Topless Mona Lisa
About twenty years ago, the popular press lit up with stories about a 1515 “topless Mona Lisa“, said to be by a student of Leonardo da Vinci named Andrea Salai, patterned after a now-lost nude Mona Lisa that da Vinci himself supposedly painted. They called Salai’s painting “the topless Gioconda” — that being the name of the “prim and proper Florentine housewife” who modeled for da Vinci’s famous painting.
The popular press being prudish, as it tended to be at the turn of the 21st century, those stories don’t have any images of Salai’s topless Mona Lisa. I had to go digging to find it, but digging is good. This much more recent Medium post had the image, along with an explanation of why all the press excitement is sort of bullshit. It turns out that there’s a whole genre of erotic Mona Lisa knockoff paintings, in which Salai’s exemplar is far from the best. The genre is termed “Monna Vanna” after a character in Dante Alighieri’s love poem La Vita Nuova. This anonymous 16th-century Monna Vana from the Hermitage in Russia is far better:
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The positioning of their breast looks wrong to me. Like maybe the model wasn’t actually topless so the artist had to paint them from his imagination. Or maybe it’s just me
While I wouldn’t want to suggest that Top Freedom has anything to do with porn, I am still reminded that Rule 34 has no exceptions and never has had any.
From the link, in re the first painting displayed here: “What’s more, the muscular left arm, the thick neck, and the hint of an Adam’s apple in this drawing all suggest that the model was a man, rather than a woman, and that the breasts were added later.”
“Well, you have to admit, she does look rather mannish”
“Austin, that’s my Mother!”