Everyone stop what you’re doing right now. You should probably sit down for this.
If you haven’t yet heard, a private Swiss art foundation recently unveiled a second version of the so very famous ‘Mona Lisa,’ painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in the early 16th century. Whether the painting is really an authentic Da Vinci version, or just an okay imitation of the original, is up in the air. And the oft-controversial, always engaging art world is in a state of nail-biting uncertainty.
Members of the Swiss foundation are positive that the painting is in fact the original Mona Lisa’s predecessor; the painting in question shows a woman about ten years younger than the Mona Lisa we know and love(?), with the same eyes that don’t stop staring at you and the same little smile. Or is it a non-smile? (Another hot art dilemma.) Others, like Martin Kemp, a da Vinci scholar, are not so sure the evidence stands up. Drama!
The Mona Lisa Foundation has run multiple technological tests, compiling their findings of over 30 years into a casual 300-page document. The FBI even got in on the action when Joe Mullins, a trained forensic imaging specialist, made a computerized version of the Mona Lisa as she would have looked ten years younger. The result was a dead ringer for the Swiss’s version. This test sounds suspiciously similar to the weird couples who take pictures of their faces to find out what their future babies would look like, but whatever.
So how will we know whether or not da Vinci actually sat down in Italy in the 1500s and painted not one but two Mona Lisas, one young and the other old and kind of pudgier? I don’t know, but I’ll probably lose a lot of sleep until I do. Apparently lots of things are at stake, like money and fame and basically the path of the universe. Marcus Frey, the Mona Lisa Foundation president, told the Associated Press, “The quintessence of any humanistic education is to ask questions, to be inquisitive, and to challenge authority. Of course, authority often sits in an ivory tower, which will no doubt be our biggest challenge.”
Hey, if Pluto’s no longer a planet, anything can happen. Stick it to the man, Mona Lisa Foundation!
