I have a bone to pick with archaeologists searching a Florence convent for the skeleton of Leonardo's model. Their faffing detracts from the basic miracle of his handiwork
Face it … Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Click for full image. Photograph: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis
Why does the Mona Lisa smile? Because she's laughing inside at all the garbage that is reported about her.
It is time to tell some home truths about the Leonardo da Vinci industry. This great artist really deserves better than the media circus of pseudoscience and hocus pocus that surrounds his art. No genius merits closer attention from today's world than Leonardo. His mind, as revealed in his notebooks, is a source of endless fascination, just as his few surviving paintings are infinitely enigmatic. But instead of stories or interpretations that enrich our understanding of Leonardo, the world media delights in endless tittle-tattle and nonsense that just makes his art less meaningful, and reduces him to a bearded magus who painted empty icons.
The latest story concerns a team of archaeologists who are optimisticallysearching for the bones of Lisa Gherardini, the model for the Mona Lisa, in a convent in Florence. What are the chances of finding that particular skeleton among all the nuns ever buried there?
Needle. Haystack. Those are the words that come to mind, and when you read the small print, the investigators are not even claiming to have found the bones they covet.
What would this skeleton, supposing it was actually to be found, reveal about the Mona Lisa? Inane reports say it can reveal the secret of Lisa's smile. How, exactly, can a skull explain a miracle of painting?
An x-ray image taken of the Mona Lisa in the laboratories of the Louvre, which owns Leonardo's painting, suggests that when he first sketched out his portrait of a Florentine merchant's wife in 1503 she did not smile at all. The smile, in other words, emerged as he reworked the painting over several years. It is his artistic creation. Everything about this painting is richly worked. Its meaning lies in his imagination and his ideas, not in some secret skeletal clue buried in a vault.
This kind of sensationalist story just feeds the attitude that causes some people to stand in front of the Mona Lisa taking cameraphone pictures instead of looking at her.
Only last week an equally daft Leonardo story splatted against the wall of reality like the rotten tomato it was. This was the silly claim that a copy of the Mona Lisa is actually Leonardo's first painting of her. This claim was never going anywhere. Not only is the supposed "Leonardo" painted on canvas, whereas he painted on wooden panels, but it doesn't look like his handiwork at all. It has no trace of his ineffable tender touch. It is a copy.
Leonardo da Vinci is an artist who deserves the fuss. In a way, the more stories about him the merrier. But please. We have had enough of thesesub-Dan Brown fantasies that just get in the way of the power of a profound genius.
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