Short Stuff: The Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa is a captivating work of art. But why? We'll try and figure it out in today's short stuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's j j over there. Let's get to it and
talk about maybe the most famous painting in all the world. Perhaps,
Um sag Clown Hobo by John Wayne Gazy. Right, have
you seen the Mona Lisa I have same here. I'm

(00:26):
sure your first impression, like many people, it was huh
sure as small, it's it's impossible to not have. You
can go into it saying I'm not going to think
that I've been prepped. I'm not going to let myself
think that, and you will think that. Yeah, it's two
ft six inches by one nine inches. It's a small
little painting, it is, and they have it behind some
seriously protective casing. You can't get too terribly close to it,

(00:51):
and you can get kind of close, but not you know,
you can't just walk up right on it. And um,
I think we talked a lot about the why they
have it under that casing in our How the Louver
Works episode, if I remember correctly, Yeah, I think we
covered that. Uh, this is a little more about the
lady herself. Um, they think for sure that Mona Lisa

(01:11):
was a person, a real person, and there's been a
lot of debate over the years, but the current thinking is,
what's her name? Oh boy, is Lisa Gerardini del gian
Condo um also known as Lagio Conda very nice because
she's a lady and she was a wealthy woman married

(01:33):
to a wealthy silk merchant. And the thinking is that
he had this commissioned to celebrate the birth of their
impending birth of a child. Yeah, and it's bizarre to
think that we don't we don't know much about the
Mona Lisa. It's not that old. I mean, um, da
Vinci started it, and I think fifteen three is when

(01:57):
he started the painting exactly, which is what I was
going to say eventually. Um, So it's not it's not
so ridiculously old that that it's just completely lost to history.
And yet it is because the the Giocondo family never
took possession of it. And the reason that they think
that they're almost certain that that is who it is,
that it's led Giaconda in that painting, um, is that

(02:20):
there there was a book written about it in the
time that Leonardo da Vinci's sons were still alive and
so still around. To refute this, if it was incorrect
that it was her, that she was the one who
was seated there. And then years and years later somebody
found a margin note somewhere in some book or some
notebook that said as much that Lisa Giardini Guerardini sorry

(02:45):
um was the Mona Lisa, and that she was going
to be sitting for this work that Da Vinci was
working on. Right, and they speculate about the impending pregnancy
because she has some kind of loose clothing on, and
that little smile uh is interpreted as, Oh, guess what's coming.
I'm about to get birth. I can't wait. So we
should probably talk a little bit about the um the

(03:07):
artistry of the Mona Lisa. I'm gonna go ahead and
throw it out there. Yeah. Oh really, are you crazy?
You don't like it? It's not that I don't like it.
I'm just I'm not a big fan of portraiture period. Uh.
Not a lot of portraits knocked me out like others. Um.
Other paintings do. UM. I can appreciate them, for sure,

(03:29):
but I've never looked at a portrait and been like, man,
I want that in my house so bad. Not a
big Rembrand fan, huh. So, um, I think one of
the reasons I appreciated Chuck is because I recently saw
Decoding Da Vinci Cova, a little Nova documentary Tom Hanks movie. Yeah,
he's got a mullet in and running around all over

(03:49):
the place. Um No, this was this was even more
legitimate than that. But they really go into, you know,
the techniques that he used in this painting, especially this
Fu Mouto method he's very well known for, which uses
shading and and um some other stuff. You're gonna have

(04:10):
to watch the nov episode for it to be explained.
But but the upshot of it is there's no lines
in the Mona Lisa. There's no hard lines, there's no
he didn't paint a line, he suggested lines. Every line
in that painting doesn't actually exist. It's all an illusion
created by the painting techniques that he was using on

(04:31):
the Mona Lisa. And they really go to town explaining this,
and it really makes it that much easier to appreciate. Yeah.
Another thing that's mentioned here in the House of Works
article is the fact, and this kind of stood out
to me, is mostly when you see portraits, especially especially
oh my lord, uh from that era, is you have

(04:51):
someone in a room maybe and not necessarily a landscape
as well, or landscapes, and there were portraits and never
between shell meet, but he blended those two things together. Uh.
And there's a landscape behind the Mona Lisa and an
aerial perspective, and she's very much in a big open
space with this these mountains and winding paths behind her.

(05:13):
And your eye doesn't always go to that because you're
looking at that face and that smile, but that dreamy
landscape is certainly back there. Yeah, And I think what
what they're what they're remarking about is that is supposedly
an imaginary landscape and that people didn't paint imaginary ones.
And there're people have tried to prove that it actually
is an imaginary most recently a pair of Italian researchers

(05:36):
Olivia and Neshi and Rosetta Borkia. I don't do it
nearly as well as you, but they said, no, it's
this place in Montefeltro, in the east of Italy, east
of Florence on the Adriatic coast, and they're like, this
mountain is this one? This is this mountain? They said,
this bridge used to be there, but it's since been destroyed.
This lake is no longer here, is filled in my

(05:56):
mud sides. But they're pretty sure they pinpointed it. But
that doesn't necessarily mean they're correct. It's it's still speculative,
but they have they seem to have a pretty good
case to back it up. But a lot of the
position is that Legio Conda posed in front of that. No, no,
just that he he um he that's why he painted,
you know. Yeah, so so yeah. I don't think that

(06:17):
they were saying like he made her sit there for
four years or that she was ever even there, but
that it wasn't. Their point is that it's not a
made up landscape. Well no, I mean, I'm sure he
took a photograph of her right and then just worked
from that, knowing da Vinci, he probably did. I will
say that the Mona Lisa's eyes following you, the Mona
Lisa effect, which he did not invent, but it is

(06:39):
referred to that way anyway. And I know you're pretty um,
pretty into this idea that eyes can follow you, that
works on a laptop even it does, and and that's
a whole other short stuff if you ask me. But this, um,
this this Mona Lisa effect. That being called that the
eyes following you around the room. The meaning that's actually

(07:01):
a misnomer because they've proven that the Mona Lisa does
not actually demonstrate the Mona Lisa effect. It did to me, man,
does it? I mean, I don't know. Maybe it was
the fact that I got super drunk at lunch, but
I was sitting at my desk and I was I
was going, you know, heavy, back and forth to the

(07:21):
left and right, and they seemed to be following me.
Or maybe it was suggested so I saw it that way.
I don't know. I wonder that, man, I wonder if
that is because when I looked and saw that she
doesn't have that effect, I was like, oh, yeah, I
totally see it. They some researchers measured where people pointed
on the screen or pointed on themselves where she was looking,

(07:42):
and most people said she was looking past them to
their right about a thirty degree angle. H Well, it
may have been power suggestion, yeah, for both of us.
Who knows. All right, Well, let's take a break here
and then we'll here you will hear we will say
a little bit about when and why the Mona Lisa

(08:02):
became soups famous. Alright, Chuck, I thought that break would

(08:31):
never come, right. So, um, it's funny to think as
famous as the Mona Lisa is, but she was fairly
neglected by the world until the mid nineteenth century. And
even then, just like a small little group of French
art critics finally discovered you know this da Vinci painting,
and we're like, this is a masterpiece. This is an

(08:54):
amazing work of Renaissance art. We haven't noticed all these
few hundred years, but it's amazing. They didn't really tell
the rest of the world, and people like the Mona
Lisa was fine, but it wasn't until she was stolen
off of the wall in the Louver in nineteen eleven
that the world really sat up and took notice. It's
very much like that Cinderella song, you don't know what

(09:15):
you got until it's gone. That happened with the Mona
Lisa too. I think they wrote that about the Mona Lisa, right, probably, Yeah,
August twenty one, nineteen eleven. There were three handymen that
just kind of went out the side door with the
Mona Lisa. It took twenty six and this was kind
of evidence that she wasn't that big of a deal.

(09:37):
Yet it took a whole twenty six hours before anyone
even noticed she was gone. And um whereas today you know,
there would be alarm bells like second it was removed,
but it was put in the papers and all of
a sudden it kind of ran away in the press.
The loop shut down for a week and everyone from

(09:58):
Pablo Picasso to JP Morgan were named as potential suspects. Yeah,
they thought they thought JP Morgan was financing people to
steal them for steal like artworks for him. Amazing. Yeah,
and actually it's funny that raised this other thing. Chuck
real quick, there's um there are accusations against wealthy Chinese people,
um like who are funding art heists to repatriate Chinese art.

(10:24):
Interesting if there's like a whole string of art heists
around the world that are just um ancient Chinese works
of art and they think that some people in China
are financing it. It's It was a g Q article
called the Great Chinese Art Heist. Wow. Well, I certainly
believe in repatriation to a certain degree, but I don't
know if you should go to that length, right, Uh So, anyway,

(10:46):
the newspapers get it out, Lou shuts down. People were
coming to the museum to see what was known as
the Mark of Shame, that empty, you know, non cigarette
stained square on the wall, and every one went and went,
is that how big it is? That little non dusty square. Uh.
And then it took a full twenty eight months for

(11:09):
this thing to finally reappear with an attempted re sale
from Vincenzo Perugia, and the owner of the art gallery
that was being offered this painting said, yeah, this is
the mona Lisa. You know what, I'm gonna make sure
you get a good reward for this. Just stick around
and stay right there. I'm gonna go in the other
room and make a quick phone call to the reward

(11:31):
center right and make sure you get your rewards and
just reward right there, reward. And then Homer Simpson just
stood in place and waited for the Italian uhl at
the com Yeah and he uh he got busted and
he got eight months in prison for this. It was
a pretty big art heist. But he was in Florence

(11:51):
trying to sell it. So he's stolen from the Louver
in Paris and His defense was, Napoleon stole this from
us uh, and I was repaid treating it myself. And
I think he actually kind of got you know, eight
months isn't exactly a slap on the wrist, but it's
also not a um, a ridiculous sentence, either for for
what he got so or for what he did so. Um.

(12:13):
I think that actually helped that defense worked. Do you
know if he read it out his two buddies, I
don't know, And I don't know if it would have
mattered because he was the one that lived with it
in like the false bottom of his steamer trunk in
his apartment for two years before he he tried to
sell it, so I don't know if it would have
helped at all. Man, I wish I had a false

(12:34):
bottom steamer trunk. Those are would be pretty handy. Oh oh,
I thought you meant like a bottom. No no, no,
it just a false bottom trunk sings like false bottom girls.
They make the rock and world go around kind of
false bottom. Stop it. Can we say that it's not
the seventies any longer? I think we're okay, okay, do

(12:54):
you got anything else? Nothing? Well? Then everybody short stuff
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