Every once in a while, some bored scientist or art historian comes up with another theory about who the model for the famous painting the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, or La Joconde*) was. I have seen a few of these hypotheses laid out in shows on the Discovery channel, the National Geographic channel (or “Nat Geo”, as they have taken to pejoratively referring to themselves in a miserably failed attempt to seem cool), et. al., and they’re almost as varied and contradictory as the numerous programs these very same networks rotate around their schedules about the Shroud of Turin (Oh, and they’re just as boring, too; with tons of cliffhanger ad break segues that collapse into anticlimaxes after the programs recommence!). Some claim that it’s actually a self-portrait by da Vinci of himself as a woman, and they point to other self-portraits he made and compare it to the x-ray pictures of the original sketches on the canvas beneath the painting, and they say that the smile on the woman’s face is like that because he’s sort of slyly winking at us about it; blah, blah. Whatever. There are a bunch of other theories too, but I won’t bore you with them here. I’ll wait until I see you at a party and then corner you and talk at you endlessly about them when I’m really drunk. What’s that? You’d rather read about them here? Well too bad! (Sorry about that…)
Anyway, so now some jackass with a new Earth-shaking theory is actually going so far as to body-snatch the corpse of the woman he thinks may have been the model for the Mona Lisa. What a ghoul! (Okay, maybe the theory’s not entirely Earth-shaking, seeing as how it’s just the same woman that most everyone else says it is. But the lengths he’s willing to go to confirm it certainly are!) Then I guess he’ll reanimate her corpse and simply ask her if she was the model. That’s what I’d do. Hey, I know! If it’s really the “end times” like so many people are always theorizing that it is, he could just keep her remains at his house, and when Jesus comes back and raises all the dead, he could just ask her then. If it turns out that the Mayans are right, that should only be in about 20 months from now, and surely that’s not much longer than what he’s talking about doing will take; which is to extract her DNA and stuff (this part was mentioned on the news, but I don’t see what it has to do with the second part, which is), and give her skull to a forensic artist to rebuild with clay on top of it what her face might have looked like.
I guess that DNA part would be just to confirm the forensic artist’s work by maybe cloning the woman from her DNA and then looking at her when she grows up to see if it matches the reconstruction of the face, and then the painting. See how easy it is? (It would be more accurate too, since she could actually lie about it if they reanimated her, and it would be really hard to prove her wrong. Plus they'd be so excited about meeting her that they'd just be putty in her hands and believe everything that she says.) Maybe they could splice her genes with something else in such a way that she’d grow up faster like Dren in the movie Splice, and then they could check their results faster. But you never can tell what that might do to her physical appearance, so I suppose they really will just have to wait until she grows up to see. But to really be especially certain, they should naturally have to clone da Vinci too and wait for him to get to be about the age that he was when he painted the Mona Lisa so that we can compare the two of them, and then compare them both to the painting. Maybe they should clone her later than him if he was older, so that they get the ages to be about right for what they were when the masterpiece was painted. They could just take a picture of the clone of her when she’s the right age, I guess; but when I took painting classes in college, the professors always used to say that you should never use photographs: you should always paint from real life. Da Vinci painted from life, so obviously you couldn’t be sure of the accuracy of your results if you used a photograph for your experiment. So you really do have to clone her. And da Vinci. Take that, anti-human-cloning conservatives! This science stuff is important, and you’re just going to have to decide if the moral principles denying the legality of human cloning are really worth defending if it means you’re going to have to sit through countless numbers of future History channel (etc.) shows droning on and on in an attempt to guess who the model for the Mona Lisa was. I mean, is it really worth it? Surely God didn’t intend for you to have to suffer that much!
I guess that DNA part would be just to confirm the forensic artist’s work by maybe cloning the woman from her DNA and then looking at her when she grows up to see if it matches the reconstruction of the face, and then the painting. See how easy it is? (It would be more accurate too, since she could actually lie about it if they reanimated her, and it would be really hard to prove her wrong. Plus they'd be so excited about meeting her that they'd just be putty in her hands and believe everything that she says.) Maybe they could splice her genes with something else in such a way that she’d grow up faster like Dren in the movie Splice, and then they could check their results faster. But you never can tell what that might do to her physical appearance, so I suppose they really will just have to wait until she grows up to see. But to really be especially certain, they should naturally have to clone da Vinci too and wait for him to get to be about the age that he was when he painted the Mona Lisa so that we can compare the two of them, and then compare them both to the painting. Maybe they should clone her later than him if he was older, so that they get the ages to be about right for what they were when the masterpiece was painted. They could just take a picture of the clone of her when she’s the right age, I guess; but when I took painting classes in college, the professors always used to say that you should never use photographs: you should always paint from real life. Da Vinci painted from life, so obviously you couldn’t be sure of the accuracy of your results if you used a photograph for your experiment. So you really do have to clone her. And da Vinci. Take that, anti-human-cloning conservatives! This science stuff is important, and you’re just going to have to decide if the moral principles denying the legality of human cloning are really worth defending if it means you’re going to have to sit through countless numbers of future History channel (etc.) shows droning on and on in an attempt to guess who the model for the Mona Lisa was. I mean, is it really worth it? Surely God didn’t intend for you to have to suffer that much!
* That’s what the Italians and French, respectively, (but not respectfully!) call the Mona Lisa, even though they clearly know that it’s actually called the “Mona Lisa”. This is just another example of those Europeans on their high-horses doing their best to contradict America by naming a famous painting something other than what we call it here just so they can bash America! Let’s bomb them! Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme; so how about we just call them Freedom Fries again or something? Didn’t that sting the last time we did that to them? That’ll learn ‘em! Oh, and what will we do to teach the Italians a lesson? Well, come on; isn’t Chef Boyardee bad enough? (After all, we don’t actually hate them!)
To see a pretty feeble article about this story, go to the following link:
