Lecture 20: The High Renaissance—Leonardo da Vinci
rapidly. The deepest darks in Leonardo’s paintings are profound. This led his
followers and imitators to further exaggerate darkness and make the contrast
between light and dark their aim rather than the gradation from light to dark.The next example is Leonardo’s enigmatic portrait, the Mona Lisa
(c. 1503–1506). This painting represents a half-length portrait of a woman
seated in an armchair in front of a parapet with a loggia behind. Her left arm
rests on a chair arm while her right hand rests on her left arm. She is well
dressed, in a robe with a scarf draped over it and with a dark veil covering her
hair. A close-up portrait of this size, with ample pictorial space to embrace
the sculptural volume of the sitter, had not been seen before, and its inÀ uence
was immediate. The painting has been cut down on the sides, but there is still
a partial column on the parapet at the left and the base of another at the right.
The landscape behind her shows a winding road and a bridge in the middle
ground, but it changes from a real and inhabitable landscape as it stretches
into the background, where it is dominated by water and rocks that recall
those in the Madonna of the Rocks. The horizon is at the sitter’s eye level,
which brings us back to this famous face. It is famous for the modeling,
which is the same subtle, smoky painting of À esh as in the Madonna of the
Rocks, and for her enigmatic smile.It is believed that the sitter was a Florentine named Lisa Gherardina. Mona is
the abbreviated version of Ma Donna (“My Lady”). Combined with her ¿ rst
name, we get Mona Lisa, the title universally used in the English-speaking
world. Lisa was married to a silk merchant and local politician named
Francesco del Giocondo. In Italy, the portrait is called La Gioconda (and, in
France, La Joconde). Giocondo means “joyous” in Italian, and it has been
suggested that Leonardo used her married name as an emblem, an idea that
would be central to the portrait. It was not a new idea to identify a sitter by
a punning reference to his or her name, but it was usually a plant or animal
or object that provided the reference point. To use a facial expression was an
original idea. The painting has become famous because of the character of the
smile, not because of its connection to her name. The famous smile is hard
to characterize, partly because of Leonardo’s smoky modeling, which leaves
the shadowy corners of her mouth ambiguous in expression. Renaissance
ideals of decorum may also have inÀ uenced the smile. A 16th-century Italian
writer suggested that a fashionable woman should smile “as if you were