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.

Continue reading Divine Elegance with membership.