Mona Lisa (PB)

This is perhaps the most famous piece of art in the entire world. It is nearly 500 years old. Obviously, this painting is cherished by world culture, but why? Why this painting and not one of Da Vinci’s other works? Lady with an Ermine has nearly the same content—a woman with a small smile and a fairly nondescript background. Why has one of these other paintings not taken our world of highly cultured populace by storm the way the Mona Lisa has?

Picasso, Cézanne, Rembrandt, Monet, van Gogh, Raphael, Warhol, Degas, Dalí, Botticelli, Renoir, the list goes on. These amazingly talented and famous artists—who created works that are incomparable—are being put on the same level as Jackson Pollock. Maybe I just don’t understand art, but paint splatters are not my idea of an aesthetically pleasing piece. So why is the Mona Lisa capable of surpassing all of this?

This painting is by the artist Chuck Close. It’s made up of hundreds of squares that use combinations of colors to create the larger image. This painting is 102 inches tall and 84 inches wide. Close is severely paralyzed and is confined to a wheelchair. His paintings defy all logic—a man in a wheelchair should not be able to create such huge pieces of art. And yet, they exist, right under our noses.

What is it really about the Mona Lisa that draws people in? Why have we found her so pleasing for all these years? Fine art exists to be seen, and yet so many pieces are ignored. Pushed aside in favor of examining this one piece of art that is colossally smaller in real life than we all picture it. The grand, wall-sized painting of a woman smiling coyly does not exist. The Mona Lisa is only 2 feet 6 inches tall. Alternatively Da Vinci’s Last Supper is 29 feet long and 15 feet tall. During the process of finding information for this blog entry I was scrounging the web for ideas and I found myself thinking about the pictures you see of the Louvre with hundreds of people crowding around, trying to get a picture of an average sized painting that you can just Google and find hundreds of images of. Yet, paintings just as old and just as beautiful don’t get half as much recognition.

I began to wonder what truly establishes the idea of fine art. I found this quote by Aristotle, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” When we look at a piece of art it either makes us feel or it doesn’t. A piece of art that makes us feel something reaches inside of our souls and starts to twist. It pulls and yanks and forms until finally it bursts forth, making you continue to stare at that painting or statue and wonder. With the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci does just that. He calls to human curiosity and forces us to stare at his most famous painting with confusion. He made us ask the same question, wonder the same thing. This is what I feel draws us all to the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci had the uncanny idea to make the entire world wonder, what made her smile?

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.” ~Pablo Picasso