RE: Your Thoughts On Art
April 6, 2019 at 7:08 am
(This post was last modified: April 6, 2019 at 7:19 am by Alan V.)
(April 6, 2019 at 12:37 am)ignoramus Wrote: Sam Harris brought up an interesting thought experiment.
What exactly makes the Mona Lisa so precious and valuable?
If a perfect replica was to hang in its place, would it still have the same impact on its audience who were none the wiser?
Then it's obviously not the actual painting but the notion that it was painted by a renaissance genius?
When I was in high school, I found a decent book on art history in the school library with a beautiful reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I often picked out that book and studied the painting, much more often than I looked at the other works of art reproduced in it.
So to answer your question:
What makes the Mona Lisa so valuable is that we can immediately recognize another human being looking back at us from across the centuries. The thoughtfulness and depth of her gaze and half-smile are remarkable, and perhaps could only have been created by a genius with a similar depth of mind.
Some details of the painting are strange, like the lack of eyebrows and the fantastic landscape. But they only emphasize the difference in the time and place.
The overall effect is idealization of the subject. Ideal beauty was a Renaissance preoccupation which is arguably best realized in this one painting, so it is an icon from that age. It therefore remains a symbol of the humanism of that time, which still has meaning today.
A perfect replica would be just as good. Many people report being disappointed by the actual object since it is smaller than they expected.
May 2nd of this year is the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo.
