Whats more mysterious?

Mona Lisa,

Her Smile or her creator!

http://leonardo-da-vinci.paintings.name/
Few paintings are so well known as Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and explaining her popularity is one
thing
we
shall
try
to
do
on
this
page.
Through the ages people have tried to explain Mona Lisa's smile and some people have
wondered why the Mona Lisa is such a reputable artwork anyway. Please allow me to try to
approach this question from an artist's point of view, arguments which may (or may not) have
been put forward before. Of course this text doesn't make a dent in the established theories, it's
just a webpage.

There may have been greater painters, even than Da Vinci, but maybe Da Vinci was the
greatest portraitist of all time. No other painter has been able to express the facial subtleties of
the human character with such startling accuracy as Da Vinci did. This is especially clear in
paintings like the "Lady with the Ermine". Authors describe her as "the unspoiled, young
Cecilia Galleriana...with her beauty and virtues". In spite of the admiration that Da Vinci
seemed to feel and the position she occupied at Ludovico il Moro's court in Milan, the way he
portrayed her is particularly realistic, almost mundane.

On the one hand she portrayed her as a saint and higher being, on the other there is the
somewhat insecure young woman, at least while posing for Da Vinci. And perhaps we may
note a touch of conceit. Da Vinci's discerning eye spared no-one, in some cases resulting in
sobering views of the human experience, and there lay Da Vinci's genius as a portraitist. He
captured every corner of the human character, good and bad. We may assume however, that
he intended Galleriana's portrait as a tribute, look at the elegance of her right hand.
Returning to the Mona Lisa, some people wonder why it is that her facial expression seems
to change depending on the direction from which you look at her.
Given the fact that Da Vinci manages to capture so many different emotions and charactertraits in one painting, it seems natural that every time one looks at the Mona Lisa, one sees
something different, irrespective from which direction the painting is looked at. In that light
her "mysterious smile" seems nothing out of the ordinary. Because it's difficult to view all
the portrayed emotions and aspects of Mona Lisa's personality in one glance, one is left with
a sense of mystery. Now you see this, and then you see something else, leaving the observer
confused.
So what do we see? According to Da Vinci's biographer Vasari, the artist had hired clowns,
singers and bell-ringers in order to amuse Mona Lisa so that she wouldn't get depressed or
bored. It's hard to believe that such a stately portrait would result from such a strange
undertaking, but Mona Lisa certainly looks amused. Her sovereignty is another thing that
catches the eye. As a high class lady she would certainly be expected to be confident, a

mental condition which is all the more convincing if it is entertained in a relaxed manner; the
mellowness of the painting is striking, one can hardly imagine it having been surrounded by
fools and jesters, as suggested above. It's a small step from sovereignty to irony and the latter
is discernible too, look at her right eye (left on the picture). The mouth often tells the truth
about a person, and Mona Lisa's suggests balance, in mood and in personality. This is a
woman that is young, but displays a calm and sobriety normally associated with an elderly
person. Then again, if you look at her differently, you see a young girl with her somewhat
inflated left cheek (right on the picture) and her good-humoured left eye (ditto). The way she
lets her curly hair hang down on her chest and shoulders seems like an attempt to attract the
opposite sex, and by it's manner definitely to be associated with a young woman, while her
dress
is
again
very
sober.
All this and more was Da Vinci able to put into one artwork and there are many such
examples. Vasari's claim about the circus activities to amuse Mona Lisa seems unlikely.
More likely is that Mona Lisa and Da Vinci had a special rapport: they liked each other. She
could look him straight in the eye and feel comfortable. And he could paint this
uncomplicated person in a very direct way. None of her many sides revealed anything
disturbing to him, a "tte tte" that changed the world of art. leonardo-davinci.paintings.name

The Secrets Behind Mona Lisas Smile

Ref:Brian Bixler on April 26, 2014 in Art, Culture, Curiosities, Discoveries, and History
image:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mona-lisassmile-closeup.jpg
image:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mona-lisassmile-closeup.jpg

Source: Creativity Post

It would be easy to blame author Dan Brown and his blockbuster book and subsequent movie,
The Da Vinci Code, for renewed public interest in the mysteries surrounding the worlds most
famous portrait. The novel imagines all sorts of keys in the artists work that unlock mysteries of
the ages. But even before Brown published his fictional tome, Mona Lisa has been an object of
scrutiny for 500 years as scholars have tried to find answers to questions raised by the
masterpiece.

Source: Wikimedia

Researchers are currently lifting and testing bone sets from an Italian convent in hopes of
identifying the remains of Lisa Gherardini, whom many believe to be the portraits subject.
Those involved with the project to exhume her remains and use the skull to reconstruct her face
say it will prove with more certainty that Mona Lisa is who they think she is, the wife of a
Florentine silk merchant. DNA results may be completed as early as June.
image:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mona-lisassmile-salai.jpg
image:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mona-lisassmile-salai.jpg
Source: Wikimedia
There are numerous theories about Mona Lisas identity, and more than a dozen others from Da
Vincis time are thought to have been the sitter for the portrait, including the revered artists male
assistant (and, some say, possible lover), Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, better known as
Sala. Other researchers have even posited that the painting is indeed a self-portrait.
image:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mona-lisassmile-davinci-portrait.jpg

image:
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mona-lisassmile-davinci-portrait.jpg

Can you spot the original? One of many copies of da Vinci's Mona Lisa is housed at
Madrid's Prado Museum. The original appears on the left. Photograph: Jean-Pierre
Muller-Javier Sorian/AFP/Getty Images Ref:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/12/nazis-steal-mona-lisalouvre

Source: New York Post

With Da Vinci himself writing little about the painting, researchers have relied on other clues
instead, including the paintings name, that the woman is Gherardini, wife of Francesco del
Giocondo, who lived near Da Vinci. Scholars explain that the term Monna Lisaor Lady
Lisais how the woman would have been addressed in her time. Moreover, the painting is
called La Gioconda in Italian and La Joconde in French, both meaning a happy or jovial person.
In Italian, though, it could also be a pun on Gherardinis married name.

The story behind Mona Lisas smile

by: Roisin O'Sullivan
Ref: http://www.myparisiantour.com/blog/story_of_mona_lisa_louvre.aspx

There are few works of art in the world that are as well-known or as talked about as Leonardo da
Vincis Mona Lisa in Paris. Despite the immense wealth of treasures in the Louvre, not to
mention the grandeur and history of the building itself, The Mona Lisa portrait is a highlight for
most visitors as well as their main reason for visiting the museum. But what is it about the
Leonardos Mona Lisa that makes it so special that everyone wants to see/steal it? Why does this
painting need to be kept in a bullet proof glass case behind a barrier while other spectacular
works hang defencelessly next to it?
Much of the magic is in the Mona Lisa mystery. No-one really knows for sure why she doesnt
have eyebrows , how da Vinci managed to paint her so that no matter where you stand in a room
her eyes always follow you and most importantly, who she was. Of course there are theories,
hundreds of thousands of them. Some are more outrageous than others like that she is a he or
that the painting is actually of Leonardo himself. Here we look at some of the more popular
theories about the Mona Lisas secrets and try to establish a few truths of the story behind the
smile.
Rumour 1: The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows
Visitors to the Mona Lisa today will notice, usually after some time, that she has a strange look
about her. This is due in part to the fact that she has no facial hair. No eyebrows, no eyelashes,
not even a beard! Historians claim that it was the fashion of the time to shave ones eybrows,
facial hair having been deemed to be unladylike. However, a French engineer called Paschal
Cotte claims that having used a scanner to search the image, he found traces of hair that once
existed there but is gone today possibly through simple aging or over-cleaning.
Rumour 2: She watches you wherever you go

There is a strange and often talked about sensation when viewing the Mona Lisa, of being
watched wherever in the room you are. This is because da Vinci cleverly didnt paint the whites
of her eyes, thereby giving the image a sense of mystery. He also achieved this by leaving the
corners of her eyes and mouth unfinished. Is she smiling or frowning? Different people see
different things in the face in the Mona Lisa just one more reason why she is so special.
Rumour 3: The Mona Lisa was stolen
Accused of kidnapping
Indeed the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 when a staff member, using very low-tech methods,
simply shoved the work of art under his coat and walked out of the Louvre with it. After two
years of searching and accusing people like Pablo Picasso of stealing it, the painting was found
in Italy. As it turns out, worker Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen Leonardos masterpiece because he
believed it belonged at home in Italy, where it was created. He was caught when he tried to sell
the work to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Members of the public have tried to destroy the Mona Lisa a number of times by way of spray
paint, rocks and even an airborne terracotta mug. Hence, the reason why visitors today view it
from the other side of bullet-proof glass.
Rumour 4: The Mona Lisa is Leonardo/his mother/his apprentice/a hermaphrodite
Probably the biggest mystery surrounding the Mona Lisa concerns her identity. Many historians
believe her to be Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo (also known as Monna Lise del Giocondo) in
which case Leonardo was commissioned to produce the piece by her husband. At the time of
writing archaeologists in Italy were digging up a tomb believed to have belonged to del
Giocondo in the hope that DNA testing would allow them to do a facial reconstruction.
The waters are muddied however by the fact that, despite keeping notes on all the rest of his
models and his projects, there are no notes about this particular sitter in Leonardo's diary.
Considering the fact that da Vinci also worked quite quickly on his paintings, people have also
questioned why this one too him so long. Or why he carried it around with him for the rest of his
life, calling it his masterpiece.
Answers to these questions have come thick and fast but it is important to remember that there is
little or no evidence to support any theory one way or another. Some people believe that the
painting is a self-portrait by Leonardo of himself as a woman since the Mona Lisa resembles the
self-portrait he drew of himself. Another development of this theory is that the Mona Lisa is
actually an image of his mother, Caterina, created from memory since she died when he was very
young. This would account for the lack of a sitter and the models plain, unadorned appearance.
That said, it is claimed that Leonardos mother was a creature of extraordinary beauty while the
Mona Lisa is quite plain by the standards of the day.
The sharp contrast between the appearance of the left and right side of the Mona Lisas face has
caused some to wonder if the painting is actually of a hermaphrodite. Meanwhile others say that

it was Leonardos male apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti who posed for the painting. Rumors
have always been rife about da Vincis sexuality, and indeed even during his life there were
questions asked. He doesnt seem to have had any relationships with women although, similarly,
there is no evidence that he had relationships with men either. Accusations that were lodged
against him at the time were dismissed by the town council.
According to one man, the Mona Lisa is a painting of the Man in the Moon, or more specifically
that Leonardo once saw a face in the moon and put it on paper as the Mona Lisa. It seems that
everyone has their own theory about the Mona Lisa which kind of begs the question - if
archaeologists did find the identity of the mysterious lady would it be for the better or for the
worse? Is the fun in the mystery?
Why not pop along to the Louvre yourself and see if you can find anything more behind the
Mona Lisa's mysterious smile.

How THE MYSTERY OF THE MONA LISA'S SMILE WAS SOLVED

In case you haven't heard about Mona Lisa's mysterious smile, here's the story.
When you glance at this famous portrait of an unknown woman, you think you catch a flirtatious
smile hovering on her lips. But when you take a better look, she's barely smiling at all!

The portrait was painted by Leonardo da Vinci about 500 years ago. It was originally called La
Gioconda. This is thought to be the family name of the woman in the portrait, although no one is
quite sure who the mystery woman is; the name Mona Lisa came later.
It's also said that once he'd finished painting it, da Vinci was even more captivated by the portrait
than by the lady herself. Leonardo apparently took the portrait with him on his travels to Milan,
Rome and France.
Now the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre art gallery in France. Every year the picture attracts
millions of visitors who love to stand and ponder the lady's beguiling expression. Is she smiling
at us or not?

Looks can be deceiving.

And the answer is ... "kind of", says Dr Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist from Harvard
Medical School. According to Margaret, when you glance at the portrait, your attention goes first
to Mona Lisa's eyes. And while your eyes are glued on her eyes, you are seeing her mouth in
your peripheral vision. Peripheral vision refers to the fact that you can see things that are not
directly in front of you, but you can't see them very well. Things that are over to the side are
detected by the edges of your retina, which is a less sensitive part of your eye.
The retina is the curved back surface of your eye that is sensitive to light; it's like the film in a
camera. Things that are right in front of you are picked up by the centre of your retina, the fovea.

Optical illusion: how it works.

Peripheral vision is not very good at seeing details but it is good at seeing black and white,
shadows and movements, Because of the shadows around Mona Lisa's cheeks and in the corner
of her mouth you get the impression that you can see the upturn of a smile.
Next, your eyes move to Mona Lisa's mouth. When you look at her mouth directly, the image
forms on your fovea, which is the most sensitive part of your retina. The fovea is where you have
good colour vision (there are lots of cells there that detect colour). However, this part of the
retina does not register shadows well, so it barely registers the shadow on Mona Lisa's cheek and
mouth. And, hey presto, you see her mouth as flat.
So there you go: now you see it, now you don't. And if you're wondering if da Vinci realised as
he painted her smile what an intriguing effect he was creating, well rumour has it, he knew
exactly what he was doing, even though it's taken scientists years to work it out!
By the way, if you're trying to see it for yourself, it helps if you zoom the picture up a fair bit, so
that you can shift your gaze around the portrait.

Ref: Berry Billingsley

http://www.esscont.com/goamazing/articles/z-monalisa.htm

Mona Lisa painting 'contains hidden code'

The numbers and letters are not visible to the human eye but have to be viewed
under a microscope Photo: CORBIS

By Nick Pisa, Rome

Ref:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8197896/Mona-Lisa-painting-containshidden-code.html
Leonardo Da Vinci's 500-year-old Renaissance masterpiece has long been steeped in mystery,
and even today the true identity of the woman with the alluring smile still far from certain.

Now members of Italy's National Committee for Cultural Heritage have revealed that by
magnifying high resolution images of the Mona Lisa's eyes letters and numbers can be seen.
"To the naked eye the symbols are not visible but with a magnifying glass they can clearly be
seen," said Silvano Vinceti, president of the Committee.
In the right eye appear to be the letters LV which could well stand for his name Leonardo Da
Vinci while in the left eye there are also symbols but they are not as defined.
He said: "It is very difficult to make them out clearly but they appear to be the letters CE or it
could be the letter B - you have to remember the picture is almost 500 years old so it is not as
sharp and clear as when first painted.
Secrets of the Dead: The Mona Lisa Mystery,

Ef: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/secrets-dead-mona-lisamystery-tv-review-article-1.1857746

YANNICK BAILLY, Gregory Payan/AP

At left, a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, displayed in Switzerland in

2012. At right, the renowned Mona Lisa.
This new Secrets of the Dead admits we may never know for sure whether Leonardo da Vinci
painted the Mona Lisa twice.
No matter. Its still a great discussion.
We learned in 2012 that a second Mona Lisa may have surfaced, after allegedly being stashed in
private hands for more than 400 years.
A syndicate bought it for a whole lot of money, gambling that it was real.
Those owners gave Secrets of the Dead, which has no dog in the race, virtually full access for
scientific and historical analysis.

25 Secrets of Mona Lisa Revealed

By Jeanna Bryner, Managing Editor | October 18, 2007

Images
of
the
Mona
Credit: PRNewsFoto/RYP Australia.

Lisa

reveal

hidden

details

in

infrared

and

visible

light.

Every year, about 6 million people visit the Muse du Louvre in Paris to see Leonardo Da
Vinci's famous portrait, Mona Lisa. An oil painting on poplar wood, the portrait was started
by Da Vinci in 1503 and took about four years to complete, although he is believed to have
continued working on it even after that. For centuries afterward, his talent and ingenuity
sparked many debates and a multitude of theories in an effort to uncover the mysteries behind
the Mona Lisa. The two biggest mysteries are her identity and the nature of her smile.
Who is Mona Lisa?

Many questions arose over the years as to the true identity of the woman in the portrait. The
Italians call her La Gioconda, which means "the lighthearted woman." The French version,
La Joconde, carries a similar meaning, provoking many thoughts and theories about the Mona
Lisa. Most experts now believe that she is Lisa del Giocondo, the third wife of a wealthy
Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo.
The title Mona Lisa is discussed in Da Vinci's biography, written and published by Giorgio
Vasari in 1550. Vasari identified Lisa del Giocondo as the subject of the painting and pointed
out that mona is commonly used in place of the Italian word madonna, which could be
translated into English as "madam." Hence, the title Mona Lisa simply means "Madam Lisa."
In addition, a note written by an Italian government clerk named Agostino Vespucci in 1503
identified Lisa del Giocondo as the subject of the painting.
Still, some experts believe that Lisa del Giocondo actually was the subject of another
painting, leaving the identity of the woman in Mona Lisa in question. One popular theory
suggests that she is the Duchess of Milan, Isabella of Aragon. Da Vinci was the family painter
for the Duke of Milan for 11 years and could very well have painted the Duchess as the Mona
Lisa.
Other researchers have stated that the painting could depict a mistress of Giuliano de' Medici,
who reigned in Florence from 1512 to 1516, or various other women. A more recent thought
is that it is the feminine version of Da Vinci himself. Digital analysis has revealed that Da
Vinci's facial characteristics and those of the woman in the painting are almost perfectly
aligned with one another.
How Does She Smile?

The enigmatic smile of the woman in the painting has been the source of inspiration for many
and a cause for desperation in others. In 1852, Luc Maspero, a French artist, jumped four
floors to his death from a hotel room in Paris. His suicide note explained that he preferred

death after years of struggling to understand the mystery behind the woman's smile.
When discussing the mystery behind the smile, art experts often refer to a painting technique
called sfumato, which was developed by Da Vinci. In Italian, sfumato means "vanished" or
"smoky," implying that the portrait is ambiguous and blurry, leaving its interpretation to the
viewer's imagination. This technique uses a subtle blend of tones and colors to produce the
illusion of form, depth and volume.
The human eye consists of two regions: the fovea, or central area, and the surrounding
peripheral area. The fovea recognizes details and colors and reads fine print, and the
peripheral area identifies motion, shadows and black and white. When a person looks at the
painting, the fovea focuses on her eyes, leaving the peripheral area on her mouth. Peripheral
vision is less accurate and does not pick up details, so the shadows in her cheekbones
augment the curvature of her smile.
When the viewer looks directly at the woman's mouth, however, the fovea does not pick up
the shadows, and the portrait no longer appears to be smiling. Therefore, the appearance and
disappearance of her smile really is an attribute of viewers' vision. This is one of the reasons
why the painting has remained an enigma to art enthusiasts and perhaps the most famous
painting in the world.
www.wisegeek.org/what-is-the-mystery-behind-the-mona-lisa.htm

The Model
Although the sitter has traditionally been identified as Lisa del Giocondo, a lack of definitive
evidence has long fueled alternative theories. During the last years of his life, Leonardo spoke
of a portrait "of a certain Florentine lady done from life at the request of the magnificent
Giuliano de' Medici." No evidence has been found that indicates a link between Lisa del
Giocondo and Giuliano de' Medici, but then the comment could instead refer to one of the
two other portraits of women executed by Leonardo. A later anonymous statement created
confusion when it linked the Mona Lisa to a portrait of Francesco del Giocondo himself,
perhaps the origin of the controversial idea that it is the portrait of a man.[citation needed]

Comparison to drawing sometimes identified as Leonardo's self-portrait

Some have seen a facial similarity between the Mona Lisa and other paintings,
such as St. John the Baptist, sometimes claimed to be a portrait of Salai.

The artist Susan Dorothea White has interpreted the masculine proportions of Mona Lisa's
cranial architecture in her anatomical artworks Anatomy of a Smile: Mona's Bones (2002) and
Mona Masticating (2006).[27] Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs suggests that the Mona Lisa is
actually a self-portrait. She supports this theory with the results of a digital analysis of the
facial features of the woman in the painting and those of the famous possible self-portrait
drawing by Leonardo. When the drawing is reversed and then merged with an image of the
Mona Lisa using a computer, the features of the faces align perfectly. [citation needed] However, the
drawing on which Schwartz based the comparison may not be a self-portrait.[28]
For Sigmund Freud the famous half-smile was a recovered memory of Leonardo's mother. [29]
In 1994 Leonardo's biographer Serge Bramly wrote, "there are about a dozen possible

identifications of the sitter, all more or less defensible ... Some people have suggested that
there was no model at all, that Leonardo was painting an ideal woman."[30]
Isabella of Aragon, Giulio Romano (School of Raphael), Doria Pamphilj Gallery

Maike Vogt-Lerssen argues that the woman behind the famous smile is Isabella of Aragon,
the Duchess of Milan. Leonardo was the court painter for the Duke of Milan for 11 years. The
pattern on Mona Lisa's dark green dress, art critic Maike Vogt-Lerssen believes, indicates
that she was a member of the house of Sforza. Her theory is that the Mona Lisa was the first
official portrait of the new Duchess of Milan, which requires that it was painted in spring or
summer 1489 (and not 1503).[31]
In 2004, historian Giuseppe Pallanti published Monna Lisa, Mulier Ingenua (published in
English as Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo's Model).[32] The book
gathered archival evidence in support of the traditional identification of the model as Lisa.
According to Pallanti, the evidence suggests that Leonardo's father was a friend of del
Giocondo: "The portrait of Mona Lisa, done when Lisa del Giocondo was aged about 24, was
probably commissioned by Leonardo's father himself for his friends as he is known to have
done on at least one other occasion."[33][34] In 2007, genealogist Domenico Savini identified the
princesses Natalia and Irina Strozzi as descendants of Lisa del Giocondo. [35] Scan data
obtained in 2004 suggested that the painting dated from around 1503 and commemorated the
birth of the Giocondo's second son.[36][37]
In 2011, art historian Silvano Vinceti claimed longtime apprentice (and possible male lover)
to Leonardo, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, was the inspiration and figure for the painting.[38]
In 2005 Heidelberg University academics discovered notes scribbled into the margins of a
book by its owner in October 1503.[39] These notes state that Leonardo is working "on the
head of Lisa del Giocondo". This is seen by some as confirmation that a certain Lisa del
Giocondo has been the sitter for the Mona Lisa. However, these notes offer no description of
the painting or drawing and could be attributed to any female portrait of that time.
In 2011, after the discovery of old documents that indicated that Lisa del Giocondo was
buried beneath a convent in Florence, an excavation was performed. [40] On May 20, 2011, the
skull and bones of a woman speculated to be Lisa were found.[41]
Angelo Paratico suggests that Mona Lisa is an image of Leonardo's mother who he believes
was a Chinese slave. It has also been suggested that she was a Middle Eastern slave.[42]
High cholesterol

In January 2010, Dr Vito Franco, professor of pathological anatomy at Palermo University,

published research in an article in La Stampa newspaper and at a medical conference in
Florence which suggested that Mona Lisa showed clear signs of a build-up of fatty acids
under the skin, caused by too much cholesterol. Dr Franco also suggested that she shows
signs of having a lipoma behind her right eye.[43]
Letters and identity of model

In December 2010 Silvano Vinceti reported that the Mona Lisa appears to have tiny letters
and numbers in her eyes which are only apparent when viewed with a magnifying glass and
shortly afterwards said that the model was Leonardo's male apprentice Gian Giacomo
Caprotti (known as Sala) and that the letters were clues to his identity. The Louvre, pointing
out that he had had no access to the actual painting, said that after "every laboratory test
possible" in 2004 and 2009 that "no inscriptions, letters or numbers, were discovered during
the tests." and that "The ageing of the painting on wood has caused a great number of cracks
to appear in the paint, which have caused a number of shapes to appear that have often been
subject to over-interpretation".[44]
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculations_about_Mona_Lisa

New images uncover 25 secrets about the Mona Lisa, including proof that Leonardo da Vinci
gave her eyebrows, solving a long-held mystery.
The images are part of an exhibition, "Mona Lisa Secrets Revealed," which features new
research by French engineer Pascal Cotte and debuts in the United States at the Metreon Center
in San Francisco, where it will remain through the end of this year. The Mona Lisa showcase is
part of a larger exhibition called "Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius."
Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, scanned the painting with a 240-megapixel Multi-spectral
Imaging Camera he invented, which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared. The
resulting images peel away centuries of varnish and other alterations, shedding light on how the
artist brought the painted figure to life and how she appeared to da Vinci and his
contemporaries.
"The face of Mona Lisa appears slightly wider and the smile is different and the eyes are
different," Cotte said. "The smile is more accentuated I would say." [Why Does Mona Lisa's
Smile Change?]
Mona Lisa mysteries
A zoomed-in image of Mona Lisa's left eye revealed a single brush stroke in the eyebrow region,
Cotte said.
"I am an engineer and scientist, so for me all has to be logical. It was not logical that Mona Lisa
does not have any eyebrows or eyelashes," Cotte told LiveScience. "I discovered one hair of the
eyebrow."
Another conundrum had been the position of the subject's right arm, which lies across her
stomach. This was the first time, Cotte said, that a painter had rendered a subject's arm and wrist
in such a position. While other artists had never understood da Vinci's reasoning, they copied it
nonetheless. [Photos: Anatomy Meets Art in Da Vinci's Drawings]
Cotte discovered the pigment just behind the right wrist matched up perfectly with that of the
painted cover that drapes across Mona Lisa's knee. So it did make sense: The forearm and wrist
held up one side of a blanket.
"The wrist of the right hand is up high on the stomach. But if you look deeply in the infrared you
understand that she holds a cover with her wrist," Cotte said.
Behind a painting
The infrared images also revealed da Vinci's preparatory drawings that lie behind layers of
varnish and paint, showing that the Renaissance man was also human.
"If you look at the left hand you see the first position of the finger, and he changed his mind for
another position," Cotte said. "Even Leonardo da Vinci had hesitation."

Other revelations include:

Lace on Mona Lisa's dress

The transparency of the veil shows da Vinci first painted a landscape and then used
transparency techniques to paint the veil atop it.

A change in the position of the left index and middle finger.

The elbow was repaired from damage due to a rock thrown at the painting in 1956.

The blanket covering Mona Lisa's knees also covers her stomach.

The left finger was not completely finished.

A blotch mark on the corner of the eye and chin are varnish accidents, countering claims
that Mona Lisa was sick.

And the Mona Lisa was painted on uncut poplar board, contrary to speculations.

In the larger picture, Cotte said when he stands back and looks up at the enlarged infrared image
of Mona Lisa, her beauty and mystique are apparent.
"If you are in front of this huge enlargement of Mona Lisa, you understand instantly why Mona
Lisa is so famous," Cotte said. He added, it's something you have to see with your own eyes.
Ref: @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

Observing Mona Lisa Upside Down

What if I told you the Mona Lisa is an optical illusion one painting hidden within another?
Well its true. And thats what my first post on this blog is about and its not about the Da Vinci
code or theory based on the numbers hidden in her eyes. Since making this discovery months
ago, I have been waiting to let the world know of my findings a secret that has been hiding
for five hundred years. I will tell you all about that in a second.

First, I wanted to tell you about a famous artist by the name of Leonardo da Vinci (as if youve
never heard of him). For the sake of keeping this post shorter than it could be, Ill give you his
biography in cliffs notes format Leonardo: 101; Leonardo famous renaissance artist, scientist,
zoologist, inventor and genius he invented tools of flight for humans. He discovered
cholesterol. He invented a diving suit. He invented the armored tank. He invented machines of
death for war (but was really a peaceful man that did not want them used) he actually would
pay bird keepers to release them back into the wild. He invented the helicopter. He invented a
robot. Yes, a robot (look it up).
NASA has referred to some of his sketches for their own works. He was such a good painter,
even as an apprentice, that his teacher quit because Leonardo had surpassed his skills. He was
that good (in case you didnt know). He painted a portrait referred to as the Mona Lisa around
1503 and also painted the The Last Supper you may have seen it.
He carried the Mona Lisa painting around with him for at least four years as he worked on it. He
never left any hint as to whom the Mona Lisa really was (which was unusual for the time)
and he wanted it kept this way.
Now fast-forward five hundred years. At one point, the painting had been stolen (1911) and was
missing for two years (Dont worry, it was found and returned to its owners). For centuries
weve been trying to figure out who the Mona Lisa really is. It has been narrowed down to a few
different women, but currently most people believe her to be Lisa Gherardini, since that is the
strongest theory that exists.

Millions of people visit the Mona Lisa every year in the Louvre in Paris. Many mysteries,
including her identity, have gone unresolved and has caused many theories. Let me list some of
those mysteries out for you:
The horizon line does line up from one side of the painting to the other
Nobody has proof as to who she really is (except for me which I will reveal to you in a bit)
The strongest belief is that she is Lisa Gherardini (currently the best guess, but still may be
incorrect)
The landscape location is a mystery (except to me also will be explained in a bit)
Leonardo never mentions her in any of his 7,000+ notes (he actually does and I will show that
also.
Be
patient)
Some think it is a man, possibly even Leonardo himself. (Once again, incorrect)
She has an unexplainable smile. The word enigmatic has been coined in describing her smile. I
will explain the smile so that it will no longer be mysterious.
Ref: http://www.thehiddenhorsehead.com/

Ref:http://memolition.com/2014/04/29/the-secrets-behind-mona-lisas-smile/

One day while doing research on Renaissance art for one of my paintings, I noticed something
odd about the Mona Lisa painting. I was viewing a copy of it upside down, something I regularly

do with my own paintings to check balance and composition. What stuck out to me was as
obvious as day a question mark. Literally. If you look at the Mona Lisa this way (upside
down) and follow the highlights of her portrait, it forms a question mark. How did no one notice
this before? Believing that anything Leonardo did was not accidental, I knew it had to mean
something. So I looked further.

Turning the painting around I looking at everything, eventually spotting what turned out to be a
lions head, an ape head and a buffalo head. I knew I had stumbled upon something, and so I

turned to a published book of Leonardos writings. I had first Googled this, but could not find
anything on it. How could something like this have gone unnoticed for five hundred years?
Eventually, I came upon a passage that talked about Man, Horse, Lion and Buffalo. I also came
across another passage from Leonardo about observing a painting. There were a few passages
that seemed to fit together like puzzle pieces. I eventually put them together to figure out
Leonardos secret vantage point, which I now refer to as the d-point. This perspective was the
key to viewing the optical illusions that were never discovered before.
In order to see the hidden optical illusions, your viewing point must be at such an acute angle to
the art. This is the d-point. According to Leonardos notes, your eye should be in line with the
painted horizon, if there is one in the painting (as in the case of the Mona Lisa). For me, it helps
to only use one eye and should be extremely close to the left edge of the painting. The other must
be closed. This is how you will get the best view of the image(s).
I remember looking first at one of his studies of drapery. My vision had been blurry from lack of
sleep, and because of my lack of focus I could make out what seemed like a hidden picture of a
horse head.

I knew about Leonardos fascination with horses but was still astounded at what I saw. The horse
head was only visible from a certain vantage point looking straight at the painting, the horse
head was unnoticeable. This couldnt have been a coincidence. As I looked at his other paintings
and sketches, I started to spot horse heads from that same vantage point, almost in every single
one of his works. These images sometime took up the whole size of the art piece. How had these

gone unnoticed for all these years? Then it was the Mona Lisas turn. Looking at it from the dpoint, time seemed to slow down as these images came to life.

From the d-point, everything seemed to come together. All the mysteries I had ever read or heard
about throughout my life slowly made sense the unaligned horizon; the wide structure of a not
so womanly model; the large hands; the smile. Why would a genius and perfectionist such as
Leonardo distort something such as the horizon line?
I could see why they had been questioned all these years everything seemed off. To me, her
right hand always seemed a little awkward. I mean, it was beautifully painted, but the position
was off. How can a craftsman such as him screw that up? I always felt that she should be
bending at the knuckles wouldnt that be a more comfortable position for a model? And maybe
there was a reason for it. It had to be off in order for the illusion to work. I couldnt process the
information fast enough to comprehend what I was actually discovering. It was inconceivable,
but then it all made perfect sense.
From the d-point I was able to see horse heads in the other paintings, cleverly hidden within a
painted illusion that could never be seen from standing directly in front of the work. I could only
describe it as standing in front of an oval line drawing (drawn horizontally). It is obviously an
oval, the way a painting is obviously about its subjects, and so why would you question it? But
as you walk to the left side (towards the d-point) the oval starts to shorten into a circle, due to the
perspective view. This is the case, obviously more complex, with the paintings. They are of one
composition of art from the front, but as you view it from the d-point, hidden image(s) start to
appear, although still improbable to be seen unless you know to look for it.

So as I looked at the Mona Lisa from the d-point, everything made sense. Leonardo had cleverly
painted the portrait in perspective. All of a sudden the horizon seemed to line up. Her left hand,
bent at the wrist, now seemed to bend at the knuckles. Her haggardness turned to a healthier state
of being. And best of all, her enigmatic smile turned into a smirk as if to congratulate me on
finding what had forever been hidden an illusion that tells a different story.
It was this illusion that led me to the next discovery, a passage by Leonardo from his notebooks
that speaks directly about the Mona Lisa painting. It was believed that Leonardo never
mentioned the Mona Lisa painting in his writings. But I knew once I read the passage and made
some comparisons that it was definitely about her.
The passage reads as follows
Envy must be represented with a contemptuous motion of the hand towards heaven, because if
she could she would use her strength against God; make her with her face covered by a mask of
fair seeming; show her as wounded in the eye by a palm branch and by an olive-branch, and
wounded in the ear by laurel and myrtle, to signify that victory and truth are odious to her. Many
thunderbolts should proceed from her to signify her evil speaking. Let her be lean and haggard
because she is in perpetual torment. Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent, and make her
with a quiver with tongues serving as arrows, because she often offends with it. Give her a
leopards skin, because this creature kills the lion out of envy and by deceit. Give her too a vase
in her hand full of flowers and scorpions and toads and other venomous creatures; make her
ride upon death, because Envy, never dying, never tires of ruling. Make her bridle, and load her
with divers kinds of arms because all her weapons are deadly.
No one had ever realized that this passage was about the Mona Lisa. You would never know
unless you were able to make the connections with the images viewed from the d-point. Let me
break down each sentence as it refers to the painting:
Envy must be represented with a contemptuous motion of the hand towards heaven, because if
she
could
she
would
use
her
strength
against
God;
Mona Lisas right hand is bent awkwardly at the wrist. It is my opinion that the natural position
would be a bend at the knuckles. To me it seems more natural that she is raising her hand
towards God than if she were to rest it on her right arm. From the illusion point though, her hand
seems to break at the knuckles, not the wrist.
make
her
with
her
face
covered
by
Her face definitely shows a feeling of fair seeming.

mask

of

fair

seeming;

show her as wounded in the eye by a palm branch and by an olive-branch, and wounded in
the ear by laurel and myrtle, to signify that victory and truth are odious to her.
The shading in the bone structure around her eyes and nose and eye socket seem to resemble the
shape of a palm tree silhouette (I have darkened the shape of her bone structure to help show the
shape). I also noted the bone structure above her eyes seems off, as if it was purposely done so in
order to create that palm tree shape.

Many thunderbolts should proceed from her to

The wrinkles on her sleeves could easily signify lightning.

signify

her

evil

speaking.

Let her be lean and haggard because she is in perpetual torment.

Her eyes look exhausted to me. She seems to be raising her brows in a frowning position, as if
too worn to speak, and with only enough energy to create an expression of haggardness. When
viewing from the d-point though, as Leonardo described, she looks thinner, younger and
womanlier.

Make
her
heart
gnawed
by
a
swelling
serpent,
This is my favorite sentence in the passage because it translates so clearly in the painting. From
the d-point, one can clearly see the head of a reptile perhaps a serpent or crocodile behind
her. Its open mouth lines up perfectly with Mona Lisas heart, which can be seen subtly by
following the shape of the highlights in the center of her chest.

The Mona Lisa as viewed from Leonardo's secret vantage point (d-point). The image on right has
been highlighted to show outline of crocodile head.
I could only guess that in the actual painting, the illusion would be even more obvious;
highlights such as white are usually painted last and thicker than the other colors, which means
they would be slightly raised above all the other colors. I could only guess that in the actual
painting, this means that you would see more white from the illusion perspective and a more
obvious heart shape.
I also see that the landscaping seems to turn into a swamp from the illusion perspective perfect
for a reptile to be floating in. Also, it seems as if the swamp water is bloody in front of the
crocodile, as if it was gnawing on a bloody item, such as her heart.

and make her with a quiver with tongues serving as arrows, because she often offends with it.
I dont get the connection with the tongue, but I would guess that the pattern on her blouse could
represent the shapes of arrows.
Give her a leopards skin, because this creature kills the lion out of envy and by deceit.
The Black Panther is a kind of leopard, obviously with black fur. The Mona Lisa seems to be
wearing all black, thus corresponding to the leopard reference. In the landscaping, there is also
the lions head facing upward is it meant to be shown to drown in the swamp illusion?
Give her too a vase in her hand full of flowers and scorpions and toads and other venomous
creatures;
She seems to be holding her right arm from the illusion perspective, but the right arm does not
look like an arm. The fingers in the left hand seem more like stems of a flower. I do not see
where the vase would be though. Perhaps with the darkening of the painting over time, it is not
noticeable anymore.

make her ride upon death, because Envy, never dying, never tires of ruling.
The position of her ring finger (left hand) bothers me. It seems awkward that it stands out further
than the pinky finger. This is exactly the position of a hand that would be grasping a saddle rope,
as if riding a horse (ride upon death). I believe that Leonardo may have represented her as
riding in the sidesaddle position a normal position for women to ride horses in because of their
dresses. Leonardo painted her in the three-quarter profile, which is a perfect angle for
representing a female riding a horse. This is definitely arguable since she is technically sitting in
a chair. I believe that Leonardo is secretly representing her as riding sidesaddle on a mule that he
hid in the picture.
I also point out that the Mona Lisa, when layed on its left side, is also a hidden image of a mules
head, which is a kindred of the horse (as written in Leonardos notes).
Also, the cloth looping around her left shoulder seems to be braided/coiled like that of a
rope/lasso. Not sure if thats how horse riders carried their ropes, but it would make sense for
Leonardo to show her as riding.
Make her bridle, and load her with divers kinds of arms because all her weapons are deadly.
Her veil makes her bridal. I do not spot any weapons though. I still need to look further into this
one
So to answer the previous mysteries that I bulleted at the beginning of this blog, here are the
actual answers:
The horizon line may not line up from the frontal view, but from the d-point it lines up perfectly,
due to the illusions perspective.
As far as the landscape goes, people have been trying to figure out the location of the
background. Some have referred to the bridge in the background on the right as possibly being
from a certain location. I believe he created the landscape in this fashion so that he could work
in the serpent/crocodile, lion and ape and what I see as a swamp. He simply made it up, unless
you could find me a mountain range with a lions head and some landscaping with an ape face
and crocodile head shaped into it.
The smile. Ah yes, the famous enigmatic smile. This one is big. I can see theorists jaws dropping
as they read this one. The smile was also painted in a way meant to be revealed in the illusion.
Simply look at it from the d-point and you will see that she reveals her true smile a clever
painting technique he used on the right of the mouth seems more distinct when viewed from the
d-point, which shows her smirking. Yes, smirking, as if to say, Congratulations. You figured it
out.

The Envy passage is a great piece of evidence that describes who

the Mona Lisa is. And that description comes straight from Leonardo himself. Theres not much
to argue with there.
Now, Im not saying that the Mona Lisa is Lisa Gherardini. And Im not saying shes not. But I
will say that Leonardo refers her to be Envy. The proof is obvious to me. So I guess the real
question now is, does Envy represent a certain person, or does she just represent the trait?
Heres an interview the Italian American Community Center put into their February newspaper
issue. I didnt know this was going to be Q&A format I just thought they were gathering the
information and were going to write a story based on my answers, but Im happy with how it
turned out. Alessandro asked some interesting questions that definitely brought some of my
opinions to the surface. Looking back, I do think some of my answers may have been a little
daring

Similarities in other paintings

Heres another painting that appears to have animal heads hidden in it similar to Leonardos
Mona Lisa. In the Mona Lisa I spotted an ape head, a lion head, a mule head, a buffalo head and
from the d-point (vantage point), a crocodile head.

This painting is Titians Pastoral Concert. Here I spot an ape head, a lion head, an elephant head
and what could be a mule or horse head.

Not sure why he didnt put a crocodile in this one, although he did paint one in his Venus of
Urbino (below).

Is this all a coincidence? Maybe.

Did I happen to mention that I found an

Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden (Sistine Chapel)?

elephant

in

Michelangelos

Its been 500 years and many theories and books and facts have been written some make
sense and some were a little, for lack of a better word, preposterous. Many have come up with
different theories of why Mona Lisas smile exists as it does. And then joe-schmo-me comes
along and discovers everything. How was I able to come up with answers to such puzzling
questions that went unanswered for so many years? Well, let me tell you. In short it was
accidental. In a case of knowing enough to be dangerous, mixed with a little bit of curiosity and
being at the right place at the right time, I was the Columbus of this event; I was looking for one
thing and discovered another.
Im both an artist and a fan of fine art. Ive studied art ever since I could hold a pencil. My dream
as a kid was to become a comic book illustrator. I wanted to be the next
Todd McFarlane. For years I would copy the covers of old super hero comics, a way of learning
super hero anatomy from the time I was able to hold a pencil. I dreamt of illustrating and inking
in covers for The Amazing Spider-Man and maybe even Captain America (And yeah,
I was a fan way before the movie.) But, I was a kid when I had those goals and eventually my
goals became a little more realistic. But the dream of being an artist would never change. I would
never settle for anything less than that. Knowing that reaching Comic Illustrator status would be
difficult, I focused my studies on Commercial Illustration. But even then (pre-iPod existence),

seeing that computers were taking over everything at the time, I decided to change my focus to
graphic design.
My first job as an artist was to create advertisements on hanging chalkboards for our local
supermarket, Wegmans. It was a job I received when my art skills (which I didnt think were all
that great back then) were presented to our store manager. I guess my art skills were developed
enough to condition people to get that gallon of milk before they left the store.
My first real art job came as a graphic designer for a small screen printing shop in which I
created many shirt designs. I referred to them as walking billboards for obvious reasons. It was a
job I loved and had a lot of fun with. I had only planned on being there about a year or so, but
growth and opportunity came into play and that plan stretched out to thirteen-plus years. I
decided during that time to update myself with some web classes at the Rochester Institute of
Technology. It had been a while since I went to school and I wanted to update my skills.
I never recognized my skills as good enough (the reason for my other blogs name
RonsWorstCritic.com). Shortly after, I was offered a job at a large local agency. For four years,
my main client at the agency was a local casino. An unfortunate set of layoffs resulted from a bad
economy and I was left without work.
I saw this time off as an opportunity to concentrate on my oil paintings until I could find another
job. I had painted my first canvas about a year previous to that and fell in love with it. Before
that I had never been interested in painting. I was always an illustrator (all I needed was a
number 2 pencil) turned graphic designer. I often joked that I didnt have any use for color. But
now my new goal was to get my paintings into a gallery in the future and maybe have my own
studio so that I could live off of my painting commissions.
I got rid of my television and started to really live the artist life; I attended exhibits and watched
documentaries on the Internet. I really fell in love with painting, developing a style akin to
Impressionism. My favorite artist of that time was Van Gogh.
One day I decided to hit the bookstore in search of some inspiration from the Renaissance. I had
just finished watching a documentary on Leonardo da Vinci and so my first visit was to a book of
his art. I opened it up to the Mona Lisa. I wanted to know what made this so famous. I remember
an old art teacher saying that this was so famous because he used a technique called sfumato on
it. But I knew it was because of the many mysteries of the painting. The thing is, I didnt care
about the mysteries. Never did. That would never help my painting skills. What I wanted to
know was why the painting itself was so well received.
So I did something with the painting I regularly do with my own paintings. I viewed it upside
down. Somewhere in art class years ago I was taught to view my artwork in the mirror in order to
get a sense of balance and composition, color, etc. The problem with working on a project for a
long time is that you lose your sense of balance. But viewing it in a mirror gives you a fresh look
at that. Instead, I like to turn my painting upside down and leave it for a few days. I then walk
into the room days later at a distance, so that I dont focus on the details. Details dont matter to

me until the balance is perfected. So turning the Mona Lisa upside down was a great way for me
to view it in a new light.
I also stood back from it, for the same reason of ignoring details. So there I am, standing a few
feet back with this book that I had placed upside down on the floor. And what stuck out to me
was something I had never noticed before. How could I not have noticed this? I must have seen
this painting thousands of times since about third grade when we first learned about it.
Ref: http://www.thehiddenhorsehead.com/

What I saw was a question mark, formed from the highlights in the main part of the portrait. I
knew enough about Leonardo to know that this could not have been created accidentally.
Leonardo was a genius to say the least. I can see him as planning every stroke on this painting.
Nothing was accidental with him. And so my curiosity started to peak. Aware of the mysteries of
the painting, I wanted to look a little further into it, so I brought the book home. It was a book of

Leonardos works so I felt I should have owned it anyways. I got home that night and looked a
little closer to the painting. I remember telling my friend, who I carpooled with, about what I had
found. I also remember him laughing at it as he brushed it off as coincidence. And maybe thats
what many others did if they had seen it also. I laughed with him, but I knew there was more to
it. And I didnt expect to find much. For me it was all about inspiration. Maybe I would learn
something that I could apply to my paintings.
While looking at the painting that night, I figured that since Leonardo had hid this question mark
upside down, maybe he hid something that could be viewed from the other sides. It only made
sense, right? It didnt take me long to find what looked to me like a lions head, roaring towards
the sky.
Ive been an artist ever since I could remember. And as an artist you can tell when something
doesnt look right whether its a shadow thats too dark, or a color that doesnt seem right, or
maybe an anatomical proportion of a figure. The thing is, everything looked perfect on this lions
head. It was definitely a lion. It was that obvious to me. Even only a years worth of painting had
taught me to learn my paintings better than anyone else could. You have no choice as you work
on it, staring at it for hours on end, sometimes working on it for weeks or months. You end up
memorizing every inch or color, composition, and brush stroke.
Now if Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for what is thought to be 5 years, I promise you he
knew every inch of it; every brush stroke, every layer of ink, and from every angle, including the
upside down position. Now in all the classes Ive taken and all the documentaries Ive watched
on TV, I have heard of artists hiding things in their paintings, but Ive never heard of Leonardo
hiding anything in the Mona Lisa. I never heard about a question mark. And I definitely never
heard about a roaring lions head. A sort of anticipation began to form. It was more contained
than anything, but a seed had definitely been planted. The Mona Lisa mysteries I had never cared
about all of a sudden peaked in the foreground of my thoughts. So I continued to look. I wasnt
going to stop now. It was like looking for pictures in the clouds the way I used to as a kid laying
in the grass on a warm day.
The lion head was hidden in the mountains. And thats exactly where I would also find an apes
head and a third animal that seems to be a buffalo head. I knew it was something though. I was
way past the town of coincidences and into the world of evidence.
I couldnt see anything else and so I went to the fourth side the left of the painting. I couldnt
find anything at first as I looked closely, but knew there had to be something. It would only make
sense since the other three sides contained images. So I stood back the way I did when I spotted
the question mark. Now you have to understand the gears spinning in my head. It was like an out
of body experience. I was way beyond focused. I was so in tune with trying to find something
that Buddha would have taken notes on my ability to focus. But there was no way that what I
eventually spotted had never seen before. So why have I never heard of these sightings?
What I saw was sort of unbelievable considering this painting and how many millions of people
have looked at this through the years, every year. Could no one have spotted this before? If you
can imagine the Mona Lisa on its side, with her head pointing left, imagine her silhouette. What I

eventually saw turned out to be a mules head. It was hard to figure out but I knew, especially
after seeing the other images, that the eye socket was so cleverly painted into her robes wrinkles.
But he painted it a touch too perfect for me. It was clearly an eye socket perfect eye socket
shape, perfect eyeball proportion. I had illustrated enough faces over the years to know it
perfectly. Plus, I knew that Leonardo had a fascination with horses, or so it was said. And in this
case a mule will suffice!

This was all too clear to me. I needed to know if anyone else had reported this before. Needless
to say, I Googled the crap out of this. And yet I found nothing. I have seen many stories on
famous art sightings such as the hidden brain in the Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel, so what
I found would have definitely had to have had a story published somewhere. After all, its the
most famous painting in the world. Yet I found nothing about it. This is where my belief of a
possible discovery started to form. It was just so hard to believe that no one had seen this. Yet it
made all the sense in the world.
I remember seeing a copy of the Mona Lisa as a child, around the third grade. We all learned
about it at a young age and were conditioned to not think much about it, aside from what we
learned. So why would we ever pay much attention to it later on, unless you were some art
historian. But even then you would view these paintings like everyone else: very close and right
side up.
The next day I purchased a book on a collection of Leonardos writings, a translation of his notes
on philosophy, drawing, thinking, perspective, human studies, observations, etc. I was hoping to
maybe see something there about these animals so I could learn what they meant. As I skimmed
the pages, a passage caught my eye. In it, Leonardo mentions a lion, ape, mule and buffalo. Once
I came across this, I knew to pay close attention to every word in that book. And so I read it all.
There were passages on perspective. There were passages on anatomy. There were passages on

philosophy. There were many, many passages. And then there was the following passage with the
following diagram and this one really caught my attention.

Supposing a b to be the picture and d to be the light, I say that if you place yourself between c
and e you will not understand the picture well and particularly if it is done in oils, or still more if
it is varnished, because it will be lustrous and somewhat of the nature of a mirror. And for this
reason the nearer you go towards the point c, the less you will see, because the rays of light
falling from the window on the picture are reflected to that point. But if you place yourself
between e and d you will get a good view of it, and the more so as you approach the point d,
because that spot is least exposed to these reflected rays of light.
Now why would Leonardo say to view a painting from the d point? This was very odd to me, so
I tried it. And this is how I saw an illusion of a horse head for the first time specifically in one
of his drapery studies. And as I mentioned in my first blog, it all started to come together from
that d-point. And thats when I saw her smile as she revealed all her secrets to me secrets that
were hidden for 500 years. I knew I had made a gigantic discovery. And so I had to view the dpoint, as I now call it, to his other works.
What other secrets would I find in these five hundred year old paintings?

Is Her Smile Real?

Writings by the sociologist Randall Collins

Viewpoint
The sociological eye means looking at things for what they are, as best we can given the blinders of
interest and ideology, of clich and ritualized belief. It is not an individual enterprise. Chaining our efforts
together as a long-term network of theorists and researchers improves ones own sociological vision,
provided we make the effort. The sociological eye holds up a periscope above the tides of political and
intellectual partisanship, spying out the patterns of social life in every direction.
MONA LISA IS NO MYSTERY FOR MICRO-SOCIOLOGY
The Mona Lisa is considered the worlds most famous painting, chiefly because of its mysterious smile.
What is so mysterious about it? Art critics have projected all sorts of interpretations onto it, and these are
endless. There is a more objective way to analyze the Mona Lisa smile, using the social psychology (or
micro-sociology) of facial expressions
As the psychologist Paul Ekman has found, analyzing emotions in photos all over the world, emotions are
shown on three zones of the face: the mouth and lower face; the eyes; and the forehead. Our folk
knowledge about emotions concerns only the mouth: the smiley face with lips curled up, the frowning
face with lips turned down. These intuitions also make possible fake expressions. The mouth is the
easiest part of the face to control. You can easily turn up the corners of your mouth, and this is what we do
on social occasions where the expected thing is happiness or geniality. Arlie Hochschild, in The Managed
Heart, calls this emotion work. In the contemporary fashion of political campaigning, politicians are
required to be professional producers of fake smiles.

The muscles around the eyes and eyelids are much more difficult to control, and along with the forehead
these are usually outside ones conscious awareness. So a fake smileor any other fake emotional
expressionis easy for viewers to catch, because we are unconsciously attuned to the entire emotional
signal all over the face. One reason we like photos of small children is that they havent yet learned how
to fake emotional expressions.

If we examine the Mona Lisa face, zone by zone, the reason for its mysteriousness becomes clear: there
are different emotions expressed in different facial zones.
Her mouth, as everyone has noticed, has a slight smile.
Her eyes are a little sad.
Her forehead is blank and unexpressive.

We will see further peculiarities as we examine each in detail.

Mouth and lower face. Smiles come in different degrees. As Ekman shows, stronger smilesstronger
happinesspull the corners of the mouth further back (from the front of the face). Corners of the mouth
may tilt up but they dont have to; very strong smiles, which pull the mouth open and expose the teeth,
often have the line of the upper lip more or less horizontal. What makes the smiley mouth is more the
rounded-bow shape of the lower lip, and especially the wrinkle (naso-labial fold) that runs from the
corners of the nose diagonally down to the beyond the corners of the lips. In very strong smiles, these
triangle-looking folds become deeper, and are matched by a flipped-over triangle of skin folds from the
chin to the outer corners of the lips, giving the lower face a diamond-shaped look.

Compare the Mona Lisa. This is a pretty pallid smile. Yes, she does turn up the lip corners a bit, but this is
more of a conventional sign than what we see in a real smile. More importantly, there are no naso-labial
folds running downward from her nose, nor any mirroring triangle up from the chin. Real smiles raise the
cheeks (as we will see in a moment, this affects the eyes in a smile), but Mona Lisa hardly has any cheek
features at all.

Eyes and eyelids. Smiles, especially stronger smiles, make wrinkles below the eyes, more or less
horizontal, slightly curved across the bottom of the eye socket (deeper wrinkles the more the cheeks are
raised). This has the effect of narrowing the slit of the eyes, as the lower eyelid is raised. This is a tell-tale
detail, since narrowing eyes can also happen in other emotions; in happiness, the lower eyelid may be
puffed-out looking but not tense. (By contrast, angry eyes have very hard-clenched muscles around them;
fearful eyes are wide-open and staring; sad eyes we are coming to). For the happy face, all these muscle
movements cause crows-feet wrinkles to spread out from the corners of the eyes.

Mona Lisas eyes? The lower lids do look a little puffy, but there are no wrinkles below them; her cheeks
if anything are flaccid. And no crows-feet.

Sad eyes. Sad eyes are passive. The lower eyelid is weak, and there is no horizontal wrinkle below it,
since the cheek is not pushing up. Whereas in a smile the upper eyelid is open, so the eyes brightly look
out, the sad upper eyelid droops a bit. Even more noticeable is the brow, which tends to collapse and sag
downwards; this makes the skin of the upper eye socket droop almost like a veil slanting over the outer
corner of the eyes. This is particularly noticeable in the picture of the Middle-Eastern woman below right;
next to it is a photo of a woman at her lovers funeral. The photo on upper left is a composite, with sad
eyes at the top, and neutral lower face.

Mona Lisas eyes. They are not brightly exposed and wide-open as in the happiness photos above, where
the upper eye-lid is generally narrow as can be. Mona Lisas upper eyelids are partly closed, so are her
lower lids; and the skin at the outer edges of her eye sockets droops a bit. These are sad eyes, although
only mildly so.

Mona Lisa is a combination of sad eyes and a slight smile, but the way she is painted makes her even
more mysterious. As already noted, she lacks the naso-labial folds and chin folds characteristics of happy
smiles. Leonardo da Vinci did very little with the cheeks, but concentrated a great deal on the corners of

the lips and eyes. This was his famous sfumato techniquea smoky look producing deliberate ambiguity.
This also has the effect of obscuring just the places where important clues to genuine smiles are found;
there are no crows-feet around her eyes, but then there are no expressive wrinkles in this painted skin
anywhere.

Was this the actual expression Lisa Gherardini, La Gioconda, had on her face when Leonardo painted
her? Probably not. Leonardo worked over all his paintings a long time; the Mona Lisa took him four
years, and was still unfinished in his estimation. He kept experimenting with the portrait, quite likely
upon just these features. The idea that Leonardo was trying to portray a specially mysterious lady was a
favorite with romanticist 19th century art critics, as was the very unlikely idea that he was having an affair
with her (he was apparently a homosexual, once charged with sodomy, and was never known to have a
relationship with a woman). He was an artist in an era when artists were rivals over the super-star status
of their time, and technical innovations made for fame. What we are viewing is less a real emotional
expression at a moment in time, as a virtuouso experiment at the frontier of what could be pictured.
No eyebrows. Another reason the Mona Lisa seems strange to us is that she has no eyebrows. For many
emotions, the brows are important points of expression; as we have seen, somewhat subtly in sadness; in
happiness, mainly by contrast with other emotionsunmoved eyebrows are generally part of the happy
face, unless it is really over the top:

For anger, the position of the eyebrows is the strongest cluethe vertical lines between them as the facial
muscles clench make even a stripped-bare cartoon emblem of anger.

So eyebrow-less Mona Lisa gives us less clues than usual to emotions; all we see are the bare ridges of
her upper eye sockets through the haze of Leonardos sfumato, making even the sad expression less clear
to us. There was nothing intentional about this; in the late 15 th century shaved eyebrows were a fashion
for European ladies, as we see from the Fouquet madonna (painted 1452) and the Piero della Francesca
portrait (1465; the Mona Lisa was painted 1503-6).

This may be one reason why the Mona Lisa was not particularly well known in its day, nor was it
considered mysterious, nor was there much comment on her smile. Leonardo da Vinci was famous but

less so than his contemporaries Michelangelo and Raphael, and his most celebrated painting was The Last
Supper. The Mona Lisa was a minor work until the 1850s-60s in France, and the 1870s in England, when
it became the object of gushy writings by ultra-aesthete art critics, led by Thophile Gautier and Walter
Pater. (The history of how this happened is told by Donald Sassoon, 2001.) Mona Lisa and her smile
became mysterious, in fact the mysterious Feminine, an Eternal Spirit with all the Capital Letters. And not
just the benevolent Earth Mother but a Cleopatra-Jezebel-Salom temptress. This sounds like fantasies of
mid-Victorian malesperhaps understandable in an era when women wore bustles and men hardly ever
saw much more than their faces. As Sassoon notes, women were always much less taken with Mona Lisa
than were men.

Is there any truth in the interpretation, that Mona Lisa was a subtly flirtatious sexpot? Again we can call
on some objective evidence, how erotic emotion is expressed on the face.
Sexual turn-on, at least for female faces, has a standard look (as can be seen by thousands of examples on
the web): eyes closed or nearly so, mouth fallen open. The womans face is otherwise slack, no fold lines
like other emotions; it may be happiness but the expressions are quite distinct.

Marilyn Monroe made the eyes-half-closed expression virtually her trademark. The sex idol of a less
explicit era than today was also a great actress in her line.

Mona Lisa? If there is any sex in her face, only a repressed Victorian could see it.

So this is micro-sociology? The purpose of micro-sociology is not to be an art critic. I only make the
venture because so many popular interpretations of the Mona Lisa blunder into social psychology. But
reading the expressions on photos is good training for other pursuits. Paul Ekman holds that knowledge of
the facial and bodily expressions of emotions is a practical skill in everyday life, giving some applications
in his book Telling Lies. And it is not just a matter of looking for deceptions. We would be better at
dealing with other people if we paid more attention to reading their emotional expressionsnot to call
them on it, but so that we can see better what they are feeling. Persons in abusive relationships
especially the abusercould use training in recognizing how their own emotional expressions are
affecting their victims; and greater such sensitivity could head off violent escalations.

Facial expressions, like all emotions, are not just individual psychology but micro-sociology, because
these are signs people send to each other. The age we live in, when images from real-life situations are
readily available in photos and videos, has opened a new research tool. I have used it (in Violence: A
Micro-sociological Theory) to show that at the moment of face-to-face violence, expressions of anger on
the part of the attacker turn into tension and fear; and this discovery leads to a new theory of what makes
violence happen, or not. On the positive side, micro-interactions that build mutual attunement among

persons emotions are the key to group solidarity, and their lack is what produces indifference or
antipathy. And we can read the emotionsa lot more plainly than the smile on Mona Lisas face.

References
Ekman, Paul. 1992. Telling Lies. Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. NY: Norton.
Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen, 1984. Unmasking the Face. Prentice-Hall.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart. University of California Press.
Sassoon, Donald. 2001. Mona Lisa. The History of the Worlds Most Famous Painting. London: HarperCollins.

The Mystery of Mona Lisa's smile, an other look

Ref:http://misterix.forumfree.it/?t=69651820

On the right we can be on a dosing the most famous

painting
in
history.

Mona Lisa, is an oil painting on poplar wood (77cm

53cm)
by
Leonardo
da
Vinci,
dating
back
to
1517.
Her enigmatic smile fascinated generations, but her
mystery
remained
a
secret.
Until
now...
Let's start first with the picture on the left, Pablo Picasso,
"Portrait
of Dora Maar"; is an oil painting on canvas (92cm x
65cm),
dating
back
to
1937.
I chose this picture because it is similar to the Mona Lisa,
and
because
it is very clear what I'm going to explain.
This picture is an example of Cubism. Cubism destructure
perspective,
and
shows us reality in its full perspective 'concrete'.
In fact we cannot observe an object from all its
perspectives
at
the
same
time.
Picasso shows us two things together concrete different
at
the
same
time.
On the left, we see the face of the figure from the front,
while
on
the
right we see -roughly- in his right profile.
Everything is very clear, but what about the Mona Lisa? ...
Leonardo was a genius, and we can say without doubt that
here
he
is
the
precursor
of
Surrealism.
What we see is a complete point of view 'conceptual', this
time.
Such as quantum mechanics is demonstrating, the 'idea'
and
'thing'
are
intimately
related.
The reality is the interaction between a conceptual part
and
a
concrete
part:
|
R=i(k:q)
In the right part of the face of the figure we see a Monna
Lisa
cheerful
and
smiling.
While the left side Monna Lisa is sad, serious.
Notice how the shadows of the eyebrows go up to the

right,
and
go
down
to
the
left.
Leonardo shows us two things together concept
different
at
the
same
time.
That can not exist. The two expressions are exactly the
opposite,
and
no
one
can
express
simultaneously.
That's

it!

Mona Lisa Smile

Written for www.wildramblings.com in April of 2015

You brighten the night with your Mona Lisa smile
dawdling through the heavens from east to west
In an ocean of twinkling darkness you appear as an isle
A brilliant reflection of light massaged and caressed.

Your image repeated on dark lakes and ponds

Late night loons giggle at your wavy image
Wolves howling mournfully both near and beyond
from lakeside shores and distant high ridge

Draped in white light the forests mood serene

Perhaps the quiet side of rapture revealed

The purpose of which can hardly be foreseen
The mystery of night always and forever concealed

Basking in your glory it is ours to understand

the size of the universe, the vastness of it all
the distance of nothing, the emptiness spanned
ancient memories lost without any trace or recall

Gracefully without warning you slip into dawn

your memory left behind but beautiful hopes remain
Your end is without fanfare; as mute as a swan
For another lap of the earth we await your refrain

Goodbye, Mona Lisa with your quiet smile

So long to sweet dreams blinded by inky night
Adios brilliant moon well see you in a while
Sayonara eventide illumination until the next lunar light