Word: giocondo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mona Lisa del Giocondo had had any idea of the lengths to which critics would go in trying to explain her enigmatic smile in Leonardo da Vinci's famed portrait, she might have split her sides laughing. For in 450 years the smile has been variously interpreted as sly and tender, coquettish and aloof, cruel and compassionate, seductive and supercilious. At Yale University last week an eminent British physician, visiting professor of the history of medicine, coolly swept aside all such adjectives and offered his own theory: the lady was smiling with "placid satisfaction" because she was pregnant...
...trouble with Dr. Keele's theory is that Mona Lisa del Giocondo, married at 16, had one child which died shortly before she began to pose for Da Vinci, and there is no clear record that she became pregnant during the four or five years that Da Vinci worked, on and off, at the portrait. Besides, the remarkably similar smile in another Da Vinci master piece cannot be explained the same way. The subject is John the Baptist...
...recalls the dark, soft femininity of his most famed creation-the Mono. Lisa. This painting, which hangs in the Louvre, is probably as well known as any in existence-though few admirers pretend to grasp it fully. A portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, it has been the subject of a towering stack of critical works. Summarizing the comments of the centuries, Johns Hopkins Professor George Boas once concluded, simply and truly, that each age sees the Mono, Lisa...