Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World, or
a Giocondophiliac's Delight:
The Mona Lisa, as represented in
Quotations from Scholarly and Literary Sources

Kenneth Clark. Leonardo da Vinci. Introd. Martin Kemp. Penguin Books, 1993.

From the introductory note to the first Pelican Edition (1957), p. 39.

Continuous change, which threatened the intellectual foundations of Leonardo's thought, developed one of his deepest instincts: his sense of mystery. The pointing finger and the smile -- the one indicating a power outside our field of vision, the other reflecting an inner process which is equally beyond our comprehension -- had a symbolic importance to him even in his early work. And as his sense of mystery was intensified and confirmed by his researches, the use of these symbols became more conscious. The 'Mona Lisa' has been irreverently described as 'the cat that's eaten the canary': which expresses well enough the smile of one who has attained complete possession of what she loved, and is enjoying the process of absorption. And Leonardo has discovered that this mysterious, continuous process has the same rhythm as that in which rain pours from the clouds, wears away the earth, flows to the sea, and is sucked up Into the clouds again. In the Louvre 'St John' these two symbols of mystery are united and concentrated, and this gives the image its obsessive power. Attributes of grace, the smile and the turning movement, become extremely sinister, because they are now indistinguishable from attributes of continuous energy; and these, being beyond human reason, are felt as hostile to human security. Yet just as Leonardo, in his intellectual pursuit of natural forces, hung on with a kind of inspired tenacity, so in the 'St John' we feel him pressing closer round the form, penetrating further and further into the mystery, till at last he seems to become a part of it, so that, like his contemporaries, we no longer think of him as a scientist, a seeker for measurable truths, but as a magician, a man who, from his close familiarity with the processes of nature, has learnt a disturbing secret of creation.

From Chapter Four: The Trattato della Pittura, p. 129.

Critics have complained that [Leonardo's] scientific study of light and shade led to a kind of academism in Leonardo's later work, and was ultimately responsible for the artificiality of the Louvre 'St. John". This is certainly untrue. Much of Leonardo's most sensitive and unacademic use of chiaroscuro dates from long after his investigations into its nature. And to those who maintain that the innumerable patient diagrams of criss-cross rays were a tragic waste of time, Leonardo might well have replied that between the 'Ginevra de' Benci' and the 'Mona Lisa' there is a difference in fullness and continuity of modelling which he, at any rate, could only have achieved by the scientific study of light striking a sphere.

Top | Return to Table of Contents | Go to List of Images | Go to Images
 Go to Mona Lisa Home Page