The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci: The Most Recognized Painting Ever
The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci has to be one of the most, if not the most, recognized paintings ever. Even ask an elementary school-aged child and most likely he or she will know that she is a painting, and may even get part of the name correct. This cannot be a fluke. Somehow, da Vinci was able to paint a face that would not only create an emotional appeal but also be remembered by people of all ages and backgrounds. Surely, there are many women models would love to be so lucky. Recently, due to a revived interest in da Vinci, Mona Lisa has been more popular than ever. This in addition, to all the other ways she is seen from being on men's ties to Mad Magazine Throughout the years, there have been all types of theories about her and the painting. If is possible, even more have come out due to this new stardom. It seems that most of these theorizers not only have a hypothesis about her smile or name, but believe that no one else's hypothesis is right except for theirs! The theories about Mona Lisa run the gambit from the most theoretical and nonscientific to the most scholarly and technical. A number of both scientists and social scientists have presented their ideas about Mona Lisa. A few years ago, Margaret Livingstone, a
The Florence teacher also discovered a wedding registration dated March 5, 1495, between Lisa, then 16, and Ser Francesco, who was 14 years older than she. This was his second wife, since the first died a year earlier. In addition, Pallanti found Ser Francesco's will that was read when he died in 1538. In the will, he states that Lisa is his "beloved" and "ingenuous wife" (Unfortunately, it does not say anything about her smile!) "All the indications are that Leonardo's father and Mona Lisa's husband knew each other before she was painted, and socialized together," Pallanti explained in his book. "The two lived almost round the corner from each other." The portrait of Mona Lisa, done when Lisa Gherardini was 24 years old, was most likely commissioned by Ser Piero for his friends, because he did the same thing at another time. "It would have been da Vinci's father's way to get money for his son, who didn't make much as an artist (Some things have not changed in all these years!) A set of scientists from the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, Christopher Tyler and Leonid Kontsevich, also decided to do some experiments on the Italian lady. Visual clutter is called "noise." If someone goes into a room that is completely filled with junk, it will be difficult to find an item, because the eye has difficulty focusing on everything. That is the theory behind this concept by the Eye Research Institute. The two scientists created 100+ different Mona Lisa portraits with different amounts of visual "noise," so each one looked fuzzy in a different way. Then they asked people to rate each of them a scale from happy to sad on a rating of one to four. It seems that people will keep on trying to figure out what they can about Mona Lisa. Thus far, it appears that only a few facts are known for sure. Everything else is pure speculation. Unless some papers of da Vinci's show up some day that explain who, what, why and when, or people can travel back in time, many of the secrets about this painting and the woman will remain hidden forever. No one will ever know for sure why, or even if, she was smiling when she posed. Perhaps da Vinci told her a good joke and caught her just as she got the punch line. percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry. (How can anyone show all of these emotions at one time?? There surely would be a great deal of communication breakdowns, if people could actually do something similar to their own faces.) Next, the scientists overlaid either the upper or lower half of what people thought were the "happiest" or "saddest" faces on the original Mona Lisa. They found that putting something over the mouth made the subjects see Mona smiling or frowning, but putting something over the eyes did not do anything to her expression. They say, in other words, that viewers get cues on a person's expression more from someone's mouth than eyes. An area of the retina, or the lining of the back of the eye, called the macula provides humans with central vision, which is used for most vision such as colors, shapes, driving, viewing faces and the like. The items humans see from the sides of their eyes is called peripheral vision. Central vision has high acuity or is very sharp, and peripheral vision has lower acuity and is actually somewhat out of focus. Livingstone says that the main reason why people see Mona Lisa's smile in this particular fashion is because her expression changes depending whether someone looks up at her eyes or down at her mouth.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa's, Lisa Atalay, According Livingstone, Lisa Gheradini, Ser Piero, Lisa Leonardo, Mary Sassoon, Lisa Gherardini, According Vasari, mona lisa, da vinci, mona lisa's, da vinci's, peripheral vision, mona lisa's smile, central vision, spatial frequencies, del giocondo, lisa's smile, ser piero, francesco del giocondo, rectangle golden triangle, golden rectangle golden, believed da vinci,
Approximate Word count = 2476
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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