Mona Lisa — Part 2

The Mona Lisa used to be a painting. Not any more. Now it’s a meme. Especially in the current climate of cellphones and online culture, the original has lost all relevance, and has been replaced by hundreds of refracted reflections. 

For that matter, “meme” isn’t what it was, either. Now, a meme is pretty much anything that someone uploads — a picture with a clever caption; a funny picture; a political observation. If it gets noticed and reposted, either in its original form, or altered by the observer, it has become a meme. A meme is a cat hanging on to a clothesline or a quote from Mark Twain that he never actually said. 

But that is not what I’m talking about here. A meme, as I’m using it, is its older meaning: a familiar image, saying, bit of music, or bit of art that has become so well known as to be instantly identifiable that it becomes a shorthand for whatever you wish it to be. The original needn’t be known for the meme to be understood. I’m sure there are people who believe the image of McCaulay Culkin holding the sides of his face in Home Alone is the original, not recognizing the reference to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The original painting has receded and the pose itself is the referent. 

Many of the most famous pieces of art have become memes: Grant Wood’s American Gothic; the Venus de Milo; Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. You don’t need to explain the joke when you use them. If I made a parody of, say, Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, with Rupert Murdoch’s face replacing Bertin’s, I’m pretty sure I’d have to explain what I meant. But Liberty on the Barricades needs no such support. We know.

 It isn’t just pictures that become memes. One of the oldest, going back to the Roman era, was a glyph sometimes called the Sator Square, an arrangement of letters (words) that reads the same top to bottom and side to side and even backwards. It has been found from ancient times into the Middle Ages. Its exact meaning and purpose are not clear. It sort of translates as “Farmer Arepo works with wheels.” Sort of. And during World War II, the little cartoon, “Kilroy was here” showed up all over the place. Memes come in all sorts of forms. 

Literature can do it, too. You don’t have to know any Shakespeare at all to recognize “To be, or not to be.” It’s there in the atmosphere. Not that we need to know much, or even know correctly. 

 

Getting it wrong is hardly a hindrance. How many people hear, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” and assume Juliet can’t find her beau? How many cartoons, comedy skits, movie bits are built from that misunderstanding? Where did Romeo go? “Wherefore” is simply too antique a term to be easily understood. And the following “Rose by any other name” is the sequent meme. 

Even music can do this. “Da-da-da-DUMM” is known to those who have never, ever heard a symphony. It is a meme. The rest of Beethoven’s symphony might as well disappear. 

And so it is with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. It hardly matters who Lisa was, when it was painted, nor all that technical hoo-hah about the sfumato technique. The lady has transmigrated everywhere, known to everyone, pretty much around the world. Use her for whatever you wish. You can even mix memes.

 

In spending weeks immersed in the Mona Lisa, gathering what I needed for my previous blog entry on the painting, I found hundreds of memed parodies. Some too good to waste. And so, I wanted to post a followup with some of my favorite Mona Lisa knock-offs. (I just counted up the images I have collected, more than I could ever use, and discovered 443 jpegs. I get exhausted just thinking about it.)

The Mona Lisa is the subject of endless cartoons. Some make jokes about the famous smile

 others to Leonardo himself… 

The Mona Lisa can just be a stand-in for important art…

The New Yorker puts them on its cover…

In fact, lots of magazines have slapped our lady on their fronts.

Or made fun of her…

And she shows up on some magazines you might not expect…

That’s just a sampling. I got lots more, but we need to move on. Celebrities get the Mona Lisa treatment quite often.

Whoopie Goldberg, Marilyn Monroe, Taylor Swift

And that last one has had the treatment over and over. Whoda thunkit? 

And you don’t have to be female…

Vin Diesel, Albert Einstein, Bill Murray

You can be a cartoon character…

 

Or a Disney character. They all run the the meme grinder…

And even more. Anyone remember Daria? 

I found dozens of anime Mona Lisas…

Muppet Giocandas… 

There are Mona Lisas with animals…

And with cats…

And Mona Lisas as animals…

And as cats… 

She shows up frequently as graffiti…

And as Pop Art. How could she not?

Quite serious artists have used our lady as a model. The joke Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp, dating from 1919, gives her a mustache and the letters “LHOOQ,” which, pronounced in French sound the same as “Elle a chaud au cul,” or roughly, “She has a hot ass.” 

By Robert Henri, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernando Botero

She comes in minimalist form, still easily identifiable…

And shows up on stamps, the side of a barn, and, of course, a port-a-potty…

And we’re just getting started with goofy. How about a balloon Mona Lisa, or reproduced on an Etch-a-Sketch or made out of Legos…

And if that isn’t enough, what about a Mona Lisa made from bacon; or a Mona Lisa Pizza; or one made from lentils…

Still further, one made from jelly beans. Or a pair of them in peanut butter and jelly. 

Poet William Blake once wrote, “You never know what is enough until you know what is too much,” and you may very well feel we’ve long gone on too long with this. I get it. But even with all the images I’ve included, I have at least a hundred more that I’ve got left over, including Mona Lisa on coins…

And, suitable for a finale, a big pile of bones…

Originally, I planned to write a single blog entry about the Mona Lisa, but soon came to realize that if I were going to give any background information about the painting to explain all the memified hoopla, it would have to stretch into two halves. I’ve been going through and editing hundreds of images, and researching information about Leonardo and his art. I think I’m ready to give it a rest now for a while. I’m sure you are, too. 

Click on any image to enlarge