My quarantine buddy is La Gioconda
The lockdown goes on, and with it, the endless attempt to fill the long days spent bouncing from the fridge to the couch to the bed. I am one of the many people who wake up every morning and ask themselves “why is this happening to me?”, and I guess we are the majority. I was looking for my way out when the government came to national TV to announce that the way out was closed until further notice. Since March 9 I went through all stages of Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle and, although fluctuating, I think I finally reached acceptance. It’s true, after all, that every cloud has its silver lining, and in the case of quarantine, it is the luxury to indulge. I found again the small pleasure of sitting down for hours reading and savoring it. I cook, I listen to podcasts, I walk to the newsstand and play with my cat. Despite the sense of guilt and the boredom kick in every once in awhile, I decided to completely surrender to the silver lining to survive.
Looking for alternative ways to challenge myself and keep my gears oiled so I don’t regress to when my brain was a mushy glop in my mom’s womb, I ordered a 1000 pieces puzzle on Amazon that my sister and I could do together. The puzzle is a fragmentation of the most famous painting of all times, the Monalisa, or better La Gioconda (I am Italian and I don’t like the translation of titles and name of artworks), and ended up becoming more than a distraction to me and my siblings. Since we opened up the box and scattered all the tiny tiles on the dining room table, Monalisa became part of my life in an unexpected way.
Ever since I placed the puzzle and its box on the dining table, I have started to constantly feel observed by Monalisa. She’s famous for her enigmatic look, for her cracked smile and her steady posture, but I never fully realized how bewildering it could be to feel her eyes on you. I’ve never had the time to stop and stare at her at the Louvre those times I’ve visited it; the oceanic crowd that gathers around her case to get a picture is insane, let’s be honest. I have a lot of trouble accepting that I live in a century where art, nature, everything is a good you can purchase as a common object. I struggle with the big numbers and I think we’ve lost the pleasure of doing things slowly. Today’s museums are just a place where people feel they have to go to when visiting a new city, and that makes me incredibly sad. So it’s easy to understand why I’ve never stopped by to try to get a glimpse of the Monalisa in person, and why now that she lives with me so many thoughts I never had the time to have came up.
La Gioconda is definitely the world’s most known lady, and her portrait has kept hundreds of critics, art historians and common people wonder what’s behind it. First of all, we are not sure who she is. According to what Vasari wrote in Le Vite, Leonardo portrayed a woman named Lisa Gherardini, wife of a merchant, Francesco del Giocondo (from here the handle Gioconda). So the first question that has been haunting me lately pops out naturally: why didn’t Leonardo give the painting to its legitimate owner? As a matter of fact, he kept it for himself throughout his life, taking it to France when he left Italy and working on it until he died. It seems he was obsessed with it, why? X-ray analysis revealed he painted over the first layer three times. Also, there are doubts about the identity of Monalisa, since the explanation given by Vasari has some leaks. Some have argued it is a self-portray of Leonardo as a woman, others that it was Leonardo’s assistant as a woman. If any of these are true, what was the purpose? Finally, Freud, in its essay on Leonardo’s childhood, assumed that behind that enigmatic and seraphic smile the genius hid his mother’s smile. She seemingly was the only woman he ever truly loved.
What I found out about La Gioconda, honestly, led me nowhere. I still feel the same subjection to her, the same distance that feels familiar. I read many articles that carefully explain how it broke with classical standards of 1500’s art, about her uncommon posture and expression, her position, the way the background is full of references to nature yet blurry. Some point out that he tried to distance himself from Michelangelo, his rival, the shining star that resembled today’s rockstars. I haven’t made my mind up yet, but what I know that his obsession with the little portrait is what I mostly can’t stop thinking about. Leonardo argued that art was an intense, never-ending process that can take up to a lifetime, and that’s why he probably never gave La Gioconda away. He kept it and worked on it until his last breath, and probably was never satisfied with it.
Acknowledging this has been both overwhelming and exciting. In my view, this encompasses a positive message that it’s never too late to make something great, and a masterpiece can take up to a lifetime to become perfect. If he’d finish the painting in a couple of years, giving it to the merchant from Florence (or whoever was the buyer), we probably wouldn’t spend hours trying to peek at it through an immense crowd of tourists. Like many artists after him, he will never know how impactful his work would become, he probably imagined it, but never really witnessed it. Something so perfect that changed the world of art, science, politics, likely was something Leonardo wasn’t even happy with. And here makes its way the negative, scary assumption that made me shake: one life can be extremely short if you strive for perfection. Thinking that you might die while still trying to accomplish YOUR idea of perfection, of satisfaction or however you want to put it, is terrifying. Because as a human I don’t know what comes next, and the idea of being constantly dissatisfied with what I’ve done and accomplished makes me question the whole thing.
