the painting's recovery.
Vincenza confessed that he had walked out of the Louvre unnoticed
with the small portrait hidden under his workman's smock because
he had briefly worked at the museum. For a fleeting moment,
there was the question of whether the Italians would surrender
their patrimony to the French. As compensation to the Italian
people for their impending loss, the painting was exhibited
in Florence, in Rome,, and then, for two days, in Milan, where
an estimated sixty thousand Italians desperately vied for a
final glimpse of their painting. Upon its triumphal return to
Paris, it was mobbed. And so the Mona Lisa once again
began appearing in popular songs, postcards, cartoons, and even
greeting cards, and the mass-circulation press excited curiosity
with endlessly detailed reports of all the events, the painting's
now-famous image prominently displayed on front pages everywhere.
For Sassoon, the "kidnapping,"
as he calls it, and the innumerable ways in which the Mona
Lisa has subsequently been exploited by popular novels,
poems, children's books, songs, satirical postcards, avant-garde
art, movies, television, and most significantly advertising
and merchandising, provide the key to understanding its celebrity
status. His aim is to "examine how a product of 'high culture'
became an object of popular consumption:" and this project
first occurred to him, as he explains in the preface, when he
was "researching the history of cultural markets."
That Sassoon came to this complicated and vexing episode in
the history of taste and sensibility by chance, and that he
thinks of it primarily in socio-economic terms, is what distinguishes
his study from the many others that have come before it. As
a social historian whose earlier books include One Hundred
Years of Socialism, he believes that such an undertaking
does not require "special insights into the Meaning of
Art or the Soul of Man" or, for that matter, "a particular
artistic sensibility."
Sassoon might mock such
"special insights" and "artistic sensibility,"
but without them he is lost. When he reviews the well-known
historical sources of the painting's fame - its aesthetic innovations
and provenance, along with the myth of Leonardo the genius and
the cult of the Mona Lisa as femme fatale - his account neither
revises nor deepens the thoughtful accounts already provided
by George Boas' The Mona Lisa in the History of Taste
(1940), Roy McMullen's Mona Lisa: The Picture and the Myth
(1975), or A Richard Turner's Inventing Leonardo (1993),
to name only a few. Instead, Sassoon's accumulation of pointless
details and digressions turns what was a historically sound
and intellectually compelling narrative into a muddle. And without
a deep grounding in aesthetics or intellectual history, his
account fares no better when trying to explain the portrait's
shifting fortunes. Sassoon is thus reduced to saying of the
Mona Lisa's transfiguration into a femme fatale: "Threatening
women are so much more interesting than tranquil housewives,"
or of Gautier's influence: "He was in the right place at
the right time," or of Pater's: "This Oxford aesthete,
in love with the past, was at one with the Zeitgeist,"
or referring to Berenson's devaluation of Leonardo not in aesthetic
terms as a harbinger of modern, formalist connoisseurship and
art history, but instead as one response to the painting's theft
from the Louvre.
When it comes to what
is original in Sassoon's account - how the painting has become
a "global icon" - his method of endlessly amassing
information, the only criterion being some connection to the
Mona Lisa, no matter how insignificant, tangential, or
tenuous, sheds very little light on this pernicious and destructive
strain in modern life. If we are to understand the means and
the consequences of the merciless commodification of art, we
will need to interpretation and criticism, taste and judgment.
Instead Sassoon provides boring plot summaries of novels, short
stories, movies, and plays, as well as countless lists of merchandise,
of advertisements, of every last thing that bears the name or
image of the Mona Lisa. Sassoon demonstrates in tedious
detail that we live in a world where what avant-garde artists
once dared to do as an act of iconoclasm - use the Mona Lisa
as an object like any other - is now routinely accomplished
by advertising and merchandising. But he is silent about the
consequences: not only is there something callous and even cruel,
aesthetically and morally, about using exquisite objects meant
for higher purposes as marketing ploys, there is also something
world-destroying in it, for neither the work of art nor aesthetic
feeling can survive such brash treatment unscathed.
And Sassoon himself contributes
to the painting's further trivialization by repeatedly calling
it an "icon of popular culture," as if there were
no difference betweens the "divine" Leonardo's marvel
of art and real icons of popular culture such as Mickey Mouse.
His end product is a collection of all manner of Mona Lisa
memorabilia: Vasari and Pater and Duchamp and Warhol are here,
but so are Nat King Cole, a letter from a sixteen year old girl
to the Louvre, Erico Baj's The Revenge of Mona Lisa,
computer mouse pads, and "Mona Lisa-Cu375" (an intra-uterine
device). All too often the book has the suffocating feel of
a matron's living room stuffed to the gunwales with her collection
of knickknacks based on her love of bumblebees or frogs - that
is, when it does not simply read like a print-out from a computer
search under "Mona Lisa." (Sassoon informs
us that as of October 2000, there were 93,800 Web pages on "Mona
Lisa" and another 2,110 on "Jaconde,"
What sort of learning is this?) And after 275 pages of undigested
facts culled from a twenty-page bibliography, Sassoon delivers
the stunning historical news that "nothing has a single
cause, nothing is static." That is his last word on the
puzzle of the Mona Lisa's unparalleled fame.
The Mona Lisa
has survived periods of neglect. Yet over and over again particular
aesthetic qualities have captivated art lovers who have dreamed
of being transported by the painting of a woman who smiles.
In those times when taste and sensibility (and, later, imagination)
have been cultivated and valued, the extraordinary beauty of
the Mona Lisa has closed the temporal and spatial gap that might
otherwise have alienated later viewers from it. Today, when
the museum goers are as accustomed to looking at flat, lifeless,
mediated images of art on television and computer screens as
they are to looking at animal corpses submerged in formaldehyde
by Damien Hirst, the anticipation - let alone the experience
- of the manifold pleasures of beauty has receded into the distance.
In this changed circumstances, it is celebrity and commercialism
that keep the Mona Lisa alive, but only by running saline
solution rather than blood through her veins. The Mona Lisa
may be the most popular painting in the world today, but it
remains to be seen whether it can survive such popularity, or
whether, like other mass-marketed celebrities of the twentieth
century, the portrait that stunned generations of art lovers
will eventually lose its place to the next new thing.
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