An ultrascan for Mother Mona
Call me a grumpy old spittoon if you wish, tell me I’ve put my trousers on backwards again if you have to, but it seems to me that all the brouhaha about “the first major scientific analysis of the ‘Mona Lisa’ in 50 years” was really about technology, not art. (Shown here, an AFP photo of the front of the back and the back of the front.)
I’m not clear on the distinctions between the scan conducted this week by Canadians and Frenchmen (and there’s no difference between them either, really) and the one done five decades ago. Why didn’t the latter discover that Leonardo had originally painted La Giaconda in a maternity bib and bonnet with her hair pulled back? Presumably because the scanning equipment has improved a lot since.
Okay, and then what?
It’s nice to get whimsical, of course, and say that Da Vinci’s model probably had that (sigh) “enigmatic” smile because she’d just had a baby. The world’s most-viewed painting takes on an broader aura of humanity beyond the merely lukewarm tale of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. See the rest.
