Word: smile
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Whether it be Nicole Kidman's or John Kerry's, these days it's most likely to come with a smile. The latter, we learn, is among 30% of the U.S. population who expose their canine teeth when they smile (67% form a toothless crescent shape); while women, unlike men, whose bodies secrete high levels of testosterone, are more likely to laugh. By book's end, the reader has become familiar with the nasolabial fold (the curving lines which form between the cheeks and upper lip) and the inner-workings of the smile, whose principal puppet master is the cranial...
...Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti's obsession with the Australian wombat, Trumble saves much of his best material for the story's marginalia. There are the early 18th century "gurning" competitions of York- shire ("The frightfull'st grinner/ Be the winner") and the various cosmetic condiments that have accompanied the smile over the years, from the 18th century English vogue for wearing mouse-skin eyebrows, to the Japanese tooth-blackening practice of ohaguro. How the author manages to connect the 16th century European habit of dog turd-throwing, Dutch painting's depiction of the chicken groper, and a potted history...
...book is strongest when it comes back to the picture. Through his eyes, he can make that most musty of matrons, the Mona Lisa, seem fresh again. Peeling back the sfumato of centuries of theory - from the femme fatale of European Romanticism to Freud's assertion that her smile was that of Leonardo's lost mother Caterina - he finds "an exceptionally subtle and sympathetic image of femininity." She was, he says, simply the young wife of a Florentine merchant whose curling lips embody the essence of her husband's name, Gioconda, meaning joyful...
Perhaps we see too much in a smile. For Trumble, there's power in the mystery. Take Franz Hals's The Laughing Cavalier, where all that really laughs is the Dutch military officer's moustache. "A smile may stimulate us in certain superficial ways, eliciting a ready smile in response, for example, but it also penetrates the deep recesses of our subconscious mind," Trumble writes. "What makes Hals's portrait great is that it convinces us that something similar is taking place, even though we know at the same time that the source of stimulation is nothing more than paint...
Like The Laughing Cavalier, Trumble's book leaves you with a heightened awareness of the smile's subliminal power. As you read this, buses around Sydney are advertising cider with a sepia photo of grave-faced frontiersmen: they saved their smiles for happy hour; while emails zip around cyberspace with the smiley emoticon of colon-dash-parenthesis. "The smile, meanwhile, is getting broader, wider, fiercer," writes Trumble. And, as his book attests, more subversive than ever...