the open field

The Mystery Behind Mona Lisa’s Smile

The “Mona Lisa” at 500 years old is still considered the most famous painting in the world, but why?

Da Vinci and the Air of Ambiguity

The ambiguity of expression. 

All of Leonardo’s paintings have a mysterious air about them due in part to the ambiguity of the idealized men and women he represented.  His women are somewhat masculine, and his men somewhat feminine.  Nothing is quite what it seems, so his paintings have a dream like quality. The affect is so subtle that it draws the viewer in without making a conscious connection with what exactly one is seeing.

In the Mona Lisa this ambiguity of expression is the mystery of her sad smile.

da Vinci the Trickster

da Vinci would not, if you asked him, “What work do you do?” answered, “I am a painter.”  I think foremost da Vinci was an engineer, architect and natural scientist.  He was also a musician and painter and even invented a few musical instruments. We also know from his notebooks that he designed machines of war, tanks, and even flying machines.  He enjoyed being a trickster, scaring people with hyper realism of paintings of lizards, or painting tree branches woven like knotwork on a ceiling so complicated no one could find out how he had done it.  He was fascinated by mathematical forms and variations.

Forms Within Forms

I once spent six months trying to paint the head of an angel from “The Virgin of the Rocks.”  I could never get it right, as I discovered da Vinci was the Master of Distortion.  He would push the envelope just as far as he could without making his figures dis-proportionate.  After six months working on the angel I threw in the towel.  (or paint rag)  I walked across the room, closed my eyes and opened them again to try to see the painting in a new way.

“Hey, wait a minute.”  I went and got a compass and put the pin directly into the center of the pupil of the angel’s left eye.  Then I drew a perfect circle and found out, “aha!”  da Vinci had, not for the first time, created the figure within a perfect form.  The angel’s head was quite distorted; if you had a sitter and took a photo and traced the photo, da Vinci’s angel would not have fit within the contours of a traced photograph. 

Just as he tried to do with the “Vitruvian Man” as it is called, the form of a man with arms outstretched fitted into a circle that was fitted into a square, the navel at dead center, da Vinci had imposed a perfect form onto the head of the angel and the proportional relationships all related to this idealized format.  Human beings are not actually built like this, but da Vinci was looking for the classic proportions in nature that he sought so he could construct his paintings with mathematical forms, variations of forms, and forms within forms.

The overall composition of the “Mona Lisa” is that of a triangle, the most stable form in nature.  One could compare the “Mona Lisa” to Raphael’s “Portrait of Maddalena Doni” and see how Raphael’s composition seems to fall apart where the hands are crossing the bottom of the frame; the energy of the painting is leaking out of the bottom.   da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is solid, monumental, and very still.

The technique.  Sfumato.  Thinness of paint layers.

One mystery is, “where did her eyebrows and eyelashes disappear to?”  I was told by my painting teacher that due to the nearly impossible thinness of da Vinci’s layers of paint, Mona Lisa’s eyebrows and eyelashes were removed the very first time the painting was dusted with a fine cloth.

The variations in tone where dark and light merge into midtone shadows is called Sfumato, which means “to vanish,” or “to shade.” There is no other painter who ever achieved the infinitesimal degrees of variations of tone as did da Vinci.  This coming in and out of the shade creates a charged atmosphere which adds to the mystery and the sense of spiritual rather than earthly events in his paintings.

da Vinci’s technique has never been duplicated.*  Unlike almost all oil paintings from the Renaissance until today, da Vinci’s paintings cannot be x-rayed to see the layers of underpainting.  The gradations of tone are so subtle that it is impossible to conceive how they were built up of thin glazes.  The underpainting and over-glazing were so thin as to be completely fused together.. as if da Vinci had painted “Mona Lisa” in one finished layer, one microscopically thin layer rather than working for months, even years with patient glazing.

Please watch this video:

My student's study of Mona Lisa:

My very gifted student Anna, seventeen years old attending special school for the deaf in San Francisco had a great interest in Old Master oil paintings.  This is her work for the lessons Sfumato and Thin Paint Layers, Her Mona Lisa is about 3/4 finished at this stage. Another of her da Vinci studies, Lady with an Ermine, is about 1/3 finished at this stage.

Back to the subject

In 1503 Francesco del Giocondo asked da Vinci to make a portrait of his wife to hang in their home.  She was a beautiful woman and del Giocondo was proud of her.  During the course of the months that she sat patiently for her portrait she went through a metamorphosis.  It takes very close inspection to see the veil that covers her forehead.. this was a veil worn by pregnant women.(1)  During the course of sitting for her portrait, Mona Lisa suffered a miscarriage and that is the source of her sad smile.  The painter has imbued the portrait with deep sympathy, compassion, and the mystery of birth, death, and passing beauty.

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Notes:

(1) Is She Smiling For Two?, Art News, Laurie Hurwitz, January 2007

See also: 

1. Ambiguity as a resource for Human to Computer Interaction Design PowerPoint Presentation by Bill Gaver, Jake Beaver and Steve Benford
2. Philosophic Uses of Ambiguity; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 2011 
3. Why I Do Not Use the Scientific Method, beginning of a theory of Truth, Meaning, and the Necessity of Ambiguity

*About da Vinci's technique

The Adoration of the Magi, an unfinished painting below, is the best demonstration of Leonardo's technique.  At this early stage of laying in the painting we see the line drawing, the dark and midtone areas, the lights are bare canvas. This is still the method taught in art schools today. From this point da Vinci, as written in his notebooks, worked into the shadow areas to create light and form. That is his special magic.

A shadow may be infinitely dark, and also of infinite degrees of absence of darkness. The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow. Leonardo da Vinci