While reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle, I ran across the passage below (had no idea about this theory):
When we visited the Louvre, we entered the Mona Lisa room and found a crowd of hundreds pushing, jostling, selfie-ing all around her.
I stared from a distance, trying to appreciate her. I really didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I wondered if all the jostling people understood or if they were just acting like they did. A woman walked over and stood next to me.
She said, “You know, there’s a theory about her smile. Want to hear it?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Mona Lisa and her husband lost a baby. Sometime later, her husband commissioned this painting from da Vinci to celebrate the birth of another baby. Mona Lisa sat for Leonardo to paint her, but she wouldn’t smile during the sitting. Not all the way. The story goes that da Vinci wanted her to smile wider, but she refused. She did not want the joy she felt for her new baby to erase the pain she felt from losing the first. There in her half smile is her half joy. Or maybe it’s her full joy and her full grief all at the same time. She has the look of a woman who has just realized a dream but still carries the lost dream inside her. She wanted her whole life to be present on her face. She wanted everyone to remember, so she wouldn’t pretend.”
Now I understand what the fuss is all about. Mona Lisa is the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women—women who feel and who know. She is saying for us:
Don’t tell me to smile.
I will not be pleasant.
Even trapped here, inside two dimensions, you will see the truth.
You will see my life’s brutal and beautiful right here on my face.
The world will not be able to stop staring.
SONG: Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters by Elton John (everybody knows his version, so here's a cool cover by the Indigo Girls... :-)
BOOK: Katie and the Mona Lisa by James Mayhew
POEM: The Aerodynamics by Rick Bursky
The night she walked to the house
she held a string; on the other end,
fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.
Wind provided the aerodynamics.
Does every collaboration
need to be explained?
She tied the string to the mailbox
left the kite to float until morning.
Every night this happens.
She sleeps, I listen, darkness
slides through us both.
The next morning
the string still curved into the sky
but the kite was gone.
This was the morning
newspapers announced
the Mona Lisa was stolen***.
This was the morning
it snowed in Los Angeles,
the morning I wore gloves
to pull from the sky
fifty-three feet of frozen string.
***From The Writer's Almanac: On August 21, 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The theft was pulled off so well that no one even noticed.
The next day, an artist named Louis Béroud went to the Louvre, intending to paint a girl doing her hair in the reflection from the pane of glass in front of the Mona Lisa. He wanted his painting to be a commentary on the debate around putting glass in front of paintings in the Louvre.
But when he got to the wall where the painting usually hung, it wasn't there. He asked the guards, and they said it was probably being photographed. But it wasn't with the photographers. The director of the museum, Théophile Homolle, was out of town — a man who had said the year before, "Steal the Mona Lisa?You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame." Finally, museum officials got together and the police were called in, and everyone realized that the Mona Lisa was really gone.
The Louvre was shut down for a week to search every inch of it for the missing painting — since the Louvre takes up 49 acres, it was no easy task. But all they found was the frame and piece of glass.
More than two years later, in Italy, the thief contacted an art dealer and offered to sell him the Mona Lisa for $100,000. The art dealer met him, along with the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, explained that all he wanted was to return the Mona Lisa to Italy where it belonged. He said he would sell it as long as the men promised to hang it at the Uffizi and not let it go back to Paris. Peruggia was, of course, arrested, and the Mona Lisa was sent back to the Louvre … but not until it went on a tour across Italy.
QUOTE: "Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves." ~ Tim O'Brien
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