Unfinished

Sometimes, we look at a masterpiece and think that the artist must have spent hours creating such a piece. That is probably true, but sometimes, what we consider a masterpiece was something the artist didn’t really like, and maybe struggled with. In fact, the world’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, was never finished. That surprised me…until i really looked at the painting.

The fact is that da Vinci was almost as famous for not finishing his work, as he was for the Mona Lisa itself. Maybe it’s just one of the idiosyncrasies of artists, or maybe it’s just this artist. I rather think it might be just this artist, but then again, artists are trying to create a picture of what they see in their minds, and if it doesn’t perfectly translate to the canvas, I suppose they might try to fix it.

For da Vinci, the problem was in Mona Lisa’s eyebrows and eyelashes, causing him to leave subtle details that are open to interpretation. The Mona Lisa, however, has puzzled art historians for centuries. Da Vinci was a known perfectionist, so I suppose that might have been why some of his paintings were never finished. He just never felt like they were “perfect” and so da Vinci often left projects unfinished, working on the painting sporadically over four years and abandoning it multiple times. When experts examined his work using X-ray scans, they could see that he originally painted eyebrows and eyelashes on Mona Lisa, but later he removed them, perhaps to give the portrait a more ethereal, otherworldly look…hard to say. One school of thought is that Mona Lisa’s unfinished touches reflect Renaissance beauty trends, when aristocratic women plucked their eyebrows and hairlines to create higher foreheads. Da Vinci’s quest for anatomical perfection drove him to constantly revise the work, layering transparent glazes to achieve the soft, mysterious sfumato effect (a technique of allowing tones and colors to shade gradually into one another, producing softened outlines or hazy forms) that we admire today. The missing eyebrows continue to inspire theories about his intentions and artistic vision. Obviously, I’m no artist, but while the Mona Lisa is interesting and extremely valuable, it would never be my taste.