While
the 'Mona Lisa' is world famous, the origins of its stellar status are
relatively obscure. After all, the genious of its creator and the
elusive subtlety of his art, however prodigious, can hardly explain the
phenomenal cult that has grown up around this masterwork. In fact, the
Florentine lady owes her status as the most adulated artwork in the
Western World to a thief.
Like the aging of a fine wine, the myth of the Mona Lisa
was the result of a slow and obscure process whose complex chemistry
defies formulation. It would be possible, however, to trace its first
stirrings to the enthusiastic comments made later in the sixteenth
century by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. Does not his
description of the painting, in which he mentions the eyelashes and
eyebrows, tend to indicate that he had never actually seen it, and was
letting himself get carried away by the legend?
Still, the cult of the Mona Lisa lay some way ahead. Although the work was part of Louis XIV's Cabinet of paintings at Versailles, La Joconde,
as she is known in France, was neglected by his successors and we do
not find the work mentioned in the Catalogue of the Museum Central des
Arts (the forerunner of today's Louvre) until 1798. Contrary to what was
long believed, the famous smile did not look down on Bonaparte's
bedchamber in the Tuileries palace, but on Joséphine' s apartments. So
much for the legend! It is true that the work was copied on countless
occasions, from its inclusion in the collections of Francis I to the eve
of the Revolution - Leonardo's apparently seamless, elusive technique
offered one of the sternest tests of a painter's skill - but these
copies, these bravura exercises, were no more accessible to the public
than the original itself.
0 comments:
Posting Komentar