The Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa “smile” is produced by barely raising the left corner of the

mouth. Leonardo himself, in his Treatise on Painting, says that the “person

who laughs raises the corners of his mouth” - as every child who has drawn a

beaming face knows. Laughs - as opposed to smiles - are rare in

Renaissance paintings, and are never used when depicting the aristocracy

and the upper classes. Mona Lisa does not laugh; she exercises restraint

and decorum. A smile can be regarded as an understated laugh, as the

French word, sou-rire – “under-laugh” - and its Latin etymological root,

subridere, suggest. In the highly codified world of fifteenth-century Italian

court life, smiles were not left to personal initiative. Numerous books were

available for those who wished to be instructed in the proper code of

behaviour. The most significant was Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortigiano

(The Courtier), published in 1528 and - as Italian manners were regarded as

a universal model to be followed - later translated into English (1561).

Castiglione advised his readers to steer away from:

affectation at all costs, as if it were a jagged and dangerous reef, and to

practise in all things a certain - to use a novel expression - sprezzatura in

order to conceal all artistry and make what one says or does seem

uncontrived and effortless.

Sprezzatura means, literally, disdain and detachment. It is the art of

refraining from the appearance of trying to present oneself in a particular

way. In reality, of course, tremendous exertion went into pretending not to

bother or care. Such celebration of the understated did not last long (it

reappeared much later, and briefly, too briefly, among the English

bourgeoisie), but it was still being promoted in the middle of the sixteenth

century by the Italian writer Agnolo Firenzuola (1493

–

1553). His treatise on

feminine beauty and behaviour, Della perfetta bellezza d'una donna (On the

Perfect Beauty of...