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Mona Lisa not well!

Aitch

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Not sure if this should be here or in the Medicine section...

Anyway, according to some expert, La Giaconda suffered from high colesterol.

I suspect that the experts may be reading too much into these paintings. Artists are known to filter what goes down onto the canvas (or panel, in the case of the Mona Lisa); not all portraits are 'warts and all' and may not have enough detail or accuracy to make such a diagnosis.

But I could be wrong. :eek:
 
I remember someone many years back suggesting a model in a famous renaissance painting might have had breast cancer.
 
I think there is a lot of wishful thinking and/or overinterpretation going on. For example the right hand of La Gioconda seems pretty normal if you account for the possibility that the artist had a bit of a problem painting the area where thumb and fingers separate.
 
Moss said:
I think there is a lot of wishful thinking and/or overinterpretation going on. For example the right hand of La Gioconda seems pretty normal if you account for the possibility that the artist had a bit of a problem painting the area where thumb and fingers separate.
Click to expand...

I don't accept that Leonardo, a master anatomist and painter, "had a a bit of a problem" with a specific area of the human body; nor do I accept the cited academic's belief that she had a fatty tumor there. Both claims are equally spurious and unsupportable.

I'm looking at my hand as I type this, placed in the same position as the subject's, and it's doing the same thing. That's just what the interossei doraslis muscle does.
 
Some diseases can be diagnosed from paintings, like goiters. Before iodized salt they were pretty common, and even considered 'normal'.
 
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