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The quotations on this page are intended to provide a literary context for understanding the popular view of the Mona Lisa and its relationship to Leonardo -- to provide a foundation for the immense popularity of the image today. The texts quoted are not to be understood as authoritative statements, necessarily, but rather indicative of the opinions current at the time of writing. These tracts are presented not to offer an appreciation of the Mona Lisa, itself, but rather, as already noted, a key to the public appreciation of its meaning. Specifically omitted from the sources cited are analyses of the art-historical significance of the Mona Lisa. I am not reproducing stylistic analysis, attribution and comparative notes. Edgar Quinet. Revolutions of Italy. 1848-52. Quoted
from A. Richard Turner. Inventing Leonardo. p. 107. Jules Michelet. [History of the Renaissance]. vol. 7.
1855. Quoted from A. Richard Turner. Inventing Leonardo.
p. 108-09. Bacchus, Saint John, La Gioconda direct their looks at you: you are fascinated and troubled, an infinity acts upon you through a strange magnetism. Art, nature genius of mystery and discovery, master of the profundities of the world, of the unknown abyss of the ages, speak, what do you wish of me? This canvas attracts me, calls me, invades me, absorbs me; I go to it in spite of myself, like the bird to the serpent. ... Only one thing needs to be said: these are gods, but sick. They are not a victory. The Bacchus and Saint John, these rude prophets of the new spirit, in suffering are consumed. You gaze upon their looks. A desert separates them, with a hundred uncertain images. A strange isle of Alcina is in the eyes of La Gioconda, gracious and smiling phantom. You believe her attentive to light readings by Boccaccio. Beware! Vinci himself, the great master of illusion, was taken in by the snare; long years he remained there without power to ever emerge from this mobile labyrinth, fluid and changing, that he painted in the background of this dangerous picture. No one was more admired than Leonardo da Vinci. No one was less followed. This surprising magician, this Italian brother of Faust. Alfred Dumesnil. Italian Art. 1854. Quoted from A. Richard Turner. Inventing Leonardo. p. 109. It goes so well with La Gioconda, only rendering better this insidious sweetness, in making rise from beneath the warmth of this slight swollen flesh an almost funereal pallor. A tragic and somber sign wells up in the mirage of fantasy, the enchantment of the smile, the treacherous attraction of a sick soul that renders sickness. This so soft a look, but avid like the sea, devours. Sigmund Freud. Leonardo da Vinci: a study in psychosexuality, tr. A.A. Brill (1947), New York, Vintage Books (Random House), 1955. 1) pp. 61 ff. On the male homosexual childhood relationship to his mother: Following this primary state, a transformation takes place whose mechanisms we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The love of the mother cannot continue to develop consciously so that it merges into repression. The boy represses the love for the mother by putting himself in her place, by identifying himself with her, and by taking his own person as a model through the similarity of which he is guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual; as a matter of fact, he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys whom the growing adult now loves are only substitutive persons or revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love object on the road to narcissism, for the Greek legend called a boy Narcissus to whom nothing was more pleasing than his own mirrored image, and who became transformed into a beautiful flower of this name. Deeper psychological discussion justify the assertion that the person who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious on the memory picture of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother he conserves the same in his unconscious and henceforth remains faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away from women who could cause him to become disloyal to his mother. Through direct observation of individual cases we could demonstrate that he who is seemingly receptive only of masculine stimuli is in reality influenced by the charms emanating from women just like a normal person, but each and every time he hastens to transfer the stimulus he received from the woman to a male object, and in this manner he repeats again and again the mechanism through which he acquired his homosexuality. Consider the theories that the Mona Lisa represents a self-portrait of Leonardo as a female and/or that it represents his mother. 2) pp. 75 ff. One the role of the smile in the Mona Lisa and related works. 3) pp. 115-116. On the role of the Mona Lisa in the context of Leonardo's sexual history: At the zenith of his life, at the age of the first fifties, at a time when the sex characteristics of women have already undergone a regressive change, and when the libido in men not infrequently ventures into an energetic rise, a new transformation came over him. Still deeper strata of his psychic content became active again, but this further regression was of benefit to his art, which was in a state of deterioration. He met the woman who awakened in him the memory of the happy and sensuously enraptured smile of his mother, and under the influence of this awakening he reacquired the stimulus which guided him in the beginning of his artistic efforts when he formed the smiling women. He then painted Mona Lisa, Saint Anne, and a number of mystic pictures which were all characterized by the enigmatic smile. With the help of his oldest erotic feelings he triumphed in conquering once more the inhibition in his art. This last development faded away in the obscurity of his advancing age. But even before this his intellect rose to the highest capacity of a philosophy of life which was far ahead of his time. Top |
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