The English critic, above all, is embarrassed by Pater's immortal passage 
ringing in his ears, and reminding him that anything he may write will be 
poor and shallow by comparison.  Yet the Mona Lisa is one of those works of 
art which each generation must re-interpret.   To follow M. Valery and to 
dismiss her smile as un pli de visage, is to admit defeat.  It is also to 
misunderstand Leonardo, for the Mona Lisa's smile is the supreme example of 
that complex inner life, caught and fixed in durable material, which 
Leonardo in all his notes on the subject claims as one of the chief aims of 
his art.   A quarry so shy must be approached with every artifice.  We can 
well believe Vasari's story, that Leonardo 'retained musicians who played 
and sang and continually jested in order to take away that melancholy that 
painters are used to give to their portraits"; and we must remember the 
passage in the Trattato (p 135) which describes how the face yields its 
subtlest expression when seen by evening light in stormy weather.  In this 
shunning of strong sunlight we feel once more the anti-classical, we might 
say the un-Mediterranean nature of Leonardo.  'Set her for a moment', says 
Pater, 'beside one of those white Greek goddesses, or beautiful women of 
antiquity,  and how would they be troubled by this beauty into which the 
soul with all its maladies has passed.'   In its essence Mona Lisa's smile 
is a gothic smile, the smile of the queens and saints at Rheims or Bamberg, 
but since Leonardo's ideal of beauty was touched by pagan antiquity, she is 
smoother and more fleshly than gothic saints.  They are transparent, she is 
opaque.   Their smiles are the pure illumination of the spirit;  in hers 
there is something worldly, watchful and self-satisfied.   K. Clark, 
Leonardo da Vanci, 1952. 
