I read a while back, that a computer analysis showed the facial structure (of the image in the famous painting) matched leonardo’s facial features. is this true? If true, why would he do this? was he poking fun at the man who commissioned the portrait? Also, how would he have done this-would he have used the camera obscura to trace his facil features onto the canvas, then add the woman’s face? It is an interesting theory, but i don’t understand what DaVinci would have gotten from this-except for the (possible) satisfaction of playing a joke 9which only he could understand)! :eek:
Generally you are influenced by the face you see the most of.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think my own face is the face I see the most of. I don’t know if the times would have made that more or less likely for DaVinci.
BTW, this is generally the point at which a whole bunch of people jump in and say, “His name was Leonardo, not ‘da Vinci’. ‘Da Vinci’ simply means ‘from Vinci’ in Italian.”
I know that such nitpickiness tends to get some people upset, and for that, I apologize… but after all, fighting ignorance is what we’re all about, right?
You can stop right there. I doubt if anyone other than the guy who did the study believes it is true.
To compare Leonardo’s facial features with those of the Mona Lisa, we’d first have to know what Leonardo looked like. To my knowledge, we don’t. There is a drawing of a bald, elderly bearded gentleman in one of the folios, which many believe may have been a self-portrait sketch, but I don’t think there’s actually any hard evidence for this. I suspect that any apparent correlation between the sketch and the Mona Lisa is a coincidence resulting from the identical 3/4 view pose… or possibly Leonardo had some sort of formula for arranging facial features to produce a maximally harmonious idealized portrait.
I’m not a painter and I don’t travel in art circles, but I think it’s a fairly popular theory.
Which, IMO, would be entirely consistent with Leonardo’s penchant for marrying art with his dabblings into science and math.
Really? What art historians believe this? Lillian Schwartz, who came up with the theory, is not herself an art historian and I don’t know of any who have bought into her theory. (They say it merely proves that Leonardo painted faces in a consistent manner.) It may be popular on the internet, but in the world of art? I flatly don’t believe it and I need lots of evidence.
Probably none. I said it’s popular, not credible.
This seems like the most likely answer to me. If someone had no idea what I looked like and went through my portfolio to compare a picture they thought was a self-portrait with another drawing, they’d find similar features between them simply because my way of drawing faces is fairly consistent. Whether I’m drawing my face or someone else’s, I’m still using the same methods. I’m still relating the features to each other in a similar manner, still preferring certain shapes and angles over others. I’m mostly just a doodler and hardly some renaissance master, but most painters seem to end up with the same kind of similarity between their portraits.
Looking at other portraits of women’s faces that Leonardo did, I can see some definite similarities between those faces and the Mona Lisa. When I compare those to the supposed self-portrait there is no outstanding resemblance between that face and the Mona Lisa that outweighs the similarities between the Mona Lisa and the other paintings.
It doesn’t seem at all implausible to me. I do some woodcarving, and I measure proportions for all of the human figures I do off of myself. That is to say, I’ll measure things like the distance from my shoulder to my elbow, and from my elbow to my wrist, and carve the figures so that those ratios are all the same. I do this even for the female ones, since males and females have mostly the same proportions of bone lengths. I don’t do facial features this way, but that’s just because the figures I carve are too small for any significant facial detail. It doesn’t mean they’re meant to be self-portraits, though, just that the human body I have easiest access to measure is my own.
I’m an art historian. It’s bullshit. And we do have a pretty good idea of what the guy looked like (it’s generally accepted that Plato in the Raff Sanzio’s School of Athens, for instance, is painted with his features (Raff knew him), and there is at least one well known self portrait that’s pretty well accepted). Why can’t there have been a woman that looked more or less like that? Why so mysterious? It’s a fairly popular theory in the same way that the theory that John’s a girl is popular, or that the Arcadian Shepherds indicate the location of the Holy Grail, or that every artist under the sun has been tracing from camera obscuras since 400 AD. It’s not a theory that art historians buy. And of course he had formulas for proportions of facial features. http://www2.uiah.fi/projects/metodi/leonardo.gif or http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/GLOART/FAR31773.jpg for example.
Haha I love the SDMB! “I’m an art historian”!!
It’s like on Good Eats when Alton is all “I wish we had a nutritional anthropologist…” and someone pops up and says “I’m a nutritional anthropologist!”
Rock on with your bad self, capybara 
The theory can’t be proved one way or the other, which is good for its longevity (it can be recycled ad nauseam without ever being resolved) but not good for any other reason. Is it possible? Yes. Is it plausible? Depends on your point of view and interpretation - in other words, it’s a subjective call. The consensus currently doesn’t support the theory, but as all wise Dopers know the consensus can be wrong. Build any argument you like on the ‘resemblance’ between image X and image Y and you’ve got yourself a theory that can run and run forever - there will always be someone, someone who agrees with your subjective interpretation. If the majority disagree… well, that just gives you a chance to feel victimised, oppressed by the closed-minded slaves of the Establishment View etc etc. So it goes.
Jumping around when you have a stick up your arse probably isn’t a great idea. I think it’s so close to being a valid surname that the distinction is worthless. After all, that’s how surnames originated - If he’d been identified as living next to a river, we might have been calling him ‘Del Fiume’ - if his father’s name had been Vincent, we might have been calling him ‘Di Vincento’ - If he came from a family of metalworkers, and had lived in England, we might be calling him ‘Smith’. What’s the difference anyway?
But the one person who would have known, who was bound to get the joke, was his favourite pupil, Gian Giacomo Caprotti di Oreno a.k.a. ‘Salai’ or ‘Salaino’. And, as has been known only since 1991, when he died in 1524 Salai left a painting that was then described as ‘la Jocondo’.
Whether this was the actual painting now in the Louvre doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that most Leonardo experts now agree that this is good, somewhat unexpected evidence to support Vasari’s claim that Leonardo painted a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. If, as thus seems likely, Salai believed that the painting showed not just a woman, but a very specific, identifiable woman (who it is now also known was then still alive), the chances are that it does indeed show her.
Schwartz didn’t do what little credibility she had much good by subsequently claiming that the Droeshout frontispiece of Shakespeare in the First Folio actually shows Elizabeth I. This is a case of how, instead of confirming the validity of a research method, a second, equally improbable result can serve as an indication that the method is invalid.
Interesting on the Shakespeare “discovery”, APB. I hope that next Hockney and his pal “prove” that Villard de Honnecourtused a camera obscura.
eta: Yay! I added a link in vb without using the buttons!
First of all, I think that remark was uncalled for.
Second, I have yet to find a single biographer or art historian who says that “Da Vinci” is a valid surname for the great master, Leonardo.
“So what?” someone might say. Well, it seems to me that on a forum that’s dedicated to fighting ignorance, such attention to detail is warranted. The experts certainly don’t seem to think that its an invalid distinction.
I think it’s a tantalizing theory, primarily because there is so much gray area involved. Yes, Leonardo could have used his own features as a mathematical ideal for constructing all other portraits, male and female, and yes, he could have done this from a detatched viewpoint of disinterested scientific appreciation of the geometry of aesthetics. It would be equally valid to suggest that he did this because he wanted to insert himself into all his paintings, or because he felt an artist’s work should reflect its creator, or because he liked his women to have faces like his own, or because he didn’t care for the looks of women, or because he felt that men were the “norm” and the male structure should be applied to every figure. For all we know, Leonardo may even have been transgendered and his portraits of women were just wishful thinking.
But my point is not to adhere to any one brand of rigid interpretation, it is to demonstrate how futile it is to guess at the motives and intent of a man dead for five centuries. Leonardo’s mystique has persisted for half a millenium because of this mysterious allure, and not in spite of it.