"I've felt bad about people who bought the Lisa for a long time.
Still – theories about the Mona Lisa are fun, and there is no harm in them.
When word got out about the Mona Lisa's disappearance, France went into mourning.
Contrary to the impression you may have formed from today's news stories, this is not the most amazing recent discovery about the Mona Lisa.
How would we feel about the Mona Lisa if we had the top of her head, her body and her hands, but were missing her enigmatic smile?
The problem was time, he said, as they were due to leave for Paris that evening "to somehow insult the Parisians, something about the Mona Lisa and Italy".
Clooney was asked if he planned to go to the British Museum, where the sculptures are kept, but said they had to head to France to "insult the Parisians" with "something about the Mona Lisa and Italy".
The only wartime documents available about the Mona Lisa say that on 27 August 1939 it was packed in a specially-marked crate, tailor-made in 1938, of double-thick poplar wood.
"In validating the idea we found a young lady who was born blind, and she is an artist and a musician, and she had heard about the Mona Lisa her whole life and she'd never had any kind of experience about what it really means," he says.
If you do not have complete visual access through the representation (from any acceptable angle) to the full tableau, you may be said to lack full acquaintance with the work through the representation, and your consequent aesthetic beliefs about the Mona Lisa may be discounted accordingly.
About the Author: Lisa and George Rajna met online in 2007 and started traveling together internationally almost immediately.
