Divine Elegance

By Theresa Rézeau There are faces that ask to be admired. They arrive beautifully arranged for the occasion: the right light, the right angle, the right clothes, the right expression. They understand that being seen is partly a performance, and they have prepared accordingly. Then there is a woman who has been sitting quietly for more than five hundred years. She wears no crown. There are no diamonds around her neck, no pearls hanging from her ears, no elaborate architecture announcing her importance. Her dress is dark and restrained. Her hair falls simply around her shoulders. Even her eyebrows appear to have abandoned the effort. And still, we cannot stop looking at her. The Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) began painting the Mona Lisa around 1503 in Florence and is believed to have continued working on it for several years. The portrait most likely depicts Lisa Gherardini (1479–1542), the wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, which explains the painting’s Italian name, La Gioconda. Now housed in the Louvre in Paris, the painting is small enough to surprise people encountering it for the first time. After the reproductions, documentaries, advertisements, parodies, T-shirts, mugs and endless photographs, one might expect something monumental. Instead, there she is.A woman behind glass. And usually, an enormous crowd trying to photograph her. This is one of the stranger achievements in the history of art. The Mona Lisa has become an object of global pilgrimage without offering most of the things we now associate with spectacle. She is not enormous. She is not covered in gold. She does not depict violence, eroticism, divine revelation or political triumph. Leonardo gives us almost nothing with which to manufacture excitement. What he gives us instead is presence. Perhaps that is why we have spent centuries trying to explain her. We have interrogated the smile as though it were withholding evidence. We have argued over her identity, examined her face, studied Leonardo’s technique, reconstructed the landscape behind her and subjected the painting to technologies its maker could never have imagined. Scholars have investigated what she might have been wearing, whether she was pregnant, whether the landscape corresponds to a real place and why her expression seems to alter depending upon where we look. We have even wondered whether she is smiling at all. There is something wonderfully human about this inability to leave her alone. A person sits quietly before us, and we immediately assume there must be a secret. But what if the secret is not hidden in the smile?What if it is in the restraint? Look again at what Leonardo has refused to give her. There is no ostentatious jewellery. No embroidered display of extraordinary wealth dominates the portrait. Her hands are gently folded, one resting over the other, without rings clamouring for our attention. Her body turns slightly towards us, but there is nothing theatrical in the pose. She does not appear to be presenting herself for approval. Even the landscape seems to participate in this refusal of certainty. Roads wind into places we cannot reach. Water disappears into distance. Mountains rise through a strange atmospheric haze. The world behind her feels ancient and almost unfinished, while the woman before it remains remarkably composed. Leonardo’s celebrated use of sfumato helps create this effect. Edges dissolve rather than announce themselves. Light passes softly across the face. The transitions around the eyes and mouth are so subtle that expression itself becomes unstable. We search for the decisive line that will tell us exactly what she feels, and Leonardo denies us one. That denial matters. Because we live in an age that has become remarkably uncomfortable with leaving anything unstated. Beauty must identify itself.Wealth must be visible.Success must provide evidence.Happiness must be photographed. Even leisure occasionally requires documentation proving how relaxed we were. The modern image rarely whispers when it can announce. We have consequently developed an enormous industry devoted not merely to beauty but to its signalling. Clothes carry names large enough to be read across rooms. Handbags acquire waiting lists. Watches become introductions. Faces are filtered, sculpted, injected, lifted and illuminated. Restaurants design corners for photographs. Hotels understand that a swimming pool is no longer merely somewhere to swim. Homes are arranged partly for the people who live inside them and partly for the possibility that somebody else might eventually see them. None of this is necessarily fraudulent. Human beings have decorated themselves for as long as we have had bodies to decorate. Jewellery, cosmetics, clothing and ceremony long predate social media. The desire to appear beautiful is not a modern corruption. But something has intensified. We are increasingly asked not simply to possess things, but to make possession legible. Luxury has become a language, and many of us have learned to speak it fluently. Yet Leonardo’s portrait is remarkably resistant to that language. Look at the hands again. They are beautifully rendered, prominent enough to matter, yet they display no jewellery demanding interpretation as wealth. Her dark clothing contains detail without turning detail into spectacle. Even Leonardo’s sfumato works through withholding: edges soften, transitions disappear, and the extraordinary labour of the painter is concealed inside an appearance of effortlessness. The difficulty is that elegance has never been quite the same thing as display. Money can purchase extraordinary craftsmanship. It can buy silk, diamonds, tailoring, architecture, privacy, rarity and access. It can surround a person with objects of unquestionable beauty, but it cannot guarantee elegance. Sometimes it produces the opposite. There is a point at which abundance begins to betray anxiety. Another logo is added, another accessory appears, another room is enlarged, another photograph is perfected. The message becomes louder because the person delivering it is no longer certain we have heard. Return to Leonardo and almost everything moves in the other direction. The sitter occupies the centre of the composition without visually fighting for it. Her clothing does not compete with her face. Her hands do not compete with her clothing. The landscape, extraordinary as it is, recedes into atmospheric distance. Nothing appears desperate to become the most important thing in the painting, and somehow the result is one of the most commanding images ever made. The Mona Lisa does something almost scandalous by comparison. She does not provide proof.Her power survives without explanation. That is partly because Leonardo understood something advertisers, politicians, celebrities and the rest of us continue to discover: the human imagination becomes unusually active when it is denied complete access. Mystery is participatory. When everything is revealed, there is nothing left for the viewer to do. The Mona Lisa requires us to complete her. We decide whether the smile is tender, knowing, amused, melancholy or barely there. We wonder what she has just heard. We imagine what she might say. We search the eyes for information the mouth refuses to confirm. Every generation approaches the same face and finds enough ambiguity to begin again. This is not emptiness but precision. Leonardo gives us exactly enough, not only in the expression but across the surface of the painting. The mouth never quite resolves into the expression we want from it. The contours refuse the certainty of a hard line. Even the road behind her winds towards a destination we cannot see. And perhaps that is one of the oldest principles of elegance: knowing when enough has arrived. The idea seems almost rebellious now because so much of contemporary culture depends upon persuading us that enough has not arrived at all. The wardrobe needs another piece, the face another correction, the house another room, the career another title, the audience another update, the photograph another attempt. There is always something that can be added, purchased, altered or displayed. Entire economies depend upon the discomfort produced by that sentence. Leonardo’s portrait presents the opposite proposition. For all its technical sophistication, the finished image does not feel accumulated. He does not keep adding visible declarations of importance to make his sitter matter. Her presence emerges partly from what has been withheld. And some of the most compelling people we encounter possess a similar quality. They do not seem desperate to persuade the room of their importance. They listen without preparing their next performance. They wear beautiful things without becoming advertisements for them. They can enter a space without immediately demanding possession of it. Their restraint is sometimes mistaken for simplicity. It is not. Restraint requires confidence because it involves leaving something unused. The person capable of saying less must believe the silence will not erase them. The person who declines to display everything must trust that value survives concealment. The person who does not constantly explain who they are must tolerate the possibility that somebody may misunderstand them. That is expensive in a different currency. He leaves us without the decisive contour, the extravagant ornament and the unequivocal expression. What appears at first to be absence becomes part of the painting’s abundance. Five centuries later, we are still supplying what he chose not to give us. Of course, we should be careful not to turn Lisa Gherardini herself into a modern lifestyle philosophy. We do not know her inner life merely because Leonardo painted her. The woman and the image are not interchangeable, and five centuries of fame have transformed a Florentine portrait into something its sitter could never have anticipated. But paintings acquire lives beyond their subjects. This one certainly did. In 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia, the empty space itself became an attraction. People came to see where the painting was not. Newspapers reproduced her face across the world. By the time she returned to the museum more than two years later, an already celebrated Renaissance portrait had acquired another layer of mythology. Her fame continued growing until the woman who asks for almost nothing from the viewer became surrounded by almost everything modern fame can produce. Barriers.Security.Cameras.Souvenirs.Crowds holding phones above their heads. There is an irony in watching people struggle to obtain an image of a painting whose greatest power may lie in refusing to explain itself through an image. Many visitors will stand before the Mona Lisa for only a short time. Some will see more of her through their screens than with their eyes. A photograph will be taken, perhaps another, and then the crowd will carry them towards the next thing. The painting remains. We have spent centuries trying to discover what she knows. Maybe she knows when enough is enough.

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