'I, Mona Lisa' by Natasha Solomons

Like many people, I'm a sucker for a story with a great concept.  When Natasha Solomons visited my area recently to talk about 'I, Mona Lisa', I looked up the book and was immediately intrigued.  

Painted Lady

In 'I, Mona Lisa', the world's most famous portrait is given a voice.  And what a voice it is.  Sharp and funny but also sad and mournful, La Giaconda describes her history in a way no one else could.  Between the first life-giving brush strokes of her beloved creator, Leonardo da Vinci, and her current resting place behind protective glass in the Louvre, she has experienced centuries of power struggles, thefts, artistic competitiveness, maltreatment, and, ultimately, celebrity and secular deification as a wonder of the Renaissance.  She has waited more than 500 years to tell you her side of the story, and here it finally is.      

Female Gaze

There's more going on in this book that I realised on page one.  I thought this would be a reasonably straight-forward piece of historical fiction, perhaps with some romance and nice frocks thrown in, which might help me learn more about art and the Mona Lisa.  Actually, there's a lot about this story which relates to current concerns, especially objectification, porn and the use of pictures of women - taken with or without their consent - for the sexual gratification of men.  Mona Lisa's roles as an object of desire, a symbol of beauty and a possession for the powerful raise some interesting parallels with challenges we're facing today.

The Pain in Painting

Enforced passivity and grief are powerful forces in 'I, Mona Lisa'.  Solomons was wise to give her subject a sharp sense of humour, a coping mechanism that gets Mona Lisa and her readers though a story riddled with abuse and sadness.  Sentience gives Mona Lisa a voice, but it also gives her the knowledge that one day her beloved Leonardo - one of few geniuses who can hear her - will die, leaving her unprotected and unable to influence her own destiny.  Her heartbreak at his loss, then the wanton destruction of her sister portrait, Leda, (The Spartan queen whose beauty so obsessed Zeus that he raped her in the form of a swan... don't get me started.) are gut-wrenchingly tragic.  It's a credit to Solomons' skill that I found myself so moved by the imagined emotions of an inanimate object.

More than She Seems

There is so much more I could say about 'I, Mona Lisa', but this is a blog post, not an essay.  I've not got the space to talk about paintings as national symbols or the book's evocative sense of place - although I think imagining the hot Italian countryside was made easier by this year's heatwaves.  There's a lot more going on than the reverse-Pygmalion that I expected, and I got so much more out of it than I anticipated.  I'll never look at that enigmatic smile, or indeed any other painting, in quite the same way again.

Now, what next..?

'I, Mona Lisa' by Natasha Solomons was published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2022.  This review is based on a hardback copy borrowed from the library.  Thank you to the publisher for providing the above cover image.  Note that this book features masturbation and other sexual activity, descriptions of mother and baby autopsies, and violence, so may not suit all readers.