Word: mona
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...Mona Lisa del Giocondo had had any idea of the lengths to which critics would go in trying to explain her enigmatic smile in Leonardo da Vinci's famed portrait, she might have split her sides laughing. For in 450 years the smile has been variously interpreted as sly and tender, coquettish and aloof, cruel and compassionate, seductive and supercilious. At Yale University last week an eminent British physician, visiting professor of the history of medicine, coolly swept aside all such adjectives and offered his own theory: the lady was smiling with "placid satisfaction" because she was pregnant...
...trouble with Dr. Keele's theory is that Mona Lisa del Giocondo, married at 16, had one child which died shortly before she began to pose for Da Vinci, and there is no clear record that she became pregnant during the four or five years that Da Vinci worked, on and off, at the portrait. Besides, the remarkably similar smile in another Da Vinci master piece cannot be explained the same way. The subject is John the Baptist...
...puts in of Freud. Plainly, Hamlet was made for Freud, but popular Freudianism much less so for Hamlet. To put all its neuroses in one bedstead is to rob a character of his tangled richness, a story of its resonant depths, and to turn what T.S. Eliot called "the Mona Lisa of literature" into a simple blueprint. And by adhering to such things as soliloquies and ghosts, Cue for Passion never quite goes its own way either. It ingeniously makes drunkenness an excuse for soliloquizing and a basis for seeing ghosts; but where Shakespeare uses both very early and formatively...
Nelson Rockefeller owns three farms in Venezuela and will vacation in his hilltop hacienda-a white stucco colonial house with red tile roof built around a swimming pool-at La Mona, a 1,200-acre spread of potato and cattle land 90 miles southwest of Caracas. His farms are no mere rich man's fancy. Originally developed by the International Basic Economy Corp. (IBEC) that he founded to invest in Latin American development, the first farm lost so much money in a try at large-scale agriculture that Rockefeller bought it from IBEC, ran it himself...
Strolling over the Louvre's polished parquet floors, Bazin likes to philosophize on two great portraits. Titian's Francis I (who seems to be examining the jewel of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa) and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (loftily surveying the great expanse of the 300-yard-long Grande Galerie). Both have a right to their proprietary air. Bazin feels, since, along with Napoleon, they are among the Louvre's greatest benefactors...