This is all bunk, based on art and not on new science. Nothing new or interesting. See current, Jan., ArtNews with article re Zeki and Livingstone, two people involved in neurology and art perception/cognition that I mentioned several years ago -- and stirred up surprising chagrin among the listers. Now their findings are mainstream, especially as it appears in popular art magazines like ArtNews.
I've said before, and since the 1960s, that one (additional) reason we are quizzical about the Mona Lisa smile is because the background horizon line is on 2 levels, and thus unresolved. We stare at the face that hides where the 2 horizons should meet, expecting, somehow, that the paradox will be resolved there. Of course it won't and that is one cause of our quzzing, as if there's something about the face that's strange when in fact it's the background (which we ignore as secondary). WC ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, January 14, 2010 9:29:04 AM Subject: Berger: Chapter 8 : Fictions of the Pose - Mona Lisa Berger returns to the discussion of Renaissance portrait paintings in Chapter 8, and comments on the most famous one of all, the Mona Lisa. "The romance of the Mona Lisa, which has been going on for nearly half a millennium testifies to the success of devices that hide the mind's construction from the face. Leonardo accentuates the drama of scopic interaction by making the fiction of the pose conspicuous enough to occlude the kind of access to inner truth that physiogomy promises" --- "this portrait seems totally dedicated to representing the hiddenness and complicating the drama of posing consciousness" But actually -- "the romance of the Mona Lisa" only began in the middle of later decades of the 19th Century, when a Romantic art critic, Theophile Gautier wrote that "[her] sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned up at the corners in a violet penumbra, mocks the viewer with such sweetness, grace and superiority that we feel timid, like schoolboys in the presence of a duchess." In 1869, Walter Pater added that "She is older than the rocks among which she sits" with "The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences" Nothing there about the enigma of Mona Lisa's smile, and Berger ignores those comments - as well as those by Vasari, the very first writer on the subject: "In this head, whoever wished to see how closely art could imitate nature, was able to comprehend it with ease; for in it were counterfeited all the minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted, seeing that the eyes had that lustre and watery sheen etc etc" For Vasari, the Mona Lisa smile was just one more natural (though rarely painted) feature to be represented, and Vasari admired the extra efforts Leonardo took to get that smile to appear on his model's face (he hired musicians to entertain her) The "strangeness in your smile.. are you warm?, are you real ? etc " wasn't expressed until much later, when it was picked up by Nat King Cole and then by several English speaking art historians: Martin Kemp, John Pope-Hennessey, and Cecil Gould, whom Berger quotes as follows. Martin Kemp argues that in the Mona Lisa Leonardo was "playing upon our irresistible tendency to read facial signs of character in everyone we meet" - thesfumato that "prevents "the physiognmoic signs from constituting a single, fixed, definite image" arouse and frustrates the desire to read the face as the index of the mind" "What is new and important, Kemp insists, is the "communicate liason" it establishes , in which "she reacts to us and we cannot but react to her"" (which Berger calls "the representation of ongoing scopic encounter") Cecil Gould observes a sense of "regal relaxation" "superb confidence and tranquility" but veiled by the attitude of "prolonged equivocation" or "knowing reticence of expression" "The famous smile anticipates prolonged equivocation and seems to welcome it. She is attracted by the painter, and knows enough of his reputation to be confident her own will not suffer. And if, in the event rumor has belied him, or her charm were strong enough to prevail against even that defence.. well, so much the better" Pope-Hennessey wrote "As he worked year after year upon [the Mona Lisa], the portrait of an individual was transformed into an essay about portraiture.The poet Bellincioni describes Cecilia Gallerani as "seeming to listen but not to talk" and of the Mona Lisa that is true as well. In neither case was Leonardo concerned directly with psychology, but in both the working of the brain was reflected in the immanence of movement in the face". Which Berger extends into making "observers conscious of her consciousness of posing" - thus fitting his own "Lacanian forumula of giving herself to be seen". Berger , himself, offers two interpretations. "imagine, then, the she is watching the painter paint her. The turn of the body and barrier of the arms seems a bit guarded at the same time that the understated modeling of the hands makes them appear relaxed, as if they had been in the same position long enough for her to have forgotten about them. The expression on her face bears trace of a similar tendency toward relaxation, but one that is being patiently, obligingly, and benevolently resisted" But then, Berger suggests that we "shift roles and imagine that the observer rather than the painter is the sitter's partner in scopic interaction" so that "everything changes. "The difference between these two scenarios is evidence of a scopic encounter at once so ambiguous in its cues and so sharply particularized in its functions(being painted vs being observed) that its range of possible meanings changes." Which leads Berger to conclude that "A portrait that probematizes the mimetic and referential functions patrons value is a portrait that comments on its own genre" So there we have it: Leonardo was a post-modernist. I suppose we're all entitled to interpret paintings however we wish (unless entitlement is institutional - in which case Berger is only entitled to fantasize whatever he can get the Stanford University Press to publish) Gould's observation of "regal relaxation" "superb confidence and tranquility" characterizes many portraits in many styles - but Vasari was the only one who offered an interpretation that is useful for distinguishing the Mona Lisa from many other, less natural kinds of portrait painting. Any portrait can be considered to "comment on its own genre", make "observers conscious of her posing", and present "prolonged equivocation" and "knowing reticence of expression" Berger's masterful method, if you would call it that, is to ignore history and re-package historical artifacts into currently fashionable discourses of academic inquiry. ____________________________________________________________ Small Business Tools Compete with the big boys. Click here to find products to benefit your business. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=QfD3-d1ArDhXLjL1DZfi7wAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMQAAAAA=
