In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse." He concluded: "In this work of Leonardo, there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold, and it was held to be something marvellous, in that it was not other than alive." "The mouth with its opening and with its ends united by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face," Vasari observed in his celebrated Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, "seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh. A preoccupation principally with Mona Lisa's inscrutable smile is almost as old as the painting, and dates back at least to the reaction of the legendary Renaissance writer and historian Giorgio Vasari, who was born a few years after Da Vinci began work on the likeness. The tragedy of art's greatest supermodelįor centuries, our attention has largely been focused elsewhere in the small (77 x 53cm/30 x 21in) oil-on-poplar panel, which Da Vinci never fully finished and is thought to have continued to tinker with obsessively until his death in 1519 – as if the painting's endless emergence were the work itself. The secret toilet humour in a Titian painting Hiding in plain sight, it may also be the arrow that points the way to the work's deepest meanings. Yet how many of us have ever consciously noted the object in the painting that is closer to us than any other – the chair on which the mysterious woman sits? Never mind that the piece of furniture is the only thing that Leonardo's sitter grips in her hand (she's literally pointing at it with every finger she has), the chair must surely be the single most neglected aspect of the otherwise over-stared-at icon. Leonardo da Vinci's inexhaustible portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the 24-year-old mother of five and wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant who sat for the High Renaissance master in 1503, is doubtless the most famous work of art in the world.
Another ubiquitous cultural image is the Mona Lisa. We've seen the sign whizz past us countless times without ever clocking its subliminal point. Take, for instance, the way the white space between the "E" and the "x" in the FedEx logo forms a big white arrow pointing forward. Some things are so obvious you never really notice them.
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