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Lisa is a Mona: Challenging Victorian Gender Assumptions

Melad Abou Al-Ghanam and Denielle Jackson

Ryerson University

Reappropriations of the Mona Lisa

During his lifetime, Leonardo Da Vinci made monumental contributions to science, engineering, architecture and various other fields of study. However, he is most and foremost remembered for creating the Mona Lisa. The painting, which celebrated its 500^th birthday in 2006, has achieved high iconic status and very much lives in our popular culture today. It’s difficult to look at the Mona Lisa without thinking of the many different ways in which the image has been used and the different meanings and interpretations it has been assigned. Leonardo's 16th century painting, also known as La Gioconda, is considered by many to be the most famous painting in the world. The Mona Lisa did not become widely recognized until the mid-19th century when artists of the emerging Romantic Movement began to acknowledge it and associated it with their ideas of feminine mystique.@ Many have recognized the Mona Lisa as a representation of the quintessential femme fatale. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire. The Mona Lisa is arguably one of the first and most famous representations of a woman as a complex human being. Her enigmatic smile and piercing eyes suggest mystery and knowledge beyond a woman’s traditionally thought intellectual capacity.

Much of the Mona Lisa’s fame can be attributed to Victorian literature and culture and more specifically the works of Walter Pater and Michael Field amongst many others, who immortalized the painting with their subversive writing. This digital exhibit closely examines two different Victorian texts about Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The first text is Notes on Leonardo Da Vinci by essayist and art critic Walter Pater. The second text is La Gioconda by Michael Field. Both authors challenged Victorian gender assumptions through the way they read the painting in an era marked with conformity, conservatism, and specific gender roles.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Melad Abou Al-Ghanam and Denielle Jackson

Ryerson University

Walter Pater and the Mona Lisa

Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry@ is a book first published in 1873 by Macmillan & Co. under a slightly varied title: Studies in the History of the Renaissance.@ Pater’s influential book has seen many revisions and reincarnations and continues to circulate libraries worldwide in modern day 21^st century. Pater’s writings and contributions to the Fortnightly Review@Walter H. Pater, Studies in the history of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1973) 91-122 served as the precursor to the The Renaissance, a compilation of his essays on art and poetry with chapters dedicated to Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Joachim du Bellay, Winckelmann, as well as Leonardo Da Vinci. Of interest is Pater’s essay on Leonardo Da Vinci, his first submission to the monthly Fortnightly Review. Walter Pater’s critique of the Mona Lisa revived interest in the portrait three centuries later as he saw it as more than just a great piece of art. Therefore, the portrait’s iconic status is no coincidence and is the result of a long thread of commentaries ignited by influential 19^th century art critics such as Walter Pater and Theophile Gautier. In his 2001 book, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon, Professor Donald Sassoon of University of London, argues that Pater and Gautier were the discoverers of the Mona Lisa.@ However, “of the two, Pater’s influence has proved the greater, as his eloquent passages on the Mona Lisa were themselves of such poetical power that many men committed these words to memory. It was not at all unusual for a man to recite Pater as he gazed at the painting itself.”@

Walter Pater

"She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her;
and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands." -Walter Pater

Walter Pater was able to see beyond the macroscopic beauty of the portrait of Lisa Gherardini that the spectator sees at a glance. Pater read the emotions hidden in the microscopic details such as the half-smile and weary eyelids. Pater designated the Mona Lisa as the epitome of eternal femininity. For a painting that took Leonardo Da Vinci an estimated twelve years to complete, one can only expect the Mona Lisa to be host to multiple underlying meanings and interpretations. Da Vinci painted with extraneous attention to detail and precision, concealing meaning behind every thin brush stroke. The Mona Lisa remains clouded with uncertainties until this day with recent speculations disputing the identity of the sitter to be Da Vinci’s personal assistant Salai.

W.B. Yeats used the quote-- controversially-- as the first 'poem' in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse

However, Pater’s attempt to decipher the portrait and emphasize its emotional impact on the spectator has far-reaching implications on authors that would follow such as Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, as well as Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalytic theories. Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny stems from Walter Pater’s work and his ability to see the hidden double meaning behind the Mona Lisa’s half-smile, “unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it.”@ Furthermore, Pater’s allusion to Da Vinci’s sexual attraction to men attributes the ideal, womanly beauty of the Mona Lisa to Leonardo’s mother hence the “weary eyelids” and “older than the rocks.” The fact that Leonardo Da Vinci was raised by his mother with no fatherly figure in his life to care for him further strengthens the argument that the portrait’s complexity has to do with the personal connection it had to the only ideal woman in Leonardo’s life: his mother. Therefore, Pater’s analysis and interpretation of the Mona Lisa took into account Leonardo’s biography hence the mention of Vasari, the renowned Italian artist biographer. Pater’s work had far-reaching implications that transcended into areas of study such as psychology and psychoanalysis.

Walter Pater can be seen as a pioneer of Queer Theory for challenging hegemonic gender assumptions perpetuated by Victorian society. Through his work, which often exhibited transparent hints of homoerotic desire, Pater legitimized homoeroticism and homosexuality. Renowned British art historian and director of the National Gallery in London, Michael Levey, speculated that Pater "guarded the secret of his own emotional urges, possibly never revealing-even to someone like Simeon Solomon-the intensity of his yearning for the ideal male friend."@Thaïs E. Morgan, "Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater". Victorian Studies 36.3 (1993): 315-332 Pater imagined the Mona Lisa to emulate “womanly beauty” and “doubtful sex” at the same time, “Pater aims not at imagining men-who-would-be-womanly in the Renaissance but men-who-would-be-another-kind-of-manly.” Therefore, much of Pater’s reading into the Mona Lisa and other works of art had do with his own personal struggles in the conservative Victorian era, seeing as he was very secluded and spent his entire life living with his two spinster sisters in London.@Laurel Brake. "Walter Pater Biography" The Yellow Nineties Online. Web. Pater’s work still resonates in modern day 21^st century, where the fight for the legitimization and acceptance of homosexuality continues. The conclusion to the Renaissance embraces and advocates for a lifestyle of hedonism, which Pater felt Victorian society was not yet ready for. Therefore, the conclusion was retracted from the revised second edition of The Renaissance only to be included in further editions. Following Oscar Wilde's trial, Walter Pater was exhausted from advocating for change through his work in his final years. Pater confessed to one of his undergraduate students, "I feel there are many things which are bound to come, though I do not feel willing to aid them in coming."@M. Seiler. Walter Pater: A Life Remembered (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1987)

Another factor that adds to the air of mystery surrounding the Mona Lisa is the fact that the painting was relocated from Italy to France, where little was known of Lisa Gherardini. In France, the painting remained in the private collections of the King of France until the opening of the Louvre. Therefore, when Parisians flooded into the Palais du Louvre upon its opening in 1793, they were able to attach mystique qualities to the portrait of a woman with little known history in France. The Mona Lisa’s half smile was seen as a window behind which she hid plenty of secrets. In his article Walter Pater's "Renaissance" and Leonardo Da Vinci's Reputation in the Nineteenth Century, Barrie Bullen even argues that much of Pater’s ideas and criticism of Da Vinci were borrowed from different French critics such as Michelet and Gautier. However, “what is perhaps puzzling is that Pater's essay has become widely known and read whereas those of his French contemporaries have been largely forgotten.” It is even argued that had Pater not republished his essays from the Fortnightly Review into a book, his interpretation of the Mona Lisa along with his other works, would have eventually suffered the same fate.

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Lisa is a Mona: Challenging Victorian Gender Assumptions

Melad Abou Al-Ghanam and Denielle Jackson

Ryerson University

Michael Field and La Gioconda

Michael Field: Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper

The Mona Lisa also served as an inspiration for many artists, poets and writers, not the least of which is Michael Field. Michael Field is the pseudonym for Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913), an aunt and niece wrote poetry and verse drama together and lived as a married couple. It’s important to understand how women were viewed during the Victorian period in which the Fields lived. Katherine and Edith lived during a time where women didn’t have a voice and women were heavily discriminated against based on their sex.@ Women were assigned a specific role in society; anything that deviated outside of that was seen as abnormal. That is why Katherine and Edith adopted the pseudonym Michael Field- they believed that in order to be taken seriously, they needed the authority that comes along with a male name. They could write whatever they wanted without being judged on their gender, and would have access to the male demographic that was so influential. It ensured their writings would not be immediately dismissed, and they were effectively able to transcend gender boundaries.@

Victorian Women

Sight and Song@, Field’s second publication of works, is a collection of poems that analyzes the relationship between paintings and poems. The works of Walter Pater and his theories of the aesthetic inspired the Fields. Despite their admiration for Pater and their common interest of the role of the spectator, the Fields disagreed with Pater in how the spectator experienced a work of art.@ Sight and Song challenges the assertions made by Walter Pater in his collection of essays, The Renaissance. Pater claims, “The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly.” Field rejects this notion of the perceiver of art. The preface to Sight and Song states the purpose of the authors is "to translate into verse what the lines and colors of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate". Rather than viewing a work of art subjectively, the Fields aim to strip away the viewer’s personal views and see the object as it really is.@

The Mona Lisa behind bullet proof glass at The Louvre

Sight and Song criticizes Victorian ideological views of sex, gender and aesthetics. One of the poems, La Gioconda, was inspired not only by Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting, but also by Walter Pater’s essay in The Renaissance. Throughout history, women have been represented in art as being sexually passive, indifferent, and receptive.@ In the Victorian period, women were portrayed as the damsel in distress. They would objectify them by assigning them a value and ignoring the fact that they are complex human beings. The Mona Lisa, a painting kept behind bulletproof glass that is there to be looked upon, is arguably a reflection of that objectification of women. Field’s La Gioconda is a critique on masculine representations of women. It acknowledges the problem of the woman who is consumed by the interests of male aestheticism and resists this commoditization.@ In Field’s La Gioconda, Mona Lisa is not merely a passive receiver of a gaze; she is the observer. In notes from the diaries of Michael Field, they write that her eyes, smile, lips, and hands "all are infamously, perfectly treacherous to the point of infatuation—& to the measure of universality. It is no portrait, it is a dream of power and occult influence."@

Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and does not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die.@

-La Gioconda, by Michael Field

Mona Lisa (La Gioconda)

Leonardo Da Vinci

Michael Field: Two women writing as a man

Field’s poem begins by describing the painting in detail with special attention given to her eyes, lips, and hands. As the poem progresses, it becomes apparent that the Fields viewed the Mona Lisa as a predator, waiting patiently for her prey (the spectator) so that she can consume them. The poem presents the view of the visual in terms of both object and subject. It gives the Mona Lisa sexual power and rejects commonly held notions of women as submissive. This is their way of subverting the hegemonic gender roles that they’ve been assigned by virtue of being women in the Victorian period and steering away from that.@ The Fields had a profound influence on the early feminist movement. The themes of feminine power, seduction and mystery were prevalent in their works. At the time of the publication of Sights and Song in 1892, Field’s dual female identity was not widely known. By writing from a presumed male’s point of view, they were able to portray women from a more pragmatic point of view and advocate for women.

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Lisa is a Mona: Challenging Victorian Gender Assumptions

Melad Abou Al-Ghanam and Denielle Jackson

Ryerson University

Michael Field's Sight and Song

Much of the Mona Lisa’s fame can be attributed to Victorian literature and culture and more specifically the works of Walter Pater and Michael Field amongst many others, who immortalized the painting with their subversive writing. Both authors challenged Victorian gender assumptions through the way they read the painting in an era marked with conformity, conservatism, and specific gender roles. By questioning widely believed notions through the authority of a male voice, Michael Field set the groundwork for the empowerment of women and challenged readers to look beyond outward gender. Walter Pater challenged hegemonic gender assumptions in Victorian society and attempted to legitimize homosexuality through his essay Notes on Leonardo Da Vinci, amongst other works.

Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance

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Lisa is a Mona: Challenging Victorian Gender Assumptions

Melad Abou Al-Ghanam and Denielle Jackson

Ryerson University

Endnotes

1 Donald Sassoon. "Mona Lisa: The History of the World's Most Famous Painting" Harper Collins, 2001

2 Walter H. Pater, Studies in the history of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1973) 91-122

3 Walter H. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1977) 105-139

4 Walter H. Pater, Studies in the history of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1973) 91-122

5 Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon (New York: Harcourt, 2001)

6 Donald Capps. "Leonardo's Mona Lisa: Iconic Center of Male Melancholic Religion." Pastoral Psychology Vol. 53, No. 2 (Nov 2004): 107-137

7 Walter H. Pater, "Notes on Leonardo Da Vinci," Fortnightly Review 6:35 (1869): 494

8 Thaïs E. Morgan, "Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater". Victorian Studies 36.3 (1993): 315-332

9 Laurel Brake. "Walter Pater Biography" The Yellow Nineties Online. Web.

10 M. Seiler. Walter Pater: A Life Remembered (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1987)

11 Patricia Caplan. The Cultural construction of sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1997.

12 Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, Michael Field and Their World (London: Riverdale Press, 2007)

13 Michael Field. "La Gioconda." Sight and Song. E. Mathews and J. Lane, 1892. Print.

14 Ana I. Vadillo "Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Observer". Victorian Poetry 38.1 (2000) 15-34. 2 Feb. 2011.

15 Kit Andrews. The Figure of Watteau in Walter Pater's "Prince of Court Painters" and Michael Field's Sight and Song. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920; 2010, Vol. 53 Issue 4. Western Oregon University, 2001.

16 Kathy Alexis Psomiades. "Beauty's Body: Gender Ideology and British Aestheticism". Victorian Studies 36.1 (1992): 37. Web.

17 Jill Ehnenn. Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field's Sight and Song. Victorian Poetry, Vol. 43, 2005

18 Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, Michael Field and Their World (London: Riverdale Press, 2007)

19 Michael Field. “La Gioconda.” Sight and Song. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892. 87. Rpt in Michael Field, The Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials. Ed. Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Canada: Broadview Editions, 2009.

20 Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

Links

Page 1

"Merriam-Webster" http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Page 2

"Studies in the History of the Renaissance" http://books.google.ca/books?id=WkELAAAAYAAJ&dq=the%20renaissance%20walter%20pater%201873&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=the%20renaissance%20walter%20pater%201873&f=false

""Leonardo's Mona Lisa: Iconic Center of Male Melancholic Religion."" http://www.springerlink.com/content/r48271756kkh25w6/

""Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater"" http://www.jstor.org/stable/3828326

""Walter Pater Biography"" http://www.1890s.ca/People.aspx?l=P&n=Pater&n1=Walter

Page 3

"The Cultural construction of sexuality." http://books.google.ca/books?id=__cNAAAAQAAJ&lpg=PR7&ots=ON_Me16Qsc&dq=victorian%20women%20feminist%20movement&lr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

""Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Observer"" http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v038/38.1vadillo.html

""Beauty's Body: Gender Ideology and British Aestheticism"" http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827932

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