I have a Mona Lisa on my fridge. Not the Mona Lisa, just a Mona Lisa. This one is free from the smokey yellow varnish of the one in the Louvre, and so its colours shine. The sky behind the sitter is very blue, her face is very pale, and her sleeves are a sort of bright terracotta.
Those sleeves are a bit of a shock. The whole thing is a shock – even if you know it’s coming. I first encountered this Mona Lisa downstairs at the Prado in Madrid a few years back, which is where I also picked up my fridge magnet. (I also have Las Meninas and a really brilliant El Greco – all told it’s quite a fridge coming together.) I knew she was there – that is, I knew the Prado had its own Mona Lisa – but when I turned the corner and there she was, I froze all the same. Everybody passing by seemed to freeze. You, here? A reminder, if any were necessary, that there is more than one Mona Lisa. This one is widely understood to be a copy from Leonardo’s workshop. No mystery here. But there are other Mona Lisas beyond the Prado’s, too. And from there it gets complicated.
How complicated? I am not going to try and untangle it all here. This mystery – it is known as the Two-Mona Lisa Theory, and it’s been knocking around for centuries – is one of the great unsolvable questions of art. It’s muddled all the more, a riot of superpositions, because so many people think they have solved it in their own ways, and so many more think there is no mystery in the first place and we’re all just picking away at nothing. Today I’m just going to tell you about yet another Mona Lisa, and yet another another Mona Lisa. This last one was offered to me for sale a week back, in Animal Crossing.
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