Leonardo Da Vinci
Gioconda

The Mona Lisa, oil on poplar wood painting (Paris, Louvre Museum, 1503-1506)

The enigmatic smile? Leonardo's self-portrait? What metaphysical meanings does this painting have? I say: none! And I label, in my humble opinion, as boutade (if I may indulge in the Gallicism) all the fanciful and abstract hypotheses that attempt to give the painting a sense it doesn't have, a meaning that the Genius Leonardo da Vinci did not intend for the painting.

The nature of Man, however, always tends towards knowledge and truth, while at the same time forgetting the flaw of human nature itself: the incompleteness of Man's being is manifested in his very finiteness, in his inability to know the infinite, to reach a certain truth. Nevertheless, it's not said that searching for truth is useless; it is possible to tend towards it, to approximate it. And so Man, observing this small portrait (just 77 x 53 cm) asks himself, spontaneously: “What did Leonardo want to tell us?”

From this question arise all those hypotheses that want to attribute to the Mona Lisa (a woman who very likely really lived: a certain Lisa Gherardini, born in Florence in 1479 and wife of Francesco di Zanobi del Giocondo). Some have argued that it is a androgynous self-portrait of Leonardo himself (even the indecent idea of exhuming the artist's body has been proposed), some have gone further trying to attribute it an alien meaning. Too much imagination, too many flights of fancy. The Genius of Leonardo does not lie in these absurd fantasies. The Genius is a subtle, discreet talent, which manifests with simplicity and greatness at the same time.

And then in this painting, obviously I emphasize (as redundant as it may seem) Leonardo's technical perfection: the masterful use of chiaroscuro on the face, corresponding to the different variations of the face's surfaces and to Leonardo's very concept of chiaroscuro, that is, his conception of space. The figure of the Mona Lisa itself painted with delicacy, almost with discretion but at the same time with a dazzling anatomical perfection, shows us the figure of a not very beautiful woman, but perfect in her imperfection and this testifies to the unsurpassable artistic talent of the Genius. It would be wrong, however, to dwell only on the well-described details of the main figure, because in this painting the landscape behind is also an integral part of the painting. It constitutes an inseparable and irreducible unicum, even the air takes shape for Leonardo (note the "vaporous" atmosphere). Let's put aside now this sterile technical description, which was useless, because from practice one can ascend to theory, one can better understand the connotative meaning of the “Mona Lisa.”

It represents the concept of creation by Leonardo. Not a divine creation, mind you, here it's about an empirical praise of Nature. The Genius studied it for years as a physicist, scientist, anatomist and combines all these ideas derived from experience in this superb work. The triumph of life, of creation, which finds its culmination in the depiction of the Woman, the Mona Lisa. Just as God from Adam's rib (according to the Bible) creates Eve, thus reaching the pinnacle of creation, so Mona Lisa represents for Leonardo the ultimate expression of life, of Nature itself. In this perfect union between cosmos, earthly nature, and human nature, in this harmonious setting the woman, the Mona Lisa, takes pleasure in herself and Nature. Her discreet, “enigmatic” smile, is precisely the symbol of this joy, of this complacence of existing. The “Mona Lisa”, therefore, as a sublime expression of Existence, of Being that is in things, in Nature and in Man.

The pinnacle of Leonardo's genius is contained in this small painting, where one can effortlessly discover Leonardo the physicist, painter, anatomist, humanist and student of Nature, in a splendid fusion of Science and Philosophy.

In a word: The Leonardo artist.