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Updated: June 2, 2025
'When you smile like that, you remind me of a photograph of a picture I've seen a woman, I don't remember her name. 'Mona Lisa La Gioconda. I know I've been told that before. 'Yes, that's it. Mona Lisa. People have written about her. 'Reams. Some day I'll read you what Pater says of her, unless you've read him already by your camp fire.
Society can and should assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time yet further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The Gioconda is not worth a million. There is no relation between a sum of money and a work of art: a work of art is neither above nor below money: it is outside it.
I have my fortune to make; you must have a splendid one, nature created you a princess " At this word Francesca could not repress a faint smile, which gave her face the most bewildering expression, something subtle, like what the great Leonardo has so well depicted in the Gioconda. This smile made Rodolphe pause.
The libretto for Verdi's last work, "Otello," was prepared by Boïto, who had previously assisted him in rearranging his "Simon Boccanegra," and who also wrote the poem of "La Gioconda" for Ponchielli. Boïto is a thorough believer in Wagner's doctrine that every composer should write his own opera books, and he followed this rule in his interesting opera "Mefistofele."
In Leonardo the Louvre is of course far richer, even without the Gioconda, but we have at Burlington House the cartoon for the Louvre's S. Anne which may pair off with the Uffizi's unfinished Madonna, and we have also at the National Gallery his finished "Virgin of the Rocks," while to Burlington House one must go too for Michelangelo's beautiful tondo.
"La Gioconda" is the first play in which Duse has had beautiful words to speak, and a poetical conception of character to render; and her acting in it is more beautiful and more poetical than it was possible for it to be in "Magda," or in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray."
La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery.
And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves.
Milden," he went on, "has the smile of La Gioconda, and hands and hair for Leonardo to paint. Lady Gloucester," he continued, leaving out the Christian name, "is English, like one of Shakespeare's women, Desdemona or Imogen; and Lady Irene has no nationality, she belongs to the dream worlds of Shelley and D'Annunzio: she is the guardian Lady of Shelley's 'Sensitiva, the vision of the lily.
But you lay under the straw at my feet; and when the gate was passed, while the women were calling back insults to the soldiers there, I gave thanks to Our Lady. "Beloved, that is my story. At Tortona I parted from the women, and hired the waggon which brought us the rest of the way. But I had done better, perhaps, to go with them to Milan, as Gioconda advised.
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