A smile that was

JAYASREE SARNATHAN

Enigmatic, alluring, captivating, mysterious, puzzling, startling... These are descriptions of Leonardo da Vinci's painting Mona Lisa. But behind her famous smile lies some secrets, say modern day specialists. The most startling revelation is that Mona Lisa was not in the pink of her health when she posed for the portrait.

According to Dr. Kedar Ardour of California, the slightly twisted smile could be the result of a kind of facial paralysis called Bell's palsy. Dr. Joseph Borkowski, a dentist in Maryland, says that the droop in one corner of her lip is due to the loss of some front teeth on the left. The Japanese heart specialist, Dr. Harou Nakamura, feels that the yellow pigmentation in the corner of her left eye must have been due to high cholesterol levels and it is likely that Mona Lisa succumbed to heart attack.

While the medical fraternity holds that all was not well with this woman, the wife of a rich Florentine merchant, others from computer imaging and x-ray analysis declare that Mona Lisa was not a woman at all! The American computer artist, Liillian Schwartz, and Maudsley Hospital registrar, Dr. Digby Quested, believe that Mona Lisa was a mirror image of Leonardo da Vinci himself. As da Vinci was known to have written many notes on mirror image painting, there was a likelihood that he had drawn his own face by mirror imaging and later converted it to that of a woman.

To substantiate their claim, they cite x-ray results of the painting. The picture was stolen in 1911 and when recovered later, it was x-rayed to check its authenticity. The picture, though authentic, revealed something more than what was actually seen - it had a beard at one time which had later been painted over!

So much for the smile. But Mona Lisa continues to captivate people with her mysterious smile.

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