The lady herself.

Leonardo da Vinci; artist, inventor, genius, and masked superhero. (Okay, I might have made that last one up.) Of all of his works, none is more famous than the Mona Lisa. I cannot think of another work of art that rivals the interest and curiousity surrounding his enigmatic lady. However, this time I think curiousity has gone too far.

According to several news sources there is talk of exhuming the remains of da Vinci. The reason? They think the Mona Lisa might be a cross-gender, self-portrait of Leonardo himself and they want to use his skull to try and reconstruct his face.

Are you kidding me?

I think a better explanation for this could even be “we just want to make sure he’s really dead”. Is there really such a collective hard-on for this painting that we need to dig up some dry bones and attempt to do a facial reconstruction that might not even be accurate? Beyond that to do this to prove he might have been a oils and poplar cross-dresser?

Trust me, I do understand the occasional necessity to dig up old remains for scientific research. We should learn about the people who came before us. For example, I got to see the attempted reconstruction of Tutankhamen’s face a few years back at a traveling exhibit, and it was positively fascinating. On the other hand, I think the Mona Lisa thing is just silly.

Why this painting anyhow? What about it makes it so unbelievably popular? I’ve seen it twice in my lifetime and remain neutral at best about it. (I am much more impressed by many of Da Vinci’s other works.) I know people keep coming back to the smile, and was it the full painting, and why the composition, and so on and so forth. There are any number of other paintings out there that also have weird under-painting and enigmatic elements. What makes this one in particular so different from any of those? Perhaps that is the true mystery of the Mona Lisa…

…either that or Da Vinci was a bit of a fruit.