That Certain Smile

Leonardo da Vinci completed his portrait of the “Mona Lisa” in 1517, and ever since then people have been asking Why is this woman smiling? Many answers have been suggested, some of them pretty spicy. Did Leonardo slip a whoopee cushion under his model to elicit that enigmatic simper? Was his subject, believed to be the wife of Neopolitan Francesco del Giocondo, enigmatically recording her pleasure because she and Leonardo were putting something over on Signor Del Giocondo? Or did Leonardo simply coax that look from the lady when, in the manner of portraitists everywhere, he told her to Say parmegiano ?

A mystery that has endured for nearly five centuries is unlikely ever to be solved, but people do keep trying. Last year artist Lillian Schwartz used computer imaging to prove to her satisfaction that Leonardo used himself as the model for “Mona Lisa,” presumably because he was either too broke to hire a woman or just because he liked putting on a dress and wig now and then. Art historians were quick to deride that notion, but perhaps they hooted in haste. Modern analytical methods shouldn’t be scorned. Our own computer imaging of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” for example, clearly indicates that his farm couple were in fact modeled on Gertrude Stein and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Gertrude is the one holding the pitchfork.

Comes now Dr. Kedar Adour--an Oakland eye, ear, nose and throat specialist--with a new theory about the famous smile. The subject, Adour says, is indeed a woman, but one suffering from a form of facial paralysis known as Bell’s palsy. This affliction, characterized by a swollen nerve behind an ear, would account for a muscle contracture that left Mona Lisa with a crooked smile--”a little higher on the left, and (with) her left eye narrower than her right.” The disorder, he notes, is sometimes associated with pregnancy. That suggestion will cheer those convinced that La Gioconda didn’t visit Leonardo’s studio just to be painted.

Adour has no doubt provided a perfectly adequate clinical diagnosis. Almost certainly, though, it will fail the test of wide acceptance because it negates all those grand romantic ideas about the basis of the famous look--like that of the 19th-Century art critic who saw in Mona Lisa a portrait of universal woman, “a perpetual life sweeping together ten thousand experiences.” Well, maybe. Our own view, for whatever it’s worth, is somewhat more prosaic. That look of sublime satisfaction on Mona Lisa’s face, it has always seemed to us, is the same look that one sees on the face of a baby who has just let go with a monumental burp.