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PECULIARITY OF MONALISA?
There is a pictured face, with shadows cunningly arranged to represent slight peculiarities in the shape and tension of the features. Their suggestive power is due in part to brushwork of exquisite subtlety, that could set down unerringly the minutest intended gradations of light and shadow. (Copyists find them almost impossible to reproduce, and the slightest change makes the whole face a caricature.) In addition, that skill was guided by profound knowledge of facial expressions and what they signify, based at once on a sensitive feeling for the nuances of human personality and on keen observation of their slight, momentary signs. In his Last Supper at Milan, Leonardo constructed a whole drama of contrasting personalities, by means of expressive faces and gestures. Here in the Mona Lisa, the peculiarities of feature which he has assembled are more or less like some which we have seen elsewhere รข?? otherwise they would have no meaning to us but we have never seen them in this exact combination. It is not an ordinary combination; it suggests no familiar, simple emotion, as the faces of Fra Angelico do, but rather several at once, that do not commonly go together. It suggests them all rather indefinitely, as in a face where inward feeling is half concealed by sophisticated reserve, or where several half-realized thoughts and fancies together share the mind, and hold it in vague musing contemplation.


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