ABSTRACT
This chapter is a stylistic study of Walter Pater’s famous “description” of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in The Renaissance. Mona Lisa, known as La Gioconda, usually considered as the most famous painting in the world, is a portrait painted in oil by Leonardo da Vinci from 1505 to 1519. In the Mona Lisa text, Pater examines a face whose features he expects everybody is familiar with. The chapter analyzes Mona Lisa reverie as text, or as a prose poem, writerly Mona Lisa, not Mona Lisa as a symbolic, symptomatic, or ideological object. In the Mona Lisa portrait, the curves and lines of the sitter’s hair, veil, and clothes are mimetically echoed in the undulating landscape lying behind her. What Pater’s syntax, rhythmical cadence, and words achieve is a mimetic rendering of the painting’s technical characteristics. If Leonardo’s Mona Lisa depicts an “idea,” be it “modern” or not, rather than a woman who actually existed, Pater’s text also forcefully departs from representation.
