Various, perhaps infinite, are the wielded theories that try, vainly in its great majority, to explain the mysterious and almost burlesque smile of the eternal woman (1), who was immortalized through that ethereal and inscrutable work of art fixed on the painter’s canvas by the generous hands (1.1) of the great Leonardo da Vinci (Bob for his few friends, and Richard for his many enemies).
During the sixth century of our Lord, approximately one thousand years before the Gioconda was painted and eleven centuries after a slave stepped on a pointy stone in the Negev desert, the Frail Giacomo Capelettini thought something like the following, in his wintry refuge located in Varese:
“It is quite evident to the senses that the Mona Lisa, as she shall be doomed to be known throughout the probable futures to come – and I also could add that she shall be quite famously admired during the sixteenth century – is going to effectively pose with a smile upon her face because she will be aware of the diabolical and temptress nature of that lip and facial posture which surely shall be destined to enhance and provoke endless and futile debates about the previously mentioned gesture; not only that I am able to foresee, but also that the painting will inspire some dreadful books, horrendous feature films – a concept that my present readers ignore… hence these following lines are just for them: it is a sort of registered theatre on a much larger scale with many changes of scenery – and a paragraph that reads just like the very one that you’ve just finished processing through your very own eyes”.
The Lutheran Pastor Manfred von Wernitz, travelling in the fifth coach of a rusty train that used to unite Freiburg and Odessa, during a cold spring morning of the year 1910, replied to Capelettini’s accusations in his personal diary:
“Futile debate? Fallacious. Endless? Wrong. I’m surprised that Giacomo, in his clairvoyant sapience, was unable to see how inaccurate and imbecile his comment is and will surely be in the probable future. Why wasn’t he capable of foreseeing my reply? What if I finish this diatribe right now and prove him wrong? How could he not foretell that strange and bizarre habit of the Florentine polymath, who used to paint all of his master works dressed as Pinocchio, this being the fundamental cause of the shy but expressive smile of the posing woman?”
The natural question arises:
How could Leonardo dress up like Pinocchio, if the character had not been yet invented? We tried to find an answer to this enigma in the previously quoted personal diary which used to belong to Manfred von Wernitz, but the solution is yet to be found. Such a lack of certainty might be due to the impossibility of finding the proper diary, but researchers are not quite convinced about the odds of getting a verbatim quote when the very source is absent: now, they are trying to reproduce the lost diary that once could have belonged to Manfred von Wernitz through lucid dreaming techniques; other less orthodox measures such as speculatory re-writing of his diary by forcing a man to live, whereas possible, the same life experienced by the Lutheran pastor, shall be the last resort; before tackling such a challenging enterprise, the minds beyond the shadows are considering paying a top novelist in order to write an extremely detailed biography of von Wernitz, with the intention of recuperating the still lost diary from it.
Now, returning to the original question:
How could Leonardo dress up like Pinocchio, if the character had not been yet invented? Given Leonardo’s genius and his special connection with the Divine Realm, clairvoyance shan’t be ruled out, nor shall the mere possibility of a concealed mystical message or metaphor, given the well known interest for the occult and the transcendence that our Genie had. Through his very painting and dressing preferences, he could have been passing on a message destined to future generations: man is not complete, man is a puppet, a marionette exposed to the unpredictable caprices of his unstable, ever-changing, undivided and raw nature, a machine that needs to acquire that which is needed in order to become worthy of the name man; the smile of the Mona Lisa implies surreptitiously that he, Bob, had found it already.
In the year 1897, Billy the Kid’s brother, Radamel García Perdoso, also showed not only a peculiar interest for such a matter, but some remarkable theories as well. Thus he wrote in his Sunday column for the Saturday edition of the West Post:
“The Mona Lisa smiles because she simply was a renowned legume lover, feeling a special inclination of appetite toward beans; a culinary preference that proved to be deadly not only for those noses who happened to be present in her vicinity once the gaseous transmutation had taken place, but also for her underwear. Had she been an inhabitant of the Olympus, she would have probably been known as the Aeolus Destructus; such were the amounts of winds she broke during her entire life. Please do note that her ‘innocent’ smile hides an involuntary escape of flatulent gas through her posterior bottom. If my theory were accurate, we would have to congratulate Leonardo’s masterful craft who skilfully concealed the lateral inclination of the posing model; though a hint of the gassy devilry can be found in the painting by the cunning observer: the flawless use of light and shades, and some mysterious signs in the background suggest that the aroma of the flatulence must have been quite exquisite, worthy of such a dame”. (2)
Eddie Molineaux, lawyer, partner and founder of the famous North American firm Molineaux, Pester, Rubicam, Young, Peterson, Masterson, Donald, Pluto, Goofy, Trump, Gouzález, da Silva, Schustermann, Kaleidoscope, Young Jr., Pérez, Gómez, Peterson III, Trump Jr. Jr. and Art Vandeley, hid his suggestions about the Mona Lisa affair inside a file which tiresomely described an obscure litigation – which is exceedingly unimportant for our task – that he was conducting:
“I have devoted years and years to the question of the mysterious smile. I believe to understand, thanks to the hints and thoughts of all the great predecessors I’ve had in this arty matter, that the Mona Lisa and Leonardo used to enjoy, and suffer, fierce joke matches or jokes-off, as Billy Zane would have put it if he had been a contemporary of those two humour masters; or if he ever became interested in such a phenomenal mystery. Those joke duels eventually became salivary battles that would inevitably end with the coronation of a winner at the end of the working day (2.1). Whilst Leonardo was recreating (because all the things of this world are merely a reflection of the ulterior reality) his masterpiece, racism, homophobia, and the dirtiest of words resounded in his private study. The mysterious and immortal grin of the Mona happened because at that precise moment, the Master Leonardo, as ablazed as a monkey that becomes president of Ecuador (for those distracted ones, because of the bananas), shouted the end of an unreproducible joke full of racism and hatred (3); but fatally for Bob, the posing model remembered, all of a sudden, a great reply for the pleasantry that was about to to meet its laughless demise (5).”
Last but not least, the wealthy industrialist, megalomaniac and philanthropist Ronald Pennypacker, born in Sydney weighing three kilos and six hundred grams, of natural childbirth and measuring sixty nine centimetres, comments in his unauthorized autobiography:
“As an important businessman, genius and visionary, I can assure you all that the Mona Lisa, rascal as few and gaseous as none, is somehow still associated with the bestselling author of The da Vinci Code. How could such a thing be possible? Apparently, at some point of the sixteenth century, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather of the today not so popular Dan Brown, Mr Daniel Damon Rupert Very Brown, could have had negotiated both with the great Leonardo himself and the posing Mona Lisa, some certain perverted terms and conditions that would eventually lead to the creation of an artificial and fraudulent mysterious halo around a simple yet virtuous portrait, with the sole objective of setting the appropriate circumstances that would ultimately help to establish a myth based on fictional clues that were to be placed throughout the course of history with the inestimable help of second class literary critics (are there any first class ones?), in order to release, at the maximum peak of hysteria around conspiracy theories, a novel meant to defame my beloved Catholic Church and my humble and admired colleagues of the great Opus Dei.
“At the time of such a shameful arrangement, it was taken for granted that the novel would ultimately prove to be a huge economic success. Among other ignored clauses, the secret tripartite pact contemplated an equal profit sharing of 33% per capita of the royalties derived from Dan Brown’s books, also from feature films inspired on any of his fictions, and from some obscure merchandising that is surely being crafted at this very moment on a factory ship near the Netherlands Antilles; the remaining 1% was left to be decided by a coin toss, performed every three years by a man in his late thirties who would, in the first place, prove to have no blood bonds with any of the members of the sinister Trinitarian pact. Dan Brown might just be the visible part of a dreadful covenant that continues to exist through space and time: a protocol that ought to be revealed and exposed for the sake of humankind and the Holy Catholic Church.
“There might be two other unknown actors who are enjoying the massive profits of such a negligible agreement; one could be the suspected heir and only living descendant of the great Leonardo. Pinocchio, whose father Geppetto could have been the second adoptive son of the third unrecognised offspring whose origin could have been found in one of the testicles of the Renaissance master, is Richard’s true great grandson (5bis). The reader might be surprised to learn about the bizarre fondness that Leonardo felt for all types of woods (6). Yet, focusing our attention on the Mona Lisa’s heirs, I’m still shocked to discover that the only inheritor of a huge fortune for centuries to come, and I do have irrefutable proofs for this, is… aaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
This is how Pennypackers’s unauthorized autobiography ends. Soon after his accounts had seen the editorial light, he was found dead, with a quill pen buried deep inside his left scapula, mysteriously locked up inside a mommy’s coffin exhibited at the Louvre.
OM
(1) Peet van Weetbroeck, art historian for the University of Thuringia, suggests that the Mona Lisa could be Leonardo in costume femminile. Volume fourth of his Encyclopaedia of Art and Good Taste.
(1.1) Thousands of letters have reached our publisher’s office due to the unscientific nature of such a claim. The entire scientific community strongly alleges that it cannot be asserted whether Leonardo painted the masterwork with his hands, given the following possibilities:
- Feet painted
- Could have hired a ghost painter who followed his indications
- Elbow painted
- Could have stolen the piece and killed the original artist
- Wrists painted
- Another probable Leonardo da Vinci could have been the author
- Buttocks painted
And due to the lack of space and also for practical reasons, we will stop quoting the surprising limited scope of possibilities sent by the scientific community, though they clearly claim in the missive an infinite realm of painting possibilities. They failed to realize that with limited elements, no infinite can be reached.
(2) The Japanese engineer Akira Matsubara humbly murmurs after his lectures about Conceptual Art and Megalomaniac Constructions at the University of East Sussex, that: “When observing with the utmost attention, it is possible to perceive a tiny inclination of 0.78° towards the left side of the posing model… which indeed is the minimal inclinatory degree believed to make the gassy internal emission possible, whilst providing a natural damper method through the minimal aperture of the exiting orifice”.
(2.1) Pulling the smile aside, the painting is famous also because of the sfumato technique, regrettably called smoke by the beasts that ignore the lingua del Dante. Nobody knows for certain how the Florentine master discovered or created this hallmark of Renaissance painting, but we have found a feasible explanation in the fungi infested pages of an obscure treaty about humour and art. The title of the opus is Spitting Genius, written by Gianluca Vasari, who was an (in) famous Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect who is not only renowned for having written some probable biographies wherein he conjures the different life paths had Leonardo da Vinci not chosen the artistic-invention way (Leo the cricketer, Leo the chess master, Leo the football goalkeeper, Leo the wooden transvestite doll, Leo the shy public worker), but also famous for the biographies he wrote about the greatest artists of the Renaissance period; yet, he might be better known for being a critic who has never ever seen La Gioconda personally, and who also has not yet done so because he is indeed terrified of any mechanical means of transport (he lives on some island of Fiji, and though he once attempted to swim all the way up to Europe, he failed on such occasion), and also for suggesting in his quoted book a theory that might shake the very foundations of art-history writing. He theorizes that the sfumato effect was a casual consequence of the amount of saliva that Leonardo spat over the painting, both when telling his jokes and listening to those told by the Mona Lisa. In the form of corollary, and to boast of his real scientific approach, he mentions that the famous Leonardo’s smoke could have occurred when the master, usually beaten by the quick-witted posing model, spat over the painted face as a way of discharging his joking frustration; yet, proving to be a real gentleman, he only did so once the Mona Lisa had left his studio.
(3) Leonardo himself claimed to have sketched a book about the nature of humour and the moral impossibility to censor any type of pleasant manifestation. He wrote down in his La Gioconda Diaries: Today, Tuesday, I told a great joke about why black people can’t eat chocolate, and the Mona did not laugh at all. I’m thinking of taking my life away from me, for ever. (4)
(4) The end of the joke proved a real puzzle for nutritionists and health workers around the world, and still is: they can’t eat chocolate because they always end up biting their own fingers. So far, several inconclusive tests have been carried out, though there’s a tendency that shows that all one handed African American, African Asian, African African, African European, African Oceanic and African Martians, seem to find in chocolate their very own culinary heaven. Such a coincidence in tasting shows, on one part, that like really attracts like. Some selected specimens where chosen in order to carry out further research. In the present day, two hundred African-X children belonging to both genders are being obliged to eat chocolate from their own bare hands: results are expected during the next fiscal year. If this theory were to be true, hence a scientific matter, the same would happen with non African-X specimens from around the world (aka as white people) with white chocolate * and their whitey hands. In order to rule out such a possibility, of course, two hundred white-X children belonging to both genders are being obliged to eat white chocolate from their own bare hands: we will share the results as soon as they are published. Up till now, no link whatsoever between one-handed humans, being black or white, and chocolate, either black or white, can yet be found.
* To call a white chocolate chocolate is a flagrant contradictio in terminis, due to the simple fact that there’s no cocoa in it; it would be something like calling coffee a decaffeinated coffee or calling a sport football when is mainly played with the hands (American football).
(5) Of course, the fair Leonardo registered the masterful and game-winning reply, also in his La Gioconda Diaries: Imagine that on a plane you have: a Jew, a Nigger, a Chinese fellow, a Latin airhead, an Arab that though he is peaceful we take him to be terrorist, a Fag, a Dyke, a Priest, a Transvestite, a Politician, a Banker and an Albino, and the plane crashes. Who survives? I thought and thought for an answer worthy of such a crew, but could not come with a logical yet at the same time joke-worthy reply, when the perfect ending slapped my face as the prelude to a laughter that even left stainy traces in my underwear: Who the fuck cares, mate?!?!?!?!?.
(5bis) Please, do remember that Richard is the name used by his enemies when referring to Leonardo.
(6) If Leonardo were alive, would he be a fan of James Woods? Would have he participated in one of Tiger Woods’s sexual feasts? The author thinks it’s enough to suggest the beginning of a funny connection by quoting two names that help the realization of the joke in the mind of the probable reader, and that it’s completely unnecessary to keep quoting names that would add nothing to the essence of the gracious remark. At the same time, it is absolutely obvious that, having stated clearly enough the very nature of this point, these same words are becoming absolutely expendable.