 |
| Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward |
In the July 6-13 The
New Yorker I read an essay Regression to the Mein – How Mirrors, selfies,
and surveillance what we make of our faces by Cal Reverly-Calder.
This paragraph caught my eye:
Only with the Renaissance would it break again, with
the fifteenth-cenutury blossoming of the naturalistic portrait: van Eyck,
Campin, Piero della Francesca. The archetype of painted interiority may still
be the good old “Mona Lisaa,” known in Italian as “La Gioconda”- the face that
launched a thousand conjectures. Bound –Alberti brings her in dutifully, to say
how “enigmatic” her smile is, though Wigginstein, again, made more of the
cliché. “When we speak of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, that may well
mean that we ask ourselves: In what situation, in what story, might one smile
like that?” To talk of stories, he means, is to talk of time; you need the
before and the after, the rounded sense of life. After all, some people laugh
in anger and weep with joy. If I read your smile, as happiness, I’m drawing on
a fluid sense of the character I know, and on our place in an emotional
culture. One reason Leonardo’s painting has endured in the popular imagination
is straightforward: we want to ask questions of her – how she feels, what she’s
thinking – and though we don’t believe she’s alive anymore that we believe
Hamlet or James Bond to be alive, we can’t help responding to her face as if
she were.
My Gioconda will always be my Gioconda. One of the
images of the four here (the one on the right) stares at me enigmatically from
the framed photograph on the opposite wall from my bed. She stares at me and
keeps on when I put out the lights.
I never did ask her why she often had those sad eyes
when she posed for my camera. I had plenty of time to do so as I took these
photographs (she was nude, they were my first nudes) in Mexico City sometime in
1969.
Nobody will know why the Mona Lisa smiled and I will
never know of her sad eyes.
These photographs are the result of putting a strip of
two pictures on top of the other and then I scanned them with my Epson V700. I then joined them by using Photoshop layers.
No AI.
