I have only two shots like this from my time standing in front of the painting itself, and that was from a burst. That's because I wanted to spend most of the time trying to look at it. Here I am standing in front of the reputed masterpiece of all masterpieces... And some of you really aren't going to like what I say about it [1].

The Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 1500s. Nobody knows exactly when it was painted, but one commonly accepted timeline has it starting around 1503. He may have faffed around with it up to 1517. If so, it wasn't going to be a particularly influential painting if it was just sitting in his studio for that amount of time. The subject is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of an Italian nobleman called Francesco del Giocondo. This explains both the original name (La Giacconda, the feminine of Giocondo) and also the more common name (in English) of Mona (a contraction of Madonna, translating roughly to "my lady") Lisa. She would have been 24 at the time that the painting was started.

I don't dispute that this STYLE of painting was incredibly important in breaking away from the stylised form of mediaeval painting. It introduced perspective and became much more realistic. This was not merely a matter of artistic style, but also how people started to see the world differently. The Mona Lisa was among the earliest examples of this change, but not the earliest and not the only.

While I recognise the importance of paintings like these, I'm indifferent to this one. First, the painting is surprisingly small. Size is far from everything, but only a couple of days earlier I had looked on the enormous and inspiring works of Canaletto, with their rich, intricate details which tell a story (actually many stories, if you look closely) of time and place, and which I found to be awe inspiring. This, on the other hand, is a small, prosaic work. It's just... Some woman. Yes, we know her name but we know hardly anything else. She is neither ugly nor beautiful. Was she kind, smart, wise? The painting tells us nothing about these things.

The second thing is the "familiarity breeds contempt" issue. Though I do not feel contempt for the work I've seen the face too many times (even if only in photos) for the small, dark original to be striking. This isn't always the case; I had seen Van Gogh's Starry Night many times in photos, but they did not even remotely compare to the real thing where the textures add to the impression.

If we came from Mars and knew nothing about da Vinci and nothing about the Mona Lisa, would we still be impressed? Maybe. The artistry is there, but it's there in many other paintings of the 1500's. I'm not sure that our Martian selves would regard it as more than a well-executed portrait, though.

Nonetheless, I'm glad to have seen it "in the paint", as it were.

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Edit January 2024: [1] That comment was probably somewhere between optimistic and narcissistic. On PBase the photo was posted about 18 months ago (23 August 2020) and has had 208 views since then. (If you trust PBase numbers which, to be honest, I don't.) And nobody has commented, so either... everyone agrees with what I said, or more likely, nobody gives a stuff about what I had to say about it. Eh...