Paris – Maybe they should call it the “Mama Lisa.”
Researchers studying 3-D images of the “Mona Lisa” say she was probably either pregnant or had just given birth when she sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece. The clue was something she wore.
Scans turned up evidence of a fine, gauzy veil around Mona Lisa’s shoulders – a garment women of the Italian Renaissance wore when they were expecting, said a leading French museum researcher, Michel Menu.
As the painting aged, the veil darkened. The thick, dark varnish on the work made it hard even to know what color her dress is – it has been described as everything from black to brown to green. A piece of fabric draped over Mona Lisa’s shoulder was sometimes interpreted as a shawl or a scarf.
But images obtained from infrared reflectography tell a different story. The veil – called a guarnello – is transparent, and it looks similar to a gauzy garment in Sandro Botticelli’s “Portrait of a Lady,” depicting a pregnant woman with her hand over her stomach.
Tradition holds that the “Mona Lisa” is a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that Leonardo started painting it in 1503. In France, the painting, on display at the Louvre Museum, is referred to as La Joconde – the French version of her married name. The name Mona Lisa is the equivalent of “Madam Lisa.”
The veil “would confirm art historians’ hypothesis that Giocondo asked for a painting of his wife to celebrate the birth of his second son,” said Menu, chief of the research department at the French Museums’ Center for Research and Restoration, which has its offices in the Louvre.
The scans also make clear that Mona Lisa does not have her hair down, as it appears. Most of her tresses are pinned back and covered with a veil, Menu said.
The analyses of hairstyle and clothes were made by Bruno Mottin, curator of the research department at the center.
Various high-grade scans were taken over three sessions in October 2004, on days when the Louvre was closed, sometimes overnight. The scans have been collected in a book, “Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting,” published this month. Menu wrote it with two other French researchers.
Mona Lisa’s smile has for centuries inspired speculation, but no scientific research will ever figure out exactly what Leonardo was trying to convey, or why exactly she was smiling.
New discoveries “don’t take away the mystery,” Menu said. “On the contrary, they merely add another layer to the meaning, which only makes things more interesting.”
