The Two Mona Lisas

This morning I spent some time looking at the website of The Mona Lisa Foundation, proponents of the "Earlier Mona Lisa" theory. I have never thought much of the Mona Lisa as a painting, but there are features to this thing that I found interesting enough to think a little about and to have an uneducated opinion about.  Here are the two Mona Lisas:

 

These are just details of the face - there is a lot more to each picture that bears looking into. The assertion of The Mona Lisa Foundation is that the picture on the left was painted by Leonardo eleven years earlier than the picture on the right, and that he painted both pictures.  They seem to have a lot of evidence which they say supports this; far more than I care to dig through.  That is why my opinion must remain uneducated.  However I live in the Kooks Museum and our shelves are full of books by people with something to prove and the one thing they all have in common is that whatever it is they have to prove, whether it is perfectly sensible or completely crazy, they all prove it, at least to their own satisfaction. I am also a painter and I have found that people who set out to prove things with lots of supporting evidence usually think in a very different way from the way a painter thinks, as I have pointed out in the past.

Here is what my opinion is. It is my opinion that this is not necessarily a person painted by same artist eleven years apart.  One painting is copied from the other painting.  I am an artist and I am going to paint the same person eleven years after I first painted her.  I have painted a really good portrait of a cute little gal and eleven years later I say I want to paint you again as a kind of stodgy matron only everything else will be EXACTLY the same except for the background. I will even give you the same hands and not paint the hands you have now which are eleven years older. And she and her husband are going to say okay that sounds good.  What gets me is the line of her hair on the left side.  I might be able to cajole a woman into wearing the same costume and same hairstyle and into striking the same pose eleven years later - which itself does not make much sense except in a 'conceptual art' context which I don't think even existed then - but her hair is not going to do the exact same thing as it did eleven years before.  It isn't even going to be the same hair.  Her hands are not going to be in exactly the same position, the folds in the sleeves are not going to be exactly the same.  Or maybe I would just have a couple of assistants copy the previous painting and I will just step in and do the face and make her look kind of flabby and grumpy compared to the peppy little doll in the old painting.  Then I have to make sure they don't see the first painting so they don't go what the hell you made her look like her own mom, that's not what we are paying you for.

One of those pictures is copied from the other one, so side by side comparisons of the proportions of the two paintings don't prove anything because all you need to do is use any one of three simple mechanical devices to copy the forms and proportions exactly, which any apprentice could do.  They both seem to be painted with a great degree of skill and they both look pretty old.  As I said I have never been able to grasp the romantic ideal of the Mona Lisa so I don't really get what a great painting it is, but it seems to be well executed.  Both of them.  I am not qualified to make any statements on how much of Leonardo's paintings were done by assistants, how often he used what kind of pigment on what kind of board or canvas, etc. but I will tell you this as an artist - I am not the only person on earth who has looked at that painting and said, "That would be a pretty good picture if you fixed up her face a little, because frankly she is not that great looking a gal."  I think that is what we have got here.   But what do I know.

HISTORY'S GREATEST SECRET REVEALED!!

I was very happy to find a fascinating page on The Discovery and Demonstration of the Minoan Calendar, describing the work of Drs. Dempsey and Herberger in bringing the ancient Minoan Calendrical system to light.  You can enjoy it in detail on your own time but I have another, bigger secret to reveal here.  The Drs. were so struck by the "visual problems and broken patterns" in the decorative borders of a wall-painting that they settled down to crack the code contained therein and at last discovered the Minoan Calender.  It's pretty impressive how well concealed it is and how much analysis and diagramming must be done to pry that secret out of ancient dead hands.  So I printed out a copy of their work and got in my time machine and went back to Knossos when they were just finishing up the painting and showed it to them and they were like this:

I do not mean any disrespect toward Drs. Dempsey and Herberger or their work. But just look at the calendar on your own wall for a second and THINK ABOUT IT. They are what I have come to call Overanalysts, and I have been enjoying the work of Overanalysts for many years. There is a guy who carefully measured and diagrammed all the standing stone rings and lines he could find in Celtic Britain and Europe, and found that they were meticulously laid out in a highly complicated secret geometry.  There is an offshoot of the Holy Blood Holy Grail myth which shows that the seemingly decorative carvings in an obscure chapel in Britain conceal secret knowledge encoded in waveforms revealed by vibrations in metal plates of specific size and thickness - I swear this is true, they really did seem to find this evidence.  The interior structures of The Great Pyramid were found to precisely diagram the prophecies of the biblical Book of Revelations, up to World War One or so, and then it all had to be revised or forgotten.  Another scholar found that the temple sculptures of  the Roman Mithraic cult symbolize the interrelations between the constellations of the stellar sphere as viewed from the outside.

It's true that there are artists and craftsmen who are initiates into Ancient Brotherhoods and devote their skills to encoding the Secret Knowledge in complex diagrams, and they do Great Work.  Those people are very few and rare.  The work of Overanalysts starts at the opposite end of that process, with a picture or a series of carvings; it measures and compares, analyzes and ponders with a dozen books on the table, astrological and qabalistic diagrams on the wall and a three foot tall brass orrery showing the positions of all the planets except Pluto at any point in time.  If they didn't find a remarkable hidden secret with all their dedication and resources that would be a real shame and they would have wasted years of work. The thing is, these people are looking at art through the eyes of science, informed by scholarship and research.  They are not thinking with an artist's mind.  I have an artist's mind, and I also know quite a bit about science, scholarship and research, and human nature to boot.  That is why I am uniquely able to reveal to you History's Greatest Secret, regarding the encoded mysteries concealed in the works of craftsmen throughout history.

SOMETIMES WE JUST EYEBALL IT.

Sometimes we just start at one end and go to the other end and when we get there we stop.  If it looks okay then we do another part.  We stick the bull in the middle and arrange the two figures so the composition is balanced and try to get it done before time to knock off work and go home.  Sometimes we just stand the stones up in what looks like a pretty good circle or a fairly straight line and not worry too much about it.  We  carve what looks like a pretty even pattern and figure nobody is really going to be looking too closely.  We put three leaves on one side of a plant and five leaves on the other side because it looks better that way, not because there is a secret message we want to convey.  

So, I congratulate the Overanalysts of the world on their discoveries, and I like to think of the craftsmen and laborers who did the work, and what their ideas and lives and concerns were, and it is fun to think about.

Books - The Overton Window "by" Glenn Beck

The Overton Window - Glenn Beck  I had seen this at the library a few weeks ago and had been thinking of it ever since.  Kook novels are a field of special interest for me because they contain ideas which I am unlikely to encounter anywhere else, usually packed in an especially mediocre form of utopian/dystopian fantasy.  I was in the mood for something easy to digest and I knew this couldn't have been written by Beck himself (if it had, it probably would have been 600 pages), so it would be a standard ghost-written page-turner which hit all the notes at the right time.  When a kook novel is written by the kook him/herself it can be challenging, if not impossible, to read and I regret that among the many on the shelves here at the Kooks Museum I have only read most of them.  Any book I can rip through in four hours is a well-crafted piece of formula fiction, and that's what this is.  Steeped in kook lore as I am, I got all the Global Political Conspiracy references and was pleased to be introduced to some pretty interesting social engineering concepts, including the eponymous Window - ideas acceptable to the public are within this so-called window, and to change what is accepted one introduces extreme and unacceptable ideas, which automatically widens the window making less extreme ideas palatable.  This is similar to less well-defined ideas of my own, that the existence of an obviously insane extremism makes it easier to introduce unusual or uncommon ideas which seem more reasonable by comparison.  This is a classic and very useful fallacy of argument which actually operates subliminally to alter people's ideas without their knowing it. The irony of Beck's use of the Overton Widow concept, to me, is that he doesn't appear to realize that he has been used for exactly that purpose - as a public loony introducing crank extremist theories in order to make a less radical deliberate thought control agenda more palatable.  After finishing The Overton Window I opened another book I got at the same time, the first volume of  Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I knew by the time I got to the second paragraph that I held in my hands a work of genius.  The sad thing is, I am not sure I will be able to read it.