Famous Artists Allegedly Painted Themselves as Women
Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is famous far and wide for that mysterious smile — look at how those upturned corners beckon the onlooker to gaze into her eyes in search of their true meaning.
Perhaps more puzzling, though, is the identity of the actual person who served as the model for this emblematic, enigmatic portrait. Officially, the model is Lisa del Giocondo (Lisa Gherardini), whose husband commissioned the portrait from da Vinci. But there have been many theories in the past questioning this claim, with one of the potential candidates being Leonardo himself. More specifically, Leonardo reimagined as a woman.
Although the subject of the painting was probably not da Vinci, his tendency to “recycle a subject in various different versions” makes it difficult to rule out any of the candidates that served as inspiration for the famous face. He may have derived the final result from years of looking at different faces, the end product an aggregate of his conscious and subconscious influences. Playing on this room for uncertainty, Sigmund Freud, in typical psychoanalytic style, posited that the subject of the painting was da Vinci’s mother.
Like many forms of art, the Mona Lisa has become an object to which we can superimpose our speculations and theories. To me, this is reminiscent of the esoterica so judiciously practiced by modern artists in their work (laymen — that is, 99% of the population, including me — find it difficult to articulate coherent responses to acclaimed artists such as Pollock and Rothko, and wonder through furrowed brows if art critics really know what they’re talking about when they come up with extremely professional explanations for such works) and explains the public’s enduring fascination with the painting.
This capacity to stay at the forefront of the public psyche is a quality common to all canonical works of art and literature. For example, when I was reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in English class last year, I took the accompanying excerpt from Heaney’s poem “The Settle Bed” very much to heart. It was roughly this:
And now this is ‘an inheritance’
Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked
In the long ago, yet willable forward
Later in the poem the lines “…whatever is given/Can always be reimagined…” round out the impression of the settle bed, for all its sturdiness, being a shape-shifting entity, navigating the waters of time fluidly. The same went for Beowulf in translation, being read in 2017 by high school students in Korea. Heaney’s translation imparted new nuances nonexistent in the original, as did our cultural and linguistic backgrounds when we discussed the work. Indeed, nothing can go untranslated, be it Old English literature or a Renaissance-era painting.
Returning to this article’s title — a shamelessly attention-grabbing allusion to artists imagining themselves as women — I’d like to show you all this:
This is 미인도 (Mi In Do) by Joseon dynasty painter Yun-Bok Shin(1758–1814?), which basically translates to “painting of a beautiful woman.” She is frequently speculated to have been the ideal of beauty in Joseon. And — you guessed it — some have raised the possibility that Shin may have used himself as a model. There is even a movie based on that very premise. Who knew Shin and da Vinci had that particular characteristic in common?
The Hongdo Kim Code aims to explore such interesting suggestions in a way that cuts through the cross sections of different cultures. Hongdo Kim and his body of work is a great place to start. Questions have been raised about his depiction of human fingers. He himself has been suspected of secretly being an ukiyo-e master, crossing the East Sea to Japan and spreading his expertise far and wide.
When I uploaded the first post, officially starting this project, I used The Da Vinci Code to justify The Hongdo Kim Code on grounds that it would direct necessary attention toward cultures both known and relatively unknown. The conspiracy theories might be just that — fabrications, imaginings — but they would be fun, and harmless given the existence of disclaimers and respect toward grounded historical fact. With this post, I would like to further my vision regarding this entire endeavor: conspiracy theories as reimaginings in the modern world are legitimate, even by themselves. They have a life of their own, as all interpretations do…and the originals are enriched by them, as all inheritances are.
— Jungmin Bae, The Hongdo Kim Code
We will return with artful conspiracy theories formulated over the course of a field trip to an art exhibit in Daegu. Stay tuned.
