Aspect Art | art history, info & news

Ah, the Mona Lisa. She been one of the most inspirational women in history and we don’t even really know if she was real or even a woman. The most popular theory and the most probable one as well is that the subject of the portrait was Mona Lisa, the wife of the rich silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo. However, it has been suggested that it is a portrait of da Vinci’s mother and also that it is a self portrait.

Regardless of whom the true subject of the painting is, the most endearing and enigmatic feature of the Mona Lisa is her smile. This smile has been talked about and studied for centuries and the reason for it still eludes us. The most recent attempt at determining the mystery behind the famous smile has been to run the portrait through a computer program that analyzes emotion based on facial features such as the curve of the mouth. According to this study, Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry. Wow, what a mix?

Now to the real reason behind the mysterious smile. It is simply because the smile seems to disappear and then re-appear right before your very eyes. Or, according to a new theory offered by Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Margaret Livingstone, it doesn’t really change; it is simply an effect of eye movement. When we look at the painting and our eyes move from one aspect of it to another, the smile will disappear and re-appear depending on the shadows, etc…

This theory isn’t all that surprising when you consider the incredible scientific, anatomical, and artistic genius of da Vinci. If anyone could have pulled this of it was him. However, there is at least one person out there who is convinced it is a self-portrait. Dr. Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs digitized the Mona Lisa and his self-portrait and then superimposed them. The facial features lined up perfectly.

We may never know who posed for the famous portrait and it is less likely that we will ever know what is behind the enigmatic smile, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that da Vinci did what artists dream of doing. He created a piece of art that has brought feeling and joy to millions of people. If you visit Paris you can stand in line for hours to get a mere 15 seconds to look at it and take a picture. This doesn’t seem very practical, but considering millions of people do it every year, there must be something about that smile…