Mona Lisa

Most tourists who go to Paris spend an hour or less in the Louvre. They make a quick stop to see the Mona Lisa.  They follow placards and arrows directing them down the long gallery to the special room where Leonardo’s famous painting is on display behind protective glass.  Usually there is such a mob of people that a short gal like me can’t even see it.  Most of them, after elbowing their way to the front of the pack, take a quick look and hurry back to their tour bus without pausing to look at anything else. 

David and I spent a day in the Louvre.  My feet hurt, my eyes glazed over, and I stopped looking after two hours.  We did manage to make the obligatory stop at the Mona Lisa.  It is a small painting, not much bigger than a sheet of typing paper.

When I was there, the most famous portrait in the World hung between two larger paintings by Leonardo. On the left was “The Virgin and Child with St. Ann.”  The Virgin sits in St. Ann’s lap.  She reaches out to the Christ Child, who stands like a toddler in front of her billowing skirts.  It is definitely a very weird painting. 

I can’t get excited over Leonardo.  He may have been a genius, but he was also a strange man.  He completed few projects.  In Florence he sketched battle scenes on walls in the city hall but left for Milan without painting the murals. 

He finished his famous “Last Supper”, but he had experimented with the paint.  It immediately started to peel off.  Today copies are in millions of homes, reproduced in bright color, while the original, on the wall in the dining hall of a monastery, is just a blur.     

In Milan, where he was put in charge of designing the defense of the city, he made a clay sculpture of a larger-than-life horse, which was never cast in bronze.  The invading French army successfully overcame Leonardo’s incomplete defense projects.  The French soldiers destroyed Leonardo’s great horse.  Then Leonardo accepted an invitation from the French king to move to France, where he set up a school for painters at the court of Francis I but seems to have done few paintings on his own. 

If you want to see a beautiful painting by Leonardo, you don’t have to go to Europe.  In Washington D.C., our National Gallery has a portrait of a lady which, to me, is more beautiful than the more famous Mona Lisa.