La Gioconda

The young Leonardo da Vinci had long been fascinated by the human body. By the age of twenty-three, he had already “borrowed” five paupers’s corpses from the Firenze town undertaker to dissect back in his garret. The fact that he had free access to the town morgue and had routinely sent its mortician large baskets of bread, Borrolo, cheese and olives did not excuse either man from this ghoulish misfeasance. However, Lenny did dispose of the human offal and rotting body parts with some dignity, wrapped in old artist canvas and buried in a land-fill near Pisa.

Moreover, Lenny’s addiction to anatomy did produce a remarkable understanding of our bodies’ kinesthetics, skeletal structure, and muscle layering; and his notebooks on these subjects were a legacy to all the artists and sculptors who plied these noble trades after he too had joined the worms. In fact, if all the artisans of Tuscany in the sixteenth century had pursued such corporeal cognition with Lenny’s equivalent zeal, there wouldn’t have been an unopened grave in all of northern Italy.

One day, the most prominent merchant-prince of Lombardy, Ferrari Gioconda, approached da Vinci to paint a portrait of his daughter, Mona Lisa Gioconda, on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday. Since da Vinci was the most highly regarded portraitist in all of Europe, Ferrari wanted to use this painting as an indication of his vast disposable wealth, of his lofty social status, and of his daughter’s vestal purity. He intended to display it prominently in the window of his carriage shop in Firenze surrounded by votive candles.

Lenny accepted this commission with great enthusiasm since he had often secretly noticed this very maiden’s budding bosoms. He arranged for her to pose for him at his studio on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and all day Saturdays. During these sessions he would casually leave body parts from his dissection experiments lying around in lewd positions to purposefully shock her tender psyche. He also gradually convinced her to shed more and more of her drapery so that he might better capture her charms.

It wasn’t long before Mona was enthusiastically spending the whole of her sittings in her “birthday suit” (the original source of this vernacular). And, when returning home, she would often devote her evenings to scrubbing Venetian red and burnt umbra smudges from her torso. Lenny’s painting too was of the fully-nude Miss Gioconda ... and it was in a frenzied panic that, during their last weeks together, he over-painted her comely torso with a thick gouache representing her heretofore abandoned garments. The enigmatic smile that da Vinci carefully etched on Mona Lisa’s visage (fascinating art lovers down through the ages), was nothing more than his homage to her oft-repeated, post-coital glow.

© Copyright, George W. Potts