Eye of the beholder

Every year a new Leonardo Da Vinci controversy. Every year around the silly season.

Last January Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage wanted to open the tomb at Amboise castle, in France, where the Renaissance artist is believed to have been interred in 1874, after fire damaged the original tomb in 1789. Da Vinci died in 1519, aged 67.

The Italian Committee for Cultural Heritage wanted to examine Da Vinci's remains to find out whether his painting the Mona Lisa is a disguised self-portrait.

Italian Cultural Heritage expert Giorgio Gruppioni told Associated Press (AP) the proposal could throw new light on Leonardo’s most famous work. “If we manage to find his skull, we could rebuild Leonardo’s face and compare it with the Mona Lisa,” he said.

The plan had its critics.

Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, told the Times “It sounds a bit fanciful, slightly mad, as if the Leonardo bug has taken hold too firmly in the minds of these people. We know that Mona Lisa was a specific person, she existed and it’s her portrait. If Leonardo heard about all this, he’d have a good chuckle”.

This year Italian National Committee for Cultural Heritage chairman Silvano Vinceti, told AP that Da Vinci's male apprentice and possible lover Salai was the main inspiration for the picture.

Vincenti told a sceptical press gallery the committee's researchers have studied what they call a high resolution digital photograph of the Mona Lisa's eyes and found what they claim might be "a love message to the figure in the painting" hidden in the Mona Lisa's eyes.

The Louvre museum, where the Mona Lisa hangs, is skeptical.

Agence France Press (AFP) reported the museum as saying it had carried out "every possible laboratory test" on the picture in 2004 and then again in 2009, and insisted that "no inscriptions, letters or numbers, were discovered during the tests".

The Louvre told AFP "the aging of the painting on wood has caused a great number of cracks to appear in the paint, which have caused a number of shapes to appear that have often been subject to over-interpretation".

Previously, many writers, and one group using mirrors (The Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings World Foundation) have claimed to have discovered secret symbols in the Mona Lisa.

However during 2010 Italian Art Historian Giusseppe Pallanti claimed to have found the remains of the Mona Lisa's model, Lisa Gherardini, in a municipal dump in Florence.

Fascination with this most famous of Western artworks continues.

Julie Clarke - Camping by the Murray River late 1950s

Julie Clarke - Camping by the Murray River late 1950s. Photographer unknown.

The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination; false on the level of perception, true on the level of time (Roland Barthes, 1980).

I have imagined this photograph for over a decade, for my Uncle told me that there existed at least two photographs he'd taken of me whilst we were camping by the Murray River. As I look at the girl looking at me from the past, I realise that this is the me that smiled before the camera and that my 'Mona Lisa' grin that began back then as a smile, had, during my life diminished to that enigmatic half-grin that people tell me I do. When I look hard at the photograph I see that neither the girl nor the dog are looking at the photographer, they are captured by something else. The dog is distracted by movement in the sky, the girl by someone who stands next to the photographer. I imagine that I have been told to put my hand on my knee and to sit up straight, for my arm is stilted, revealing the self-consciousness that the smile conceals.

I remember the tartan skirt and the soft yellow jumper (I was always dressed in Autumn colours). The bowl haircut was a source of embarrassment; both myself and my sisters had the strange mark of my grandmother's unskilled craft. I can see the small gap in my fringe where my cowslip formed.

In this photograph I'm not caught in action. I am aware that I am to be photographed and that I am being photographed. This had not happened much before (I only know of one other photograph that was ever taken of me when I was a child) and so this would have been a special and unique moment in my life. I sit slightly forward on the chair, perhaps with anticipation, perhaps with interest. There is an easiness on one side of my body as I stroke the dog. It is the other side, the good Catholic girl side of me that has pulled her skirt down over her knees, and with legs crossed at the ankles smiles for the future.

It is important to me that over the past week or so I have been writing about the Infanta in the Diego Velazquez painting 'La Meninas' and the re-interpretation of it by the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. In both the painting and the photograph there is a dog. In the former it stands alert, in the latter it sleeps. In both, the dog is connected to the girl child as companion and aid.

In is magical that in the midst of my writing this photograph of myself with a dog has been given to me belatedly for my Birthday. It has appeared at an opportune time, as a reminder of the past that is connected to now. My childhood was always something that was half-articulated through memory and fragmented stories, touched as they were by the shadows and blurred remembering of someone else. Now, the photograph somehow pins it down and is like the feet of the dog and the girl, fixed firmly on solid ground.


I wrote this to celebrate my 50th Birthday in 2001 and gave it to friends and acquaintenances I knew at the time as a photocopy with soft cardboard cover. It was my older sister Glyns who gave me the photo. I was writing about La Meninas in a chapter on cyborgs in my PhD thesis.