The Mona Lisa and the Virgin with Child and St Anne, Leonardo Da Vinci, Part III
In the other two articles, the personality of Leonardo Da Vinci was analyzed, based on phrases found in his diary and a childhood memory that was decisive in his spiritual development. On this occasion, I will present the consequence of his childhood memories, of those sad years together with his abandoned mother, with the absence of the father that every child needs.
From the hand of Leonardo came two paintings that synthesize his feelings: one, the Mona Lisa, in which Leonardo encounters a smile full of sensuality that reminded him of his mother, a smile that after the creation of this painting would never disappear from his subsequent pictorial undertakings. The Mona Lisa left the men of the Renaissance dumbfounded and that enigmatic smile still fascinates men in the present-day. Nobody has deciphered the thoughts of the Mona Lisa. However, how many poets and novelists have thought of her in moments of great inspiration!
The Mona Lisa — as Muther said — “as soon as she appears, she smiles seductively as if letting a cold and soulless gaze lose itself in the distance. Everything in this painting, including the scenery, appears submerged in a dense and fiery sensuality.” On the other hand, there are many critics who believe that Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the most perfect reproduction of the antitheses that dominate women’s erotic lives: reserve and seduction.
This painting has been interpreted in other ways: M. Herzfeld says: “the features of the Mona Lisa have long lain in Leonardo’s soul.”
It is very possible that Leonardo’s mother had this same smile, a smile that had been forgotten and which he found on the lips of the Gioconda.
In this painting, Leonardo recalls his mother, finds the smiling expression that she lost during his childhood and he finds it in the Gioconda, and it is very possible that this memory drove him to create a glorification of maternity, his painting “The Virgin with Child and St. Anne,” and to return to his mother the smile that he had found again.
THE VIRGIN WITH CHILD AND ST. ANNE: Leonardo’s closest work to the Gioconda, chronologically speaking, is the painting that represents the Virgin with Child and St. Anne. In it the two feminine faces show a “Leonardesque” smile. Regarding this painting, some critics have stated: “only Da Vinci could have painted it as in it one finds the essence of his life.”
One sees: two women and a child. The child is, of course, Leonardo, and the two women are the two mothers that he had; from the time he was born until he was 5 he stayed with his real mother and from 5 years of age through adolescence he lived with his father and his father’s wife, Donna Albiera. He lived with his father and stepmother since that marriage was unable to have children and in view of the child’s beauty and powerful intelligence, Donna Albiera allowed Leonardo to become part of the family. Leonardo felt the serious pain of his real mother, the indignation she suffered upon seeing that the same woman who had previously deprived her of the man she loved was taking away her son. In the painting the two women are in different positions: one extends her arms to him and the other watches him in a relegated way, with that Leonardesque smile, so enigmatic and indecipherable. The mother is represented in the figure of Saint Anne, and Leonardo, as though to pacify his mother’s troubled heart in the face of the double deception that destiny had for her, places a blessed smile on her face and especially on her lips. He did so because he was pursuing a specific goal: to cover up and deny the envy that the miserable Catalina, his real mother, felt upon finding herself obligated to give her child up to the noble rival, as she had earlier given up her beloved husband.
With regard to this painting, Freud states: “It is difficult to delimit the figures of Saint Anne and the Virgin Mary. It deals with poorly condensed dreamlike images, which although they could be considered a defect of composition artistically, this is not the case, since what Da Vinci was pursuing was to meld his two mothers in a single and unique figure.” Oscar Pfister sought to go into more depth on Leonardo, in relation to how to interpret this painting and, after long studies, reached the conclusion that it dealt with an unconscious puzzle, since after a long time observing and studying this painting, he found that “in the strangely folded and difficult to delimit clothing of the Virgin Mary I found the outline of a vulture.”
In any of the cases and the opinions set out regarding Leonardo, what is indubitable is the powerful influence of his childhood, the presence of a mother whom he glorified and the absence of the father that he names nowhere: his unknown father.
