Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [29]
The audience for fine art had previously been restricted exclusively to those who were able to travel to museums to view the works on display, and to the even fewer people who could afford to buy such works. But after about 1840, technological developments, such as photography and new printing techniques, made it possible to mass-produce reproductions of fine art. Critics who had previously confined themselves merely to describing and evaluating works of art expanded their role. For now that anyone could view fine art for themselves, critics needed to justify their superior position by taking on the role of popular interpreter.
Nevertheless, literary artists popularized Mona Lisa before the art critics did. The Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote of “Mona Lisa, on whose eyes / A painter for whole years might gaze.” 47 The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, popular French novelists of the mid-nineteenth century, described a hero’s mistress: “All women are enigmas, but she is the most mysterious of them all… and wears, like an enchanted mask, the smile full of night of the Gioconda.” 48
Théophile Gautier (1811–72), a prolific French author of novels, poems, travel books, and criticism, waxed ecstatic over the portrait of Mona Lisa. In a review of an 1855 play titled La Joconde (though the subject matter did not concern the real-life Mona Lisa), he began, “La Joconde! This name makes me think immediately of this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, and who seems to pose a yet unresolved riddle to the admiring centuries.” 49 A dozen years later, writing a guide to the Louvre, he recalled those words and added, “I have seen her frequently, since then, this adorable Joconde. She is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. She has the serene countenance of a woman sure that she will remain beautiful for ever and certain to be greater than the ideal of poets and artists.” 50
Shortly afterward, in an essay published in November 1869, a thirty-year-old English critic, Walter Pater, offered his own paean to the Mona Lisa. “La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo’s masterpiece,” Pater wrote. Expanding on Gautier’s observations, he noted “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo’s work.… From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady embodied and beheld at last.” 51 It was a thought later taken up by a certain Viennese physician.
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Only a year before the Mona Lisa was stolen, Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of the new science of psychology, wrote a small book titled Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. In his notebooks, Leonardo had described a recurrent dream that he had, and dreams were to Freud significant indicators of the psyche. Like the scientists who were finding a new physical world — atoms, X-rays, quanta — previously hidden from view, so Freud sought to uncover secrets of the mind below the level of consciousness.
Leonardo had been born in Vinci, a small town near Florence, in 1452, the illegitimate son of a woman named Caterina; his father was Piero da Vinci, a notary who worked for the Signoria of Florence. Though Piero married another woman in the year of Leonardo’s birth, he acknowledged the boy as his son and later brought him into his household. Leonardo’s earliest years, however, were spent with Caterina.
Freud, like Pater, found the enigmatic smile not only in the Mona Lisa but in other paintings by Leonardo, notably