What is the Mona Lisa?

This paper mainly narrates the Mona Lisa from the angle of artistic characteristics, including the background of characters, creative background, creative techniques and the meaning conveyed.

Character background?

? Leonardo da vinci was born in Finch, a suburb of Florence, and died in France. His father is a lawyer and notary, and his mother is a peasant woman. He came to Florence at the age of 15 and studied in a workshop in verrocchio. 1472 Join the Painters' Guild. Personal style has matured in the mid-1970s. A wide range of artistic and scientific activities were carried out from 1482 to 1499.

? He is a genius. On the one hand, he is keen on artistic creation and theoretical research. He studies how to use lines and three-dimensional modeling to express various problems of the body. On the other hand, he also studies natural science. The most prominent feature is the scientific expression technique, which permeates the meticulous painting style. In Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, he integrated them, and they were a complete structural whole. In his paintings, he fully demonstrated the harmonious proportion and sense of balance among various images. Such as the well-known golden section.

Creation background

1

The Mona Lisa is a product of the Renaissance. Let's analyze the Renaissance in the long history.

Before the Renaissance, Europe was in the Middle Ages, which lasted about 500 years. To understand the Renaissance, we must understand the medieval and Roman periods.

The Roman period was the glorious period of the Roman Empire, and its territory at that time included most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In other words, these dozens of countries were all one country at the beginning.

A map of the Roman Empire

Europe lies to the north of the Mediterranean, Spain to the west, Amelia to the east, Africa to the south of the Mediterranean, and North Africa is the territory of the Roman Empire.

Not only the national strength is strong, but also the artistic and architectural attainments are unprecedented.

sink

celebrity

After talking about glory, let's talk about decline, the decline of the Roman Empire, the division of Europe, and the Middle Ages in the fifth century. In the past five centuries, Europe experienced the Black Death, and nearly one third of the population died. Economic stagnation, technological stagnation and artistic stagnation made the Middle Ages also known as the "dark century".

Gothic style is towering, gloomy, weird, mysterious and scary. ...

2

In order to get rid of this "stagnant" state, people began the Renaissance, which is the greatest artistic innovation since the Middle Ages. In the early Renaissance, painting encountered some difficulties. From the original two-dimensional realistic style in the Middle Ages to the three-dimensional realistic style in the Renaissance, artists began to paint with what they saw with their eyes, so composition and color became difficult.

Therefore, in order to overcome this problem, Leonardo da Vinci invented the smudge painting method, which refers to the painting technique of "no lines and boundaries, just like smoke" (in short, the smudge painting method is created by coating superposition, and the characters and scenery in the works are often shrouded in a faint smoke, showing a soft and hazy aesthetic feeling). Apart from Leonardo da Vinci, this technique was widely used by many painters during the Renaissance.

Halo coating method

Both Mona Lisa and The Beautiful Princess use halo painting.

Four painting techniques with different styles appeared in Renaissance paintings, namely, color change, contrast between light and shade, Sfumato and Unione, which were widely spread by later generations. For example, when the three Italian Renaissance masters were alive, Michelangelo often used Cangiante in his paintings; Giovanni Bei Lini's paintings use the method of contrast between light and shade; Leonardo da Vinci likes to use Sfumato；; Raphael, as a master in the history of painting, created "You Nini" after mastering all the above painting techniques, and also witnessed the development of painting from early immaturity to peak in the Renaissance.

The Prophet Daniel of Michelangelo

Decorative screen of Giovanni Bei Lini's St. Job's church

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa

The Madonna on Raphael's chair

three

Mona Lisa is a portrait of the wife of a fur dealer in Florence. She was only 24 years old when the painter painted her. This woman has just lost her beloved daughter and is often sad and depressed. When the painter painted her, he tried every means to make her smile: asking musicians to play music, sing songs or tell jokes for her, so that a cheerful atmosphere would help her show her smile. Although the Mona Lisa in the painting shows a faint smile, it is from the heart. The frozen smile, slightly tilted corners of the mouth and stretched smiling muscles can make people feel the mood of the woman in the painting at the moment.

At the same time, some researchers have found that all Leonardo da Vinci's paintings and portraits have the same facial expressions, such as another painting, Santa Anna and the Son of the Virgin, and the smile on Santa Anna's face holding little Maria is the same.

Santa ana and the virgin

According to Freud's recollection of Leonardo da Vinci's childhood, at that time, Leonardo da Vinci shirked that he had not finished painting and kept it with him. It was not until the painting was later acquired by the protector of leonardo da vinci and sent to the Louvre that Leonardo admitted that he had finished the last stroke. Even if it is not completed, it is enough to make future generations feel that it has reached its peak. In fact, due to the polishing and washing of time, all the exquisite things that Leonardo left on the canvas have long since disappeared.

A brief analysis of Mona Lisa (technique, composition, color, character expression, etc. ) and the meaning behind it.

1

First of all, the drawing board was made by Leonardo da Vinci. Poplar boards are first coated with gypsum, then treated with glue, dried and then painted. It is neither cloth nor paper.

Secondly, Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter and a Florentine painter. This painter has a very good tradition of pastel, so he can't be unaffected. Egg-colored painting is a mixed pigment of egg yolk or egg white. It is an ancient painting technique, and most of them paint with plaster on a drawing board. It prevailed in the European Renaissance in14 ~16th century, and made brilliant achievements in the Renaissance. /kloc-After the 6th century, it was gradually replaced by oil painting. So from the perspective of the era of Mona Lisa, there may also be the shadow of oil painting pigments. As can be seen from the figure, the oil color layer is obvious and the egg color trace is not heavy, so it is not excluded to use it in the background color layer.

The sky behind the Mona Lisa is painted with lapis lazuli worth 2000 dollars per kilogram, but there are no gems on the Mona Lisa, so the sky looks so mysterious, which also implies that the painting itself is valuable.

Finally, six years after starting in 2004, the Sfumato method used by Leonardo da Vinci was decrypted by the research team of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the Louvre with X-ray fluorescence spectrum ... They pointed out in the summary report of 20 10 that although Leonardo used different painting methods and a large number of color layers in different works, each color layer was painted quite thin. From the thin ground color at the beginning, the molding layer in the middle to dozens of transparent color masks at the top, the thickness of each layer is so thin that the color layer can only be calculated in microns after drying.

This painting uses 40 layers of extremely thin oil paints, each layer is only 2 microns thick (1/50 of the hair thickness).

At the same time, the fuzzy state of some contours is treated by multi-layer mask dyeing technology, which effectively overcomes the shortcoming of single viewpoint in perspective painting. Because people have left and right eyes, what people see in reality will not be exactly the same as that taken by a single-lens camera. Photos often give people a sense of plane, because traditional cameras can't compare with eyes with natural visual angle difference, and the images and spatial sense produced by comprehensively reflecting the objects they see to the brain through the optic nerve. Therefore, the blurring of some parts of the outline makes the characters in the painting really blend into their space, making the picture more realistic-just like what we see with two eyes. Compared with medieval paintings, characters have a real feeling like looking in a mirror. Compared with the early realistic style, it is more vivid and natural.

Livingstone, a neurobiologist at Harvard University in the United States, believes that this is not only a simple daubing method, but also Leonardo da Vinci tries to "deceive" human vision when painting, so that the audience can clearly see Mona Lisa's smile only from the side.

2

Image: the image of bourgeois women in cities during the rise of capitalism.

Character clothing: high hairline, wide forehead and no eyebrows, which reflected the aesthetic standards at that time. The external cultural image of women in the western world during the Renaissance includes not only the smoothness and softness of the body, but also the whiteness and symmetry of the face, which is often determined by thin eyebrows. So women at that time all trimmed their eyebrows into a straight line. Now, with the change of time, the eyebrows have gone from thin to seemingly no eyebrows. Similarly, in Leonardo da Vinci's other paintings, women have eyebrows.

Composition: Da? Finch changed the habit of using the side bust or reaching the chest when painting portraits in the past, and replaced it with a positive bust. The perspective point rises slightly, making the composition pyramid-shaped, and the Mona Lisa looks more dignified and steady. The composition is perfect, the scenery behind the characters expands the picture space, sets off the inner world of the characters well, and the characters are also extremely prominent;

Body: accurate modeling proportion, chest, hands overlapping in the abdomen. Mona Lisa's hand, tender, precise and plump, is impressive, showing her gentleness, status and class status. It shows Leonardo da Vinci's exquisite painting skills and keen observation of nature. The scenery in this portrait, with its vast natural scenery, sets off the lady and extends to the distance. But the scenery in this painting can never be considered as real scenery, and it must be understood that all this is only depicted from the perspective of pure decorative function.

Color saturation: mainly dark brown (some people think it is glossy cyan gray).

The overall tone transition is soft, and the Mona Lisa's face is painted with halo, hiding hazy shadows from time to time, and covering her eyes and lips with veil. Da? Finch painted the corners of the eyes and corners of the mouth lightly, without clear boundaries, so he had this elusive "mysterious smile". (Dr. Livingstone is an authority on visual nerve activity, mainly studying the response of eyes and brain to different contrast and light and shade. He believes that the Mona Lisa's smile is hidden, which is related to the human visual system, not because the human expression in the painting is mysterious. There is no unnecessary discussion here)

First of all, this painting didn't win by color. Leonardo da Vinci's painting technique is to choose the tone (dark or "low"). First of all, two locks of long hair are dark on both sides, and other mountains and rivers such as clothes and background are a kind of "half tone", only the cheeks and chest and hands are still bright. Therefore, the tone of the whole picture gives people a feeling that it is not simply "cheerful") as a formal factor and expression.

Artistic concept: realistic painting concept, which truly and objectively expresses the scenes of real life and the inner world of characters.

Basic social values: to some extent, it got rid of the control of medieval churches and religious thoughts and emphasized humanism.

It took him four years to draw such a small portrait, which shows that Leonardo da Vinci not only wanted to draw a good portrait of a noble lady, but also pursued people's ideological liberation in the19th century.

When we appreciate this painting, we will first be moved by the wonderful light and shadow effect. The layering of blooming shows rich space and realistic texture, and the borderless morphological transition and color change are centuries ahead of our contemporaries. The real magic is not skill, but the mysterious smile that appears and disappears in that moment is fascinating. People will get different feelings when they appreciate this painting from different angles and under different light. That smile is sometimes gentle, sometimes serene and serious, sometimes slightly sad, and sometimes somewhat ironic and ridiculous. The mysterious smile reveals the mysterious spiritual activities of the characters.

three

In the era controlled by Christian asceticism, women's behavior is subject to many constraints. Most importantly, she also showed people's ideological emancipation and opposition to religion in the19th century. Without permission, they can't show their joy and pain, otherwise, it is a "blasphemy" to God, and among ordinary upper-class women, they are not allowed to cry and laugh at will. Therefore, the portraits in the Middle Ages are generally drawn in a rigid and expressionless way.

Portrait of medieval Ma Saqiao

Under the influence of humanism, Leonardo da Vinci began to make great efforts to express people's feelings and draw the true image of Mona Lisa. He also studied anatomy and physiology, explored the smiling state of facial muscles hidden under the skin, and studied the psychological changes and reaction processes of people when they were relaxed and happy.

Leonardo da Vinci's world-famous sketch Vitruvian Man was created around 1487.

Oil painting takes many times more time than sketching, and the expression of Leonardo da Vinci's researchers is also many days and nights. He painted many subtle changes on a simple face, giving people such a mysterious feeling. His research and innovation are unprecedented in art, which makes Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world.

The Italian writer Kong Di tried to explain this smile. He said that the lady's smile contains a beautiful desire to conquer, an evil instinct, a female inheritance as a whole, an ability to seduce people, a deceptive charm and cruel kindness. In this writer's eyes, Mona Lisa's smile is very complicated, covering all the psychological characteristics of women. This explanation may be a person's own opinion. Some viewers only see the smile in the smile, but they don't see other psychological activities that are over-interpreted. Up to now, it is still a mystery.

Not only the Mona Lisa in the eyes of this writer, but also the Mona Lisa in the eyes of others.

Duchamp not only added a beard to the mysterious Mona Lisa, but also named it "L.H.O.O.Q", which means: Mona Lisa's ass is very hot. (Mona Lisa's angry coffin lid won't hold)

Salvador dali-Narcissistic Mona Lisa

Marco Pece, an Italian photographer, is an avid fan of Lego toys. He perfectly reproduces Mona Lisa's smile with Lego toys.

This fake Mona Lisa is on display at Takashimaya Department Store in Japan. It is made of discarded train tickets.

Colombian painter fernando botero is a famous contemporary artist. He painted the obese Mona Lisa.

Artist Jim Hans created this strange Mona Lisa and named it "Mona Lisa".

Extended reading:

Let's look at another statue called "Mona Lisa in the East".

The handprint made by the statue is called meditation seal, which means to calm your heart and enter the supreme realm of meditation. Sitting on the Buddha's five senses is to close your eyes slightly, calmly and calmly, with a faint smile on your mouth. The whole person's expression is very complacent, which can make people feel that the smile on his face is the kind of heartfelt smile, just like a sudden epiphany after falling into a myth and searching hard, which makes him smile and naturally gives birth to a feeling of joy from his heart. This feeling is called "Zen Yue". This sitting statue expresses the state of meditation, and the corners of the Buddha's mouth are slightly upturned, and a subtle and heartfelt satisfied smile emerges. This kind of smiling Buddha is a very clear state of laughing, and it is very rare and difficult to keep the feeling of not being tired or burdened.

Many people say that the caves in the Mogao Grottoes should sit for 100 years. Why is it called the Mona Lisa of the East? Even the Mona Lisa has changed from the observation object of a few elites to the entertainment object of the general public, and various versions of the Mona Lisa derivative works on the Internet are almost flooded.

Benevolent people have different opinions, and wise people have different opinions. Whether you are an official or an amateur, you can't agree. What matters is the value conveyed by the work itself, and what matters is the value you give to the work. ...

four

The significance of Mona Lisa lies in that she inherits the classical solemn, elegant, balanced, stable, idealistic and rational code of conduct. However, it further broke through the limitations of Greek classical art in human nature, and set an example for the later art to be true, objective, deeper, more internal and more subtle. This is how the Mona Lisa occupied people's hearts. Centuries have passed, and the Mona Lisa has almost become a rule, which has been imitated by countless artists. In this way, a painting has become a discipline, and many people are willing to spend their whole lives. Future scientific research may answer many questions about this painting, but once the mystery disappears, everything will be as boring as solve riddles on the lanterns. After all, the Mona Lisa is a painting, a beautiful portrait, and it is enough for us to appreciate her with pious and unsolved questions.

Conclusion:

After a hundred years of hard work, modern art has brought the artistic theme that once belonged to only a few people into the picture of daily life, and then combined the classical works of art prepared only for the aristocratic class with daily utensils to bring art back to the general public.

Duchamp once said, "The so-called masterpiece is what people often talk about", but you have no chance to do what people always talk about.

For example, the Mona Lisa is so famous, but I don't think the Mona Lisa is such a high-ranking painting in the world. There are several paintings in which Leonardo da Vinci himself is better than Mona Lisa. He painted a girl holding a mouse or a weasel (a woman holding a silver mouse) and a young musician with big eyes (a portrait of a musician), which I think is better than the Mona Lisa. But among all his paintings, Mona Lisa is the most talked about and constantly mentioned. It is deified, so even if there is saliva under a painting and too many people talk about it, the painting becomes famous. I don't know why.