Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Mona Lisa

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

The Mona Lisa is a captivating work of art. But why? We'll try and figure it out in today's short stuff. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's JJ over there. Let's get to it and talk about maybe the most famous

painting in all the world. Perhaps. Sad Clown Hobo. By John Wayne Gacy. Right. Have you seen the Mona Lisa? I have. Same here, I'm sure your first impression

like many people was, huh, sure is small. It's impossible to not have, you can go into it saying I'm not going to think that I've been prepped. I'm not going to let myself think that and you will think that. Yeah, it's two feet six inches by one foot nine inches. It's a small little painting. It is, and they have it behind some seriously

protective casing. Yep. You can't get too terribly close to it. You can get kind of close, but not, you know, you can't just walk up right on it. No. And I think we talked a lot about why they have it under that casing and how the Louvre works episode

if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think we covered that. This is a little more about the lady herself. They think for sure that Mona Lisa was a person. Yeah. A real person and there's been a lot of debate over the years, but the current thinking is. What's her name?

No, boy, is Lisa Gerardini del Giancando. Nice. Also known as La Giocanda. Very nice. Because she's a lady. Yeah. And she was a wealthy woman, married to a wealthy silk merchant.

And the thinking is that he had this commissioned to celebrate the birth of their impending birth of a child. Yeah. And it's bizarre to think that we don't know much about the Mona Lisa. It's not that old. I mean, Da Vinci started it. And I think,

1503 is when he started the painting. Exactly, which is what I was gonna say eventually. Okay. So it's not so ridiculously old that it's just completely lost the history. And yet it is because the Giocando family never took possession of it. And the reason that they think that they're almost certain

that that is who it is, that it's La Giocanda in that painting is that there was a book written about it in the time that Leonardo Da Vinci's sons were still alive. And so still around to refute this, if it was incorrect, that it was her, that she was the one who was seated there. And then years and years later, somebody found a margin note somewhere in some book

or some notebook that said as much that Lisa Giardini, Giardini, sorry, was the Mona Lisa and that she was going to be sitting for this work that Da Vinci was working on. Right, and they speculate about the impending pregnancy because she has some kind of loose clothing on and that little smile is interpreted as, oh, guess what's coming, I'm about to give birth.

I can't wait. So we should probably talk a little bit about the artistry of the Mona Lisa. I'm gonna go ahead and throw it out there, meh. Oh really, are you crazy? You don't like it? It's not that I don't like it. I'm just, I'm not a big fan of portraiture period.

Not a lot of portraits knock me out like other paintings do. Okay. I can appreciate them for sure. But I've never looked at a portrait and been like, man, I want that in my house so bad. Not a big Rembrandt fan, huh? Nah. So I think one of the reasons I appreciated Chuck

is because I recently saw Decoding Da Vinci a little Nova documentary. The Tom Hanks movie. Yeah, he's got a mullet in it running around all over the place. No, this was even more legitimate than that. Oh, wow. But they really go into the techniques that he used in this painting, especially this Fumato method

that he's very well known for, which uses shading and some other stuff. You're gonna have to watch the Nova episode for it to be explained. But the upshot of it is there's no lines in the Mona Lisa. There's no hard lines. There's no, he didn't paint a line. He suggested lines.

Every line in that painting doesn't actually exist. It's all an illusion created by the painting techniques that he was using on the Mona Lisa. And they really go to town explaining this and it really makes it that much easier to appreciate. Yeah, another thing that's mentioned here in the House of Works article is the fact, and this kind of stood out to me

is mostly when you see portraits especially, oh my Lord, from that era is you have someone in a room maybe and not necessarily a landscape as well. There were landscapes and there were portraits and never the tween shall meet. But he blended those two things together and there's a landscape behind the Mona Lisa and an aerial perspective.

And she's very much in a big open space with these mountains and winding paths behind her. And your eye doesn't always go to that because you're looking at that face and that smile. But that dreamy landscape is certainly back there. Yeah, and I think what they're remarking about is that it's supposedly an imaginary landscape and that most people didn't paint imaginary ones.

And people have tried to prove that it actually is an imaginary. Most recently, a pair of Italian researchers, Olivia Nesci and Rosetta Borgia. I don't do it nearly as well as you. But they said, no, it's this place in Montefeltro in the east of Italy, east of Florence on the Adriatic coast.

And they're like, this mountain is this one. This is this mountain. They said this bridge used to be there, but it's since been destroyed. This lake is no longer here, it's filled in by mudslides. But they're pretty sure they pinpointed it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're correct. It's still speculative,

but they seem to have a pretty good case to back it up. But their supposition is that Lagioconda posed in front of that? No, no, just that he, that's what he painted. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, so yeah, I don't think that they were saying like he made her sit there for four years

or that she was ever even there. But their point is that it's not a made-up landscape. Well, no, I mean, I'm sure he took a photograph of her right and then just worked from that. Yeah. Knowing Da Vinci, he probably did. I will say that the Mona Lisa's eyes following you, the Mona Lisa effect, which she did not invent,

but it is referred to that way anyway. And I know you're pretty into this idea that eyes can follow you. Sure. That works on a laptop even. It does. And that's a whole other short stuff, if you ask me. But this Mona Lisa effect, it being called that,

the eyes following you around the room and painting, that it's actually a misnomer because they've proven that the Mona Lisa does not actually demonstrate the Mona Lisa effect. Oh, it did to me, man. Does it? I mean, I don't know. Maybe it was the fact that I got super drunk at lunch,

but I was sitting at my desk and I was going heavy back and forth to the left and right and they seemed to be following me. Or maybe it was suggested, so I saw it that way. I don't know. I wonder that, man. I wonder if that is because when I looked and saw that she doesn't have that effect,

I was like, oh yeah, I totally see it. Some researchers measured where people pointed on the screen or pointed on themselves where she was looking and most people said she was looking past them to their right at a 30 degree angle. Well, it may have been power suggestion. Yeah.

For both of us, who knows? All right. Well, let's take a break here and you will hear what we will say a little bit about when and why the Mona Lisa became Supe's famous. Living things with Chuck and Chuck. Chuck and Chuck, all the way, stop you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing

who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, I thought that break would never come. Right? So, it's funny to think as famous as the Mona Lisa is,

but she was fairly neglected by the world until the mid 19th century. And even then, just like a small little group of French art critics finally discovered this Da Vinci painting and were like, this is a masterpiece. This is an amazing work of Renaissance art. We haven't noticed all these few hundred years, but it's amazing.

They didn't really tell the rest of the world. And people liked the Mona Lisa, it was fine, but it wasn't until she was stolen off of the wall in the Louvre in 1911 that the world really sat up and took notice. It's very much like that Cinderella song. You don't know what you got until it's gone. That happened with the Mona Lisa too.

I think they wrote that about the Mona Lisa, right? Probably. Yeah, August 21st, 1911, there were three handymen that just kind of went out the side door with the Mona Lisa. It took 26, and this is kind of evidence that she wasn't that big of a deal yet. It took a whole 26 hours before anyone even noticed she was gone.

And whereas today, you know, there would be alarm bells like the second it was removed. Yeah. But it was put in the papers, and all of a sudden it kind of ran away in the press. The Louvre shut down for a week, and everyone from Pablo Picasso to J.P. Morgan were named as potential suspects.

Yeah, they thought J.P. Morgan was financing people to steal like artworks for him. Amazing. Yeah, and actually it's funny that we raised this other thing Chuck real quick, there are accusations against wealthy Chinese people who are funding art heists to repatriate Chinese art. Oh, interesting.

If there's like a whole string of art heists around the world that are just ancient Chinese works of art, and they think that some people in China are financing it. It was a GQ article called The Great Chinese Art Heist. Wow, well, I certainly believe in repatriation to a certain degree, but I don't know if you should go to that link. So anyway, the newspapers get it out, Louvre shuts down,

people were coming to the museum to see what was known as the Mark of Shame, that empty, you know, non-cigarette stained square on the wall, and everyone went and went, is that how big it is? That little non-dusty square. And then it took a full 28 months for this thing to finally reappear with an attempted resale

from Vincenzo Pereguia, and the owner of the art gallery that was being offered this painting, said, yeah, this is the Mona Lisa. You know what? I'm gonna make sure you get a good reward for this. Just stick around and stay right there. I'm gonna go in the other room and make a quick phone call to the reward center.

Right, and make sure you get your reward. So just reward right there, reward. And then Homer Simpson just stood in place and waited for the Italian polizia to come. Yeah, and he got busted, and he got eight months in prison for this. It was a pretty big art heist, but he was in Florence trying to sell it.

So he'd stolen it from the Louvre in Paris, and his defense was Napoleon stole this from us, and I was repatriating it myself. And I think he actually kind of got, you know, eight months isn't exactly a slap on the wrist, but it's also not a ridiculous sentence either for what he got, or for what he did. So I think that actually helped that defense worked.

Do you know if he ratted out his two buddies? I don't know, and I don't know if it would have mattered because he was the one that lived with it in like the false bottom of his steamer trunk in his apartment for two years before he tried to sell it. So I don't know if it would have helped at all. Man, I wish I had a false bottom. Steamer trunk, those would be pretty handy.

Oh, oh, I thought you meant like a bottom. No, no, no, just a false bottom trunk seems like that. False bottom girls, they make the rockin' world go around kind of false bottom. Stop it. Can we say that? It's not the 70s any longer. I think we're okay.

Okay, you got anything else? Nothing. Well, then everybody, short stuff says Arrivederci. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

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