Da Vinci visited morgue to perfect Mona Lisa smile
New Delhi: While perfecting Mona Lisa’s smile, Leonardo da Vinci spent his nights in the depths of a hospital’s morgue, peeling the skin off cadavers and studying the muscles and nerves underneath, says a new book.
Da Vinci became fascinated about how a smile begins to form, and he analysed every possible movement of each part of the face to determine the origin of every nerve that controls each facial muscle, Walter Isaacson writes in Leonardo da Vinci: A Biography.
Isaacson, a university professor of History at Tulane who has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine, weaves a narrative that connects da Vinci’s art to his science. “At the time when he was perfecting Lisa’s smile, Leonardo was spending his nights in the depths of the morgue under the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova (near Florence studio), peeling the skin off cadavers and exposing the muscles and nerves underneath,” the book, published by Simon & Schuster, says.
Da Vinci was especially interested in knowing which of these nerves were related to the brain and how these would help in painting Mona Lisa’s smile. There is a mystery to the smile, Isaacson says.
“As we stare, it flickers. What is she thinking? Our eyes move a bit, and her smile seems to change. The mystery compounds. We look away, and the smile lingers in our minds, as it does in the collective mind of humanity. Never in a painting have motion and emotion, the paired touchstones of Leonardo’s art, been so intertwined,” he writes.