When Brazilian artist Sōnia Menna Barreto was a teenager in São Paulo, her mother used to stay up all night long playing cards with her friends. That memory sunk into Barreto’s consciousness, surfacing in a surreal series of trompe l’oeil paintings the artist has been creating over the last few years.
Mona Lisa
Posted inNews
Was the Mona Lisa the World’s First 3D Image?
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been long studied and celebrated for its virtuosic composition and sfumato technique, its mysterious background and sitter, but two experimental psychologists in Germany are suggesting that the iconic painting may have another claim to fame: being the first 3D image in history.
Posted inOpinion
Another Day, Another Dubious Mona Lisa Discovery
Professional art history charlatan Silvano Vinceti has narrowed down his quest for the Mona Lisa’s definitely real body to one of three skeletons exhumed from Florence’s Santissima Annunziata basilica, all of which are currently being tested at the University of Bologna, the Guardian reports. The journalistic seriousness accorded to Vinceti’s antics suggests that the public hunger for arcane relics connected to famous artists is far from dying out. After all, dubious claims about the Mona Lisa, in all their sensational absence of verisimilitude, are something of the art world’s Shark Week.
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NASA Beams the Mona Lisa into Space
What do art mavens and NASA nerds have in common? Maybe not much. But late last month, the two were artfully brought together when the Mona Lisa was projected into outer space on laser pulses.
Posted inOpinion
The Mona Lisa, Genetically (and Digitally) Evolved
Roger Alsing’s project “Genetic Programming: Mona Lisa” shows simple, transparent polygons gradually evolving into one of the more subtle and intricate compositions in art history: the Mona Lisa’s face.
Posted inOpinion
Get This Season’s It Bag, Courtesy of Leonardo da Vinci
Based upon sketches drawn round the time he worked on “The Last Supper” (15th C.), an Italian fashion house is introducing a new bag designed by the original Renaissance man himself.
Posted inOpinion
A Century Later, Mona Lisa Is Still Here
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and the Financial Times observes the occasion with a fascinating feature article that tells the tale of the theft of what was (then as now) the world’s most famous work of art
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading … Banksy on UK phone-tapping scandal, Hirst-a-palooza at Gagosian Galleries worldwide, affordable Warhols, what do you do with a stolen art work, Sam Maloof, Hans Hoffmann as art teacher, how the “Mona Lisa”‘s became famous and the problem with “minorities.”
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading explores the restoration of earthquake-damaged Haitian murals, an archeological mystery in West Asia, the 18th C toilette tradition, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on pandrogeny, connecting the dots on Mona Lisa, the Banksy app, the year’s worst first sentences, cool iPhone cases and even Death has a generational divide.
Posted inOpinion
Gagosian, Basquiat…Get Shout Out From Kanye & Jay-Z
And art continues its march into mainstream pop culture … with the newly released/leaked (who can tell anymore) Kanye West track featuring Jay-Z, “That’s My Bitch,” which includes the following artful references to Basquiat, Picasso, Mona Lisa, and Larry Gagosian.