Someone has to say it, may as well be me. I do not have a print of the Mona Lisa hanging in my office and I don’t personally know anyone who does. Leonardo’s painting is more famous for being famous than it is for being loved.
Art experts like to emphasize the portrait’s sfumato (its ombré-ness) and its aerial perspective — new methods of painting that Leonardo da Vinci either invented or took to the next level. But sophisticated techniques rarely create an emotional connection between you and the sitter.
Here’s something that might: What if I told you the Mona Lisa is a gutsy portrait, not only in the reach of its feminist-like ambition, but also in its power to rattle the men in Lisa Gherardini’s life?
A Renaissance woman and her image
In Leonardo’s day, women wore expensive clothes and oodles of jewelry in their portraits to trumpet their parents’ wealth and their husband’s social rank. The idea was to create a carefully curated public image, similar to the way “certain” couples promote themselves on social media today.
For example, the woman in this double portrait is wearing a velvet overdress lined with fur. Seed pearls embroidered along the edge of the sleeve spell LEALTA (faithful) — literally tagging her as the loyal wife of the man leaning in.
An amazing number of tiny feathers adorn her gorgeous chaperon headdress. Married women in Renaissance Italy covered their hair in public because loose, flowing hair signaled a gal was single and available.
Her brooch — strategically positioned in the center of the image — features large organic pearls, the most treasured gem in the world at the time.
This wealthy Florentine woman is dressed to the nines yet appears encased in her own home, as if she’s under house arrest. A French traveler told his friends:
Women are more enclosed in Florence than in any other city in Italy! They see the world only from the small openings in their windows.
On their tax forms, Florentine men were obliged to record the physical condition of everyone residing under their roof. You’d be surprised how many returns declared that a woman had tumbled out of a window. I often wonder if some of these women were just trying to see more of the outside world.
More precious than jewels
What’s striking about this portrait by painter Domenico Ghirlandaio — one of Michelangelo’s teachers — is what you don’t see. Conspicuously absent is a window view.
The woman is portrayed in coffin-like confinement because this hauntingly beautiful portrait was completed soon after she died during her second childbirth.
Her signature brooch has been laid to rest on a shelf. Draped along the upper shelf are coral beads that many new mothers carried as a protective talisman for infants. On the wall above her prayer book, the Latin inscription reads:
Art, would that you could represent character and mind. There would be no more beautiful painting on earth.
The woman’s amber-colored giornea overdress is embroidered with “L” motifs and other emblems that identify her as Giovanna, the late wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni. Her red gamurra features one of the most beautifully painted sleeves in art history.
Lorenzo kept this portrait in his private suite at the Tornabuoni Palace for years. Centuries later, the painting was purchased by American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, whose wife died of tuberculosis just a few months after their honeymoon.
Portraying a woman’s character and mind
As it happens, Leonardo da Vinci knew Giovanna’s family. Odds are he saw her portrait and read Ghirlandaio’s Latin inscription.
You might say he snatched the ball and ran.
To portray Lisa del Giocondo (née Gherardini), the first thing Leonardo did is rewrite the Renaissance playbook: no bejeweled dress, no flashy brooch, no bound-up hair, no meaning-laden attributes.
Next, he tossed out the canon of corporeal beauty associated with literature. If you were looking only at 15th-century portraits, you would assume nearly all Italian women had the same blue eyes and golden hair as Laura, a married woman who became the romantic obsession of Petrarch — a popular poet who dedicated more than 300 sonnets to her.
In Leonardo’s innovative painting, Miss Lisa is wearing a dark dress and gossamer veil, but not because she’s in mourning. Darker fabrics were en vogue at the turn of the century, when fashionable women emulated the Spanish court of Charles V, the most politically powerful ruler in Europe. Lisa probably acted as her own stylist for this portrait.
The neckline of her dress is adorned with a row of spirals that catch the golden light and draw the eye to a row of exquisitely rendered knots that resemble doodles in Leonardo’s sketchbooks. Below these decorative details, the garment cascades over her body like a waterfall.
Lisa is portrayed at home, sitting in an open-air room called a loggia. Her brunette hair is loose and flowing, as it naturally would have been. She’s making eye contact with the viewer — indeed, even with male viewers — with a poise and presence not seen in previous female portraits.
It remains a mystery why Leonardo kept this painting for himself. Did Lisa’s husband refuse to pay for it? Did their friends say the portrait made Lisa look (shall we say) available?
Doesn’t matter. During the Renaissance, women were customarily portrayed as something other than themselves: ideals, symbols, allegories. Lisa del Giocondo — wife and mother of five — leaned in to being depicted as herself. You gotta love that.
Postscript: “Pictures of Me”
Looking for a creative activity to enjoy with young learners? The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. offers Pictures of Me — a free, online art lesson that encourages children to explore who they are through portraiture and collage. Click on the link for details.