Did all the women in that time period and location have no eyebrows? Or was it painted that way to give a lack of emotion? After looking around the net it seems there are mixed answers. Do women in art from that same decade also have their eyebrows missing? Answering that might answer my first question, but I’m not well educated in the art field so I’m having a hard time finding the answer myself. As always, thanks in advance.
It was Renaissance fashion statement.
I’m trying to find a decent cite for it, but it’s my understanding that Florentine ladies of that era would shave their eyebrows, and an inch or so off their hairlines, to give their foreheads a high-browed, intellectual look.
Because Da Vinci didn’t paint any eyebrows on that picture.
Yeah, fashion. They would actually pluck their hairlines back as well. There might be some difference between what it actually looked like and how it was idealised in pictures, of course. Raphael’s portraits froma couple of years later are similar, from a cursory look.
Here’s a selection of Leonardos, and you’ll note that they all have very little/no eyebrow hair:
(Web Gallery of Art)
Perhaps she kept pulling them out & they didn’t grow back?
another thought crossed my mind this morning… yes two in on morning!
Anyway, given Leornardo’s fame at never finishing anything he started its possible that Mona just isn’t finished being painted…
This fashion seems to have peaked around the turn of the sixteenth century. You can see it as early as the 1460s (in, say, Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonnas).
The complete absence of eyebrows is a bit unusual, though. Raphael’s portrait of Maddalena Doni, which was directly modelled after the Mona Lisa, has very thin eyebrows, but some hair nevertheless. It’s interesting to see in Raphael’s later portraits, the female sitters have fuller eyebrows. I suppose the thin eyebrow thing + the high forehead fashion has passed by the 1510s. Or the fashion just never took hold in Rome, where Raphael’s late works were all painted.
I have seen the absence of eyebrows in ML attributed to Leonardo’s (in)famous penchant for procrastination. But after looking more closely at his other portraits, I have to admit many of Leonardo’s other women also lack eyebrows. So, unless eyebrows were the last thing Leonardo painted in his portraits, I’d have to chalk this one up to a Leonardo idiosyncracy based upon a real fashion trend (the Florentine fashion for thinner eyebrows, but pushed to an extreme by Leo).
Three reasons:
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DaVinci pulled them out, to make brushes.
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She was a drag queen, and running late.
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She also doesn’t have feet.
hijack/
Skopo: inquired in another thread but you didn’t return-- what’s your specialization, if I may be so bold?
/hijack
I think Panache has the winning answer.
I like this best:
" This same physician mentions that Mona Lisa must have suffered from a dermic affectation called schlerodermia that consists in a hardening of the epidermis. He also analyzes the possibility that she might have been affected by an alopecia (baldness) that affected her eye brows and lashes and that her enigmatic smile might have been caused by a facial paralisis."
http://www.artnexus.com/servlet/releaseDocument?document=8938
The mona lisa was likely unfinished. IIRC it was probably commissioned by a noble and is a portrait of a mistress, most likely it wasn’t paid for or the comission got cancelled and that’s why it still exists (it was put in storage or something rather than being hung on a wall of a manor house that could be sieged).
The eyebrow thing, fashion statement.