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Summary
Summary
Perhaps better than any other art object, the Mona Lisa demonstrates that something can be high art and pop, classic and cool. Donald Sassoon provides a fascinating account of how Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece became what it is today. He examines how the Renaissance genius created the picture, who the subject was, why it gained its unrivalled position in the art world, and how it has come to be used and abused by other artists and the international advertising industry.
Tracing the reception of da Vinci's paintings as well as the development of the museums, essential to bringing art to a broad public audience, Sassoon's account is as much the story of serious art's popularization as it is of one painting's ascendance to the status of global icon.
Brilliantly illustrated, this lively, engaging narrative is meticulously researched and written in an elegant, accessible prose.
Facts Behind the Smile
1) The most commonly asked question at the Louvre:
Where is the Mona Lisa?
2) In 2003, the Mona Lisa will become the only painting in the Louvre to occupy its own room.
3) As well as hanging in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa appears on mugs, ashtrays, calendars, folders, T-shirts, and mousepads.
4) Eighty-five percent of all Europeans think the Mona Lisa is the
best-known painting in the world.
Author Notes
Donald Sassoon is professor of history at Queen Mary College of the University of London.
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, perhaps the world's best-known painting, will be 500 years old in 2003, an event the Louvre, its home since 1797, will celebrate by enshrining the masterpiece in its very own room. Curious about the portrait's enduring magnetism and mystery--the identity of the eyebrowless lady with the strange smile has never been firmly established--Sassoon has written an illuminating and entertaining biography of an icon. It seems that the small but revolutionary Mona Lisa achieved her great fame in the nineteenth century after creative and influential poets and critics transformed this odd portrait into an archetype of female power, a phenomena Sassoon chronicles with verve and acumen. He goes on to document how the painting's 1911 "kidnapping" kept Mona Lisa in the news and precipitated a flood of reproductions; then how, thanks to Marcel Duchamp, the first to give her a moustache and goatee, she became kitsch. Ultimately, the lady became positively ubiquitous, as Sassoon proves in an impressive tracking of her appearances in everything from the writings of Henry James to crime novels, children's books, pop music, and advertising campaigns, thus concluding a delightfully canny assessment of the Mona Lisa's unique appeal. Donna Seaman
Choice Review
Neither a work by an art historian nor scholarly, this journalistic romp through centuries of the reception of Leonardo's most famous painting does reveal gems of information: that Freud much admired the dubious fictionalized biography of the artist by Merezhkovsky; that Fragonard delivered the painting to the Louvre after the Revolution; that Taine only partially resisted the heady flavor of Michelet's writings on Leonardo. The obvious is rehearsed: the painting's theft in 1911; its spin-offs--visual, literary, and commercial; its role in the modern politics of museum diplomacy. Sassoon, a historian, avoids issues of quality and analysis of art historiography. For him, the painting "demonstrates that something can be both a classic of Western art and pop, hip, and cool." He himself struggles to master that divide, trying to cover the bases from Goethe to the dessert served when the Kennedys visited Paris and initiated the loan of Mona Lisa aided by Malraux. Despite the richness of the material, the result is unsatisfying, intended for too many readerships, all with too little patience for critical analysis. Saddling Leonardo with Gautier's crushes offers at once too much and too little about a painting whose history has the potential to yield real cultural insight. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through faculty. P. Emison University of New Hampshire
Kirkus Review
On the eve of its 500th anniversary (in 2003), the story of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Is it the world's greatest painting, as well as the most famous? Curators at the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa is displayed, don't like such labels, states Sassoon (History/Univ. of London; 100 Years of Socialism, 1997); in fact, the painting is a mixed blessing for the museum. Despite strict prohibitions, visitors insist on photographing it, and under no circumstances can it be withdrawn from display, for fear of public outcry. Many visitors are interested in no other work of art. The Mona Lisa is universally recognized, revered, distorted, and parodied. But unlike Mickey Mouse, it is clearly a product of high culture, part of the accepted canon of art and much admired in Leonardo's time. Sassoon discusses the artist's innovative use of sfumato, a technique that gives a "smoky" texture to backgrounds and an aura of mystery to eyes. The lady's mystery is further enhanced by her uncertain identity, which art historians have never pinned down. Why does she smile? Sassoon suggests that Leonardo provided entertainment for his model as she posed, but still the enigma of that smile, what she knows that you will never know, cannot be explained. In Napoleonic France she was seen as a bold new republican, casting off the pretensions of nobility, looking at you frankly and directly. Almost simultaneously, English and French writers began canonizing her: she was a courtesan, perhaps, or Leonardo's plain-clothes Madonna, or both. Then, reproduced in engravings, her fame spread worldwide; by the 20th century she was being used to sell cosmetics, chocolate, champagne, wigs, coffee, motorcycles, olives, cigars, and false teeth. There may be more information here than most readers want, but Sassoon admirably summarizes the famous lady's mysterious past.
Library Journal Review
The publisher is really high on this book, which treats the history of our fascination with Leonardo's famous painting. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Mona Lisa, the Smile and LisaA young woman is seated, her right hand upon her wrist, her left hand on the wooden arm of the chair, gripping its edge. The arm of the chair is parallel to the picture plane, as is the unseen lower part of her body. If she sat straight, we would see only her profile. But she turns towards us, presenting three-quarters of her upper torso. Her white visage faces us almost directly. Her brown eyes glance towards the right. Her missing eyebrows enhance her broad forehead. Her cheeks are full. Her hair, shoulder-length, is wrapped in a translucent veil. She wears a sober, dark dress. Her left shoulder is adorned by a thickly pleated mantle. Her neckline reveals the inception of her breasts.She wears no jewels.She smiles.The loggia or balcony supporting her appears to be suspended on the edge of a chasm. Immediately behind her, at the back of the parapet surges a complex, strange and distant landscape: rocky formations, mountain peaks, hills and valleys; on the left a lake and a winding path; on the right a river crossed by a bridge, the forlorn sign of human existence in a barren landscape.This is what is represented by means of oil paint on a piece of poplar wood. It is small: seventy-seven centimetres high and fifty-three centimetres wide. The Louvre identifies it by the inventory number 779, one of the six thousand paintings the museum currently holds. Only this one, however, is in a special container, set in concrete and protected by two sheets of bulletproof triple-laminated glass, separated from each other by twenty-five centimetres. The painting has been in this box since 1974.It is inspected annually; the silica gel used to maintain the temperature is changed; the wood is checked to establish whether it has contracted or expanded.1In 2003, in time for its presumed five hundredth anniversary, painting number 779 will have a room of its own. Until then it will be kept with the Venetian paintings, which comprise ten Titians, eight Veroneses including his gigantic Marriage at Cana, and five Tintorettos. Just outside, along the walls of the Grande Galerie, reputedly the longest corridor in Europe, are five paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, various Raphaels, Bronzinos, Correggios, Fra Angelicos and a marvellous Caravaggio. Further along, visitors can find Velzquez, Drer, Van Eyck, Vermeer-not to speak of Rubens, Poussin, Rembrandt and Goya.These works-among the most celebrated of Western art-can all be contemplated at leisure, even in the summer months when the season is at its peak, by any of the five and a half million people who visit the Louvre every year. All except number 779, known in France as La Joconde, in Italy as La Gioconda and everywhere else as the Mona Lisa. This is, allegedly, the portrait of a Florentine lady, Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a wealthy merchant. She would have been addressed as 'Monna' Lisa, Monna being a contraction for Madonna (mia donna), or my lad Excerpted from Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon by Donald Sassoon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Chapter 1 Mona Lisa, the Smile and Lisa | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 A Revolutionary Painting | p. 31 |
| Chapter 3 Lisa Enters the Louvre | p. 44 |
| Chapter 4 The Cult of Leonardo | p. 59 |
| Chapter 5 Mona Lisa Becomes Mysterious | p. 91 |
| Chapter 6 Mona Lisa as a Visual Zeitgeist | p. 133 |
| Chapter 7 Mona Kidnapped | p. 171 |
| Chapter 8 Exploiting the Theft | p. 195 |
| Chapter 9 Lisa Goes Pop | p. 220 |
| Chapter 10 Lisa Goes Global | p. 239 |
| Notes | p. 277 |
| Bibliography | p. 301 |
| Index | p. 325 |
