Mona Lisa, under the surface
2pnet.net News:- What’s behind the Mona Lisa’s smile? It could have been that she’d just become a mother.
The possibility has arisen following work by Canadian researchers John Taylor and Francois Blais who used their infrared scanner to delve beneath the painting’s surface.
They found that Leonardo da Vinci’s model, "had a gauzy layer over her dress they say was typically worn by pregnant women of the time, or mothers who had recently given birth," says The Globe and Mail, going on:
"Mona Lisa was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine cloth merchant. Records suggest she wasn’t pregnant when she posed for Leonardo, but that the painting was commissioned to celebrate the birth of her third child, says Bruno Mottin, curator in the research department of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France."
Working at night when Paris’ Louvre museum was closed, the researchers, "found that in addition to a veil that is visible on her head, Mona Lisa was wearing a dark bonnet that can’t be seen under the layer of varnish applied long after Leonardo died" and, "They found that the artist had changed the position of one of her hands. She had been gripping her chair as if she was about to get up, but the final painting shows one hand folded over the other in a more relaxed pose."
And back to the famous enigmatic smile, "Italian doctor Filippo Surano suggested that whoever posed for the Mona Lisa suffered from bruxism, an unconscious habit of grinding the teeth during sleep or periods of mental stress," says The Ottawa Cirizen.
"The strain of posing for the painting, he said, could have triggered an attack of teeth grinding."
Surano also wondered if the Mona Lisa was in fact, "an unhappy, abused wife, and da Vinci, in order to rid her face of melancholy, hired court jesters to entertain her while she posed".
Also See:
The Globe and Mail – Mona Lisa was a mom, September 27, 2006
The Ottawa Cirizen – Decoding Mona: more questions than answers, September 26, 2006
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