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Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. Stand far back, and his outline is a sharp drawing, as if Michelangelo had confidently mapped the shape in the air with pen and ink. The face, turned almost 90 degrees to look to the left, with its triangle of a nose, mountain outcrop of an overhanging brow and florid hair flying out into space, forms a scintillating profile. The proportions of the body are, from this distance, mathematically graceful.
The measurement from the hair on the head to the fusillade of hair above the penis appears identical to that from genitals to toes. You can almost feel the weight of the body gracefully shifting on to its right foot, as the figure easily inclines its left knee forward, rolling its ribcage on top of its stomach to move its centre of gravity.
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As you approach, this harmonious silhouette stays in your mind, yet also dissolves into glances and momentary impressions. The ridges and tensions of the immense chest high above you — the statue is more than twice the height of a living person, still higher because of the tall plinth — drink in nuances of shadow so that, up close, David is richly shaded: At his side hangs his gargantuan right hand — out of proportion, you suddenly realise, not just in scale but in the mesmerising, exaggerated attention to detail the sculptor lavished on it: Once you recognise the strangeness of this hand, the beautiful body Michelangelo has carved becomes still more alive.
This, you start to comprehend — although actually you sensed it from that very first view along the avenue — is not some chilly, perfect nude. It is mobile, active, keen-eyed. The hand is the most radical instance of a quality that all David's parts possess: The statue may be finished as a work of art, but what it portrays is unfinished: David contradicts himself even in his grace, because to be alive is to be contradictory. Where David displays every muscle, his rival is respectably swathed.
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Her only action is to smile — to use what the anatomist Leonardo described coolly as "the muscles called lips". She is both mortal and goddess, smiling archaic personage and merchant's wife. Her pose has an eternal inevitability, as if she contained within her a serpentine column, revolving heavenward in a perfectly calibrated spiral: The relief of shadow on her strong features gives her feminine beauty a masculine counter-life.
She is a hall of mirrors, a shrine of paradox. Those who see the Mona Lisa's reputation as exaggerated are refusing to see how formidable her mixture of classical perfection and dreamlike ambiguity actually is; how much is in that smile.
The Mona Lisa dwells in a painted atmosphere so thick she might be suspended in tinted liquid. Reality melts in her world. Mountains dissolve, roads wind to nowhere. The power of this painting owes a lot to the strangeness and universality of its landscape, which feels like some kind of conclusion about the nature of life on earth.
Her portrait is drawn with shadows. The darks that deepen her features are so bold, you can lift them off and reproduce them as a black template. These shadows have the effect of diminishing the distance between foreground and background; the colours of the landscape bring it forward as her shadows draw her back. This heightens the psychological and poetic sense that somehow she contains grottoes and rocky recesses within her.
The tenebrous voids that darken her beauty make us unconsciously recognise that we cannot interpret this as merely a portrait with a landscape in the background. The vista beyond her, with its coiling road, arched bridge, rocks, rivers, lakes, mountains and sea, is as much part of her as she is. The Mona Lisa — "Mona" or "Monna" being short for "Madonna", the reverent way to title a married woman in 16th-century Florence — started life as a portrait commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo, a textile manufacturer and merchant who had business dealings with Leonardo's notary father.
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But the picture of Francesco's wife that Leonardo showed his fellow-citizens in must have looked very different from today's unfathomable mystery. She must have looked like a real woman. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for years — perhaps until close to the end of his life. He never let the painting go, never handed it over to Francesco and Lisa del Giocondo. The poplar-wood panel was with him when he died. Leonardo's long and loving work — that and the smoke of time — created the dream picture we see today; it is impossible to see this as a "portrait" in any normal sense.
As her obscurities deepened and her landscape ramified, so Lady Lisa was transfigured into a being of myth and fable. Yet Leonardo's rhapsody really did start out as a portrait of a Florentine woman, and what amazed the first people who saw the picture was its brilliant verisimilitude.
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This, surely, is where she mirrors the lifelikeness of David who, though an ideal character from the Bible, was so closely observed in his anatomy that he seems almost to move. So wrote the artist and critic Giorgio Vasari in , going into raptures for the curve of the Mona Lisa's eyebrows, the graceful nose, the mouth that "seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh". I feel the same way, standing under what seems the animate stone form of David.
Art in the 21st century happens in the glare of publicity and fame. New art is a public event, a media circus. It was like that in Renaissance Italy, too. Leonardo's new portrait got people talking when it was still just a sketch. The installation of Michelangelo's David in front of the city's government palace in suddenly unveiled a new star, nearly a quarter of a century younger than Leonardo but in the same incredible category of human genius.
Their new works were self-evidently similar not just in quality, but in appearance and theme. The human individual had never been portrayed so convincingly before. The Mona Lisa's first admirers said she was so lifelike, there seemed to be a pulse in her throat; thus with David's almost-beating ribs. The power of these objects, then and now, is to seem alive.