Mona Lisa or the Demoniacal Power of the Feminine

Last week it was announced that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa won't be leaving Paris’s Louvre Museum to appear in an exhibition in Italy in 2013.

While there wasn't actually a formal request, the Italian National Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage Committee, wanted a loan of the painting to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its recovery following its theft from the Louvre in 1911.

Yet, Vincent Pomarede, head of the Department of Paintings at the Louvre, stated that transporting the painting could lead to irreversible damage since it is extremely fragile.

The Mona Lisa – known in Italian as La Gioconda since it shows a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, a member of the wealthy Gherardini family – actually travelled to the US in 1963 and Japan in 1974.

The second image illustrating this post relates to Mona Lisa's trip to the States in the '60s and is taken from a feature published at the time on the American magazine Cavalier (borrowed for this occasion from Kutmusic's archives).

Interviewed about the famous painting, Salvador Dali stated:

“Mona Lisa immediately had a sexual echo on me.

I first saw her when I was 6 years old. My parents were friendly with an opera singer who one day sent us news of herself on the back of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

What was particularly attractive to me was that this singer had hair under her arms, and she excited me sexually. You know that little boys have secret perversions, and the fact that she had sent us the Mona Lisa created an inescapable association of ideas on an erotic level (…)

The Mona Lisa represents for me two things: the idea, the symbol of Art; and the archetype of a woman idealised with a very sensitive degree of eroticism. You know that Leonardo da Vinci had an exaggerated love for his mother. When he painted Mona Lisa, he put in it all the symbols of maternity, and within her the demoniacal power of idealisation of the feminine (…)

Placing the Mona Lisa in large cities like Paris or New York is dangerous, because the public museums there are like brothels, filled with paintings of Venus and erotic statues somehow suggestive of one's mother (…) Mona Lisa doesn't give a damn. She stays the same through all the storms. She keeps her smile and will continue to trouble millions of men for thousands of years.”

Though I find this rare picture showing Dali and a model playing with a Mona Lisa scarf inside Saks Fifth Avenue really fun, I guess that, rather than this photograph, it's Dali's words about “the demoniacal power of idealisation of the feminine” could provide an interesting inspiration for a womenswear fashion collection.

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