C.courageous, revolutionary: a woman who hides a fierce intelligence and a refined critical spirit behind her enigmatic smile. Beyond the icon, the legend and the myth, the voice. La Gioconda speaks through Natasha Solomons’ intelligent and fluent writingauthor of many novels, including The Goldbaum And The missing husbands gallerywhich returns to the bookstore with Io, Mona Lisa, the story of the most famous portrait I know in the world but also of a woman trapped behind glass, alone, looked at but never understood over the centuries.
Natasha Solomons was born in 1980 and lives in Dorset with her husband David, an award-winning children’s writer, and two children. Her novels are translated into seventeen languages. (photo David Solomons)
From Florentine studies to the French courts of Fontainebleau and Versailles, up to the twentieth century. Between brilliant inventions, dangers of all kinds and ambiguous characters willing to do anything to possess it, Mona Lisa will pass from hand to hand, recounting her adventure and that of humanity. How did the idea for this novel come about? I had finished a novel: I usually start the next one right away, I can’t go without writing. Instead I got stuck. I had a terrible emptiness inside. I felt like I had lost my voice. I found myself looking at images of the Mona Lisa, standing in a museum, alone in her landscape, silent behind glass. I recognized my situation in her, I felt a deep connection. And I asked myself: what would he say if he could talk?
Me, Mona Lisa by Natasha Solomons, Neri Pozza, pages 352, euro 18
Do you feel alone without writing?
The reason I write is that one story connects us to another: in the dark it creates bonds. When a novel is published there is always the fear that the reader does not feel affinity and that he will fall back into the dark. Perhaps this is also the reason why I felt so attracted to the Mona Lisa and to Leonardo, who, we read in his writings, had similar feelings. In art you have to hold back something: the eye of the beholder brings the work to life. The same concept goes into literature. A book lives with its readers but for a writer it’s a terrifying process.
Why the decision to give voice not to the model but to the image of the painting?
I wanted to separate the Mona Lisa, that is the woman in the picture, from Lisa del Giocondo, the model, because it was interesting for me to think about the relationship between the two women, the relationship between the woman in the picture and Leonardo, as well as over the centuries between the Mona Lisa and the men and women around her admire her. At first the Mona Lisa looks at Lisa, so shy and modest, with horror. She finds it obtuse, banal. Throughout the novel she understands her suffering and the terrible losses she has suffered.
A very different novel from his previous ones …
Yet it seems more personal to me. I have written stories that deal with themes that on the surface may seem very close to my reality, Judaism, family, but in Me, Mona Lisa there are my feelings, my thoughts, my questions about creativity, what it means. being a woman, about aging. It seems to me that I have exposed myself a lot.
Have you ever posed for a portrait?
At my parents’ house there are two of my portraits. The first made when I was eight. I’m wearing a yellow sailor suit and I don’t recognize myself at all. In the other I am 17 years old. I am by the side of my mother and my sister. I am wearing a very short miniskirt and a low-cut T-shirt. I remember my father asked the artist to lengthen the skirt. When I look at this second painting I have a sense of myself at that age, rebellious, determined. It hangs next to a portrait taken from Berlin at the beginning of the war when my grandmother is ten. You look a lot like my daughter. It is strange to think that these portraits will live much longer than all of us.
Now that the book is finished, and its story has been told, what is your impression of La Gioconda?
It is a masterpiece that I am only now beginning to understand. It is interesting what he remembers and understands next. And this for me is an unexpected joy, the book is finished but the Mona Lisa remains. On the contrary, it is as if the true image had been returned to me, in all its splendor, far from the thousand reproductions, posters, memes, T-shirts, kitchen towels that constantly present it to us. She, the somewhat rebellious, revolutionary woman who looks directly at whoever looks at her, without ever lowering her eyes.
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