PROFILE/Mona Lisa: She is the symbol of art and, equally, the symbol of high kitsch - but there are no official plans to celebrate what may or may not be Mona Lisa's 500th birthday, writes Sarah Binchy in Paris.
Right now, she is France's biggest celebrity. In the past 10 days she has been on the covers of three separate magazines on the news-stands all over Paris; a documentary on France 2 tomorrow night will explore her "enduring mystery and charm".
She recently caused panic at Gare du Nord when she was spotted in the company of BBC documentary director Nick Rossiter attempting to leave the country on the Eurostar; closer examination revealed the lady in question to be just a lookalike. She has more fans than she knows what to do with, six million a year, who mob her home for a glimpse of her and perhaps a forbidden flash photograph if her bodyguards aren't looking. She even has a Hollywood film due out later this year, in which she is certain to upstage her co-star, Julia Roberts. Not bad for a 500-year-old piece of badly varnished canvas.
Like all the best-loved celebrities, Mona Lisa is a survivor. She's been fêted by emperors and kings, assaulted, kidnapped, name-called, worshipped, parodied, psychoanalysed, reproduced a million times - and come out . . . smiling.
She is not insured because her value, according to her hosts at the Louvre, is incalculable. She is the symbol of art and, equally, the symbol of high kitsch. With such a rich history you would think the Louvre might plan a little something to mark the half-millennium of its most famous resident.
But not a bit of it.
"We have no interest in this so-called birthday," Louvre spokeswoman, Cecile Bourdillat, wearily tells The Irish Times. Even though 1503 is the date the Louvre itself gives, unequivocally, on the plaque beside the painting, Bourdillat insists it's an estimate only. "Like many of the artworks from the Renaissance, we can't be 100 per cent sure, so there's nothing to celebrate," she says.
Pedantic, perhaps, but in any case the Louvre has nothing to gain from marking this event. "Frankly, we have no desire to encourage more people to come to see the Mona Lisa than come already," Bourdillat says. "The crowds cause us plenty of problems as it is: they disturb people who want to look at the other paintings, they try to take flash photographs . . . This is not something that needs any more promotion."
Accepting that the majority of Mona Lisa visitors will not want to see much else on their visit, the Louvre is preparing a private room for her, which will be ready in 2004. Her bulletproof isolation will be complete.
Why all the fuss? Why all the mystery? It's partly due to the myth-making around her creator Leonardo da Vinci himself - the heroic Renaissance man, the seer, or the scatty experimenter who only completed a dozen or so paintings in his lifetime, if that.
Although he left thousands of pages of writings, he never once mentioned this picture. It is known that he was in Milan when he painted it, but there is doubt about the date: estimates vary from a start date of 1503 or 1504 to 1513.
As to the mystery of Mona Lisa's real-life identity, Giorgio Vasari, an early biographer of Leonardo, squarely names her as the 24-year-old Lisa del Giocondo, wife of a Tuscan silk merchant. Vasari was wrong about many other facts of Leonardo's life, but Mrs del Giocondo is certainly the person most commonly associated with the painting, giving it its name, La Gioconda in Italian or La Joconde in French ("the merry one"). In the English-speaking world, it's Mona Lisa, from "Monna Lisa", from "Madonna Lisa" ("My Lady Lisa").
Nonetheless scholars have delighted in putting forward rival theories as to the identity of the sitter, from a 45-year-old duchess (which would make it a pretty flattering portrait), to the mistress of Giuliano de Medici, to a lover of Leonardo's, to Leonardo's imaginary ideal woman (the Marquis de Sade got quite excited about this one), to Leonardo himself, in a joke for posterity - her features and his own in a self-portrait from the same period align quite nicely.
Whatever the source of her mystique, Mona Lisa revolutionised painting, with its smoky blending of colours and tones and its introduction of the half-turn pose, which is so universal today in portrait photography that you will see instructions to sit in much the same manner in every passport photo booth. It was instantly copied, by Raphael and others, and rapidly became famous.
Leonardo must have been fond of the painting, because he never handed it over to Mr del Giocondo, or whoever commissioned it, but rather took it with him everywhere he went. After his death, King Francois of France bought it for 4,000 gold coins, and exhibited it at Fontainebleau, where it dazzled viewers. In 1625 the Duke of Buckingham tried to buy it, but several people appealed to the French king that he would be losing "his most beautiful painting out of the kingdom". The painting moved in and out of public view over the next 70 or 80 years.
Napoleon Bonaparte had it hung in his bedroom in the Tuileries between 1800 and 1804: "Madame Lisa," he saluted her, respectfully. Afterwards she was moved to the Grande Galerie of the Louvre where a fleet of writers and artists from the Romantic age paid homage and her myth as a femme fatale began in earnest. In 1852 a young French artist, Luc Maspero, threw himself from his Paris hotel window, leaving a note: "For years I have grappled desperately with her smile. I prefer to die."
And Walter Pater has a lot to answer for with his famous lines: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits . . . like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave . . ."
Oscar Wilde learned the passage by heart and whispered it in front of her.
Her fame soared in 1911 when the painting was stolen from the Louvre by a member of staff, a carpenter called Vincenzo Perrugia. "The Louvre's Joconde Stolen: When? How? Who?" screamed the headline in the daily, Excelsior, the next day.
The day afterwards, crowds queued to view the empty space where she had hung. When the police got nowhere in their investigations, their efforts were lampooned by cheeky postcards showing her eloping with Leonardo or thumbing her nose at France - the kitschification of Mona Lisa had begun.
She showed up in Italy two years later, miraculously unscathed. Tired of keeping her at the bottom of a trunk, Perrugia had naively tried to sell her to a Florentine art dealer, who'd had him arrested. She got a royal welcome on her return to France, with exhibitions all the way home. New postcards were printed showing her with a baby and Perrugia in the background, as though she'd been on a romantic escapade.
The popular mockery paved the way for the Dadaists, who saw her as a cultural fetish of the bourgeoisie: Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache and a beard on a reproduction and called it L.H.O.O.Q: elle a chaud au cul (She's got a hot ass). Far more disrespectful was the nasty incident in the 1950s when a Bolivian student threw a rock at her (Salvador Dalí blamed it on the boy's mother fixation), leaving her permanently marooned behind bulletproof glass.
She hasn't left France since two short visits to the US and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s - the hype at the time was worthy of The Beatles. But now her travelling days are over, not much can happen to her; she merely has to put up with the indignity of her image being used to sell everything from condoms to a squeaky toy called The Mona Lisa Giggling Pillow.
At the centre of it all is that tight-lipped, slightly lop-sided smile. For Freud it is "the lost, mysterious smile of the artist's mother"; to an early viewer in the 16th century it is "more divine than human"; according to French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, it is "doubting, licentious, epicurean, deliciously tender, ardent, sad"; and, in Somerset Maugham's opinion, it is merely "sex-starved".
Lawrence Durrell called it "the smile of a woman who has just eaten her husband"; in a similar vein, feminist Camille Paglia argued that "what Mona Lisa is telling us is that males are unnecessary". From adoration to violence: it seems clear that every age reads into the smile its own preoccupations, fetishes, and attitude to women.
More prosaically, the 20th century has been peppered with eureka moments explaining physiological reasons for the smile, from toothache, cerebral palsy and asthma, to syphilis. Most recently, it has been identified as the contented smile of pregnancy, by the recent BBC documentary on Mona Lisa. It asserts that the sitter was indeed Lisa del Giocondo, and that the portrait was commissioned to celebrate her pregnancy, which is why her hands were bare of rings (her fingers were swollen). Actually, this theory was first put forward in the 1950s and is by no means conclusive: plenty of paintings of the era showed ringless ladies, and so on. In the absence of hard facts, the debate will no doubt continue for the next 500 years.
In the meantime, she's worth a visit, notwithstanding the crowd control. Catch her at a quiet time in the Louvre, such as late evening, and try the famous trick of walking around the room and watching her eyes follow you. But if you find her reality disappointing, smaller and darker than the reproductions had led you to believe, keep it to yourself. She must have heard that line a million times.