The Mona Lisa v. The Lady with an Ermine

From The Economist's Intelligent Life:

WHY THE MONA LISA STANDS OUT

When a work of art is considered great, we may stop thinking about it for ourselves. Ian Leslie weighs the evidence 

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2014 

In 1993 a psychologist, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of impressionism. 

Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte. 

Caillebotte's not exactly unknown. Here's Paris Street - Rainy Day, which is given a pride of place at the Chicago Art Institute second only to Seurat's Sunday in the Park with George painting.

That was what got him thinking. 

Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great? 

The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents. 

Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.

A psychological truth very near the basis of conservatism: familiarity breeds affection.

Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more. 

Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. 

The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars”, Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”

For example, art history textbooks generally are biased toward the art displayed in museums near where the professor lived. For example, the art history textbook I read at Rice U. featured numerous paintings from the Art Institute, so when I moved to Chicago, I was preconditioned to be wowed by the collection at the Art Institute, which I was.

On the other hand, in the very long run, scholars have less of a say than other creative artists in what remains of interest. The current high reputation of Norman Rockwell, for instance, has much to do with the appreciation for Rockwell offered by Spielberg and Lucas.

The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts, who is employed by Microsoft to study the dynamics of social networks, had a similar experience to Cutting in another Paris museum. After queuing to see the “Mona Lisa” in its climate-controlled bulletproof box at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos in the previous chamber, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention? 

Probably The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the Virgin of the Rocks, and Portrait of an Unknown Woman or St. John the Baptist.

When Watts looked into the history of “the greatest painting of all time”, he discovered that, for most of its life, the “Mona Lisa” languished in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the “Mona Lisa”. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo’s portrait of his patron’s wife rocketed to the number-one spot. What propelled it there wasn’t a scholarly re-evaluation, but a burglary [in 1911].

But it's not really true that the 1911 burglary is what first made the painting famous. Long before, Napoleon chose to hang the Mona Lisa in his bedroom, while Walter Pater's florid 1893 appreciation of the Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous bit of prose about painting.

Duncan Watts proposes that the “Mona Lisa” is merely an extreme example of a general rule. Paintings, poems and pop songs are buoyed or sunk by random events or preferences that turn into waves of influence, rippling down the generations. 

Personally, I'd prefer Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, in part because it looks finished. That there's no background looks like a conscious choice to highlight the luminous foreground. But Lady with an Ermine has been mostly been in off-the-beaten-path Poland (it currently resides in Krakow) for the last couple of centuries (when it hasn't been packed off to safekeeping elsewhere), while the Mona Lisa has been in the Louvre. Virtually all the ambitious artists in Europe went to the Louvre and studied what was on display.

On the other hand, the unfinished aspect of the Mona Lisa no doubt contributes to its appeal. It's fun to theorize that Leonardo was more challenged by the Mona Lisa than by the Lady and come up with reasons why that might be so.

Of course, the point is also that we are talking about two Leonardos. For over 500 years, Leonardo has been thought a magus.