The Tale of Mona Lisa and the Hidden Animals

Recently, I found an interesting article. It is a variant on a tale we have heard before – there is a new hypothesis regarding the real meaning behind Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, Mona Lisa. And while this story doesn’t have any of the conspiracy hallmarks that seem to trouble da Vinci’s art lately, it does include the “hidden object / hidden meaning” trope.

The Claim

The man behind the new theory is graphic designer and painter, Ron Piccirillo of Rochester, NY. On his blog, Mr. Piccirillo puts forth the claim that hidden within the imagery of Mona Lisa are the heads of animals; specifically, those of of a lion, an ape, a buffalo and a crocodile. Further, he claims that the writings of da Vinci corroborate this finding. And in these writings he has discovered the true identity of the woman depicted in the painting.

The Evidence

Below is an image of the Mona Lisa. You may be familiar with it.

Can you see the hidden animals? Let’s try a different view and you can have another look:

How about now? Can you see the animal heads? No? Okay, one more try:

Okay, now you can’t miss them (because I have highlighted them).

According to Mr. Piccirillo, the above highlighted images are the heads of an ape, a lion and a buffalo. He first noticed these images by viewing the painting on its side. In addition, what he calls the ‘d point’ is another piece of his evidence that is taken from Leonardo’s writings. The passage from Leonardo’s writings state:

“Supposing a b to be the picture and d to be the light, I say that if you place yourself between c and e you will not understand the picture well and particularly if it is done in oils, or still more if it is varnished, because it will be lustrous and somewhat of the nature of a mirror. And for this reason the nearer you go towards the point c, the less you will see, because the rays of light falling from the window on the picture are reflected to that point. But if you place yourself between e and d you will get a good view of it, and the more so as you approach the point d, because that spot is least exposed to these reflected rays of light.” – The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, pg 547

To quote Mr. Picirillo from his blog, “Now why would Leonardo say to view a painting from the d point? This was very odd to me, so I tried it.”

In doing so, Mr. Picirillo discovered a crocodile’s head, which can only be seen on an extreme angle (from the aforementioned ‘d point’) on the left-hand side of the painting.

He then “spent the next two months poring over da Vinci’s journals and came across the passage on envy which for me sums up what this is about.”

“Envy must be represented with a contemptuous motion of the hand towards heaven, because if she could she would use her strength against God; make her with her face covered by a mask of fair seeming; show her as wounded in the eye by a palm branch and by an olive-branch, and wounded in the ear by laurel and myrtle, to signify that victory and truth are odious to her. Many thunderbolts should proceed from her to signify her evil speaking. Let her be lean and haggard because she is in perpetual torment. Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent, and make her with a quiver with tongues serving as arrows, because she often offends with it. Give her a leopard’s skin, because this creature kills the lion out of envy and by deceit. Give her too a vase in her hand full of flowers and scorpions and toads and other venomous creatures; make her ride upon death, because Envy, never dying, never tires of ruling. Make her bridle, and load her with divers kinds of arms because all her weapons are deadly.” – The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, pg 677

Again, from Mr. Picirillo’s blog, “No one had ever realized that this passage was about the Mona Lisa. You would never know unless you were able to make the connections with the images viewed from the d-point.” (His full analysis of this quote and how it describes Mona Lisa can be found here.)

The Conclusion

Mr. Piccirillo believes that he has discovered the true identity of Mona Lisa – she is Envy personified.

Media Reaction

The story grabbed headlines all over the world. There were stories in The Telegraph, The Huffington Post, and many local news outlets. There were also features on The Today Show and articles all over the blog-o-verse. The dominant theme of the reportage was that an artist had found hidden images in the painting which reveal her true identity. (In one odd twist, zoenature.org – a nature and animal rights blog – has interpreted the news of the hidden animals as “…placed there by Leonardo because of his concern for animal protection.” Um.)

The disappointing thing was that I had a lot of questions that went unanswered by most of the media I saw. I could find only two sources which had contacted art historians: The Today Show (linked above) and this article by ABC News.

So I decided to do a bit of research on my own to see if I could gather all of the facts.

I read a few of the news stories and looked at the painting without any of the highlighted areas to see what I could, to no avail. I was interested in this story because, on occasion, we do learn new things about old artworks. Usually it has to do with new imaging techniques to see beneath the surface of paintings, or new attribution (“We thought this was a Rembrandt, but it’s not”) or new chemical analysis.

But in the end, I have done what no news organization could possibly be expected to do. I have spent an hour Googling the relevant information. And here is what I have found.

The Counter-Evidence

The D Point
Let’s begin with what is described above as the ‘d-point’. On his blog Mr. Piccirillo says “Now why would Leonardo say to view a painting from the D point? This was very odd to me…”

Now let’s compare this drawing with the text:

“Envy must be represented with a contemptuous motion of the hand towards heaven, because if she could she would use her strength against God; make her with her face covered by a mask of fair seeming; show her as wounded in the eye by a palm branch and by an olive-branch, and wounded in the ear by laurel and myrtle, to signify that victory and truth are odious to her. Many thunderbolts should proceed from her to signify her evil speaking. Let her be lean and haggard because she is in perpetual torment. Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent, and make her with a quiver with tongues serving as arrows, because she often offends with it. Give her a leopard’s skin, because this creature kills the lion out of envy and by deceit. Give her too a vase in her hand full of flowers and scorpions and toads and other venomous creatures; make her ride upon death, because Envy, never dying, never tires of ruling. Make her bridle, and load her with divers kinds of arms because all her weapons are deadly.” – The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, pg 677

I don’t think I am overstating the case when I say that the image above is exactly what is described in the passage that it accompanies. Further, the Envy sketch is from a suite of several that are allegorical representations – Virtues and Vices (in this case the vice of envy). Also, this suite was made something like 20 years before the Mona Lisa was begun. Of course artists sometimes return to their sketches for inspiration later on – and we have many examples of Leonardo’s sketches from which we can see his process – but the only thing that the Envy sketch has in common with the Mona Lisa is that they both depict women. I do not find it to be a compelling argument.

It should also be mentioned that you and I are seeing the painting in a manner that is far removed from how it looks in person and in time. We are looking at a low resolution digital representation of the painting. It may be lighter or darker than it appears on our screens. It has been restored several times in the past. The surface is riddled with craquelure (even the Wikipedia article uses Mona Lisa as an example) that distorts it greatly – adding small hills and valleys, highlights and shadows that would not have been there when the painting was new. All of these variables increase the odds that we, as viewers, may be able to ‘find’ things that are not actually there. It’s like seeing Jesus in a water stain.

In looking over the evidence that is available, it is my opinion that these new claims are nothing more than pareidolia, cherry picking of evidence and wishful thinking.

So What?

So why spend so much time fussing over this? There are plenty of people out there who have pet theories and it’s not like this is particularly harmful, right? Well, this story gained a lot of traction with the press. Quite a few electrons were spent in disseminating this story of an artist who finally ‘cracked the code’ of, arguably, the most famous painting in the world. But there was almost no expert opinion presented in most of the news stories.  I found only two sources that had comments from art historians. If this was a story about a controversial astronomy story, you can bet the networks would have been falling all over each other to get Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s opinion first. Also, it took very little time for me, a nobody with a computer, to find a counterpoint to the claim. Why can’t news outlets do the same? Or more to the point, why was this even a story in the first place? If we assume for a moment that the claims made about Leonardo’s intent are true, what have we learned? We learn that Leonardo wasted time setting up a puzzle that no one was intended to solve. We see that he had hidden images in his painting that would most likely never be found, because who hangs a painting on its side? We see that one would never have been able to decode the meaning of these images because his notes were disjointed, written backwards, and not published until the 17th century. In short we learn nothing of Leonardo’s intent. In my mind it diminishes the man and the care he took in creating his art.

What we gain when we look at great art is, in my opinion, quite personal. I love the Mona Lisa. It is a beautiful painting made by a master. Her smile never really intrigued me the way it does for so many people. It has always been her hands that entrance me – they look so soft and fleshy, so alive. I can easily imagine what it would feel like to hold those hands to feel their warmth and yet, they are not hands. They are nothing more than pigment and oil spread over a piece of wood. That is the real illusion.

Full Disclosure: I had an email correspondence with Ron Piccirillo in which I asked him the questions that I wish the media had – about his process and his interpretation and whether there might be other explanations. Despite a back and forth of 6 emails, he managed to answer none of my questions.