I, Mona Lisa

by Natasha Solomons

This is a monarch’s display of power.’ ‘Yet it’s very similar to a child’s tantrum.’

I had endured and survived.

I listened to the curators discuss my venerable age and the fragility of my woodwork and the historic damage inflicted by worms and beetles and grotesque varnish by ignorant restorers, and I thought how little they knew. I have endured centuries of assaults by men and miasmas and insects. I am chipped, scuffed, eaten and I have suffered, yet I am unbroken.

Leonardo had painted me and together we changed how everyone saw the world. Art wasn’t the same after me.

Whether I saw him in a week, or month or even a year, I would be satisfied. It was a relief because, as with all my friends, there’d come a time when I would no longer see him again.

Leonardo has become old. There is a fragility to him. He is like a painting that has been restored again and again but I can see the cracks in the panel and at some point the picture must warp and snap, broken beyond repair.

jasmine and laurel for a future king and poet.

He wants all the dissection drawings and writings to be published together. Surgeons need to study his work, to examine his discoveries and learn from them in order to understand the human machine. From death, we can learn about life.

I look at them both side by side and I understand that we are a family. Every day with one another is more precious than the layers of gold leaf in the studio.

I accept human flaws and frailties. I love a man.

A trip to Paris was not complete without a visit to see me. I was like the obligatory maiden aunt with whom one must take tea when in town.

Art is the eternal part of us. Leonardo da Vinci is dead, but as I look at his landscape rendered in exquisite beauty all around me, I catch a glimpse of a piece of his soul, his very essence.