Thanks for this great selection of painting..I would talking about "The Mona Lisa" that fascinates us because we do not know anything about her.

Who is she ? Why is she smiling?

Serge Bramly explains in his "Leonardo da Vinci" that the Mona Lisa may not be a portrait, but an ideal woman, a dream person that Leonardo would have painted for himself, for pleasure. It is established that it is one of the very few paintings entirely painted by the hand of Leonardo alone. The artist may have lent him an expression that reminded him of his mother. This is the opinion of Freud, who was very interested in the "case Vinci", a child born out of wedlock of a servant whom his father then repudiated.

The smile fascinates precisely because we do not know what causes it. Why this woman (what is her age?) She smiles, while the background of the painting itself is frankly sinister: it suggests rather the annihilation (the sun is gone, not a trace of life, the darkness threaten ...). Oscar Wilde wrote of her that "her head is the one on which all the ends of the world have gathered, and her eyelids are a little tired". We also know, thanks to his notebooks, that Leonard was rather pessimistic at this time of his life.

But after all, the question "why is she smiling?" is it not important? Perhaps Leonardo especially wanted to paint a smile which one wonders what he means? One can read there the sweetness, the comprehension, the indulgence, the patience ... It seems ephemeral but it expresses the immutability ... all that Leonard expects of a woman? or rather a mother? Serge Bramly finds that the Mona Lisa "smiles with the smile of the wife, of the eternal mother, who has lived all the pleasures, all the sorrows, and who, even in pain, omniscient, full of compassion, as a female equivalent of Christ hands wisely crossed, peacefully defies time, consummator of all things.

Let's not forget that Leonardo da Vinci painter is a genius of mystery ...