The Mona Lisa syndrome is the name given to the condition of the idiopathic peripheral facial palsy occurring in the third trimester of pregnancy or the postpartum period. Partial motor recovery due to wallerian regeneration and related synkinesis of the facial muscles would explain the enigmatic half smile of the humble ‘Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo’ (Mona Lisa), the woman who was portrayed (after her pregnancy) in the Da Vinci’s masterpiece.
The husband of the woman commissioned the portrait after her pregnancy but Leonardo never delivered it to him. Actually, Leonardo da Vinci worked on this painting for a long time, over many years, after the commission.
For reasons that remain unknown, the idiopathic Bell’s facial palsy is slightly more frequent in pregnant women than in the normal population. I examined some women with this condition who had particularly unaesthetic synkinesis and contractions of facial muscles.
Actually, I saw the Gioconda’s smile only sometimes and only in happy healthy women.
My personal experience seems to agree with the results of a famous study who applied facial recognition technology of basic emotions to the Mona Lisa’s face. The results of that study showed that Mona Lisa’s smile was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry and less than 1 percent neutral.
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Leonardo will always attract seekers!
When I was in Paris 2005, I could not visit the Louvre. But the Louvre came with sound recording equipment, which were kindly provided by the French. Found the “Mona Lisa” and began recording background sound created numerous visitors who came to see the masterpiece. The logic was simple. Allow myself to be noted that any masterpiece has the property of highly structured information field. Man – this is also, at its basis, the field structure. There is a contact of two field structures – human and masterpiece. This is probably the power of art. The sounds published the people who were in the masterpiece (talk, the shuffling of feet, etc.) were very valuable to me, they were correlated associated with him. Subjecting these records complicated transformation process, I managed to get some incredible sound. Many are led into shock – these sounds there is a clear identification with the portrait of “Mona Lisa.” Similar records I’ve made in the famous sculpture of Venus. As a result, based on these records, I had three works – “Knowledge”, “Flow” and “Communication”. Composer Mihail Afanasiev