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Updated: June 2, 2025
But the play is not a good play; at its best it is lyrical rather than dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "Titus Andronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda."
In him first appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light their exact antitype is in our own western seas; all the solemn effects of moving water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing, as a little fall, into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a goodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, washing the white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of divided streams in La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Anne that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as hair.
The man's name was Masuccio, his wife's Gioconda; between them they had a brood of nine children a grown daughter of fourteen, three stout lads, four brats, and a child not breeched; and in addition to all these, and to Belviso and myself, to a sow in farrow, four goats, and hens innumerable, the good man's father was posed as veritable master of the whole an old man afflicted with palsy, who did nothing but shake and suck at his pipe, but who, nevertheless, had, by virtue of his years and situation, the only semblance of a bed, the first of everything, and the best and the most of that.
Had he followed his inclinations and the advice of Victor Hugo, who gave him a letter of introduction to Emile de Girardin, he would have become a journalist in Paris instead of the composer of "Mefistofele" and the poet of "Otello," "Falstaff," "La Gioconda," and "Ero e Leandro."
That is how I can best repay you for what you have done. The words were so bitter, so humiliated, that the colour rose to her cheeks. 'I ask you to stay. But let us talk of other things. For a moment he kept silence. He seemed no longer to see Margaret, and she watched him thoughtfully. His eyes rested on a print of La Gioconda which hung on the wall. Suddenly he began to speak.
He even felt no bitterness. Grazia's peace spread over him. He accepted everything. O life why should I reproach thee for that which thou canst not give? Art thou not very beautiful and very blessed as thou art? I must fain love thy smile, Gioconda.... Christophe would gaze at his beloved's beautiful face, and read in it many things of the past and the future.
So many artistic young men had told her she was like La Gioconda, that when she first saw the original in the Louvre she was so disappointed that she thought she would never smile again. About ten minutes after the pretty creature had gone out, Anne, who had kept her eyes steadily on the clock, looked out of the window, from which she could see a small brougham driving up.
Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by the finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards and meadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse, just outside the walls of the town of Amboise, where, especially in the hunting season, the court then frequently resided.
He showed this woman's mysterious smile in the Madonna, in Saint Anne, Mary Magdalen, and the outlines of the features are suggested in the Christ and the Saint John of the "Last Supper." But not until La Gioconda had posed for him did the consummate beauty and mysterious intellect of this ideal countenance find expression. There is in the face all you can read into it, and nothing more.
But when I pulled the plank a little aside and looked down, I saw a girl unknown to me until I recognized her for one of those who lived above the archway at the entrance of Messer' Fazio's court. Lauretta had told her, swearing her to be secret, and she was here in pity. She called herself Gioconda; and I bless her, for your sake. "She fetched me bread, milk, and a little wine.
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