Lisa Gherardini Visits the Moon

Left, Initial transfer. Right, Image with laser-communicated corrections.

On January 18, it was widely reported that NASA’s scientists had successfully beamed a picture of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a powerful spacecraft which has been orbiting the moon since 2009. NASA claimed that it was testing the technology of laser communications in deep space, and that its effective transfer of the image was a major advance for interplanetary spacecraft.

Thinking of the lone Mona Lisa, out there circling the moon, I imagine her reception in that alien region. Perhaps ET art historians are already on the case-- worrying over the image, analyzing the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic expression, debating the model’s true identity. Are they trying to decide whether it is in fact a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, rather than Isabella of Naples, or Caterina Sforza, or Cecilia Gallerani, or Isabella d’Este? Or are they wondering whether the image that dazzles and puzzles them is perhaps a self-portrait of the great Leonardo himself?

I’m curious about how these art-deprived ETs would react if, as a follow-up, instead of another single painting, we decided to send a truly comprehensive representation of our globe’s art works. If, for example, we were to send them, via digital images, the entire contents of the Louvre, or another major art museum. Would they be overwhelmed with admiration, stunned by our skill and aesthetic taste, and, longing to see the real thing, would they be inspired to immediately jump on the next space vehicle and become our first extra-mundane tourists?

But what if we were to send out art works that displayed the more dismal aspects of life on our planet. For many years, political artists here on earth have used projections as a type of powerful urban guerilla tactic. I’m thinking, for instance, of  Krzysztof Wodiczko, who since the 1980s has used ephemeral images, projected onto public buildings and monuments, as a means of highlighting social and political problems. Such projections could probably travel far into space via the new laser technology.

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Public Projection on Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 1988

And perhaps it would even be useful to send S.O.S. messages about our political stalemates and social distresses to other worlds. How marvelous if someone out there, on the shoulder of Orion or in some black galaxy gazillions of miles away, looking down on our poor, tormented earth and perceiving our woes-- our perpetual wars, our unending international conflicts, our mindless culture of violence, our starving millions, our looming climate crises, our terrible inequalities of wealth, privilege and opportunity-- perhaps some stranger out there will know how to solve our seemingly insoluble problems, know better than we, caught up in our troubles, seem able to know for ourselves. 

From Dr. Johnson to Un Ballo in Maschera

I’ve always liked works that dare to blend disparate elements and/or styles. It’s remotely possible that my interest in “discordia concors” grows out of some irregular childhood experience, but I rather think it dates back to my years in grad school when I fell in love with Metaphysical poetry. Samuel Johnson’s famous description of those works (“the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) was not meant kindly, but did capture a quality of the poetry. What Johnson failed to recognize was that, in the best of them, in the works, for example, of Donne, Marvell or Herbert, that violent yoking produced thrilling effects.

The danger, of course, is that a reckless heterogeneity, whether in poetry or prose, will result in an incoherent mess. But when the mix succeeds, it’s exciting. Take David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a brilliant instance of “discordia concors.” Mitchell’s novel boldly combines six disparate narratives set in different historical periods, ranging from the nineteenth century to the post-apocalyptic future. The genre of each story is different, each has a unique voice, and each breaks off at a cliff-hanging point, only to be completed in reverse order in the novel’s second half. There are subtle links between tales-- a repeated name, a reference to a previous character. The novel’s ascending-descending structure is its major oddity, but that complicated structure is precisely what functions to unify the dissimilar elements.

 Recently, I saw David Alden’s surreal production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Metropolitan Opera. It was an eye-opening, if not entirely satisfactory, instance of operatic “discordia concors.” Alden describes the opera as a “bizarre combination of serious political material, high Italian melodrama based around the hackneyed stuff of marital infidelity, and an almost operetta-like lightness of being.” He thinks of it as “experimental and dislocated” and unlike Verdi’s other masterpieces.

The dislocations are built into the libretto. On the one hand, there's lyric romance involving a feckless, love-obsessed monarch, a guilty wife, a brazen fortune-teller and an irate cuckold. This story is awkwardly joined to an unrelated, long-simmering royal assassination plot. The tale’s sinister finale occurs not in deep darkness, but at a frivolous masked ball. And not only the story line is disjunctive. Verdi’s heterogeneous score is unsettled and unsettling. It combines haunting, grand-opera love-arias, duets and a superb quintet with stinging passages of coloratura mockery and frisky scenes of operetta-like farce.

In Alden’s production, Verdi’s musical discordances are underlined rather than glided over. They are made more salient by the production’s taut film noir ambience, its ambiguous and incongruous costumes, and a curious minimalist set-- the latter dominated by a huge reproduction of the Louvre's ceiling painting of Merry-Joseph Blondel’s The Fall of Icarus. All this “discordia” takes its toll. The night I saw the performance, much of the singing was good, some even splendid. Yet the emotional impact of Verdi’s magnificent music felt somewhat vitiated, as was the power of the opera’s tragic ending. At the end, I came away less than moved, though I was nevertheless delighted, amused, and pleased by Alden’s fresh approach.