Like the woman herself - was she good looking?

well maybe at the time but i dont think that if i run into this woman someday my reaction is going to be "oh the gorgeous woman!"

yeah i see what you mean.

not really attractive.

I think she'd be kinda plain and boring. But not ugly or anything.

At the time she was definately considered beautiful, but our perception of beauty has changed over the hundreds of years since that painting was done. There are loads of other women in paintings from that time who are not as beautiful as she is.

It's such a tiny painting, too. It's about half again as large as an A4 piece of paper.

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when i was going to the Louvre everyone was like 'oh its tiny' but when you go into that specific gallery all the other paintings there are MASSIVE so it seems small in comparison.

I just meant for the actual time frame. Everyone else was doing canvases the size of a house, or frescoes on chapels and Da Vinci comes along with a scrap of canvas with a beautiful lady on it.

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she looks like she parties alot. i'd like to see what she looks like after 1/2 a g of CK...

not really attractive, no

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then she dances skirt swaying in the half-light she dances white blossom in the black sky
'I need new clothes', she thinks, 'new skin, a mind I can bear to live in'.

I wouldn't call her "gorgeous" (it's too 20th century for me), but I do think that she is absolutely beautiful, just not in a conventional way.

It's fairly nice, I don't love it though.

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she probably looked okay before the restorer wiped her eyebrows off!

ming!

this one sho is

i don't think she's pretty, nor ugly either. she just seems very plain to me.



but duchamp's reproduction of L.H.O.O.Q. makes me laugh.

Yes, especially her hands. Something always seemed 'off' about her face and it turns out she doesn't have eyebrows because a bigger forehead was seen as more beautiful.

I still like Ginevra more.

edit: Looking at it at the Louvre is pretty impossible. First, it's behind glass (annoying) and second, people crowd around it trying to sneak pictures and the guards keep telling them no. Seriously, a postcard from the shop would be much better than your crappy ass flash picture of a painting covered by glass.

Ginevra looks like she'd be a cold bitch in real life.

I like Lady with an Ermine (I forget her real name), but she is so incredibly beautiful.

Edit: I think that Leonardo's depictions of Mary are lovely as well. Especially in The Annunciation and Madonna of the Rocks.

yeah i liked the Ginevra and the Lady with an Ermine.

when we saw it at the Louvre it was damn busy - but we did get one or two not too bad shots. my mum just walked right past it.

yeah it is small in comparsion in that respect.

I used to dislike the painting, right until I saw it in Louvre. It actually is amazing. There is something inexplicably attractive about it, whether it's the fact that he painted the perfect human being with the perfect proportions, himself, surreal landscape of whatever different theories say, but there is definitely some magic about it.

As for woman herself, I agree that the standards of beauty have changed significantly since then.

However there is an opinion that it's even a real woman, the real Gioconda was painted underneath (seen on x-ray).

When I look at her I don't think "woman" for some reason, more like an abstract persona, If you know what I mean. Maybe she's not meant to be "attractive" or "beautiful" in that way, as a "woman".