Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World - 9

Mona Lisa Joins the Middle Class
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One of the most popular techniques used to "humanize" Mona -- to bring her down into our middle-class world -- is to undermine Renaissance conventions of formal portraiture and representation by depicting private or ungainly activities of the modern world. A Mona in Hair Curlers postcard may serve as a suitable example of this tendency to deconstruct the formal protocols of public presentation. This protocol of appropriate form is key to the methodology of Renaissance portraiture. It informs the outward personality of the Mona Lisa as much as it sets the formal disposition of her image on the plane of representation. The question of her smile -- of its meaning -- a bridge between the public and the private Mona -- may be just a modern-age question that we have superimposed on a famous work. But the underlying theme of conflict that takes place between public and private personalities -- between outward and inward personalities -- to which Mona's smile speaks as a metaphor, itself, is not unknown in the Renaissance tradition, for while it became a hallmark of Renaissance portraiture in general, it is fundamental to any appraisal of symbology in portraiture, as in, say, The Ambassadors by Holbein, where the outward content is contradicted by the hidden, inner content. In the presentation of the private Mona in hair curlers one thinks also of Degas' images of women, who, off their pedestals, are shown by the artist in their most private, often inelegant moments.

The process of "humanization," cited above, clearly works two ways. A Hallmark greeting card ("Another famous face is looking great in braces,") recasting the Mona Lisa as a candidate for orthodontics is meant to uplift the embarrassed and awkward wearer of new dental braces. The ideal world and the real world, brought nearer to each other here, by formula, as it were, in these examples, must ultimately derive from the kind of demythologizing of the ideal that takes place in the work of Degas on one hand and in the oeuvre of Puvis de Chavannes on the other.

[Note: See also Bill Dare, Beauty Feature, 1978. MS London (in Storey, Mona Lisas, p. 80) where the Mona Lisa is given curlers. On the Internet one can find examples of Mona Lisas, smoking cigars and marijuana cigarettes. She can be an actor in any number of professions and common activities, from fortune-teller to motorcycle rider.]

The protocol that permitted the Mona Lisa to be used as an instrument with which to break through the conventions of upper-class sensibility, correspondingly can be made to mock the bourgeois ethos of propriety. In a Mona Lisa greeting card from England, the British love of making humorous fare of bodily functions takes the form of explaining the Mona Lisa's smile as a premonition of Leonardo's expected reaction to her flatulence. In this case, the joke is revealed in the caption, not in the image, which seems rather neutral.

[Note: The same theme takes the form of a visual, non-textual, joke in Maxfield Parrish's infamous mural of Old King Cole made in 1906 for the Hotel Knickerbocker and now installed in the Hotel St. Regis in New York City. Although denied by Parrish, it is commonly believed that the king's attendants are reacting to the king's flatulence. (See Coy Ludwig. Maxfield Parrish, Watson-Guptill, New York, 1973, p. 149 and fig. 93.)]

If the artists of modern Monas can show her in her hypothetical private life, it is not surprising, then, to see the image of Mona absorbed into the private lives of Mona Consumers. Depicted here is a vinyl shower-curtain (fig. 27a.) that bears the familiar image within its golden frame. Because significant portions of the curtain are clear, it does not seem likely that the image on the curtain is intended to offer privacy. Rather, as in other instances, Mona must have been chosen to imply some degree of identification or complicity between the user's intention and the image's significance -- whereby the bather projects himself or herself into the image of the Mona Lisa who, analogously, also serves as a mask. It is unlikely that the impetus to place Mona on the plastic sheet was independent of the influence of the soft sculptures of Claes Oldenberg, who had already fashioned soft bathroom fixtures, and of Andy Warhol, whose elevation of the ordinary to high art is being met here half way with the degradation of high art to the ordinary. Significantly, the connection between Mona as shower curtain and Leonardo's Mona is not entirely fortuitous -- there is a connection.

In his essay on Leonardo's Leicester Codex ("The Upwardly Mobile Fossils"), paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould sees the Mona Lisa as a pictorial essay illustrating Leonardo's belief in the ancient theory of man as a microcosm to the world's macrocosm. In the Mona Lisa, as in the Leicester Codex, water is the flux that animates both man and earth. Indeed, Leonardo's Mona Lisa is all about water, about its flow and cycle through the earth and atmosphere as shown in the background, and about the manner in which a universal force on an ubiquitous element erupts into the flow of forms within the figure itself. Art historian Martin Kemp describes it as follows:

The processes of living nature are not only mirrored by anatomical implication within the lady's body, but are more obviously echoed in the surface details of her figure and garments, which are animated by myriad motions of ripple and flow. The delicate cascades of her hair beautifully correspond to the movement of water, as Leonardo himself was delighted to observe: "Note the motion of the surface of the water which conforms to that of the hair." [Note.]

[Note: As quoted in Gould. op. cit., p. 33.]

Works of art, however, have a nasty habit of escaping from the enclosure of intentions defined by their makers, and that is what is happening here, if ever so momentarily. Studying the photograph of the soft two-dimensional image held aloft by female acolytes who have been charged with the task of helping to promulgate this Mona cult, one cannot but see this draping Mona as a mocking materialization of Veronica's famous veil. Over live-size, this outwardly familiar image yet expresses and embodies the bather's secret inner image of self, just as Veronica's sweat cloth (sudarium) was imprinted with the image of Christ, or, may we suggest, as the shroud of Turin picked up the imago Christi. Does this object carry similar connotations of death, and of a mystical materialization? As it substitutes Mona's visage for that of the bather, it envelops the bather and puts Mona's face forward while relegating all else to the watery beyond behind the curtain, a beyond curiously evocative of the wet world in front of which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa. With her image on a shower curtain, the Mona Lisa has traversed the centuries and has come full circle. She has returned as an ironic materialization of Leonardo's wet world. In this uniquely 20th-century form, Mona has been returned to its original gallery: to its place as an adornment in baths. (See below.)

Water is a ubiquitous theme in Mona Lisa references. Is it an accident or merely fortuitous that a firm known for marketing fragrances during the 1950s and 1960s put out a product, an Eau de Toilette, to be precise, named after Leonardo's famous sitter. Ritornelle's "Mona Lisa Eau de Toilette" invites the bather to become a Mona Lisa by bathing in the waters of its fragrance. The allusion to the Mona Lisa is made without reference to her image -- only the name and a suggestion of an art frame serves to establish the metaphor, a metaphor that seems to imply that the wearer who wraps herself in the curtain of its fragrance is the, or is like the, person missing from the scene.

As moderns we no longer subscribe to the archaic beliefs that posit a mechanism that relates the activities of the larger to the smaller worlds around us. Yet we are happy to resurrect these ideas in the form of metaphor and analogy, as if, by so doing one need not take intellectual responsibility for beliefs so deeply rooted in the human psyche, and so opposed to common sense and to direct observation, that to pretend to hold them would make one seem ludicrous. Yet, we do hold onto these notions, and we do act on them, and we do organize our decision-making lives around them. And, in the form of literature, of all sorts, and especially the literature of commercialism, that we see in 30 second doses on television, it is assumed that we will make choices that enrich the the uncontested connections between our lives, our microcosms, and the lives of those universal beings who implore us to make the same choices they did, and ask us to imitate their lives by making those choices. We think of ourselves as above superstition, but act out the little bits of our lives as if there is no choice but to embrace it. Those who read horoscopes believe that they can synchronize their daily moral choices with the will of the universe.

Another Mona Lisa curtain -- this time a beaded curtain -- may be seen on the set of the ABC television sit-com Dharma and Greg (fig. 27b.). Here, as in so many other occasions when the Mona Lisa is affixed to an everyday utilitarian or decorative item, Mona is intended to function as a link between the microcosm of the "here-and-now" and the macrocosm of the "then-and-there." But in Dharma and Greg it also serves as an over-arching metaphor for the show's thesis or concept. The show is about a marriage between an "artsy" hippie and an aggressive yuppie -- between the freewheeling, creative Dharma, and the Harvard educated attorney Greg. The curtain signifies both sides of this unlikely duo -- the beaded curtain, reminiscent of hippie "pads" of the 1960s and Mona, as a signifier of taste and accomplishment. If the show is to play on the conflict and synergy of the merger of "high" and "low," they could have seized on no better emblem.

[Note: On Dharma and Greg, see: http://www1.cedar-rapids.net/solis/dglinks.htm, http://abc.go.com/primetime/dharma_and_greg/episode_guide/index.html, http://www.wchstv.com/abc/dharmagreg/. Thanks to Minnie Singh and Matthew Reichek for the reference to this show.]

Mona and Mythology: Commerce, Politics and Sexual Metaphor
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In the frenzy to plaster examples of nearly every kind of thing used in modern life with the likeness of the Mona Lisa, it is difficult to determine whether themes such as those that are identified and described here reflect the conscious (or unconscious) intentions of their makers, or whether they just appear as if by chance or by the force of human observation and will -- like finding figures hidden among the random pattern in the night's stars. Are the meanings we find in these narrative and thematic threads innate attributes of the objects themselves, or do they become manifest only by the force of the criticism and analysis of the objects -- are they just constructs of the observer? Do they mean what we say they mean, or are they simply vehicles upon which are carried our own meanings -- in which case that would still mean what we say they mean, except for us only? Are they hobby horses saddled to carry our own fantasies? As readers, you must determine from whence these themes and their significances derive. But, perhaps, more importantly, you must determine whether, irrespective of their source, they convey significance to us; for, today, creation and criticism vie with one another as acts of invention; indeed, one might even say that as the arts have become more critical, criticism has become more artful.

It is therefore difficult to assert without some degree of self-doubt that the designer of the Mona Lisa Bathing Suit appearing in a 1999 mail-order catalogue of the Carabella Collection (fig. 30a.) ever intended, by choosing the image of the Mona Lisa, to allude to the innate association Leonardo established between the Mona Lisa and water (see above). Certainly, the idea to put the Mona Lisa on a bathing suit was not meant to imply, as Leonardo did, that the human body was a microcosm of the world of sun, sand and water. Certainly, neither the designer nor the photographer had any idea that the Mona Lisa could be read as an essay in a Renaissance belief system that posited a correspondence between earthly and human liquid flux, and that Leonardo had used this idea as a means of animating the Mona Lisa -- where every human fiber evokes the moist background landscape in which the life-waters of the earth saturate everything. So we must ask, is there something about the Mona Lisa, something outside of specialized knowledge, that speaks to our society and tells us that she belongs in a wet world? Is it just by happenstance that among the objects collected during the writing of this paper, there are several that place the Mona Lisa squarely in the vicinity of water: shower curtains, bathing suits, umbrellas. Even in her early life as an object -- the one that hangs in the Louvre --, water was a ubiquitous Mona Lisa theme -- from its early location in the baths of Fontainebleau, to the early variants that used the Mona Lisa as a source upon which to pattern images of women bathing.

In our society, a woman's bathing suit, of course, is intended to reveal the body, and to convey in that revelation an image of feminine sexuality. Given that the Mona Lisa is commonly held to signify a feminine duality -- coy enticement and motherly tenderness -- but is never intended to be overtly sexual or erotic (except in some modern variants), the presence of Mona on a bathing suit offers a startling contrast and an opportunity to ask several revealing questions: Quite obvious to this observer, is the fact that the image on the bathing suit, super-imposed, as it were, on the female physique, serves to hide it, and forces the observer to choose whether to interpret the plane of the image or to ponder the physiognomy underneath. The image hides as much as it reveals. [Note: Gombrich.] Yet, the very process of gazing at the modeled bathing suit challenges one's focus and forces the observer to search out the underlying human form. It is easy to see that the intent of the designer is to lead the eye from the image to the body. In the illustration, gazing at the eyes of Mona forces the observer to contemplate the model's breasts. To this observer, the bathing suit, as did the shower-curtain discussed above, recalls or evokes a metaphorical role of the Mona Lisa. If the Mona Lisa does not express sexuality, it yet embodies sexuality, but not an erotic sensuality (That object is obscured by decoding the image on the bathing suit.); rather, it conveys the kind of sexuality in which women are presented in their historic and mythic roles: as the fount of life, in motherhood, responsible for eternal generation and for regeneration, of the kind of love that exists beyond and before passion. This dichotomy is an ancient one, and is implicit in numerous Hellenistic images of Venus and Cupid, the former evocative of the "higher" loves of creation and of human bonds, and the latter of the eroticism that everywhere must be bound to the former. In the iconography of this era, the feminine duality implied by Botticelli's Venus and Leonardo's Mona is more likely to take the form found on a greeting card by Sharon Housen from Eugene Oregon: "Let's Do Lunch."

[Note: Gombrich. Ernst Gombrich, in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, 1969, p. 5) notes that when confronted with two possible alternate readings of the same object "we cannot experience alternate readings at the same time." This is true even though we may be simultaneously aware intellectually of both readings. Also, writing in the New York Times (2/13/99, p. A19), columnist Frank Rich notes, in seeming contrast (quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald) that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." These two observations are not contradictory, however. While we can't simultaneously experience two readings of the same illusion, we can balance and integrate the results of these experiences as simultaneous contradictory readings, which is what I claim is the experience one encounters with the Mona Lisa bathing suit.]

Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Venus appear together in a Birthday Card published in 1998 by Portal Publications. Here they appear as a pantheon of goddesses culled from the pages of the history of art. Presented, left to right is the Mona Lisa, a figure modeled after Picasso's cubist style, the woman from Grant Woods famous farmers, Botticelli 's Venus and Whistler's Arrangement in Black and Gray: The Artist's Mother. There is no reference in this work to the sympathetic opposition we saw in the examples cited above; rather, this essay relates more closely to the set of female bottled spirits discussed earlier.

For this observer, the most curious aspect of the Bathing Suit as the Mona Lisa is the way it superimposes a generic type over the individual. It has always been a difficult task among artists who wish to present sexuality or sexually explicit images to balance the sensitive observation and rendering of individual humans with sexual and erotic elements; it is as if the artists wanting to depict the erotic cannot determine how much weight to give to the depiction of specific human personality, so they attempt as much as possible to avoid the issue altogether -- sometimes this happens by not even considering that there is such an issue. The most obvious first-known example of this tendency, of course, is the famous "Venus" of Willendorf figurine (Vienna, Naturhistorisches Museum, ca. 30,000-25,000 B.C., Hartt, fig. 1.) and others of that genre, where the resulting generalization of the figure -- its abject anonymity -- is likely the consequence of the artist's intent to represent only those attributes associated with fertility, fecundity and generation. In a word: for such topics, the general is more functional than the specific. These certainly are fetish objects. In the reduction to idealization and generality such images become totemic. The typical soft-core pornographic image and other types of visual erotica tend to make this point clearly: Drawings by an illustrator named Vargas, for instance, which used to appear regularly in Playboy Magazine (and are now undergoing a renaissance of sorts), never depict individuals, and never go further than representing stereotypical emotion. Bodies exist only for what they reveal, and, for that matter, for what they don't reveal -- for what they suggest.

The same may almost be said for the erotic drawings of the nineteenth-century draughtsman Felecien Rops, whose erotica embraces (some may say "manipulates") the allegorical vocabulary of classical antiquity and traditional Christianity, but who uncharacteristically peeps into the everyday erotic practices of modern life with an interest and eye that rivals Degas' in observation and perhaps Daumier's in its ability to relay irony and sarcasm, but without appearing to be critical. But, for the most part, the Western Tradition's failure to seek out the personal in representations having to do with sex may be attributed less to our inbred discomfort with the theme and more to the Western need to speak symbolically and generically rather than directly. Direct speech in this area is used for caricature and social criticism. Often, we are happier to see ourselves as types, to be understood as exemplars of a class than to be taken as individuals. By taking on an image such as the Mona Lisa that has achieved the status of having an iconic, instantly recognizable meaning, people are allowed either not to bother asserting their unique individuality, or are given opportunity to seek harbor behind a stereotype.

By donning the Mona Lisa bathing suit, its wearer therefore partakes in a ritual act that serves two symbolic purposes: she takes part in the sexual/erotic beach ritual defined by society, yet is able to hide behind the mask of Mona, which to our minds is neither sexual in the base sense, nor erotic. Rather the image of the Mona Lisa speaks of the other side of sex -- of child rearing, of loving tenderness, of motherly affections, of human contact and society, in short of the kind of love that lives as the hidden implication within the first. It is the other side of erotic love and the other side of physical alluring beauty, that speaks of the love that precedes generation and regeneration. [Note.]

[Note: While these ideas are not new, and certainly not new when used to explain the Mona Lisa, this writer can never forget when he first heard some of them expressed: in lectures on Hellenistic Sculpture delivered in the autumn of 1968 by Peter H. Von Blanckenhagen at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. No one better than he could extract human tension and content from cold sculpture depicting seemingly routine themes.]

Water, of course, is a common motif in depictions of Venus (or, rather, in images Aphrodite romanized). Hellenistic images of the goddess frequently show her washing her hair, fixing her toilette, or rising from the waters from which she was born. The Aphrodite who rises out of the ocean in Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus (Florence, Uffizi) (fig. 30b.) is not the image of Venus as Mother, but rather the mysterious image of Venus who stands for the Creation of Beauty -- a beauty that is not sexual, not erotic, not motherly, but rather, a beauty of form so intense, so revealing, so "out-there," that it must be counterbalanced, as it is by Botticelli by indicating just a hint of modesty. At the same time, it is a representation of a classical myth -- one that speaks of birth and undying renewable fecundity (Venus was conceived in the sea by sperm from Saturn's severed genitals.). It represents the procreative force of nature in the larger sense -- in a cosmic if not an altogether human dimension. But as a twentieth-century icon, many of these meanings are now functionally lost and are engulfed by the painting's new meaning: the birth of a feminine ideal -- an ideal acquired by virtue of its celebrity as a "star" in the world of art. No longer the symbol of birth and generation, Botticelli's Venus has become a mannequin useful for selling clothing and Slimfast.

It should not be surprising, then, to see that the bathing-suit catalogue photographer chose to pose his model in a position quite close to Botticelli's -- even reproducing Venus' far-away unfocused gaze. The automatic association of the female with water and beauty may have been too much for the photographer to resist -- too common a type to avoid. Although the idea to use Botticelli's pose could have been automatic -- instinctive, even--, could the presence of the Mona Lisa on the bathing-suit have suggested to the photographer that Botticelli's other theme -- the theme of perpetual generation -- birth from the waters of life -- could be reunited with the image and communicated through use of the Mona Lisa? Most likely this catalogue photographer did not think deeply about his subject. We might think that any connection implied that links Botticelli's Venus to Leonardo's Mona Lisa is merely fortuitous. Indeed, such a juxtaposition -- Botticelli's image of newly ripened sexuality against Leonardo's coyly inviting woman of mature maternity, while logical, is not a natural one. To find among the ever more numerous pieces of monalisiana, then, the image of Botticelli's Venus reformed into the face of the Mona Lisa (fig. 31c.), in the current context must indicate that at some level an underlying thematic relationship exists between the kind of image signified by Botticelli's Venus and that of the Mona Lisa -- their commonality, the theme of generation and regeneration, as it turns out -- two sides of the same coin -- is quite apt for this image. The oval portrait of Botticelli's Venus qua Mona Lisa itself is related to the theme of regeneration: it comes from an advertisement used to sell beauty-cream.

[Note: The exhibition catalogue for a monalisiana exhibit at Cornell University, "Oh, Mona!: Biography of an Icon," April 6 - August 15, 2002, Ithica, New York. (Curated by Nancy Green), supplies the proper attribution for this work. It is a detail from a painting by Paul Giavanopoulos (American, born Greece, 1939) Mona Lisa, 1939 coll. Iris and Michael B. Lewiston, Birmington, MI. Illustrated on front cover of exhibition brochure.]

Mona Lisa Portraits: From the Universal to the Mundane
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When myths or themes, though ancient, still have currency, when they remain useful tools with which to explain the events, persons and subject matters of daily life, one expects to find them both coarsely and subtlety woven into the frequently ratty fabric of everyday life and imagery. Portraiture, perhaps because the highest of its goals are so illusive, or because the need to bow to fashion tends to undermine portraiture's want to express the permanent and universal as manifest in the individual, has frequently held fast to the crutch of conventional metaphor, symbolism and self-conscious reference to broaden the context in which its subjects are presented. Without surprise, we discover that the Mona Lisa has served as the point of reference in many portraits. Some of these have been cited above, others will be encountered below. Typically, when a portrait is fashioned in the form of the Mona Lisa, the famous painting is being used to signify some attribute of the subject such as his [sic] or her ubiquity, celebrity or self-importance, as for example in the image of Miss Piggy cited earlier, or the portrait of Hilary Rodham Clinton as the Mona Lisa, in which the face of Hilary Clinton was photographically merged with the Mona Lisa. But Hilary in this pastiche has no dimension, there is no ostensible reason, not from her own history, nor from the persona created for her by the media, to cast her in the roll of the Mona Lisa. She grins with her public smile out of the familiar setting with an extroverted countenance that seems ill content to remain within the frame or form of the image. How different is the portrait of Monica Lewinski as the Mona Lisa that appeared the week of this writing on the front cover of the New Yorker magazine. Ms. Lewinsky was chosen as the New Yorker Woman of the Year. The accompanying editorial by David Remnick explains why Monica was paired with the Mona Lisa:

Republican managers of the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton want the Senators to "look into the eyes" of Monica Lewinsky. "And so, like the crowds at the Louvre who come each day to stare through a sheet of bulletproof glass and into the inscrutable eyes of 'La Gioconda,' the lawmakers [if the Republican Managers have their way] will finally have their chance to encounter her ..." ... "In the meantime, a hundred senators and the entire impeachment-addled country keep gazing at her image -- our Gioconda. In the iconography of the Madonna, an enigmatic smile hinted at the greatest of all secrets ("I am pregnant by God"); less clear is the meaning of the same enigmatic expression on a secular face. In Monica we have taken to seeing anything or anyone we care to; the innocent brought low, the sexual independent, the retrograde temptress. She is everywhere, She suits all interpretations. She is featured in everything from law journals to porn zines. ..." "But Monica is the woman of secrets who no longer has any. Her eyes are not windows but mirrors, and what we see in them is awful. Yet we go on staring."

Mr. Remnick sees the irony in juxtaposing Monica and the Mona Lisa. And he gets it all about right, from their celebrity, to the fact that the Mona Lisa is an empty vessel that can hold almost any meaning, to the way Monica seems to imply that an innate connection exists between the Madonna, hiding the secret of her pregnancy, and her secular counterpart, the Mona Lisa, who according to legend is also pregnant. Renaissance Madonnas are not just hiding joy, of course; frequently they are also contemplating sorrow, for they know the foreordained fate of the child they are to bear. And so it is in the New Yorker's Monica, Ms. Lewinsky's expression tells of her knowledge and of its consequences. Bitter fruit: having tasted of the tree of life and having been expelled from the garden with an obligation to keep the faith.

[Note: The New Yorker cover is not the first instance in which Monica Lewinsky was compared to the Mona Lisa:

• On June 4, 1998, Camille Paglia appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," where she links Monica Lewinsky and the Mona Lisa as follows: "Paglia is asked to comment on another news story. She picks out a *photo* of Monica surrounded by three lawyers. (It's a revealing moment -- she makes her comments on what the photo says -- it contains as much or more information than the accompanying article.) "I just find this a bit tiresome: Monica Lewinsky floating along with her Mona Lisa smile around these older men. I think feminism has been set back by this imagery of a young girl." She's always been with father figures, and silent. "She's like a geisha, being dragged around, always with the men! She's perfectly capable of making decisions on her own. She doesn't have to be this prisoner, this odalisque, that she has been in the past few months." (http://www.teleport.com/~polettij/Paglia/c-span.html LINK DEAD 4/02). What does Paglia mean by saying Monica has a "Mona Lisa smile?" Does she mean that it is overt, prominent, or does she mean that it is concealing some secret?
• "Washington, D.C., April 2 [1998] - The owners of Kramerbooks and Afterwards, a Washington bookstore, announced at a press conference here today that they would refuse to comply with a subpoena issued by Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr that seeks information about the book purchases of Mona [sic] Lewinsky." As quoted from PWNA: The essential link: http://www.periodical.org/apr98.html LINK DEAD 4/2002. In this instance a reporter's slip of the tongue fused the name "Mona" to Lewinsky.
• Preceding the New Yorker cover is a Mona/Monica fusion that appeared on a Spanish website dedicated to Monica Lewinski. This site places Ms. Lewinsky into a variety of famous works of art, the Mona Lisa included. The result is closer to the Hilary Clinton pastiche than to the New Yorker Cover. See further: Mona Lisa Link File: ]

The Monica/Mona fusion highlights the mismatch between Monica's secular persona and the idealized, nearly religious perfection with which Leonardo cast the Mona Lisa. But, for Leonardo there are no absolutes, only the gentle haze that eats at the edges of hard personality as surely as his sfumato erodes the edges of tangible objects. Remnick, knowingly or not, has reversed the novelist Dimitri Merejkowski's famous picture of Leonardo gazing into the eyes of Mona Lisa, restriking the figure into an invention of his own. Compare the following with Remnick's last statement, above.

Monna Lisa gazed straight into his eyes with a smile that was filled with mystery, like still waters, perfectly clear, but so deep that no matter how much the gaze plunged within it, no matter how it probed, it could not see the bottom,--she was smiling upon him with his own smile.

(Dimitri Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, tr. New York, The Modern Library, 1928, p. 510-11.)

Instead of reflecting the unfathomable mind of the artist, her eyes -- Monica's eyes -- now reflect what our civilization and our hypocrisy has done to her -- they reflect, Remnick says, ourselves. This, of course, is one theme of the paper before you: The Mona Lisa (as a type) is held up to our society as a mirror with which to reflect its pomposities, uncertainties, presumptions, surely, but also its longing for things now thought unattainable. Monica in the New Yorker cover, like Mona the icon, is overexposed -- too familiar -- and is quickly becoming an empty vessel for an empty metaphor. Today, the image of the Mona Lisa is nearly a blank, except for some threads of original and acquired meanings that insist in winding their way through the interwoven modern imagery; but for the most part, the Mona matrix is ready to take on the shape of our own dreams and issues. Monica, too, is a blank -- a public blank -- only the outlines and a few lurid facts of her story are known -- along with images from news-clips repeated over the last year ad nauseum. The talk-shows to come, undoubtedly will try to peek inside this sphinx. But, we don't know her secrets and may never know them. And it is the same with the Mona Lisa. We may never know her secrets because they are not her secrets; they are ours -- we project them into the icon that is the Mona Lisa. Today's Mona is a mask -- a surrogate of ourselves -- intended to hide whom we are and offer, instead, a catalogue of formalized personalities.

The rest of the story rightly belongs to the politics of our time, and less to our subject. But I want to end with a conjecture regarding the choice of the Mona Lisa to represent Monica Lewinsky. For someone who is primarily known for her role in the sexual politics of our time, the choice to depict Monica as the Mona Lisa seems peculiar because the image conveys no allusion to the erotic content of the story, but rather connotes values that we all cherish as life-enhancing and life-fulfilling. Without knowing who was depicted on the cover of New Yorker Magazine, there would be no reason to think that the subject matter entailed an illicit sexual liaison of national proportions. These days we tend to think that the truth of things has as much to do with how it is presented as it does with indelible facts -- and imagery serves to mold the truth better than anything else. (We call this "spin.") With this in mind, what does it mean when Monica Lewinsky's image is melded into the Mona Lisa's. The final irony may be the best irony: that on a level we find difficult to fathom, Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa may be a more genuine statement, more fitting, than the disingenuous image of Hilary Rodham as the Mona Lisa.

[Note: Two additional examples of monalisiana help explain the use of the Mona Lisa as a pattern for portraiture. The first of these, not a portrait, though, is a coloring page for children. Unlike picture puzzles or paint-by-numbers, there there is no "correct" way to fill in the picture. Mona is a blank to be completed as the child sees fit; the consequences are always subjective. The second comes from what is really a silly story that someone mounted on a web-page with very little explanation or identification except that it is the page of "Tha Gurk Clan.". The narrative explains that a sitter for a portrait by Leonardo is told to wear the mask of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo paints the Mona Lisa, ignoring the human beneath. Without attempting to comprehend the point of the artist, I think we can understand this to mean that the Mona Lisa serves as a universal mask for personalities, and that these people (meaning, all of us) cannot be known other than through the mask.]

If Monica Lewinsky, Hilary Clinton, Salvador Dali and even Miss Piggy can appear as the Mona Lisa, why not everyman. Indeed, the service that created the Hilary-as-Mona portrait (Masterpuss, Eugene, Oregon.) advertises that it will produce a customized image of anyone as the Mona Lisa. Just send them a photograph. In a similar, but less technologically advanced mode, tourists can have themselves photographed within a copy of the masterwork. The photographer Vincent Raynal has captured this service in an amusing and surreal image that shows the painting montage being transported with the carrier's arm poking out where the face ought to be. In a variant, Ennio Marchetto, "an Italian actor who takes his inspiration from commedia dell' arte and Walt Disney," uses a Mona Lisa cutout as a set piece for his touring show.

In so many ways, but large and small, by allusion and by direct superimposition, the image of the Mona Lisa affixes itself to all kinds of personality, celebrity and common man. More than a tired cliché of our time, these fusions that carry our mundane existences into the sanctified halls of fame, and into a time when we can fantasize we lead lives of significance serve as testimonial to our own insecurity and to our own doubt that we have power over our destinies.

[Note: On Marchetto, see The New York Times, April 2, 1999. Weekend Section E, p.1]

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