What is the Lady Really Smiling About? Mona Lisa's Secret Admirers

Abstract

The world's most famous work of art owes its subtle fascination, usually held to be inexplicable, to the subliminal embedding of a large number and variety of male faces in the Mona Lisa's clothes and hair as well as in the surrounding land and cloudscape. This is not an isolated instance of an unconscious or accidental process, but shows all the wit, craftsmanship and sophistication we have by other means come to expect of Leonardo da Vinci. Although all the great masters seem to have clearly recognized and imitated this trick, it seems to have completely escaped the notice of academic art criticism, which generally begins recognizing facial alternatives in Arcimboldi and then skips over the centuries to Picasso or Dali. The father of modern art was impressed by a painting full of embedded faces and, realizing the extent to which practically all visual art owes its “ineffable” fascination to this simple technique, evolved the notion of “abstract art” by the simple expedient of gradually eliminating the main Gestalt. Having the key to artistic success within their grasp, Freudians vastly underestimated the extent of its use as well as its relevance to the impact of an art work. Their insistence on interpreting it as an automatic manifestation from the secret recesses of the artist's unconscious mind prevented them from seeing it as a calculated toying with one of the beholder's principal higher order feature detectors, the specialist face processor.