The compulsion to delve into the unknown is hard-wired into the human brain. Survival often has depended on it. Figuring out how things worked and why has brought countless advances and made modern civilization possible.
But sometimes the unknown really is unknowable, and no amount of human sleuthing changes that. This does nothing to satisfy the compulsion, and leaves us vexed by such mysteries as the most famous smile in the world. The “Mona Lisa”–Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece painting–has transfixed the world for 500 years. What the heck was behind that smile?
Late last year, Dutch researchers ran the painting through an “emotion recognition” software program and determined the smile to be 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry.
Now French and Canadian researchers believe, after scanning the painting with a 3-D laser camera, that they have deduced the reason for the 83 percent happy. They contend that the subject of the Mona Lisa, Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, was pregnant or had just given birth. The proof? Their high-tech infrared camera picked up hints over her shoulders of a gauzy veil or robe, called a guarnello, commonly worn by women in that condition in Renaissance Italy. Aha! She was smiling just so because of the impending or recent arrival of her second son.
So say the researchers at the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, headquartered at the Louvre in Paris, where Mona Lisa has resided since the French Revolution.
But why then did da Vinci originally paint one of her hands in a clenched position rather than relaxed? That detail also was divulged by the researchers’ fancy technology. Were her teeth clenched, too, behind those famous lips? The enigmatic, alluring yet aloof smile may have masked something altogether different from the beatific glow of motherhood that is now being ascribed to, dare we say, Mama Lisa.
Mrs. del Giocondo may well have been fuming because her husband had commissioned this painting, meaning she had to sit motionless for hours and hours when she had children to care for. By the way, Francesco, who’s doing the marketing while I’m trapped here with this da Vinci guy–and when will you fix that leaky roof like you promised months ago?
Despite modern researchers’ insistence on knowing the unknowable, Mona (Madame) Lisa’s secrets remain secret. She was the only one who knew positively what prompted her expression while the masterful da Vinci worked.
