The beauty of the Mona Lisa's pose
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 On his return to Florence in 1503, however, Leonardo did execute one portrait entirely with his own hand. This portrait still exists, though hardly as Leonardo would wish us to see it. Before looking at the original we should read Vasari's description. "The eyes had that lustre and watery sheen which is always seen in real life, and around them were those touches of red and the lashes which cannot be represented without the greatest subtlety. . . . The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, seemed to be alive. The opening of the mouth, united by the red of the lips to the flesh tones of the face, seemed not to be coloured but to be living flesh." Red, rosy, tender, it might be the description of a Fragonard. Who would recognise the submarine goddess of the Louvre? How exquisitely lovely the Mona Lisa must have been when Vasari saw her; for of course his description of her fresh rosy colouring must be perfectly accurate. She is beautiful enough even now, heaven knows, if we could see her properly. Anyone who has had the privilege of seeing the Mona Lisa taken down, out of the deep well in which she hangs, and carried to the light will remember the wonderful transformation that takes place. The presence that rises before one, so much larger and more majestical than one had imagined, is no longer a diver in deep seas. In the sunshine something of the warm life which Vasari admired comes back to her, and tinges her cheeks and lips, and we can understand how he saw her as being primarily a masterpiece of naturalism. He was thinking of that miraculous subtlety of modelling, that imperceptible melting of tone into tone, plane into plane which hardly any other painter has achieved without littleness or loss of texture. The surface has the delicacy of a new laid egg and yet it is alive: for this is Pater's "beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh little cell by cell "--a phrase which more than any other in that marvellous cadenza expresses Leonardo's real intention.
Familiarity has blinded us to the beauty of the Mona Lisa's pose. It is so easy, so final, that we do not think of it as a great formal discovery until were-discover it in Raphael's Maddalena Doni or Corot's Dame à la Perle. Where the romantic overtones are less insistent we are freer to contemplate formal relationships, and we see, in the Raphael for example, how carefully the axes of head and bust and hands are calculated to lead us round the figure with an even, continuous movement. A proof that Leonardo's contemporaries felt the value of this invention is the number of pupils' copies in which the figure is shown undraped. It is possible that Leonardo did a large drawing of this subject in order to realise more fully the implications of the pose, and from this there derives the many pupils' versions, including an accomplished cartoon at Chantilly. At all events, a nude figure in the attitude of the Mona Lisa was well known in France in the early sixteenth century, and formed part of the stock in trade of the Fontainebleau painters on the frequent occasions when they had to portray royal favourites in their baths.
Once we leave these technical conclusions, we are surrounded by mist and mirage. The English critic, above all, is embarrassed by Pater's immortal passage ringing in his ears, and reminding him that anything he may write will be poor and shallow by comparison. Yet the Mona Lisa is one of those works of art which each generation must re-interpret. To follow M. Valéry and dismiss her smile as un pli de visage, is to admit defeat. It is also to misunderstand Leonardo, for the Mona Lisa's smile is the supreme example of that complex inner life, caught and fixed in durable material, which Leonardo in all his notes on the subject claims as one of the chief aims of art. A quarry so shy must be approached with every artifice. We can well believe Vasari's story that Leonardo "retained musicians who played and sang and continually jested in order to take away that melancholy that painters are used to give to their portraits"; and we must remember the passage in the Trattato which describes how the face yields its subtlest expression when seen by evening light in stormy weather. In this shunning of strong sunlight we feel once more the anti-classical, we might say the un-Mediterranean nature of Leonardo. "Set her for a moment", says Pater, "beside one of those white Greek goddesses, or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty into which the soul with all its maladies has passed." In its essence Mona Lisa's smile is a gothic smile, the smile of the Queens and Saints at Rheims or Strasbourg, but since Leonardo's ideal of beauty was touched by pagan antiquity, she is smoother and more fleshly than the Gothic saints. They are transparent, she is opaque. Their smiles are the pure illumination of the spirit; in hers there is something worldly, watchful and self-satisfied.
The picture is so full of Leonardo's demon that we forget to think of it as a portrait, and no doubt an excellent likeness, of a young Florentine lady of twenty-three. She is often described as Leonardo's ideal of beauty, but this is false, since the angel in the Virgin of the Rocks and the two St Annes show that his ideal was more tranquil and more regular. None the less, she must have embodied something inherent in his vision. How else can one account for the fact that while he was refusing commissions from Popes, Kings and Princesses he spent his utmost skill and, as we are told, three years in painting the second wife of an obscure Florentine citizen? We may speculate with Pater on the relationship of the living Florentine to this creature of his thought--"by what strange affinities had the dream and the person grown up thus apart and yet so closely together". At least we can be sure that his feeling for her was not the ordinary man's feeling for a beautiful woman. He sees her physical beauty as something mysterious, even a shade repulsive, as a child might feel the physical attraction of his mother. And as often with Leonardo, this absence of normal sensuality makes us pause and shiver, like a sudden wave of cold air in a beautiful building.
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