The Lie Behind Mona Lisa’s Famous Smile
How researchers found a new mystery hiding in plain sight
You’ve probably seen the Mona Lisa, a famous painting created by Leonardo Da Vinci that depicts a woman seemingly half-smiling against an earthy background. Now, however, researchers have discovered that the famous painting may be hiding a lie in plain sight.
The famous painting has intrigued and entertained people for centuries, sparking mysteries and conspiracy theories depicted in movies like National Treasure and more.
The reason the researchers say the famous painting’s smile is off? Asymmetry.
“Our results indicate that happiness is expressed only on the left side,” said the authors of the paper. “According to some influential theories of emotion neuropsychology, we here interpreted the Mona Lisa asymmetric smile as a none genuine smile, also thought to occur when the subject lies.”
The study was published recently in the April 2019 issue of the journal Cortex. Luca Marsili, MD, PhD, an instructor in neurology and rehabilitation medicine at the UC College of Medicine, was the lead author of the paper.
The study was conducted on 42 people who were asked to describe what emotion was being conveyed in chimeric images, or mirror images, of the right and left sides of Mona Lisa’s smile. Nearly 93% said that the left half of the smile conveyed happiness, while the right side saw no voted for happiness.
Voters agreed that the right side of the “smile” most likely indicated neutral emotions, disgust, or sadness.
The researchers of the study also point out the fact that their are no upper-face muscles being activated in the painting, indicating that Mona Lisa is not likely smiling as smiling causes the cheek muscles to raise and muscles around the eyes to contract.
This type of smile, coined the Duchenne smile, after the 19th century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne. Non-Duchenne smiles are the opposite, indicating a non-genuine emotion, and is often thought to occur when a subject is lying.
However, researchers have another theory about the neutral smile that Mona Lisa conveys in the famous painting.
“Considering it is unlikely that a person who sits motionless for hours to be painted is able to constantly smile in genuine happiness, the simplest explanation is that the Mona Lisa asymmetric smile is the manifestation of an ‘untrue enjoyment’ in spite of all the efforts that Leonardo’s jesters used to make in order to keep his models merry,” the researchers said. “An alternative intriguing possibility, however, is that Leonardo already knew the true meaning of asymmetric smile more than three centuries before Duchenne’s reports and deliberately illustrated a smile expressing a ‘non-felt’ emotion.”
The researchers write that if Da Vinci was aware of what an asymmetric smile was, then the half-smile that Mona Lisa dons might just be a clever cryptic message.
“While the Mona Lisa smile continues to attract attention of its observers, the true message it conveys remains elusive and many unsolved mysteries remain to be elucidated, perhaps via the knowledge of emotion neuropsychology,” the researchers concluded in their paper.
