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ALL IN THE DETAIL

The detail that unlocks the Mona Lisa

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(Image credit: Alamy)

By Kelly Grovier 12th February 2021

The 1503 painting by Leonardo da Vinci is the world's most famous piece of art.
Kelly Grovier explores an overlooked object that offers a different perspective on
the masterpiece.

Article continues below

ome things are so obvious you never really notice them. Take, for instance, the

S way the white space between the "E" and the "x" in the FedEx logo forms a big
white arrow pointing forward. We've seen the sign whizz past us countless
times without ever clocking its subliminal point. Another ubiquitous cultural
 image is the Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci's inexhaustible portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the
24-year-old mother of five and wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant who sat for the
High Renaissance master in 1503, is doubtless the most famous work of art in the world. Yet
how many of us have ever consciously noted the object in the painting that is closer to us
than any other – the chair on which the mysterious woman sits? Never mind that the piece
of furniture is the only thing that Leonardo's sitter grips in her hand (she's literally pointing
at it with every finger she has), the chair must surely be the single most neglected aspect of
the otherwise over-stared-at icon. Hiding in plain sight, it may also be the arrow that points
the way to the work's deepest meanings.

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For centuries, our attention has largely been focused elsewhere in the small (77 x 53cm/30
x 21in) oil-on-poplar panel, which Da Vinci never fully finished and is thought to have
continued to tinker with obsessively until his death in 1519 – as if the painting's endless
emergence were the work itself. A preoccupation principally with Mona Lisa's inscrutable
smile is almost as old as the painting, and dates back at least to the reaction of the
legendary Renaissance writer and historian Giorgio Vasari, who was born a few years aer
Da Vinci began work on the likeness. "The mouth with its opening and with its ends united
by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face," Vasari observed in his celebrated Lives of
the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, "seemed, in truth, to be not colours
but flesh. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of
the pulse." He concluded: "In this work of Leonardo, there was a smile so pleasing, that it
was a thing more divine than human to behold, and it was held to be something marvellous,
in that it was not other than alive."
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Many scholars have been fascinated by the mystery of Mona Lisa's smile (Credit: Alamy)

The mesmerising mystery of Mona Lisa's smile and how Leonardo magically leveraged it
into creating "a thing more divine than human" and yet "not other than alive" would prove
 too intense for many to bear. The 19th-Century French art critic Alfred Dumesnil confessed
to finding the painting's paradox utterly paralysing. In 1854 he asserted that the subject's
"smile is full of attraction, but it is the treacherous attraction of a sick soul that renders
sickness. This so so a look, but avid like the sea, devours". If legend is to be believed, the
"treacherous attraction" of Mona Lisa's irresolvable smirk consumed too the soul of an
aspiring French artist by the name of Luc Maspero. According to popular myth, Maspero,
who allegedly ended his days by leaping from the window of his Paris hotel room, was driven
to destructive distraction by the mute whispers of Mona Lisa's engrossingly gladsome lips.
"For years I have grappled desperately with her smile," he is said to have written in the note
he le behind. "I prefer to die."

Walter Pater sees past the seductive snare of the portrait's

smile to a larger vitality that percolates as if from deep below
the surface
Not everyone, however, has been content to locate the centre of Mona Lisa's magnetising
mystique in her enigmatic grin. The Victorian writer Walter Pater believed it was the
"delicacy" with which her hands and eyelids are rendered that transfix and hypnotise us into
believing that the work possesses preternatural power. "We all know the face and hands of
the figure," he observed in an article on Da Vinci in 1869, "in that circle of fantastic rocks, as
in some faint light under sea". Pater proceeds to meditate on the Mona Lisa in such a
singularly intense way that in 1936 the Irish poet William Butler Yeats found himself
compelled to seize a sentence from Pater's description, break it up into free-verse lines, and
install them as the opening poem in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which Yeats was
then compiling. The passage that Yeats couldn't help co-opting begins: "She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and
learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen
day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was
the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to
her but as the sound of lyres and flutes." The portrait "lives", Pater concludes, "only in the
delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the
hands".

Some viewers are as transfixed by Mona Lisa's hands as by her face (Credit: Alamy)

Pater's description still astounds. Unlike Dumesnil and the doomed Maspero before him,
Pater sees past the seductive snare of the portrait's smile to a larger vitality that percolates
as if from deep below the surface. Contending that the painting depicts a figure suspended
in ceaseless shuttle between the here-and-now and some otherworldly realm that lies
beyond, Pater pinpoints the mystical essence of the panel's perennial appeal: its surreal
sense of eternal flux. Like Vasari, Pater bears witness to a breathing and pulsing presence –
"changing lineaments" – that transcends the inert materiality of the portrait's making. Key
to the force of Pater's language is an insistence on aquatic imagery that reinforces the
fluidity of the sitter's elusive self ("faint light under the sea", "a diver in deep seas", and
"trafficked… with Eastern merchants"), as if Mona Lisa were an ever-flowing fountain of
living water – an interminable ripple in the endless eddies of time.
 Da Vinci's subject has a strangely submarine quality to her
that is accentuated by the algae green dress she wears – an
amphibious second skin that has only grown murkier and
darker with time
Perhaps she is. There is reason to think that such a reading, which sees the sitter as a shape-
shiing spring of eternal resurgence, is precisely what Leonardo intended. Flanked on either
side by bodies of flowing water that the artist has ingeniously positioned in such a way as to
suggest that they are aspects of his sitter's very being, Da Vinci's subject has a strangely
submarine quality to her that is accentuated by the algae green dress she wears – an
amphibious second skin that has only grown murkier and darker with time. Pivoting her
stare slightly to her le to meet ours, Mona Lisa is poised upon not just any old bench or
stool, but a deep-seated perch known popularly as a pozzetto chair. Meaning "little well", the
pozzetto introduces a subtle symbolism into the narrative that is as revealing as it is
unexpected.

By placing Mona Lisa on a 'little well', surrounded by water, Da Vinci could be drawing on earlier
spiritual connections with springs (Credit: Alamy)

Suddenly, the waters we see meandering with a mazy motion behind Mona Lisa (whether
belonging to an actual landscape, such as the valley of the Italian River Arno, as some
historians believe, or entirely imaginary, as others contend) are no longer distant and
disconnected from the sitter, but are an essential resource that sustain her existence. They
literally flow into her. By situating Mona Lisa inside a "little well", Da Vinci transforms her
into an ever-fluctuating dimension of the physical universe she occupies. Art historian and
 leading Da Vinci expert Martin Kemp has likewise detected a fundamental connection
between Mona Lisa's depiction and the geology of the world she inhabits. "The artist was
not literally portraying the prehistoric or future Arno," Kemp asserts in his study Leonardo:
100 Milestones (2019), "but was shaping Lisa's landscape on the basis of what he had
learned about change in the 'body of the Earth', to stand alongside the implicit
transformations in the body of the woman as a 'lesser world' or microcosm." Mona Lisa isn't
sitting before a landscape. She is the landscape.

Drawing from a well

As with all visual symbols employed by Leonardo, the pozzetto chair is multivalent and
serves more than merely to link Mona Lisa with the artist's well-known fascination with the
hydrological forces that shape the Earth. The subtle insinuation of a "little well" in the
painting as the very channel through which Mona Lisa emerges into consciousness
repositions the painting entirely in cultural discourse. No longer is this a straightforwardly
secular portrait but something spiritually more complex. Portrayals of women "at the well"
are a staple throughout Western art history. Old Testament stories of Eliezar meeting
Rebekah at a well and of Jacob meeting Rachel at the well went on to become especially
popular in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, as everyone from Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
to Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to William Holman Hunt tried their
hand at one or other of the narratives.

There are many depictions in art of people at wells, such as Christ and the Samaritan Woman
(1310-11) by Duccio di Buoninsegna (Credit: Alamy)

Moreover apocryphal depictions of the New Testament Annunciation (the moment when
the Archangel Gabriel informs the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to Christ) as occurring
at the site of a spring were a mainstay among Medieval manuscript illustrators, and may
even have inspired the oldest surviving visual portrayal of Mary. An endlessly elastic
emblem, as Walter Pater intimated, Mona Lisa is doubtless capable of absorbing all such
reflected resonances and many more besides. There is no one she isn't.

But perhaps the most pertinent parallel between Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and pictorial
precursors is one that can be drawn with the many representations of a biblical episode in
which Jesus finds himself at a well, engaged in cryptic conversation with a woman from
Samaria. In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes a distinction between the water that can be
drawn from the natural spring – water which will inevitably leave one "thirsty" – and the
"living water" that he can provide. Where water from a well can only sustain a perishable
body, 'living water' is capable of quenching the eternal spirit. Notable depictions of the
scene by the Medieval Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna and by the German
Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder tend to seat Jesus directly on the wall of the
well, suggesting his dominion over the fleeting elements of this world. By placing his female
sitter notionally inside the well, however, Da Vinci confounds the tradition, and suggests
instead a merging of material and spiritual realms – a blurring of the here and hereaer –
into a shared plane of eternal emergence. In Da Vinci's enthralling narrative, Mona Lisa is
herself a miraculous surge of "living water", serenely content in the knowledge of her own
raging infinitude.
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ART | ALL IN THE DETAIL

The hidden toilet humour in a Titian masterpiece

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(Image credit: National Gallery)

By Kelly Grovier 14th August 2020

 The Venetian master’s Bacchus and Ariadne is an iconic portrayal of falling in
love. But it could also contain one of the greatest depictions of breaking wind,
reveals Kelly Grovier.

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ou could easily miss it amid the romp and revelry that surrounds Bacchus, the

Y
Roman god of wine, as he leaps from his cheetah-drawn chariot aer clapping
eyes on the beautiful Ariadne: that tiny detail that transforms Titian's
passionate painting of love-at-first-sight into something a little less fragrant.

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The work, inspired by a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, depicts the instant Bacchus’s
boisterous posse happens upon a heartbroken Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on
the island of Naxos, and has long been cherished for its sensuous portrayal of ‘the way in
Continue
which the world seems to come to a stop at the reading
moment when people fall for each other,’ as
the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has described it.

ART | ALL IN THE DETAIL

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere: A symbol planted in cleavage

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(Image credit: The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London)
 By Kelly Grovier 12th March 2019

What does a corsage have to do with prostitution? Kelly Grovier reveals how the
shape of a posy echoes one of the world’s first corporate logos in Manet’s A Bar at
the Folies-Bergère.

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veryone knows that staring at a woman’s cleavage is disrespectful. But in the

E
case of Édouard Manet’s famous portrayal of a Parisian cabaret, A Bar at the
Folies-Bergère (1882), our objectifying gaze has been deliberately orchestrated
by the artist to nestle on a detail carefully positioned at the bosom of the
barmaid. Here, Manet has planted in plain sight an underappreciated floral flourish that
unlocks the power of one of the most intriguing and poignant paintings in all of modern art.

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To understand the significance of that seemingly innocuous detail – a simple posy of red
petals sculpted into a triangle – we first need to remind ourselves of the cultural context
that Manet has chosen to depict, in what is widely regarded as the aging artist’s last major
painting. At first glance, the scene may seem straightforward enough: a bored barmaid with
faraway eyes awaits our order of spirits, champagne, or ale. In the expansive mirror behind
Continue reading
 her, the bustle of cabaret goers, whiling away a Parisian evening, ricochets from over our
shoulders fixing her inscrutable stare in a frozen flash of suspended hubbub

ART | ALL IN THE DETAIL

Virgin of the Rocks: A subversive message hidden by Da Vinci

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(Image credit: Louvre)

By Kelly Grovier 19th February 2019

A palm tree in an Alpine scene prompts Kelly Grovier to follow a trail of clues
that unlock a 15th-Century mystery – transforming Da Vinci masterpieces into
ruminations on the Earth’s geological evolution.

Article continues below

ome paintings are as mysterious as they are famous. Gazing at them is like

S
diving into a deep dark sea. You never know what unsuspecting pearl your eyes
might prise loose from their secretive lips – what key you might find that can
unlock their power. Take Leonardo da Vinci’s the Virgin of the Rocks, in which
the infant Jesus finds himself in a shadowy cave on an Alpine playdate with a baby John the
 Baptist. Or rather, take both versions of the work that Leonardo created between 1483 and
1508: the one that hangs in the Louvre in Paris (thought to be the earlier of the two,
completed around 1486) and a subsequent one that resides in the National Gallery in
London (begun in 1495 and finished 13 years later).

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Hiding in plain sight in both paintings is a small and previously overlooked detail that, once
spotted, transforms the scene into something more complex and controversial than the
vision of a sacred creche, watched over tenderly by the Virgin Mary and the archangel Uriel.
They become subversive statements that challenge the Church’s conception of the creation
of the world. No, I’m not alluding to Uriel’s sharp, shiv-like finger in the Louvre version
(removed in the later painting), which Dan Brown sensationally claims, in his novel The Da
Vinci Code, isn’t pointing to John but slicing the neck of an invisible figure, whose phantom
head Mary grips like a bowling ball in the splayed fingers of her outstretched le hand.
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(Credit: Louvre)

The element to which I’m referring does not feature in any conspiracy theory, and indeed is
evident for all to see. It appears, slightly transformed from version to version, just above
Mary’s right hand: the seemingly innocuous palm tree, whose flaring fronds (especially crisp
in the earlier Louvre version) are fashioned in such a way as if to echo precisely the contours
of an open scallop shell.

To appreciate just how surprising and provocative this

complex symbol is, we must first remind ourselves of the
backstory of Leonardo’s vision
 To appreciate just how surprising and provocative this complex symbol is – an Alpine palm
tree doubling as a displaced scallop shell – we must first remind ourselves of the backstory
of Leonardo’s vision, which pulses with a strange subterranean poetry all its own. Though
very different in temperature and tone, the two paintings share the same basic composition.

Set in a clammy mountain recess, the works are based not on a passage in the Bible but on a
popular apocryphal tradition that imagined Jesus and John meeting by chance as infants
while fleeing the Massacre of the Innocents (the execution of all male children in and
around Bethlehem, as ordered by Herod the Great), decades before John would baptise
Jesus as an adult. Clustered into a pyramid, the works’ four figures – Jesus, John, Mary, and
Uriel – huddle against a ragged snarl of soaring rock formations, perched beside a still pool
that separates us from them.

What is believed to be the first version of the Virgin of the Rocks is held at The Louvre (Credit:
Louvre)

Whether the rocky portrayal is what the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in
Milan would have wanted when it commissioned Leonardo to create a central panel for its
altarpiece in 1483, is doubtful. Rather than elevating and enthroning the mother and child
among a choir of angels, as was expected, Leonardo fossicks from the depths of his
imagination a grotty and comfortless grotto.

So overwhelming is the primordial backdrop, the paintings are at risk of appearing more
about the ancient architecture of time-chiselled crags than the miracle of Christ’s arrival
and survival in a perilous world. That Leonardo, moreover, seems to have neglected to
include any conspicuous allusion to the doctrine from which the Confraternity derives its
name (that the Virgin Mary, like Christ himself, was conceived ‘immaculately’ and without
sin), has confounded observers of the works.
In what is thought to be the second version, Da Vinci added haloes and painted John the Baptist
with a cross (Credit: National Gallery)

Few art historians doubt that Leonardo’s vision was influenced by his memory of a mountain
excursion on which he found himself wandering “among gloomy rocks”. “I came to the
mouth of a great cavern,” Leonardo would later attest, “in front of which I stood sometime
astonished. Bending back and forth, I tried to see if I could discover anything inside, but the
darkness within prevented that. Suddenly there arose in me two contrary emotions, fear and
desire – fear of the threatening dark cave, desire to see whether there were any marvellous
thing within.”

Impelled to enter, Leonardo’s curiosity was repaid by the discovery inside of a fossilised
whale and a horde of ancient seashells whose engrossing geometric grooves he would
memorialise in the pages of his notebooks.

In Study for the head of Leda, c 1506, Leonardo da Vinci reveals the spirals of a seashell in her hair
(Credit: Royal Collection)

Over the ensuing years, the perplexing presence of “oysters and corals and various other
shells and sea snails” on “the high summits of mountains”, far from the sea, worried away at
the artist’s imagination. For Leonardo, the accepted explanation by ecclesiastical scholars
of a great flood, such as that described in the Old Testament, for the relocation of these
shells, didn’t wash. These creatures weren’t thrown there. They were born there.

Seashells in mountains were proof, Leonardo came to believe and confided to his journal,
that Alpine peaks were once the floors of seas. And the Earth was therefore much older and
far more haphazardly fashioned by violent cataclysms and seismic upheavals over a vast
stretch of time (not the smooth hand of God in a handful of days) than the Church was
willing to admit.

Fossils and flora

We know from a remark Leonardo makes in his notebooks that the riddle of seashells
cropping up incongruously on mountaintops was fresh in his mind just prior to his
undertaking work on the first version of the Virgin of the Rocks in 1483. Recalling an
incident from the year before, when the artist was designing a never-completed equestrian
statue for the Duke of Milan Ludovico il Moro, he writes: “When I was making the great
horse for Milan, a large sack full [of shells] was brought to me in my workshop by certain
peasants; these were found in [the mountains of Parma and Piacenza] and among them
were many preserved in their first freshness.”

The fact that Leonardo was preoccupied with the puzzle of seashells on mountains at the
very moment that he began to conceive the Virgin of the Rocks is crucial to our
interpretation of his paintings. His fascination with the shells’ displacement sheds intriguing
light on how his mercurial imagination might cra the double entendre of a scallop-shaped
palm tree, like the one that bristles to the le of Mary, just above John’s head.
(Credit: Louvre)

Leonardo was a dab hand at inserting iconographically meaningful flora in his works; the
primrose we see beneath the hand that Christ raises to bless John, for example, would have
been recognised by contemporaries as an emblem of the saviour’s sinlessness. Taken at face
value, the palm could likewise easily be dismissed as nothing more than a simple and
straightforward foreshadow of the palm fronds that will be thrown before Christ on his
entry into Jerusalem on the Sunday before his crucifixion.

But Leonardo never works on a simple or straightforward level. To scan his notebooks is to
witness time and again one image morphing effortlessly into another – the spiral of a
nautilus shell spinning into a woman’s coiffure. It would not have been lost on him that the
palms that radiate outwards in the tree’s flaring fans are identical to the spokes found inside
a scallop shell – a symbol associated not only with Mary, but specifically with the doctrine of
her Immaculate Conception.

The Brera Madonna, 1472-74, by Piero della Francesca (Credit: Public domain)

A painting by the Italian master Piero della Francesca, a contemporary of Leonardo’s,

executed a decade before Leonardo began working on the Virgin of the Rocks, illustrates
the well-established connection between Mary and the scallop. In the so-called Brera
Madonna, a shell-like dome hovers protectively in the apse behind Mary while a pearl-like
egg dangles down, completing the iconography and suggesting that Mary’s fertility is as
miraculous as the mystical manufacturing of pearls, which were then thought to grow
supernaturally from a drop of purest dew.

Where, you might reasonably ask, is the pearl in the Virgin of the Rocks, if the palm tree is
really a double-sign that merges into the symbolism of a pearl-bearing scallop? In fact,
Leonardo has given us 20. At the precise centre of both paintings, glinting at us
 underappreciated for half a millennium, is a polished brooch that keeps Mary’s cloak from
slipping off her shoulders. Surrounding the central stone in that clasp is a halo of 20
dazzling pearls. If you doubt that this clutch of sparkling seastones is intended to be
connected with the palm/scallop that yawns an arm’s length away, follow the trajectory of
Mary’s outstretched cloak hem, which leads our eyes directly from the constellation of
pearls to the open palm of the scallop.

(Credit: Louvre)

When it came time for Leonardo to revisit the subject for the second version (perhaps
because of a dispute with the Confraternity over compensation, prompting the artist to sell
the initial painting for more money to another buyer), every type of plant initially depicted
in the Paris painting is replaced with another kind of foliage. Except for the palm tree.
Though simplified and more stylised in the later painting, the palmate fronds in fact come to
resemble even more closely the fluted grooves that radiate from the hinge of a scallop. The
decision to equip the infant John the Baptist with a cross (whether taken by Leonardo
himself or by a later artist, as some scholars believe), only amplifies the profile of the palm
within the narrative of the London painting. The collision of the tilting cross with the palm,
against which it appears to rest, prefigures the brutal bolting of Christ’s own palms onto the
cross during crucifixion.

(Credit: National Gallery)

What does all this mean to how we read the pair of masterpieces that are the Virgin of the
Rocks? The claim here that Leonardo was capable of sculpting a complex and ambiguous
symbol with competing meanings is hardly revelatory. His was an incorrigibly unifying
imagination that perceived correspondences of form where others would be likely only to
see difference and discord. But merging a palm tree with a scallop shell in a mountain cave
is much riskier in its religious implications than conflating the nautilus shell with an
 elaborate hairdo. By secreting within his paintings an allusion to the heretical contention
that seashells found in rocky mountain landscapes are evidence that the Church’s teachings
on the creation of the Earth were wrong-headed and superstitious, Leonardo le himself
and his work vulnerable to charges of heresy. (When the French inventor Bernard Palissy
made similar observations publically a century later, he was violently denounced.)

Leonardo’s determination to create such a subversive symbol (not once, but twice) suggests
just how important it was for him to bear witness, however subtle or encoded, to the
beautifully blasphemous truth of nature. The easily overlooked scallop/palm, crouching
quietly in the shadowy margins of the works, transforms his masterpieces into subversive
ruminations on the Earth’s geological evolution – the cold and icy predicament in which we
all find ourselves stranded and desperate for a soul-salvaging miracle.

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