Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World - 5

Narrative Brought to the Mona Lisa
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For instance, among the examples shown here, the Mona Lisa Cookie Jar brings a three-dimensional palpability to Leonardo's revered, remote and enigmatic icon. But most importantly, as a vessel, Mona is made into a useful object -- she is invested with an every-day functionality and is introduced as one of an expanding cast of licensed characters for the sit-com that has become the model for a middle-class life. Saint Mona's attribute is the chocolate-chip cookie, and holding it brings her to the brink of narrative. But the contents, the cookies -- chocolate-chip, to believe the advertisements offer something that transcends daily sustenance -- so much so that fortunes have been made by boutique cookie bakers. One then asks -- is there a fundamental difference between the container of holy relics and the work before us?
[Note: See correspondent's letter and author's answer.]

Mona stars in her own narrative drama in a set of images found on a piece of salvaged wrapping paper. These are related to a twelve-image sequence, illustrated, but unidentified, on the rear cover of a recent collection of monalisiana, Mary Rose Storey's Mona Lisas, 1980. (In the 1970s, this sequential array appeared as a design on inexpensive cocktail napkins.) While the crude cuts pictured here parody Mona, they also provide the context for narrative, and offer in that narrative an ironically reasonable explanation for the sitter's cryptic smile. Here, Mona's familiar visage is projected into the fourth dimension -- cinematically -- to suggest what might have occurred had the artist's gaze caught Mona in the flow of time. This laughing paroxysm of a Mona no longer bears the patina of remoteness inherited from the quattrocento, and is no longer removed from everyday experience. She has emotion and exists in the frame of human events. For these images to suggest that Leonardo's picture is simply an image caught in time -- in an instant -- like a snapshot -- requires the observer to acknowledge that a Renaissance convention of portraiture has been undone -- a convention that attempts to escape or ignore time's swift flight by portraying its personalities in a state of ideal permanence. Only later, for example, in the seventeenth-century portrait busts of Bernini, is the human figure to be seen caught in and by the flow of time. Moreover, it is not entirely inconceivable that the artist(s) of the cinematic Monas had the pre-cinematic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge in mind. Off her pedestal, Mona is made to move and ham for the camera, like an elephant or like any other subject of these early "animal locomotion" studies.

Leo Steinberg once asked: "Instead of asking why Mona Lisa smiles, we wonder what keeps her from laughing." [See Note.] To judge from the sequential set of Monas seen here, it must be the strength of Renaissance convention that keeps her from laughing. That dispensed with, the hypothesis before us suggests that it is only how we view time that stymies her laugh. In this modern age, now that we can show Mona in motion, have we granted her her long-due liberation? Sidney Freedberg observes that the conventional stasis that forms Leonardo's Mona bears the seed from which grows the suggestion of movement: "The result is a rare miracle of synthesis between art and actuality: an image in which a breathing instant and a composure for all time are held in suspension." [Note.] Applying Freedberg's observation to the after-history of the Mona Lisa, it may not be unreasonable to assume that it is the potential for further movement that implies the full-blown narratives depicted in some of these modern versions.

[Note: Steinberg: As quoted in Mary Rose Storey, Mona Lisas, p. 17.]
[Note: See also C'mon Mona, Smile! a flipbook by Fliptomania.]
[Note: Freedberg: S. J. Freedberg. Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1961. p. 50.]

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