Floyd Dell

“ It is no accident that the Mona Lisa is the most talked-about painting in the world. Walter Pater was not the first, nor the mad Italian who ravished her away the last, to see a mystery in her smile. Nor has the world been fooled into seeing a mystery where the painter only put a mouth. ”

“ He knew that curious Florentine—he knew that the genius inherent in machinery would yet lift men above the clouds. He did not know that the invention of a spinning-jenny would change the whole world, sweeping away all but the ruins of his own age and erecting above them a hideous factory civilization, turning skilled artisans into machine hands and superseding the prince by the capitalist. ”

“ He did not dream how men would come to look on machinery with fear, and then at last with a dawning hope, seeing in its relentless evolution a destructive and transforming power which would destroy and transform this new civilization even as the last. ”

“ Men painted what they thought as well as what they saw. And Leonardo da Vinci, the most desperate imaginative inquirer of all the Renaissance, may well be supposed to have put into his four years’ work on that painting what four centuries have found there. Mona Lisa is not a woman: she is Woman. ”

“ We know well enough that Woman has behind her a long tradition of servitude. And we look at her and wonder if she will have the stamina to be free. We know that she does not yet particularly desire to think. ”

“ And we look at her and wonder if she will subject herself unreluctantly to those larger social processes which alone can make of her a real individual. We know that she submits to being the victim of Life even as the Moslem submits to being the victim of Death. ”