“What began as a portrait of a silk merchant’s young wife became a quest to portray the complexities of human emotion, made memorable through the mysteries of a hinted smile, and to connect our nature to that of our universe. The landscape of her soul and of nature’s soul are intertwined. Ginevra de’ Benci was made by a young artist with astonishing skills of observation. The Mona Lisa is the work of a man who had used those skills to immerse himself in a lifetime of intellectual passions. The inquiries chronicled on his thousands of notebook pages—of light rays striking curved objects, dissections of human faces, geometrical volumes being transformed into new shapes, flows of turbulent water, the analogies between the earth and human bodies—had helped him fathom the subtleties of depicting motion and emotion. “His insatiable curiosity, his restless leaps from one subject to another, have been harmonized in a single work,” Kenneth Clark wrote of the Mona Lisa. “The science, the pictorial skill, the obsession with nature, the psychological insight are all there, and so perfectly balanced that at first we are hardly aware of them.”1 Isaacson, Walter. Leonardo da Vinci (p. 477). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. Isaacson, Walter. Leonardo da Vinci (p. 477). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. Isaacson, Walter. Leonardo da Vinci (pp. 476-477). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. ”
