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Although 500 years have passed since Leonardo da Vinci left us (2 May 1519), we are still questioning the reasons for the allure of his most famous work, the Gioconda, better known as the Mona Lisa.
Neuroscience has unveiled one answer among many.
The fame of the painting:
It might be not a coincidence that more than 85% of people nominated the Gioconda as one of the most famous paintings in the world. The mysterious identity of the subject, the enigmatic smile, the penetrating gaze are just some elements of its timeless charm.
The portrait of the Mona Lisa continues to create a recurring set of studies, publications and curiosities of what has been a true icon of popular culture for a long time (Cover of the magazine Epoca, Italy 1957).
Seeing the Mona Lisa at the Musée du Louvre is an experience in its self. The immensity of the building, the glass pyramids of Ieoh Ming Pei that welcome you to the beating heart of the museum, the grand entrance. From there 5 thousand visitors a year (pre-covid-19 era) are sorted in the three wings of the museum, some aware and some unaware of where they are going. Only one thing is sure at all, they will not leave the museum before seeing the Mona Lisa. The painting has become the very symbol of the Louvre, universally known and reproduced. She, the Mona Lisa, is famous and her name is legend.
It seems that a visit to the most famous museum in the world has no value if you do not stop for a few seconds to see Leonardo’s famous lady. If you’ve been there, you will have queued in the first-floor room and been kept away by security to see it behind thick glass. Yet even in that crowd we are there for a few moments to consciously admire (or perhaps not) the portrait of a young woman who lived 500 years ago in Florence. Admiration and frenzy, in the short time of taking a picture in the perhaps unique event of being there. On an evening visit to the Louvre, you may be lucky enough to see it without the crowds and you may have time to test the famous gaze that follows you everywhere. Leonardo perfectly calculated every effect of wonder. The penetrating gaze of the Mona Lisa captures ours from afar, with a perfect eye-shadow that is the envy of makeup artist. What is notoriously surprising for many is the small size of the portrait compared to the enormous fame. Now to explain the first myth.
Why so big yet so small?
The portrait is actually slightly smaller than its given measurements (only 77×53 cm). A half-length portrait of a woman in the foreground with a hilly landscape behind it. Leonardo thought of it as a close-up view. A private, intimate and deeply contemplative portrait. The dimensions are similar to real life; therefore a few seconds are not enough to grasp the deeper details, condensed on the canvas by the undisputed genius of the Renaissance.
Going back to the question. Why does this canvas attract more than 5 million visitors a year? And who is Mona Lisa? Surely over the centuries the mystery behind the Mona Lisa’s face has stratified. Art critics have expressed themselves copiously to find who the face belongs to. Leonardo’s famous contemporary biographer, Giorgio Vasari, had already identified her as Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo (and so named La Gioconda). Recent archival data have made it possible to trace the real woman’s profile and the events behind the portrait. Nevertheless, her identity is not essential to understand her eternal charm.
Facts to fame:
1. Leonardo’s infinite devotion: Leonardo worked on the portrait from about 1503 for four years on several occasions, until he decided not to be parted from the canvas for the remaining ten years of his life (1519). The Mona Lisa followed him from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Milan, and then to the court of the King of France, Francis I, and remained there to this day (Napoleon Bonaparte is not to blame this time!).
2. Admiration and copies: Incredibly, the Mona Lisa aroused “vast fame” since the seventeenth century within Italy, France and England, as evidenced by the numerous high-quality pictorial copies, fervent testimonies and false attributions that had appeard. These were then overshadowed by art critics for about a century, but never completely forgotten.
3. The theft of the Mona Lisa: the famous act of 1911, by a patriotic Vincenzo Peruggia who wanted to bring it back “to its homeland” played a fundamental role in cementing the attention of a wider audience (and not only of connoisseurs) aiming the spotlight of a nascent popular culture on the shy smile of the Mona Lisa.
4. Its priceless value $$$: Following a controversal loan request of the Mona Lisa to the USA by the First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962, the value of the Mona Lisa was estimated to be 100 million dollars ($ 800 million today), making it the most expensive works of art in the world.’
- 5. The mystery: In 1995 a New York artist, Lillian Schwartz proposed a theory that became the subject of a cover story for the Scientific American magazine. She stated the Mona Lisa was nothing more than a disguided self-portrait of Leonardo, based on physiognomic similarities with one of the most famous portraits of an elderly Leonardo displayed in Turin, fuelling intrigue and mystery. The last theory dates back to 2015 when a private multispectral lighting engineer announces the presence of another face beneath the surface of pictorial layers.
Experts from the Louvre Museum have not confirmed these theories, while Martin Kemp, Leonardo’s greatest scholar in Oxford, reaffirms the genesis of a single portrait used in multiple drafts and changed as it was used in Leonardo’s pictorial process.
Emotions, mirror neurons and the aesthetic experience
For Kemp, Leonardo in the portrait of the Mona Lisa played on one of our basic human instincts: the irresistible tendency to react to facial signs, that is physiognomy.
But how can a painting on a canvas convey emotions?
One of Leonardo’s objectives was precisely to elicit an emotional reaction in the viewer through the art of pictorial fiction. He claimed that whoever looks at a portrait tends to unconsciously project himself into the painted subject, so much so that he identifies himself as the subject. Before Leonardo, the Renaissance theorist, Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise on painting (1435) urged artists to make maximum use of this effect. Leonardo himself in his diaries considered a work a success only when he managed to provoke a noticable [UK2] reaction in the spectator.
“Farai le figure in tale atto, il quale sia sufficiente a dimostrare quello che la figura ha nell’animo; altrimenti la tua arte non fia laudabile” (Ms. A, f. 199, 1490-1492 ca.) (You will make the figures in this act, which is sufficient to demonstrate what the figure has in mind; otherwise your art will not be laudable)
It seems that these Renaissance ideas were indeed plausible. Forerunners of the modern neurobiological discovery of empathy.
Now entering gingerly into the scientific realm, I follow the theory of Stefan Klein, physicist and philosopher of Munich, on the artist as a neuroscientist. Neuroscience studies the nervous system in various fields. Research has made it possible to isolate a “class” or group of cells of the motor cerebral cortex that are activated while we observe others in action, called Mirror Neurons. An exceptional discovery made in 1992 by the Italian team of the CNR of Parma, led by the neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti (Oscar winner of neuroscience).
Mirror neurons
The principle in brief: some classes of nerve cells have the function of controlling the muscles of our body, for example the impulse to curl the lips in a smile or in an expression of pain. Others, mirror neurons activate exactly with the same signal as motor neurons when we observe others being happy or sad. As if we have those feelings ourselves, the mirror neurons reflect the expressions of others like a mirror, empathizing the visual inputs of movements in our expression. Basically, we feel like smiling when we see someone smiling. Has this ever happened to you?
This discovery made it possible to clarify the complex mechanism of empathy, followed by multidisciplinary applications, including visual art. In 2007, the Rizzolatti team published an experiment of mirror neurons to demonstrate the biological basis of the experience of “beauty” in art. (Great!) One result was that the observation of the beauty of classical art activates the mirror neurons of the emotional areas of the brain, expressing itself in a particular state called the aesthetic experience. A project on this is currently being carried out by Doctor Cinzia Di Dio and her research team from the Catholic University of Milan. The neurobiologist Semir Zeki [UK3] of the University College of London, pioneer of modern Visual Science, exploring the brain of the artists in his book Inner Vision (1999), affirms that great figures like Leonardo were also neurologists, as they were capable of unconsciously understanding the functions of the visual brain.
Therefore, Leonardo was interested in the processes of the origin of emotions and related facial expressions, which emerged in his studies half a millennium before modern neurology. Thanks to this intuition, he managed to paint figures so convincing as to provoke an unparalleled emotional engagement from the viewer.
Raphael’s admiration
The first to marvel the Mona Lisa was the young Raphael who probably saw the portrait at Leonardo’s workshop in Florence,as revealed by his drawing dated to 1504. That sketch of the young Raphael is reflected in the poses of two of his later works: The Lady with the unicorn and the Portrait of Maddalena Strozzi-Doni. At the time he was just twenty years old, probably sensed the Leonardesque innovation of the three-quarters pose, and perhaps inspired by the Flemish art circulating as drawings and works at the Mantuan court. Although Raphael’s indisputable pictorial talent is in portraits, such as the Lady with the unicorn, it has never achieved the fame of the Mona Lisa, failing to arouse admiration in posterity.
Raphael portrayed the woman as he saw her, idealizing beauty but without going beyond what is immediately visible. His artistic understanding of the young woman ends at the level of a pure portrait. What was beyond the image and in the observer’s mind was of little interest to Raphael. Therefore, in the portrait we only see what the artist wanted to show us, a beautiful but lifeless face. Leonardo instead managed to penetrate the surface of the work. The Mona Lisa “lives” – says Martin Kemp, – “she reacts to us, and we cannot help but respond”.
The imperfect face of Lisa
Nonetheless, the Mona Lisa is not perfect,her physiognomy reveals a lot of what has been carefully concealed. We note that the face is actually asymmetrical. For example, the left corner of the mouth is higher and the shadow of the left eye is more pronounced.
Each side represents a different state, one more serious and the other smiling. Modern science reports that facial asymmetry is dictated by the brain divided into two hemispheres that control the two mirror parts of the body. The left side of the brain controls the muscles of the right side of the face and vice versa. Since the right hemisphere is more directly responsible for the process of emotions, feelings are expressed more markedly on the left side of the face.
The extraordinary thing is that Leonardo deduced this particular physiognomy of expressions thanks to his methodical observations. Studies that he then applied to make the face of the Mona Lisa inscrutable, exaggerating the natural difference of the two parts of the face and thus creating an extremely enigmatic, if not hyper realistic face.
Given that the asymmetry is accentuated when you want to mask sensations, what did Lisa Gheraldini want to conceal? It seems that Leonardo did everything possible to mask the mystery. There are no marked lines on the face, the colour transition between the various parts between light and shadow are perfectly balanced. The so-called Leonardo nuanced effect -chiaroscuro- is a technique that developed in the early Renaissance, where translucent and opaque layering creates the illusion that the gaze of the Mona Lisa moves with us (this is the myth). Our gaze glides on colours without being able to cling to any point of light or sign. Leonardo knew how a slight change of shadows could change an entire expression. We see it in the corner of the mouth, raised on one side and lower on the other, a veil of sadness as if Lisa Gherardini had spent weeks hiding a devastating secret. The puzzle remains, but if our mirror neurons went into action in that room in the Louvre, we would probably be overwhelmed by centuries of emotions.
Undoubtedly Leonardo’s intuitions are based on his particular ability to manipulate perceptions.
Direct observation was the fulcrum of his knowledge, albeit aware of the limits of human perception. He did not take anything for granted, as if he always saw things for the first time, he was fascinated by the constant change of nature. Leonardo experimented with the use of optical instruments from the beginning of his training,designing lenses, concave mirrors and machines for channelling light. Discoveries that he incorporated with skill in painting. Once again, he had hit a biological explanation of visual acuity.
The last deception between space and light
In the portrait of the Mona Lisa, the result is of enormous visual depth, the figure emerges almost incorporeal from the background, suspended in the distant landscape. The light that hits the Mona Lisa is instead steady on the face, and plays with the fingers of the hand in the foreground. But pictorial and constructive elements conceal a true visual deception designed by Leonardo.
The woman is seated in a loggia, note the detail hinted at by the base of columns in the corners of the painting. The lady should be backlit. Instead she is illuminated in front from the top left edge of the painting.
In this portrait Leonardo used the law of optics in a way so perfect as to correct the light in an imperceptible illusion. It doesn’t bother us. We simply accept that the woman seems more real than reality itself.
Leonardo painted the picture not to be realistic but to create an alternativereality. He did not invent the perspective, but he was the first to understand the reasons for these phenomena and apply them in his works in an incomparable virtuosity. The Mona Lisa is therefore part of a moment of maximum experimentation on optics and how the incidence of light alters the visibility of things. When the portrait began in 1503, Leonardo was 51 years old, at the height of his studies and as a legacy of his experience.
The effect created by Leonardo comes from the awareness that the work is not completed on the canvas but in the eye of the observer themselves. / herself-or himself.
The enigma of the Mona Lisa … is Leonardo, the visionary, the artist scientist, who dug deep, wondering how an image takes shape in the eye and what feelings it arouses in the beholder. I would say that perhaps he managed to arouse a 500-year emotion.
What is certain is that on my next visit to the Louvre I will spend as much time as possible observing it, and maybe who knows, my mirror neurons may activate to make me feel like the Mona Lisa. Observed by millions of visitors, behind a glass in a room on the first floor of the Musée ’du Louvre.
Fin.
Ps. I would like to thank my friend and museum explore companion Umut for his support and editing of the english version of my article.
Dietro l'Immagine 