V. Put the sentences in correct order to make the description of a famous picture by Paul Cezanne (1883-1885) still life with soup tureen

With Cezanne this is never the case. On this point Cezanne is more austere than Chardin, who always painted the more ordinary objects, but ones not lacking in a certain refinement of shape. Everything is sacrificed to volume an shape. The decorated and almost luxuriant soup tureen, which appears in this still life, is an exception.

…Apart from oranges, and above all the apples which he has made famous the accessories used by Cezanne is all have this in common: they were never object of luxury. The background in his pictures is always furnished; never, or hardly ever, is it neutral in shade. Among them on the left is a landscape; it is a road seen in perspective, giving a depth to the background of Cezanne’s picture.

The round jam pots, the plain plates, the pots and jugs of grit stone, ordinary bottles - those are his favorite materials.

Behind these still lifes there is always a second still life: curtains, wallpaper or furniture, serving as decoration to the objects.

(From “Impressionist Paintings in the Louver” by Germain Bazin)

Discussion Exercises

VI. Much has been said and written about “Mona Lisa” and its being “very enigmatic”. Compare your knowledge on the picture with those pieces of information you get from the articles. Do they contain anything new?

PORTRAIT OF A LADY: IDENTITY UNCERTAIN

Ben Rogers on the forces that propelled Leonardo’s picture to the top

To say that the “Portrait of Mona Lisa” is the world’s most famous painting understates it; it is in a league of its own. Asked in a recent survey for their judgment on the best painting in the world, a staggering 85 percent of Italians named “La Gioconda”, so called because, according to Vasari, she was Francesco del Giocondo’s wife. The runner-up, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world, gained only a feeble 3.6 per cent. Léger, Duchamp, Dubuffet, Rauschenberg, Magritte, Jasper Johns, Warhol and Peter Blake are a few of the better-known artists to have incorporated the painting into their work. Reproductions have been found in the walls of African hunts and Nepalese lodges. It has been used to advertise corsets, condoms, boiled sweets, false teeth, toothpaste and everything else besides. Indeed, or so Donald Sassoon persuasively estimates, a new advert using the painting appears every week.

Donald Sassoon, a history professor at Queen Mary College, London, has tried to make sense of why Leonardo’s modest painting of the woman with an oddly elusive gaze should come to occupy this Olympian position. His first step is to deny that its intrinsic aesthetic qualities alone could explain its rise to fame. As Sassoon acknowledges, the Mona Lisa is undoubtedly a masterpiece – one which makes innovative and powerful use of oil, of the contrapposto posture and the sfumato technique. In its own time, both Raphael and Vasari praised it (although Vasari never actually saw it), And many lesser artists imitated it, so that by the time of Leonardo’s death the term “jaconde” had come to denote any painting of a woman posing with her body facing sideward, her head forward, her hands visible and relaxed.

Yet for three centuries the Mona Lisa was viewed as just another Renaissance masterpiece. As late as 1849, the Louvre itself valued it at FFr90,000, well below Leonardo’s own “Virgin of the Rocks”, and paintings by Titian and Raphael.

Nor, Sassoon suggests, is this ranking obviously inappropriate. Despite the rivers of ink devoted to her beauty, Mona Lisa is not, by conventional standards, exceptionally beautiful. She has no eyebrows, her cheeks are too full, her hair thin, her eyes dull and puffy, her nose long and upper lip narrow. At best she is, as George Sand put it, a laide seduisante- seductively plain. Nor is the famously enigmatic smile so extraordinarily enigmatic. Other renaissance paintings sport similar grins, yet no great mystery is attached to them.

In the absence of any overwhelming intrinsic quality, Sassoon looks outside the painting, and identifies an array of external factors that help account for its preeminence. Some might be classed as “chance” or “enabling” causes. Thus it helped that no one knows for sure when the Mona Lisa was painted or whom it depicts; that its theme was secular rather than religious; that it should, since the French Revolution, have been in public view in the world’s greatest art museum. (Museums as Andre Malraux said, don t just exhibit masterpieces, but create them.) The fact that Leonardo ended his life in France, at Francois I’s court, has allowed the French authorities to promote the paintings as a French creation – as late 1971, it could still be claimed that Leonardo’s “message is part and parcel of the normal intellectual and artistic heritage of the French ‘the fact that it was stolen in 1911 and recovered two years later worked to raise its profile and give it an air of indestructibility.

There were also deeper and more interesting cultural forces at work. Sassoon suggests that Leonardo came, during the course of the 19^th century, to be elevated above even Michelangelo and Raphael as the greatest genius of the Renaissance. No matter that Leonardo left no enduring scientific legacy, that his inventions were impractical and unrealized; the belief that he was both a scientific and artistic genius, the Romantic ideal of a truly universal man, inevitably raised the reputation of his art, including the Mona Lisa. At the same time, the 19^th century also saw the construction of a new female type, the femme fatale- the beautiful but cruel woman-and this in turn encouraged a new interest in the Mona Lisa, who came to stand as its leading visual embodiment. The greatest French writer and art critic, Theophile Gautier, who loved to depict his selfless, heroic susceptibility to heartless enchantresses, returned again and again to sing the praises of ‘this adorable Joconde’’ and her ‘mocking’mouth.

Finally, the development of mass tourism and modern marketing in the 20^th century worked to spread her 19^th-century reputation among the masses. When the young Queen Elizabeth visited the Louvre in the 1950s, and stopping before the Mona Lisa, commented ‘very enigmatic’, she was unwittingly echoing the views of Stendhal, Gautier, Walter Pater, and other 19^th-century art critics.

At 350 pages, this history is long and its argument is at times dispiriting. Sassoon shows no great feeling for Renaissance art, or much insight into the intentions of later artists, such as Duchamp, in making use of Leonardo’s work . But then Sassoon is less interested in ‘the intrinsic ‘’qualities’’ of art works than in the forces surrounding their evaluation. And he proves to have a good eye for the follies of the art world and ironies of the culture industries.