Do you know about a few details that unlocks the mystery behind the Mona Lisa?
It was in 1503 that Leonardo Da Vinci first painted the ‘Mona Lisa’ the most famous piece of art in the world. However, there are some things in this picture that are so obvious you never really notice them. For example, how many of us have ever consciously noted the object in the painting that is closer to us than any other – the chair on which the mysterious woman sits? Never mind that the piece of furniture is the only thing that Leonardo's sitter grips in her hand (she's literally pointing at it with every finger she has), the chair must surely be the single most neglected aspect of the otherwise over-stared-at icon. Hiding in plain sight, it may also be the arrow that points the way to the work's deepest meanings. Here is then providing a few insights that should help in unlocking the mythical aura that surrounds this world famous painting.
The undiscovered centre of the myth that surrounds the Mona Lisa:
Moreover, not everyone, however, has been content to locate the centre of Mona Lisa's magnetising mystique in her enigmatic grin. The Victorian writer Walter Pater believed it was the "delicacy" with which her hands and eyelids are rendered that transfix and hypnotise us into believing that the work possesses preternatural power. "We all know the face and hands of the figure," he observed in an article on Da Vinci in 1869, "in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea". Pater proceeds to meditate on the Mona Lisa in such a singularly intense way that in 1936 the Irish poet William Butler Yeats found himself compelled to seize a sentence from Pater's description, break it up into free-verse lines, and install them as the opening poem in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which Yeats was then compiling.
The symbolism of flowing bodies seen in the Mona Lisa picture:
Flanked on either side by bodies of flowing water that the artist has ingeniously positioned in such a way as to suggest that they are aspects of his sitter's very being, Da Vinci's subject has a strangely submarine quality to her that is accentuated by the algae green dress she wears – an amphibious second skin that has only grown murkier and darker with time. Pivoting her stare slightly to her left to meet ours, Mona Lisa is poised upon not just any old bench or stool, but a deep-seated perch known popularly as a pozzetto chair. Meaning "little well", the pozzetto introduces a subtle symbolism into the narrative that is as revealing as it is unexpected.
The symbolism behind the chair on which Mona Lisa appears to be sitting:
As with all visual symbols employed by Leonardo, the pozzetto chair is multivalent and serves more than merely to link Mona Lisa with the artist's well-known fascination with the hydrological forces that shape the Earth. The subtle insinuation of a "little well" in the painting as the very channel through which Mona Lisa emerges into consciousness repositions the painting entirely in cultural discourse. No longer is this a straightforwardly secular portrait but something spiritually more complex. Portrayals of women "at the well" are a staple throughout Western art history. Old Testament stories of Eliezar meeting Rebekah at a well and of Jacob meeting Rachel at the well went on to become especially popular in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, as everyone from Bartolomé Esteban Murillo to Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to William Holman Hunt tried their hand at one or other of the narratives.
When it comes to Mona Lisa however, Da Vinci confounds the tradition, and suggests instead a merging of material and spiritual realms – a blurring of the here and hereafter – into a shared plane of eternal emergence. In other words, as per Da Vinci's enthralling narrative, Mona Lisa is herself a miraculous surge of "living water", serenely content in the knowledge of her own raging infinitude.
