Topless Mona Lisa
Friday, December 13th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
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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