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Among Friends |
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| Mona Lisa smile Mona Lisa has been smiling for 500 years. Despite this autumn's global financial and political upheaval, her expression remains unchanged. Leonard da Vinci's masterpiece, painted around 1504, is at the heart of Paris' vast Louvre Museum, where it attracts about 7 million visitors a year. The day I paid homage to La Gioconda, as the Italian noblewoman is known, I shared her with a swarm of admirers, from octogenarians to giggly teens. Along with a Chinese group wearing identical Olympic jackets, Japanese housewives on a cooking tour, English soccer fans on a group holiday, African businessmen in native dress and a covey of American women clad head-to-toe in French designer labels, I pressed forward in the 20-deep polyglot to point, photograph and stare at the world's most famous painting. As the crowd ebbed and flowed, I hung around awhile, puzzling over the portrait the artist hand-carried in 1516 when he came from Florence to Paris at the invitation of King Francois I. Seeking reassurance that we haven't yet gone to hell in a bankrupt hedge fund, I'd sought out the Mona Lisa's smile as a comforting antidote to a worrisome week of looking back over my shoulder toward my troubled country across the Atlantic. Her smile worked its magic. As British and European commentators declared, "We're 15 minutes away from the end of the world" because the United States "is on life support and being kept alive only by the Federal Reserve," I was reassured of life's continuum by the total lack of stress on her priceless Florentine face. If Mona Lisa had money worries, her children were unruly, her husband was a gambler or her mother-in-law was a pain, her smile reveals none of those universal irritants. Captured five centuries before iPhones, adjustable-rate mortgages and credit cards, da Vinci's muse appears at peace with life's inevitable woes. Yet, like us, she lived in uncertain times. People ate with their hands; a woman's life expectancy wasn't much past 40; rulers' sobriquets included the Fool, the Fat, the Bald, the Simple and the Stammerer, and more than one pope had a girlfriend. Contemplating great art from the past puts the present in perspective. Near the Mona Lisa, the displayed Venus de Milo may have lost her arms, but the marble Greek goddess still has her looks 2,200 years after a sculptor, perhaps Alexandros of Antioch, created her in the Hellenistic Age. Another popular Louvre attraction is the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the 190 B.C. equivalent of our "Mission Accomplished" bravado. Even older are portraits of a Mesopotanian known as Gudea, Prince of Lagash, a long-forgotten ruler whose power may have been absolute, but like all despots, was short-lived. A carved black rock from Babylonia is displayed as one of the world's oldest legal documents, a 1,700 year-old precursor to briefs being filed by lawyers looking for Wall Street fall guys. What would have been unthinkable behavior by public figures just a month ago -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reportedly on his knees begging the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to help save the nation, President George W. Bush warning "this sucker could go down" without a $700 billion congressional bailout -- has precedence in thousands of museum works that captured the greed, power and political maneuverings of men and women through the ages. Do painters slip secrets into their art, just as they disguised what would have been the pornography of their day by putting wings on naked angels? Do they, in such subterfuge, share the same traits as politicians who disguise ulterior motives by putting lipstick on pigs? When Napoleon Bonaparte made the leap from commander of a revolutionary army to emperor of France in 1804, he demanded his official painter not just depict his self-coronation but "rather to arrange its depiction," according to the Louvre catalog entry for Jacques Louis David's massive tableau picture. "Carefully assembled and detailed, everyone is there ... even those who were absent," the guidebook adds. Ten years later, Napoleon abdicated; seven years after that, he was dead. The painting which had been commissioned as a narcissistic vanity survives as a magnificent, if historically inaccurate, reminder of how the mighty fall as life moves on. In this time of trial for my own 232-year-old country, it's good to be in a city that, from 1,000 years before Christ, has often suffered but survives with aplomb. Each generation has calamities -- plagues, wars, avarice, betrayals -- but Mona Lisa's smile reminds me that although we humans are messy and fallible, we are also pretty good at picking up the pieces and moving forward with humor and courage. |
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