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point for other artists—most famously in 1919, when the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp parodied the painting and poked fun at its creator by adorning a commercial reproduction with a mustache, a goatee, and an obscene inscription. Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol followed suit with their own interpretations, and so did many others—in all, it has been copied hundreds of times and incorporated into thousands of advertisements. As Sassoon points out, all these different people—thieves, vandals, artists, and advertisers, not to mention musicians, moviemakers, and even NASA (remember the crater on Venus?)—were using the Mona Lisa for their own purposes: to make a point, to increase their own fame, or simply to use a label they felt would convey meaning to other people. But every time they used the Mona Lisa, it used them back, insinuating itself deeper into the fabric of Western culture and the awareness of billions of people. It is impossible now to imagine the history of Western art without the Mona Lisa, and in that sense it truly is the greatest of paintings. But it is also impossible to attribute its unique status to anything about the painting itself.

This last point presents a problem because when we try to explain the success of the Mona Lisa, it is precisely its attributes on which we focus our attention. If you’re Kenneth Clark, you don’t need to know anything about the circumstances of the Mona Lisa’s rise to fame to know why it happened—everything you need to know is right there in front of you. To oversimplify only slightly, the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it is the best, and although it might have taken us a while to figure this out, it was inevitable that we would. And that’s why so many people are puzzled when they first actually set eyes on the Mona Lisa. They’re expecting these intrinsic qualities to be apparent, and they’re not. Of course, most of us, when faced with this moment of dissonance, simply shrug our shoulders and assume that somebody wiser than us has seen things we can’t see. And yet as Sassoon deftly but relentlessly lays out, whatever attributes the experts cite as evidence—the novel painting technique that Leonardo employed to produce so gauzy a finish, the mysterious subject, her enigmatic smile, even da Vinci’s own fame—one can always find numerous other works of art that would seem as good, or even better.

Of course, one can always get around this problem by pointing out that it’s not any one attribute of the Mona Lisa that makes it so special, but rather the combination of all its attributes—the smile, and the use of light, and the fantastical background, and so on. There’s actually no way to beat this argument, because the Mona Lisa is of course a unique object. No matter how many similar portraits or paintings some pesky skeptic drags out of the dustbin of history, one can always find some difference between them and the one that we all know is the deserving winner. Unfortunately, however, this argument wins only at the cost of eviscerating itself. It sounds as if we’re assessing the quality of a work of art in terms of its attributes, but in fact we’re doing the opposite—deciding first which painting is the best, and only then inferring from its attributes the metrics of quality. Subsequently, we can invoke these metrics to justify the known outcome in a way that seems rational and objective. But the result is circular reasoning. We claim to be saying that the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we’re saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.

CIRCULAR REASONING

Not everybody appreciates this conclusion. When I explained the argument to an English literature professor at a party once, she practically shouted, “Are you suggesting that Shakespeare might just be a fluke of history?” Well, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I was suggesting. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Shakespeare as much as any normal person. But I also know that I didn