What figures/events in history do you think the significance of has been exaggerated?

Oh please. when you can paint something as lovely as the Mona Lisa, then maybe you can actually criticize others with the talent to do so.
The very mystery of the history of the Mona Lisa adds to the paintings greatness.
And of course the fact that Leonardo da Vinci painted her is a big plus.
She is symbolic of the Renaissance, for which Leonardo helped make happen…with her help.
And of course her eyes, which seem to look right through the observer…and that smile. Yes, when you do this you can criticize Mona.

@Ben_Dover

I can’t build a bridge. Does that mean I’m not allowed to find fault with the engineers who designed it if the bridge collapses? Doesn’t matter, I can paint the Mona Lisa. I do it every morning. I have a warehouse full of Mona Lisa’s, and a terabyte harddrive full of digital Mona Lisa’s. Can you answer the question now? Why is it mysterious? Why is the smile not just a smile?

You know what I genuinely think is a great piece of art? This. I truly and honestly believe that, while simplistic and probably took no more than 15 minutes to draw, the facial expressions of the characters perfectly capture the indescribable and intangible quality of what the artist is trying to convey. I’m completely serious. Of course, it will never seriously be regarded in history as a great piece of art because of the context in which it is found, which makes me sad.

@Ben_Dover

You’re still not answering my question. WHY has the Mona Lisa not collapsed? I really want to know what do YOU personally think about this painting that makes it an exceptionally successful one, that isn’t some regurgitated answer passed around from one birds mouth to another. I want to reach some genuine understanding of this painting.

And I’m not trolling. I’m completely serious. That troll picture evokes more emotion in me than the Mona Lisa does. Try to think outside the box of your pretension.

Here’s my opinion on the Mona Lisa; it is a bit creepy. It’s definitely not something I would want to hang on the wall where it’s eyes would be constantly scanning me. But a creepy face does not make a masterpiece. Clowns are creepy too, sometimes.

@chocolatechip You’re the one who tried to get me to click that trolling link…of course you’re trolling.
However, I love the fact that Leonardo managed to paint her with no eyebrows and still make her simply beautiful.
The way he pictures her, she looks as if she is looking lovingly at her lover, which I believe she and Leonardo were.

All of those Presidents who were immortalized by defacing a beautiful, natural, scenic mountain that was called Six Grandfathers by the Lakota Sioux

@chocolatechip Something tells me you haven’t seen any of Leonardo Da Vinci’s work in real life, or you most likely wouldn’t feel that way.

@chocolatechip I think what @Ben_Dover is trying to convey is that it was iconic of that time period and it reminds us of the beauty of that time period. Similar to the Beatles. The are awesome in their own right. But, they also represent a time in history wherein the culture was changing. Yes, some people will exagerrate. But, it’s their opinion and their right to have that.

@Ben_Dover

I see you have chosen to ignore my suggestion. In fact, this is the perfect example of that which I am trying to demonstrate. I link to an internet meme and clearly explain my intentions, but the very fact that it is an MS paint drawing causes you to immediately ignore the actual content of my post and write it off as trolling.

But thank you for pointing out that she has no eyebrows. I wonder why that is. Didn’t da Vinci pass away before he could finish the painting though? Could it be that he simply hadn’t gotten around to painting the eyebrows yet?

@Deja_vu

No, I haven’t seen any of his works with my own eyes. Should that affect my opinion of it? It’s a two dimensional painting that I am viewing on a two dimensional monitor. What quality about it am I missing on a monitor that I can’t see with my own eyes?

@py_sue I’m not denying anyone their right to an opinion; in fact I’m asking for them. What about the painting do you think is iconic about that time period? What features about the painting scream, “Renaissance!”?

@chocolatechip If you actually look at the picture of Mona, you will see that Leonardo has paited a fine veil upon her head…I believe the eyebrows would have come before the veil…Nope, she probably had no eyebrows. Perhaps it was the custom of those days, just as nowadays women remove their eyebrows and then draw them in. (ouch)

Yes, you really should look at art in person (3-D) to get the full effect.

@chocolatechip I’m not an art major. I just see it’s existence as a piece of history from that time. I’m gonna leave it at that, because YARNLADY is the only one so far who has posted anything other than an answer about the Mona Lisa.

If I have to pick an event in history, I guess I’d pick the Dust Bowl.

@Ben_Dover

But the veil does not cover her eyebrows. And if it was common practice for women to remove their eyebrows, why would that be of any importance then? If that is true, then it is simply an ordinary depiction of a woman in that regard.

Does her facial structure make her look a little inbred or is it the complete lack of eyebrows? Both maybe? It looks like someone took an old man’s face and superimposed a baby’s face onto it. It’s a well-done painting, of a mutant.

I actually like the Mona Lisa a lot for a painting, but I also like other works of art just as much and more. A good movie made today will effect more people in meaningful ways than the Mona Lisa ever has and ever will. Not because all “low-brows” just don’t appreciate fine classical art, but because most choose not to obsess and fantasize about it. People can take what is there for them to feel and move on without being overcome with reverence and awe.

There are great works being shared all the time, much more impressive than any classical work ever could be. It’s sad that there are still so many who hold art in hierarchies, as if one work of art could rule another. It’s some kind of offshoot of sycophantism, art snobbery. If a piece of art needs to be vouched for with simple admiration to get people interested in it, it’s already insignificant. The art is supposed to do the speaking. When it doesn’t, it fails.

The Mona Lisa was, like all popular art in its time, overrated. They didn’t have as many producing artists as we do now, or the systems of distribution that we have now, let alone the accumulated knowledge and intuition that we have now. People were projecting way more on to it than was actually there, because they didn’t have much else to do. The tradition has been continued, with the excuse of historical preservation whenever someone really questions it.

@Ben_Dover The link is to a comic strip satirizing trolls.

Sorry for the clumsy writing. Apparently sleeping pills actually prevent me from going to sleep. They just slow me down a whole lot. It’s very strange.

Many (MANY) people feel the Mona Lisa is the most over rated piece of art in the history of all human art – bar none.

I am one of those people.

No doubt one of Jackson Pollock’s comes in second place. Or perhaps Andy Warhol.

The thing is with art, you really do have to take into full account the context of the times to approach a “proper” appreciation.

I’ve been told that the Mona Lisa – created in a time that is all but impossible for us to imagine – before cameras, print media, modern advertising, any form of common recording of human features – was renown because her look (“her eyes”) captured a nuance and subtlety that was… par excellence, relative to anything of her time.

It was transcendent.

I can respect that.

But I’ve seen her from about 12 inches (mostly behind plate glass) and I think she is still one really ugly undeserving broad.

@zophu I’m glad you fell for it.

@Ben_Dover

Fell for what? There is no trickery involved here.

@YARNLADY

That looks like a pretty ordinary mountain to me.

@ipso

Don’t even get me started on Pollock. Gah!

Betsy Ross.

She did not make the Flag.

I suspect @chocolatechip is about 12 years old and has never left the town he was born in. I can’t imagine anyone older or more experienced trashing a painting universally accepted as just shy of being a World’s Wonder, painted by a genius. His @bio says says it all: “I’m pretty awesome, and modest too!”

There’s a small Rembrandt hanging in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth which I have gazed upon in wonder many times. It’s called “Portrait of an Old Jew.” If you stand right up close to it, which you’re allowed to do, you see a tiny daub of white paint near the middle of one of his eyes, than the size of this *. Yet if you stand five or six feet back, that tiny dot of paint is a glow of light that seems to be pulsing on the canvas. It’s an incredible thing to see. @chocolatechip would do well to experience something like this.

I think we are all desensitized to the most well-known works such as the Mona Lisa from the time we’re very small. I know that I wasn’t very impressed when it was finally brought up in class around the seventh grade. I had already seen it in magazines and books and even a few talking versions in Warner Bros cartoons, bugs bunny and looney toons. I finally saw it at the Louvre when I was about 30 years old and the first thing that impressed me was how small it was. It had just had about a hundred and fifty years of grime taken off of it and the colors were much more vibrant than in any pictures I’d seen up till that time. And, yes, that expression is unique, ambivalent, strange.

There are many aspects to a work this old, they are usually pregnant with rich provenance at least as interesting as the work itself. Napoleon evidently found her fascinating as he kept her secreted in his bedroom at the Tuileries Palace throughout his tenure as Emperor.

Exactly 99 years ago last week it was stolen by an Italian immigrant carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia, who took it while doing renovations at the Louvre on a Sunday when the museum was closed. This put western Europe on lockdown for weeks as nearly every police organization west of Poland vowed unprecedented cooperation to recover the painting. Perugia had been commissioned by some mastermind, but the mastermind never showed up for the exchange and payoff so Perugia was left holding the goods. Amazingly, he simply went back to his lodgings near the Louvre, stuck the rolled up painting in a suitcase, walked through streets thick with cops to the nearest Metro station and took a train back to Italy.

The French were in an uproar and there were dragnets bringing in every criminal in Paris. The world famous smart-assed, loudmouthed, bon vivant poet/art & literary critic/pornographer Guillaume Apollinaire began boisterously speculating on how the theft was accomplished while insulting the abilities of the constabulary and Louvre administration in his daily newspaper column. To his great surprise they arrested his ass and threw him in jail because he evidently had guessed details of the crime that the police had withheld from the papers. Big scandal. Real comedy at times.

Eventually Perugia, after spending a year with the Mona Lisa under his bed at his pensionate in Italy, turned himself in. They arrested him and put him in an Italian jail initially to be held for the French cops, but the Italian papers portrayed him as a hero for returning La Giaconda to her home turf and the Italians threatened to riot if he or the painting were returned to France. This allowed Perugia to negotiate a slap on the wrist and the French cops eventually left with the painting after some heavy negotiating.

Eventually, Perugia went back to France and served in the French army against Germany in WWI. He came back from the trenches a heavily decorated hero, married a French woman, had a bunch of kids and a cabinet shop and died in the 1940s. He was one lucky son of a bitch.

To me, this story was much more entertaining than viewing the painting itself and I often find this the case with works of art, antiquities and especially famous diamonds.

Jesus.

@Austinlad I suspect you are a lemming, and if all the other lemmings jumped into a turbulent river, you would follow. And if the current carried them far far away to unfamiliar places, you would not resist. And if all the lemmings went to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, upon which they would comment the likes of, “What a masterpiece this is! A work of genius from none other than a genius!”, you would, without hesitation or individual thought, agree.

@Austinlad Also my bio is obviously meant to be a joke, unless you are implying that this small glimpse into my sense of humour has somehow revealed some great flaw in my character.

If you go far enough back an event as small as someone taking a left turn instead of a right turn can change the entire landscape of today. So in that essence nothing is really truly ever overblown.

@tedd

I was thinking more on the lines of, “do you think Einstein was really the most influential physicist of all time?” Of course, that specific example would be difficult to debate.

@chocolatechip Of all time would remain to be seen. Of the last hundred years, without a doubt. In the known timeline of man, I would probably argue Newton.

Three major events have made mankind as technologically advanced as we are now. Without them a person living in the 1500’s was only marginally more productive in his lifetime than someone living in the 1500 BC’s.

Electricity.
Nuclear power.
The Micro-chip.

@tedd

Sorry, I think I may not have communicated my question very clearly. I’m asking what people/places/things/events that are held in high regard do you believe are not worthy of that status, and why?

Brilliant question. Also it’s inverse: What events in history that had remarkable effects get nearly completely ignored?

For your example, I think it’s nothing special. To me it’s an example of fantastic marketing. If you give an object, work of art – anything higher value than it has. Communicate that, others are likely to take on the suggestion and agree. If you create a stir, it grows stronger due to the social dynamics. Just think about deceased artists. That said – the works may have inherent value and they do. But is it what their marketing suggests? Some may be better than their marketing, some worse. You have artists unknown that produce masterpieces, but lack marketing skills. You have below average artists that create a stir with a smart marketing house behind them.

History is full of simplistic disconnected comments sadly. Which is why I would only join the revisionist history department – to overhaul the writings and turn it into a proper science. Following evidence from archeology, environmental sciences, phys-chem based evidence, anthropological and so forth. People tend to overstate, ignore other forces.

For example, Einstein lately discussed – or Newton. Both of them realized that they “stood on the shoulders of giants” as I think Newton said. And they were right. It was not just them, it was what was available to them through culture, writings—access. And that they decided to do with it. They’re not that unique. We have many examples of simultaneous invention. But one gets more known, and ‘history’ writes that one down. Then polarizes around that one person or event ignoring the other connections to the environment. It’s similar to the FAE (fundamental attribution error) in Psychology. If someone does something, we’re more likely to accuse him than any environmental influences – or see the connectedness of both and have a holistic understanding. And oh, let’s not forget the recent finding of Archimedes’ “the method” that pretty much proves he invented calculus before it had this name for his own purpose.

I could go on, but simply put – history is just too focused around single events, persons, populations with so far great ignorance for the surrounding factors. I prefer the holistic approach, and re-writing half of our history books and sources.

@chocolatechip So like…. things done by Republicans?

ZING

@tedd

I might have understood that if I knew anything about American politics. =P

I was going to say the hype around the death of Michael Jackson but the discussion kind of went in a different direction to the question.

@janbb

Certainly the hype was very much exaggerated; such is what the media does best. It’s funny how quickly public opinion changed after his death.

When you stop looking at art as decoration, your mind will be open. It’s not about something being “beautiful”. Historical/cultural context is crucial. But I understand your point.

@SundayKittens

I would definitely like to understand the historical/cultural context of the Mona Lisa. Can you elaborate further on this? I understand art is more than just the aesthetics, and I focus on this aspect of the Mona Lisa because it seems to be the most understood (or falsely understood) aspect of the painting. I admittedly also don’t have the knowledge to talk about historical/cultural context, so please, enlighten me.

To me, she’s significant because of the icon of art she’s become. I don’t think she’s particularly better done than any of his other works, but for some reason she’s become significant. It happens with a lot of things in the arts I’ve noticed (recently I was defending Nirvana with this argument). A sort of zeitgeist for the Renaissance.

Basically, she’s famous for being famous and that in itself is more a study of human nature than art.

Speaking of human nature, MJ FOR LIFE, SUCKAS!!!!! :)

My pet peeve is all the glory we heap on the most brutal, bloodthirsty despots and warmongers. Sure, we need to know what Alexander Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Atilla the Hun snf Napolean accomplished. But do we need to glorify them? THey were rapacious thugs who got hundreds of thousands or millions of people killed and left a long legacy of human misery in their wake. Let’s concentrate on that part of the story instead of their glory days as Dear Leader. And let’s note that in the case of every single one, all the lands they conquered were soon lost again. All the blood and treasure they squandered ended up being for naught in the long lens of history.

For that, you shouldn’t be called “The Great” unless it is followed by “Ghoul”.

9/11

The Hindenburg
33 people died out of 80+
Today if a jet liner goes down Hundreds die, no survivors. . .
The end of an enlightened (pardon the pun) air travel age. . .

@chocolatechip ordinary The picture does not do it justice. Of course, beauty is in the beholder, one famous person said “Redwoods – huh – you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”. For people who do not enjoy nature in it’s most unspoiled condition, the horror of what has been done is lost.

When you see the Mona Lisa in person and up close, you will be amazed at Leonardo’s ability to paint in 3D—his masterly command of perspective for which he was famous. The dark background, her luminous face this was long before the technique was used impressively by the artists known s the “Dutch Masters”).. Her nose and chin actually look as though they are a few millimeters forward of the eyes. She looks as though she is alive. The eyes are not dead. You can see his meticulous, minute brush strokes—the effort he put into it. She was a noble woman and the fashion of the day was the removal of the eyebrows for women of her class. In her day, she was considered a great beauty. Her steady gaze can be disconcerting, especially to a man. She is confident and gives you nothing, yet you know she has so much to give. Da Vinci was able to put all that onto a piece of poplar lumber with homemade paints. Very little of this is apparent from photographs of the painting.

Sadly, because some crazy son of a bitch attacked the painting, she now resides in a roped off glass case and the public can’t get closer to her than about 12 ft. which prevents one from enjoying the more technical aspects of the painting, such as brush strokes and technique.

@YARNLADY
As Redwoods go.
The T-Shirts here in the park gift shops, show loggers at the base of an old growth, with the caption. “Redwoods – Anything else is just a weed”. . .