8 Hidden Secrets In The Mona Lisa
1. The Hidden Horse Head
So we've all had a lot of fun speculating as to Mona Lisa's identity, existence of facial hair and propensity towards obscure mathematics, but it's time to get serious. Because whilst all those hidden secrets are certainly there if you look, getting too bogged down in those details will cause you to miss the real mysteries to be uncovered within Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece: it's all one big optical illusion!
Not just the smile, but the entire painting! It's like a Renaissance magic eye picture! Look past the snarky woman in the foreground, tip the canvas on its side (legal note: please don't go into the Louvre and knock the Mona Lisa on its side) and you'll discover a whole menagerie of animals painted into the background. Or so goes the theory of Ron Piccirillo, whose slightly rambling website The Hidden Horse Head looks a bit like those pages on the wrong side of the internet tracks, where eccentric folk with knowledge of HTML's ability to change font sizes and colours disseminate their theories on who actually killed John Lennon and JFK and who the alien reptiles were who ordered their assassinations. He seems a bit like a kook.
A crank. But dismiss him at your peril because, once you get past the slightly unorthodox presentation, he might be onto something. It's actually a series of paintings within a painting, see? According to Piccirillo, looking at the Mona Lisa upside down and following the highlights of her portrait will form a question mark. That's just the first step - tipping it on its side will reveal a lions head, an ape head and a buffalo head in the background, something that went unnoticed by everyone else for five hundred years. Tilting it and looking at the painting from an angle will heighten the optical illusion of the smile, making her grin even bigger, as if she's congratulating you for looking deeper into the portrait.
From there the website goes into a crazy amount of detail, reading into many of the countless journals of da Vinci that have been preserved and published (in which, interestingly, he doesn't mention who the subject of the Mona Lisa is - even though he was carrying the unfinished canvas around with him for, like, four years), stringing together a whole idea of an alternate landscape concealed with the painting, with even more animals and a load of Biblical symbolism. It's pretty wacky, but also pretty convincing. And they're hidden secrets that have remained undisturbed for centuries. How about that? Something to smile about, for sure.