Humans are temporary. Art is forever.
Reflections on an outing to the Louvre and a very long book
This is another longer one. But I think you’ll like it. My fingers kept typing away as words flooded my head, unpacking what I saw in Paris that day.
She smiles for every picture. Mouth softly curved as if she knows something you don’t. For 10 hours a day, every day, she never drops her gaze. She watches you move around the room. A perfectly kind smile for every selfie without complaint.
Who would have known one of the most recognized women in the world lives at the Louvre. She’s lived there for the past 225 years. Smiling at people. The wife of a merchant, immortalized in the galleries of one of the most famous museums in history.
With the number of people in line, you’d think it was the queue to a Disney World ride. Not to a 500-year-old painting.
Growing up I’d give museum-going an eye roll. I loved crafting and painting but never felt emotional appreciation for a painting. I didn’t identify as an artist because I felt I wasn’t ever any good at “art.”
But my definition of “art” changed in 2017 when I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci.
I don’t have a clue what made me pick it up. It’s like 4 inches thick. It’s filled with art vocabulary I’ve never heard of.
It took me 14 months to finish it. Only because it was that. good.
It transported me into the life and age of a man who we think of as an artist but we forget was also a writer, a scientist, philosopher, and a mathematician. He was vegetarian, persecuted for homosexuality, liked dissecting cadavers, and wrote backwards using a mirror. He questioned why the sky is blue and dreamed of flying. He was a man ahead of his time.
He never did finish the Mona Lisa. Not because he died but because he designated it as his constant work in progress. I think he never intended on finishing it. Because there was always something new to add. Maybe he’d dissect another corpse and then modify a hand tendon or something. A reminder that our work is never finished. We should die in the process of finishing it, knowing that we never will finish.
But his life transformed the way I feel about art and its creators. It showed me art’s important role in our world. That it’s worth doing even if you don’t finish it. Because time passes and we fade away, but it lives on like residue of our fingerprints.
Did you see it?
We got to the Louvre early and made a beeline to the Mona Lisa before it got overtaken by crowds.
But the room was already a madhouse. Selfie sticks were already there. Luisa, Matt, and I stood in line puzzled looking at the crowd of people waiting patiently for their 60 seconds with La Gioconda only to turn their backs on her, take a selfie, then walk away.
Did they see how he portrayed the landscape of her soul intertwined with nature’s soul? How she looks alive and moving by the way her eyes follow you across the room and her torso looks like she’s about to stand up. How the background is a prehistoric landscape alive too with veins as rivers, roads as tendons, and rocks as bones.
Did they see how the river in the background flows directly into her heart in a cascading waterfall that is her scarf? And that the road connects to her heart?
Did they notice she has no eyebrows? Did they spot the thin veil covering her head and ringlets of hair?
Did they know that to perfect Mona Lisa’s smile, Leonardo dissected human cadavers to see which muscles control a human smile?
He never intended on giving it to the man who commissioned it, Francesco del Giocondo. I think perhaps because he discovered what he was painting was a living meditation of what it means to be human. It became less about Lisa and more about the cosmic duality between nature and people.
Isaacson describes it as, “a distillation of his [Leonardo’s] accumulated wisdom about outward manifestations of our inner lives and about the connections between ourselves and our world.”
Lisa is alive. Much like the earth and nature behind her. They merge. Human and nature become one.
Time passes, people pass, art remains.
500 years after Leonardo’s last brush stroke on her poplar wood panel, we still flock to go see her like a bunch of crazies.
She’s under bulletproof glass. Under very specific lighting and room temperature. Under the protection of basically the French Government because she’s already been stolen once before. (But she’s Italian, by the way.)
I wonder what Leonardo would think of this. He wouldn’t know why on earth someone would want to steal his painting. Why would people fly to come to see his unfinished work? (The airplane wasn’t invented yet, but actually has some of the earliest sketches for a flying human vehicle) And taking photos of it and sharing it instantly across the world? Would he think we lost our minds?
Seeing her reminded me that art is like the residue of our fingerprints. We live and die and often what we create outlives us.
Brushstrokes and words
Even if my talent is closer to words than brush strokes, I can now confidently say that I am artistic and appreciate art.
It dawned on me that art is the only way we’ve been able to preserve our human history. Not only through paintings and sculptures, but things like buildings, architecture, music, dance, cooking, and words are art too.
Ancient buildings like the Roman Pantheon, the Egyptian pyramids, the Mona Lisa–those are all art. But so is the Bible and so is the Declaration of Independence. Those are all works that required years of studying and careful crafting. They all contribute to the meaning of being human. Our religion exists because of it. Our governments function because of it. Our economies reflect it. Our society enjoys it. We capture it, and it captures history.
Leonardo
I can’t possibly come to even summarize the kind of man Leonardo was. Even the word, genius, falls short.
An illegitimate homosexual child in the 16th century with a restless curiosity at the most mundane things became a playwright, a mechanical and hydraulic engineer, a city planner, musical instrument inventor, mathematician, anatomist, physicist, scientist, and of course as we most know him, an artist.
His days in contemplation, discovery, and invention don’t even come close to what most of us spend our days doing. As we are often pressured to pick one thing to be good at, Leonardo is an example of someone who proved that doesn’t have to be the case. His art and inventions immortalized him.
While our daily life consists of fixing tech bugs, producing marketing plans, and creating “content”, this man’s mind just puts all that to the dust.
If you do anything today, go to Google and look up: “describe the tongue of a woodpecker”. Read the articles about Leonardo that come up and you’ll see what I mean about insatiable curiosity.
I hope if you ever get the chance to see the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, that you actually “see” it. Drop the camera and see it with your eyes. Allow the fingerprints of a man who lived 500 years ago, touch your soul.
Also, read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. It will make you live a lot more.
With love,
Maria
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