Hi all,
As I continue my research about Leonardo I've looked more closely at Leslie
Geddes' commentary on the bridge in her 2020 book Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci
and the Mastery of Nature. (The title is partly ironic, I'm sure.)
Excerpted below, the scope and extent of her evaluation of the bridge as a
central theme and metaphor is more evident to me now. I do not concur with her
interpretation in all details but the overall approach is, I think, on the
right track. Several of her references will be helpful I think, as is her
discussion of another 1473 drawing by Leonardo depicting a bridge in a
landscape.
All of which leads me to believe even more hopefully that the bridge could very
well serve as a powerful new launch-point into new interpretations of both the
Mona Lisa and Leonardo's work overall for the 21st century.
All best,
Max
+++
p. 138:
"This correspondence between man's habitation and the natural landscape is made
visible through his inclusion of a stone bridge, pictured in the landscape of
the Mona Lisa just beyond the figure's left shoulder (Fig. 97). Unlike mobile
bridges, this bridge has a fixed location; its three semicircular masonry
arches span a broad river channel. The sole man-made element in the landscape,
it signals technical ingenuity, man's stake in the land, and access to travel
across variable natural environments. As the natural world underwent constant
change, the process of building and navigating its terrain was hardly static.
To master nature was not a one-time enterprise but rather an unrelieved process
of upkeep and adjustment. The stone bridge recalls ancient Roman designs and
references both the durable and the potentially -- even persistently -- useful.
The bridge tapers off at the riverbanks, seeming to touch Lisa Gherardini's
shoulder on the bare flesh just above the fold of her dress. The structure
forms a symbolic link between the sitter and the background (italics mine),
connecting the personal and human to the wild and natural landscape.67 The
motif appears on the verso of the early landscape, where an arch suggesting a
bridge connects a steeply inclined hill with a low-lying, flatter plain (see
Fig. 83). Beyond this detail, quickly drawn ribbons of ink squiggle back and
forth, supporting the notion that Leonardo was quickly sketching a bridge
spanning a broad watercourse, itself dividing the composition.68 While
unfinished, the landscape as it is rendered in black chalk with an ink overlay
preserves a sense of nature's uneven, untamed terrain. In the Mona Lisa, the
difficulties of physical passage are encoded in the landscape even as Leonardo
renders it from a bird's eye view. The background calls upon the viewer to
navigate heterogeneous terrain and wending, even obfuscating passages.69 In a
way, close observation of the landscape of the Mona Lisa correlates with the
early modern experience of traversing land, where roads are comprised of
switchbacks and overgrowth, waterways rendered poorly navigable by flooding and
erosion.70"
[The early landscape referenced as Fig. 83 also with a bridge (compare to Woman
Standing in Landscape RCIN 912581) is Landscape and Figure Studies, 1473, black
chalk, pen with brown ink, 194x285 mm (7 3/5 x 11 1/5 in.), Gabinetto dei
Designi e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence, Inv. 8 P verso.]
>From notes 67-70, p. 220:
67 My interpretation of the bridge detail is complementary with other readings
of the painting, which seek to frame a similar exchange between the sitter and
the landscape. For example, Rosand offers: "On one level of interpretation we
might read this neat contrast as a simple binary structure: flesh and rock,
soft and hard, feminine and masculine...[but] his art acknowledged instead
relationships that were more open, complex, and dynamic" ("The Portrait,
Courtier, and Death," 112). Pedretti presents an overview of the historical
documentation of the painting in Studi vinciani, 132-41. For an account of the
early sources on the painting, see Jack M. Greenstein, "Leonardo, Mona Lisa,
and 'La Gioconda': Reviewing the Evidence," Artibus et Historiae 25, no. 50
(January 1, 2004): 17-38. For an account of the painting and its recent
technical examinations, see Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, 2:262-70.
On the afterlife of the painting, see Andre Chastel, L'illustre incomprise:
Mona Lisa (Paris, Gallimand, 1988). Chastel begins his book with the remark:
"Le litterature sur La Joconde est, comme sa renommee, sans limites" (7), which
sums up well the challenge of presenting a comprehensive bibliography of the
painting.
68 If indeed depicting a bridge, this detail does not make an appearance on
the recto, which, as already discussed, renders water with greater
attentiveness.
69 The paths on either side of the sitter in the Mona Lisa obviously do not
match up. The landscapes of Joachim Patinir (c.1480-before 1524) feature
similarly bifurcated geographical territories. On how their symbolic meaning
relates to the pilgrimage and life's two paths (the sinful and the virtuous)
see Reindert Leonard Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the
Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1988), 61-112.
70 Joseph Leo Koerner's assessment of viewing Pieter Breughel's printed
landscapes is salient: "Our eye travels among the local details, discerning in
each the outline of an operation or experience." Joseph Leo Koerner, "Humanism
and Faith in the Prints of Pieter Breughel the Elder," in The Printed World of
Pieter Brueghel, ed. Barbara Butts and Joseph Leo Koerner, (St. Louis: St.
Louis Art Museum, 1995), 24.
+++
A couple of points on which I differ somewhat from Geddes' reading:
* Although the bridge does lead the eye to the sitter's shoulder, its
primary connective point is not "bare flesh," but rather, it aligns with and
connects the composition to the garment thus infusing the sitter's dress with
and carrying further forward the metaphorical, compositional, and thematic
content of the bridge.
* Regarding the s-shape in the left background and the roughly
mirror-symmetrical shape in the right background of the Mona Lisa, I do not see
two paths or roads (an interpretation which is fairly common but I believe
mistaken based on physical details as well as parallels to many other drawings
in Leonardo's notebooks) but two rivers, the left one shallow or dry and older.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192697/watermarks
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