I, Mona Lisa

by Natasha Solomons

They hasten after him. Wealth cannot insulate a man from unhappiness. The ill-fated man grieving for his beloved wife and now enraptured and enchanted by a painting. I study Leonardo through the darkness. It takes powers of divine genius to make a painting of such beauty that a man loves it as though it were a real woman. Yet, in me, he has created something else entirely.

‘Don’t console me, my darling. I don’t want it. Pain is our memory of love.’

‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark,’ replies Michelangelo.

Pablo had woken me up to colour and noise again, and now I had someone to talk to, I couldn’t bear to be abandoned to silence. He understood his power over me and gloried in it. He was the same with me as with all his women – witty, charming and diabolical. I was smitten.

Picasso was a genius, but, unlike Leonardo, he seemed to take macabre pleasure in women’s pain. He needed to inflict torment upon us in order to create his art. I was filled with repugnance. Beside Pablo, Michelangelo seemed a gentle, agreeable fellow.