EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Mona Lisa’s Bad Hair Day

After breakfast this morning I read an article on Tudor coinage – God knows why –but what a lucky break!  Who would ever have thought that England’s Bloody Mary and the Mona Lisa would have anything in common? But, first, some background. It has been fifteen years since Lillian Schwartz demonstrated that the proportions of the Mona Lisa’s face are identical to those of Leonardo’s and still no academic art historian has acknowledged the correctness of her claim.¹ They cannot dismiss geometrical fact but, within the paradigm they use, it makes no sense. So they ignore it. They believe portraits are pictures of someone else and, in any event, Leonardo would not be so frivolous as to dress himself up in drag. Only once you know that art does not represent nature like a photograph can you begin to understand why Leonardo might have placed his features in the Mona Lisa. As a woman, she is the symbol of Leonardo’s very fertile mind. She is in his mind!

Fertility is a recurrent theme in the literature on Leonardo. An art historian-doctor demonstrated long ago that the hands of the Mona Lisa show the physical signs of pregnancy while Kenneth Clark believed that Leonardo was obssessed by the creative process.² Yet no-one put two and two together: the Mona Lisa is fertile and Leonardo is fertile.³

This is where the coins come in. I have long been intrigued by an observation –  cannot remember where – that the Mona Lisa is a rare Renaissance portrait in that a woman is portrayed with her hair down. The scholar claimed that no woman then would want to be seen in public that way so, perhaps, the portrait was indeed uncommissioned. It helped support my position but seemed to have no meaning….until this morning. The article recounted how when Queen Mary of England came to the throne she was portrayed on her coinage with long tresses. Like those of the Mona Lisa, I thought, puzzled by why a Queen would have a bad hair day. After marrying the King of Spain, however, the hair on Mary’s coins disappears under a tight-fitting cap and she becomes the very model of a proper wife. This scared her subjects who feared that England would soon be under Spanish domination. Rebellion ensued, fuelled in part by the disappearance of that long hair. When she died, Elizabeth came to the throne, and in paintings, prints and coins the long tresses of England’s Queen flow downwards again. Richard Bishop explains that the loose hair on the original coinage symbolized that Mary:

“was a maiden, a virgin, and, it was hoped, fertile. In all representations, painting, sculpture, ceramics, as well as on coinage, this was the case, a potential bride was always depicted like this, and a royal bride was no exception…..the profusion of thick flowing hair was a clear sign to the world of a woman’s natural potential, regardless of wealth or political position.”⁴

I realized for the first time over my toast today that the Mona Lisa's hair is yet another sign of the fertility of Leonardo’s mind. One day that old nonsense about the Mona Lisa being Lisa Gherardini will be toast too.

1. Lillian Schwartz,“The Art Historian’s Computer”, Scientific American 272, April 1995, pp. 106-11

2. Kenneth D. Keele, “The Genesis of Mona Lisa”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 14, April 1959, pp. 136-59;  Kenneth Clark, “Mona Lisa”, Burlington 115, March 1973, p. 149

3. Laurie Schneider and Jack Flam questioned the belief that the Mona Lisa was modeled on a sitter. They concluded that the painting represents "a brilliant and highly synthesized image of Leonardo as painter and philosopher." Schneider and Flam, “Visual Convention, Simile and Metaphor in The Mona Lisa”, Storia dell’Arte 29, 1977, pp. 19, 21

4. Richard Bishop, "Veritas Temporis Filia", Spink Magazine, Summer 2010, p.46