posted on 21 Jan 2018

Smile by Mary Hoffman

Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting that we know as the Mona Lisa is probably one of the best known artworks in the world. Even those who haven’t had the chance to see the painting in the flesh know about the legendary smile on the face of the woman sitting for the artist. There must have been acres of print dedicated to trying to describe or capture just what that facial expression tells us about the artist and the artist’s model.

In this latest offering from the Barrington Stoke stable, Mary Hoffman’s Smile  takes an engagingly different approach to the painting and its subject. The author gives us a pretty big hint about what we’re going to encounter here because she’s sub-titled here book The story of the original Mona Lisa  but this isn’t a painstaking piecing together of some fragments of history. What we get in fact is an intimate, imaginative recreation of the life and thoughts of the young woman who would become immortally famous as Mona Lisa.

The story is largely fictional but it’s based on those fragments we do know to be true and some interesting original speculation by Hoffman who gives us an insight into her research in a useful and very interesting final note at the end of the book:

I have made the story of Smile up, apart from facts of births, deaths and marriages.

You’re not going to find explosive action and thrills here. What we get is the life of a young girl who grows into a teenager, marries and, like so many women of that time, had child after child, some of who flourish and some who don’t. This is a peep into the domestic life of women growing up in late 15th century Italy (actually 1500 is a key date that Lisa’s life straddles) and Hoffman cunningly and skilfully smuggles in a whopping great history lesson that younger readers will absorb without groaning. She even manages to introduce her readers to the politics of the day – this is Florence when the Dominican friar, Savonarola, was whipping up an austere religious backlash against the blooming, mercantile Renaissance taking place in the city.

Death, disappointment and female oppression were facts of the day and Hoffman doesn’t try to dodge these issues but equally, she doesn’t dwell on them. She’s also confident enough to introduce the topic of homosexuality without feeling she has to apologise for it being there.

Of course, the climax of the book is Lisa’s time sitting for her painting once her husband had commissioned it. We also get plenty of information about the rivalry between Leonardo and Michelangelo and Hoffman allows us an insight into this by making both artists friends of Lisa and giving Leonardo a (fictional) previous meeting with ‘lovely Lisa’ when she was just a child.

This isn’t a book designed to teach history but like all the best stories it opens up a world for the reader that might otherwise seem boring or forbidding without having someone to identify with and care about.

This is history that is made to live and it’s peopled by characters from a distant time and place you can believe might have been a lot like us.

 

Terry Potter

January 2018