Archives - Fine Art: Page 25
Author: amparo enriquez (Fri Feb 03, 2006 2:37 pm)
Title: fine art
V. Da Vinci's Mysterious Lady.
In December of 1988, I was in Paris and made the obligatory visit to the Louvre, which was a great joy. There is a limit to what one can see in a day, but I made certain to spend some time before what is probably the most famous painting in Western history: Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." I will not consult biographies or works of art history at this point, because my purpose in this essay is much more personal. I wish to illustrate what Schopenhauer's theory means by attempting to understand and describe my experience of that painting in light of his theory.
Although it is not a very large canvas and it is surrounded by a number of other great masterpieces, including two other paintings by Leonardo himself -- one of them being the astonishing "Virgin of the Rocks" -- the encounter with that mysterious figure is unforgettable for all of those who have stood before her. No reproduction comes close to doing the painting justice.
I wonder if people in Paris take it for granted that the paining is there and simply ignore its presence. I believe that if I lived in that gorgeous city, I would be in the Louvre every day, looking at that painting.
It is beyond words to reproduce such an intimate and personal encounter with a work of genius, yet I can try to suggest some of the aspects of the painting that I would urge others to consider: 1) the gender ambiguity at the heart of this masterpiece; 2) the theme of doubleness which characterizes the work; and 3) Da Vinci's blending of erotic and thanatic elements, "moods" of love and death in the emotional tone conveyed, somehow, by the textures and colors. These are all themes that interest me.
I am not alone in detecting these "issues" in the work, viewers of the painting, including Walter Pater and Henry James, have had similar experiences. In the spirit of Schopenhauer, I should note that of all the paintings that I have seen, it is the one whose effect is closest to music.
The Mona Lisa is almost a complete Puccini or Verdi Opera by itself.
As one approaches the figure, one has the uncanny impression of a kind of splitting, or multi-dimensional quality in the painting. There is a recognizable portrait of a young woman, more beautiful than we have come to expect from the reproductions that we all know. Yet there is also, hauntingly, another and more masculine presence in the canvas, standing behind and, as it were, blending into the figure of the smiling woman.
This second, masculine figure whose presence is "felt," is both more formidable and frightening, but also infinitely, nearly intolerably sad and superhumanly intelligent. It is as though the painter were looking at you, the viewer of his work from beyond the grave, and judging you for presuming to judge his genius, reminding you both of your mortality and of the immortality of his canvas. Also, Da Vinci manages to give a sense of his own soul as being somehow grafted on to that painting, of his ghostly presence as his true signature.
The painting is, only on one level, a portrait of a young woman -- smiling at one of Leonardo's witticisms perhaps -- but also of the painter, whose sadness is almost unbearable, even as his fearsome scrutiny of you, the viewer, alarms and disconcerts. It is the viewer of the painting who is being seen, even inspected. It is you, as the viewer, who is being placed "in" the frame. What is unclear is where the boundaries of this frame are to be found.
It is also -- and I don't know how else to say this -- a painting of his mortality and yours, through the suggestion of the age and death that awaits both its ostensible subject and you too, as against the eternal quality in the mountains and landscapes beyond and the painting itself. This painting is Da Vinci's "Hamlet."
Is the sitter turning towards or away from the viewer? Do you turn towards or away from your life? Or your death? Is this the portrait of a person who is primarily masculine or feminine? Is this the portrait of a man or a woman? Or is the subject both male and female? Is the persona captured in pigments and charcoal on canvas recognizable? Is the presence even human? Is this a painting, a mirror, or a window into the mind of the artist? Is this painting of Mona Lisa the first work in the history of cinema?
There are no answers to these questions, there is only the experience of something almost beyond the human realm, numinous, life-altering, enigmatic.
I looked at my watch and realized that I had not moved, being unaware of myself, as if unconscious, for almost forty minutes. I was required to move on at that point, but I have never fully recovered from that aesthetic experience. These moments had nothing to do with my material life or practical interests, I did not make any money during that time. Yet those forty minutes remain among the most significant moments of my life.
My experience of that painting helps me to understand what Shopenhauer means by "transcendence" and liberation from the will, along with the ways in which we are altered by art through the sharing of works with others -- others who have also enjoyed similar experiences, over many years and centuries.
In standing before that painting, I was participating in a kind of relationship not only with the painter and his subject, but with all of those observers moved by this work over centuries and standing where I stood then, where someone must be standing even now, as I type these words. My knowledge of that masterpiece was an entry into a spiritual community.
My experience of the painting was, therefore, both aesthetic and metaphysical. The lessons learned may be described as ethical too. For Schopenhauer, these were the best experiences to develop our sense of compassion, providing us with the only possible liberation from the ego and its sufferings. For this reason, art yields the most significant and prized lessons available to any of us, together with the experience of community and sheer pleasure in the freedom obtained through transcendence.