Mona Lisa and Me

When did I first see her? It was such a long time ago that I cannot remember exactly. It could have been when I was in fourth or fifth grade in primary school in a remote mountain village in Korea.

One day, leafing through the school’s only copy of an encyclopedia in the small reading room that was dubbed a library, I came across Mona Lisa.

It was a faded black-and-white photo printed on coarse paper. The caption, I remember, said something along the usual line that the name of the woman “with the mysterious smile” was Mona Lisa and that it was a great portrait done by Leonardo Da Vinci.

I just didn’t know what to make of her. To tell the truth my first impression was that she wasn’t so beautiful. I thought she looked rather severe, if not forbidding, on account probably of her fixed and unflinching gaze. And her famous smile was not a smile at all; it simply looked like she was smiling because of the shape of her mouth.

Thinking back, I realize it was impossible to judge any work of art by looking at an extremely poor black and white reproduction only a little larger than a postal stamp in the Japanese edition of the encyclopedia. What’s more, I was only 10 or 11 years old, born and living in a remote village where I had had no chance of running into a Westerner. There was no point of reference, in other words, and therefore, I had no way of knowing whether Mona Lisa was a beautiful woman or not.

It was during the Japanese colonial period in Korea. And Japan was in the midst of the Second World War against the United States and its allies. The Japanese imperialists had been brainwashing their own people as well as Koreans with daily bombardments of propaganda that portrayed all Westerners as evil incarnate and downright monsters. That was despite the fact that Japan was part of the Aix with Germany and Italy.

In view of the hatred that we were supposed to feel toward the people in the West, it was almost unimaginable that there still existed an edition of an encyclopedia in Japanese that showed the Mona Lisa among other objects of Western culture.

I saw the “real” Mona Lisa in her permanent home—the Louvre Museum in Paris—in 1964. Even now, whenever I think of that day, I feel it was like a miracle as I had the great fortune of being almost alone while standing face to face with Mona Lisa in that room.

It was a dismal rainy Friday afternoon in late October that I happened to pass by the Louvre, on my way to my flat from Alliance Francaise, the language school. I noticed that there weren’t many visitors at the museum, perhaps because of the inclement weather or perhaps because most foreign tourists had gone home by then and the Parisians were busy preparing for the coming weekend. Anyway, I decided to drop in.

As expected, the museum was practically deserted. Even in the room where Mona Lisa was hanging, there were only two or three visitors at a time. And even they were not lingering in front of the smiling woman for long.

Imagine how excited I was! There was a god-given chance to have a tete-a-tete with Mona Lisa without being distracted by other visitors. I told myself to be calm and collected while unobtrusively looking at her from various angles and distances and without disturbing the occasional fellow viewers.

Needless to say, since my first encounter with her in primary school in Korea, I had seen many different copies of the masterpiece before I was actually able to look at the real Mona Lisa. And some of them were really excellent reproductions showing even the traces of individual brush strokes. I had also read a great many articles and books on the paintings by Da Vinci written by art critics and cultural historians. As a result, I had already formed a vague sense of admiration for the Mona Lisa, like so many people around the world.

Yet, the moment I stood in front of the painting, all they said about her seemed to have vanished; there was only her “real self,” having shed, as it were, the words of almost universal adulation and appreciation; there was only the close and intimate look and the feelings that I got from her in return.

My initial reaction was that the painting was small, much smaller than I had expected. And it was also dark, perhaps because of her dark hair, the dark brown costume she was wearing and dark bluish background. If I had not known her all those years through reproductions, I must confess, I could have easily passed by it after giving it a cursory glance as I would at many other portraits by other major Florentine artists that were hanging in the Louvre. But then, of course, it was Mona Lisa, and she is different from all the rest.

Even though I was untrained and unsophisticated as a lover of art, I was struck by the ethereal quality that, I understand, is evident in all Da Vinci paintings. There is that all-too-well-known smile of hers with a slight touch of irony and sense of being amused at the whole set-up she found herself in—posing for a portrait.

But because of her serious and unflinching gaze, I felt, she was not only an enigmatic woman but also a nobler lady than the mere wife of a wealthy merchant as she was reported to be.

I lingered in front of her for more than a quarter hour and then, thoroughly familiarized with the famous woman, I came out of the museum and into the October rain, with a profound feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.

“Accomplishment,” I must admit, is a strange word, but in view of my later experience where Mona Lisa was concerned, I, indeed, felt that I had accomplished something on that day in the Louvre.

The next time I came close to meeting the Mona Lisa was in 1970 or 71 in Tokyo. The Japanese Government borrowed the painting and exhibited it at the Ueno Museum in the capital. At that time, I was working as a reporter for a large international news agency at its Tokyo bureau.

Since I was covering social and cultural affairs, I had the right to attend the “introductory” event open only to the members of the press prior to the opening of the exhibition to the public. But somehow the highly coveted ticket allocated to our agency found its way to the teenage daughter of one of our bosses at the bureau. And I was forced to write a report on the exhibition without having gotten another look at the painting.

As I still felt like meeting Mona Lisa once more, I decided to join the crowd one day during the exhibition. Expecting a few hundred visitors and ready to wait in line for some two hours or so, I went to the Museum.

To my great surprise, however, I found a serpentine line of Japanese art lovers extending at least three long city blocks from the entrance to the Museum. And I was told I would have to wait at least four hours before I could get to Mona Lisa. That was not all, you were allowed, they said, to halt in front of the picture for only a few seconds, much less minutes, as visitors were constantly urged to move on. Even if you insisted on halting for a few more seconds, you wouldn’t be able to because the people behind you would push you right out of the way, they said.

After a long debate with a friend who went there with me, we decided to drop out of the line and go home. I was able to consol myself because, unlike my friend, I had had the chance to see Mona Lisa in Paris less than a decade before.

The last time I saw Mona Lisa—a glimpse of her, really—came in 2008 when my wife and I went to Paris for a visit. Even though I didn’t tell my wife in so many words, one of the reasons I wanted to revisit the City of Light was to meet the Mona Lisa, among other great paintings at the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay.

When we got there, it was at the height of the tourist season and the Louvre was filled with an incredible number of people. Every corridor and every room were crowded with camera toting tourists from all corners, I suppose, of the world. Especially the room where the Mona Lisa was being shown was packed with so many visitors that it was well neigh impossible to move around even if you managed to squeeze into it.

And everybody in the room seemed to be taller than me (at 5 feet 7) so that it looked as though a huge wall was formed inches from my eyes; I tried standing on my toes and craning my neck as much as possible in order to take a look over the shoulders, if not over the heads, of the people in front of me. But despite my desperate efforts, all I got was a couple of fleeting glimpses of the Mona Lisa who now seemed to be smiling in amusement at so many of her admirers.

But what made me really feel bad about the whole affair was that my wife, who had never seen the real Mona Lisa before, had a much harder time as she is shorter than I am and is not such a strong and aggressive person that she could push her way somehow through the walls of milling people. To make the situation worse, the room was very hot and stunk with sweat and other bodily odors of the many people so that my wife decided to give up her attempt.

Coming out of the Louvre, I suggested that we buy a good reproduction of the Mona Lisa at the souvenir store, but my wife, who is an art purist of sorts, said no. “No one can live through one’s life by doing everything one wants to,” she said. And I agreed with her but took secret comfort in the fact that at least I had had the good fortune to take a close and intimate look at Mona Lisa when I was young.
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