He writes that many tourists are disappointed when first seeing the Mona Lisa in person, including this writer. The painting now has its own room. In April 2005, the painting moved to a new location and is currently displayed in a purpose-built, climate-controlled enclosure behind bullet-proof glass.
As Mr. Garner writes, the Mona Lisa sits at the center of the Louvre located in the center of Paris, which as been the center of Western Art. There has been much attention on the painting because of Leonardo, a myriad-minded polymath and inventor, who acquired the aura of a magus in his own lifetime.
Mr. Garner says that the Mona Lisa is a great work of art. He writes:
But if ever you succeed in seeing the painting as people saw it in centuries past, you will discover something astounding: The Mona Lisa looks entirely different from what we have been led to believe. To many observers, this is the one supreme masterpiece, the unarguable bedrock of our visual culture, the painterly equivalent of the Parthenon, Chartres and the Taj Mahal.
In fact, it is anything but that. It is a mysterious, shifting, elusive thing, and it was that very ambiguity that so confounded and compelled the attention of all who saw it in the past. Most portraits, by design, convey one fairly simple idea: They preserve the particulars of their sitters while bringing them into conformity with a general type, whether of beauty, rank or piety. What distinguishes the Mona Lisa is that no fewer than three portraits coexist within it simultaneously.
Mr. Garner continues:
The first of these, the most common sort of female portrait in the Renaissance, presents the sitter as a beautiful and desirable woman who, true to type, smiles at the viewer. But if we look more closely, her expression becomes one of sadness, even pain, which is almost unheard of in a portrait of this time.
And no sooner have we grasped that impression than another follows fast upon it: a sense of nightmarish menace that caused Walter Pater, the great 19th-century essayist, to declare in a famous passage that "she is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave."
So it was not only her beauty, but also her sadness and then those intimations of savagery, that so transfixed the critics of the 19th century.
Mr. Garner says that what is most striking of Mona Lisa is its "potent originality," as no other portrait of its time, and only one or two other paintings by Leonardo, had such intensity. What induced Leonardo to place this young woman against a backdrop of subaquatic menace, of ancient meandering rivers and treacherous precipices?
Wikipedia writes on its website:
Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, is a 16th century portrait painted in oil on a poplar panel by Leonardo da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance. The work is owned by the Government of France and is on the wall in the Louvre in Paris, France with the title Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo.
The painting is a half-length portrait and depicts a woman whose expression is often described as enigmatic.The ambiguity of the sitter's expression, the monumentality of the half-figure composition, and the subtle modeling of forms and atmospheric illusionism were novel qualities that have contributed to the painting's continuing fascination. Few other works of art have been subject to as much scrutiny, study, mythologizing, and parody.
Mr. Garner says that the face is an odd compromise between the general and the particular. It expresses naturalism and an androgynous type, one that recurs in Leonardo’s "Virgin of the Rock" and in his depiction of St. John.
Mr. Garner says that one is drawn to the incongruous perspectival and anatomical perfection of the hands and midriff, which are angled away from the picture plane. The hands embody the scientific naturalism that began among the Lombard Herbalists of the late 14th century and would be revived, a century after Leonardo, in Caravaggio and his followers.
Mr. Garner concludes:
If, for the generation after Leonardo, perspective became an intuition, for the generation before him, it had been a mathematical science. That was how the aged Leonardo saw it as well: and in those hands, the science of Florentine perspective achieves its final and noblest flowering.
Perhaps, Mona Lisa is special and she deserves a second viewing in person.
Source.
