Comparation

What could you comment on these pictures?

Mona Lisa - Leonardo Da Vinci


Thiếu nữ bên hoa huệ - Tô Ngọc Vân (should I translate it into English as: The lady next to the lily - TNV ????)


Though Mona Lisa is famous around the world, I think this Vietnamese picture is nicer. If Mona Lisa hadn''t had that enigmatic smile, she would have never been famous like that! Look at the Vietnamese lady! He he, no secret, but thoughtful, right?

I will translate some documents about these 2 pictures and post here later. I really want to share and.... to practice English with all of you, he he

Those pictures are great and fantastic. Each has its own beauty. I like both

Thieu nu ben hoa hue (The lady next to the lily???)
Perhaps the art work ?oThieu nu ben hoa huê? (TNBHH) by the late painter Mr. To Ngoc Van (TNV) is very farmiliar with a lot of people but does anyone know that it?Ts just one of the copies from this masterpieces, while the original one got a really interesting fate?
The ?oTNBHH? was painted by Mr.TNV in 1943 (2 years before joining the Resistance). At that time the painting hadn?Tt been considered as an importance in his life-work, so when he left Hanoi to evacuate (Dec 1946), he just took some sketches along, and all the rest of them were still at the art shop Yet Kieu (Hanoi) (including the ?oTNBHH?). ?oLeaving and never getting back?, the painter ?" soldier named TNV sacrified at Lung Lo pass, in the Dien Bien Phu campaign (1954). Therefore, a lot of his paintings were dispersive. About the ?oTNBHH?, according to Mr. To Ngoc Thanh (TNV?Ts son), one of the relative begged for it to commemorate his father, after that this man sold it to a collector named Duc Minh.
In 1958, Vietnam fine arts museum (VFAM) borrowed Mr. Duc Minh the ?oTNBHH? from his collection in order to join in ?o12 Socialist countries?Ts fine arts exhibit? (with some of other paintings) which was organised in Soviet, Hungary, Poland,? (Hungarian had taken a photo of this original to put in the catalogue). When the exhibit finished, VFAM asked Mr. Nguyen Van Thien (a painter) to copy this picture and show there, but the Museum hasn?Tt noticed that it?Ts a copy. (Notes: The ?oTNBHHs? which have been printed in some internal art books were from this copy, also haven?Tt had any notice)
Mr.TNV?T student- Mr. Luu Cong Nhan contemplated this original picture at Mr. Duc Minh ?~s house many times, he recognised that Mr.TNV painted the ?oTNBHH? by knife (so-called ?ocutô?), his talent was expressed by each line of ?ocutô? in order to set off the flexible and purified appearance on the tra***ional dress (I shouldn?Tt translate the word ?oaodai? into English, should I?), the lithe and fascinating curve on the girl?Ts thigh and especially, he scrape the top layer of paint to reveal the blush on her cheeks (Nhân di?n 'ào hoa tỈỈng ánh h"ng = Peoplê?Ts faces are as red as the peach blossoms? ). As copying, Mr. NVT couldn?Tt express all of these polished characters. In 1970, there was a Hungarian painter seemed suspecting the art work in VFAM until he saw the original one at Mr.DM?Ts house, then he had to say: ?oHow masterly!?
After that exhibit, the painting ?oTNBHH? (original) hasn?Tt been appeared until confirmed that it has been belonged to an overseas Vietnamese Ha Thuc Can and this man took it out of Vietnam (Mr. To Ngoc Thanh also confirmed that it?Ts right!). In the book ?oVietnamese current arts in 100 years? by Mr. Ha Thuc Can?Ts Dong Son Gallery also got the ?oTNBHH? but named it as ?oThe lady and the lily?.
In the beginning of Mar 2003, fine arts speacialists and antiquarians in Ho Chi Minh was debating that Mr.HTC sold the ?oTNBHH? to a gallery on Dong Du street (dis.1) with the dizzy price of $75000. If so, how unusual this case is! ?oLost jewel returns to its owner?, and the painting?Ts price is also a new record for Vietnamese paintings (The old record was the lacquer one named ?oVuon xuan Trung-Nam-Bac? by the late painter Mr. Nguyen Gia Tri was bought by HCM peoplê?Ts committee at the price of 600 millions VND).
(I translated this from:
http://www.hn-ams.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-6572.html
. He he, if u don?Tt understand my English, u may read it there, then help me to correct ha , thanks a lot.

About The Mona Lisa, I have a lot of information about it. Now I just quote some of them. (In fact, I started to look for the info about this painting and its story after reading the Da Vinci Code)
Mona Lisa - La Joconde
Portrait of Mona Lisa (1479-1528), also known as La Gioconda, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo; 1503-06 (150 Kb); Oil on wood, 77 x 53 cm (30 x 20 7/8 in); Musee du Louvre, Paris
This figure of a woman, dressed in the Florentine fashion of her day and seated in a visionary, mountainous landscape, is a remarkable instance of Leonardo''''s sfumato technique of soft, heavily shaded modeling. The Mona Lisa''''s enigmatic expression, which seems both alluring and aloof, has given the portrait universal fame.
Reams have been written about this small masterpiece by Leonardo, and the gentle woman who is its subject has been adapted in turn as an aesthetic, philosophical and advertising symbol, entering eventually into the irreverent parodies of the Dada and Surrealist artists. The history of the panel has been much discussed, although it remains in part uncertain.
According to Vasari, the subject is a young Florentine woman, Monna (or Mona) Lisa, who in 1495 married the well-known figure, Francesco del Giocondo, and thus came to be known as ``La Gioconda''''''''. The work should probably be dated during Leonardo''''s second Florentine period, that is between 1503 and 1505. Leonardo himself loved the portrait, so much so that he always carried it with him until eventually in France it was sold to FranĐois I, either by Leonardo or by Melzi.
From the beginning it was greatly admired and much copied, and it came to be considered the prototype of the Renaissance portrait. It became even more famous in 1911, when it was stolen from the Salon Carrâ in the Louvre, being rediscovered in a hotel in Florence two years later. It is difficult to discuss such a work briefly because of the complex stylistic motifs which are part of it. In the essay ``On the perfect beauty of a woman'''''''', by the 16th-century writer Firenzuola, we learn that the slight opening of the lips at the corners of the mouth was considered in that period a sign of elegance. Thus Mona Lisa has that slight smile which enters into the gentle, delicate atmosphere pervading the whole painting. To achieve this effect, Leonardo uses the sfumato technique, a gradual dissolving of the forms themselves, continuous interaction between light and shade and an uncertain sense of the time of day.
More....
There is another work of Leonardo''''s which is perhaps even more famous than The Last Supper. It is the portrait of a Florentine lady whose name was Lisa, Mona Lisa. A fame as great as that of Leonardo''''s Mona Lisa is not an unmixed blessing for a work of art. We become so used to seeing it on picture postcards, and even advertisements, that we find it difficult to see it with fresh eyes as the painting by a real man portraying a real woman of flesh and blood. But it is worth while to forget what we know, or believe we know, about the picture, and to look at it as if we were the first people ever to set eyes on it. What strikes us first is the amazing degree to which Lisa looks alive. She really seems to look at us and to have a mind of her own. Like a living being, she seems to change before our eyes and to look a little different every time we come back to her. Even in photographs of the picture we experience this strange effect, but in front of the original in the Louvre it is almost uncanny. Sometimes she seems to mock at us, and then again we seem to catch something like sadness in her smile. All this sounds rather mysterious, and so it is; that is so often the effect of a great work of art. Nevertheless, Leonardo certainly knew how he achieved this effect, and by what means. That great observer of nature knew more about the way we use our eyes than anybody who had ever lived before him. He had clearly seen a problem which the conquest of nature had posed to artists - a problem no less intricate than the one of combining correct drawing with a harmonious composition. The great works of the Italian Quattrocento masters who followed the lead given by Masaccio have one thing in common: their figures look somewhat hard and harsh, almost wooden. The strange thing is that it clearly is not lack of patience or lack of knowledge that is responsible for this effect. No one could be more patient in his imitation of nature than Van Eyck; no one could know more about correct drawing and perspective than Mantegna. And yet, for all the grandeur and impressiveness of their representations of nature, their figures look more like statues than living beings. The reason may be that the more conscientiously we copy a figure line by line and detail by detail, the less we can imagine that it ever really moved and breathed. It looks as if the painter had suddenly cast a spell over it, and forced it to stand stock-still for evermore, like the people in The Sleeping Beauty. Artists had tried various ways out of this difficulty. Botticelli, for instance, had tried to emphasize in his pictures the waving hair and the fluttering garments of his figures, to make them look less rigid in outline. But only Leonardo found the true solution to the problem. The painter must leave the beholder something to guess. If the outlines are not quite so firmly drawn, if the form is left a little vague, as though disappearing into a shadow, this impression of dryness and stiffness will be avoided. This is Leonardo''''s famous invention which the Italians call sfumato- the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination.
If we now return to the Mona Lisa, we may understand something of its mysterious effect. We see that Leonardo has used the means of his ''''sfumato'''' with the utmost deliberation. Everyone who has ever tried to draw or scribble a face knows that what we call its expression rests mainly in two features: the corners of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. Now it is precisely these parts which Leonardo has left deliberately indistinct, by letting them merge into a soft shadow. That is why we are never quite certain in what mood Mona Lisa is really looking at us. Her expression always seems just to elude us. It is not only vagueness, of course, which produces this effect. There is much more behind it. Leonardo has done a very daring thing, which perhaps only a painter of his consummate mastery could risk. If we look carefully at the picture, we see that the two sides do not quite match. This is most obvious in the fantastic dream landscape in the background. The horizon on the left side seems to lie much lower than the one on the right.
Consequently, when we focus on the left side of the picture, the woman looks somehow taller or more erect than if we focus on the right side. And her face, too, seems to change with this change of position, because, even here, the two sides do not quite match. But with all these sophisticated tricks, Leonardo might have produced a clever piece of jugglery rather than a great work of art, had he not known exactly how far he could go, and had he not counterbalanced his daring deviation from nature by an almost miraculous rendering of the living flesh. Look at the way in which he modelled the hand, or the sleeves with their minute folds. Leonardo could be as painstaking as any of his forerunners in the patient observation of nature. Only he was no longer merely the faithful servant of nature. Long ago, in the distant past, people had looked at portraits with awe, because they had thought that in preserving the likeness the artist could somehow preserve the soul of the person he portrayed. Now the great scientist, Leonardo, had made some of the dreams and fears of these first image-makers come true. He knew the spell which would infuse life into the colors spread by his magic brush.
Now u need to massage ur eyes dear!
Được FJX sửa chữa / chuyển vào 15:38 ngày 27/11/2005

if u can''t see the picture above, u may click here:
http://www.studiolo.org/Mona/images/MovieLandWaxWorksML-A.jpg
And what do you think about these 2 pictures?(I don''t know why it''s denied as I was uploading, just click to view)
http://library.thinkquest.org/13681/media/monamorf.gif
http://www.unmuseum.org/leomona.jpg
Mona Lisa''s secret is that the background behind her face is uneven! Da Vinci painted the horizon line on the left significantly lower than the right. This was a little trick Da Vinci played. By lowering the countryside on the left, he made Mona Lisa look much larger from the left side than from the right side. A little Da Vinci inside joke. Historically, the concepts of male and female have assigned sides - left is female and right is male. Because Da Vinci was a big fan of feminine principles, he made Mon aLisa look more majestic from the left than the right.
It is rumoured that the Mona Lisa is a picture of Da Vinci in drag.
Da Vinci was a prankster and computerized analysis of the Mona Lisa and Da Vinci''s self-portrait comfirm some startling points of congruency in their faces. His Mona Lisa is neither male nor female. It carries a subtle message of androgyny. It is a fusing of both.
Da Vinci left a big clue that the painting was supposed to be androgynous. If you''ve ever heard of the egyptian god named amon. The God of masculine fertility.
Amon is represented as a man with a ram''s head, and his promiscuityand curved horns are related to our modern ***ual slang horny.
His counterpart was the egyptian goddess of fertility known as Isis
whose ancient pictogram was once called L''ISA.
Amon L''isa
Not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female.
that is the reason for Mona Lisa''s knowing smile.