Art Historians Prove Mona Lisa Was All Knocked Up; Dan Brown Soils Himself At The Thought Of The Possibilities

I don't actually find this all that fascinating, but apparently it's a big deal:

Researchers studying 3-D images of the “Mona Lisa� say she was probably either pregnant or had just given birth when she sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece. The clue was something she wore...Scans turned up evidence of a fine, gauzy veil around Mona Lisa’s shoulders — a garment women of the Italian Renaissance wore when they were expecting, a leading French museum researcher, Michel Menu, told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday.

A wry grin spread across Robert Langdon's face as he stared at the 3-D infrared image in front of him. Here at last was the incontrovertible proof he'd been looking for. Throughout its history, the Catholic Church had always tried to cover up the fact that women were the child-bearing half of the human race; how many people, he wondered, knew that Opus Dei had blackmailed Arnold Schwartzenegger into making Junior? Sure, it had been a crude cinematic piece of male-birth propaganda, but it had served up the same tired old lie that they'd been disseminating for centuries: Men were better at having babies than women.

Langdon wondered how many of the people with him in the room realized that female pregnancy had always been associated with the sacred feminine. From the crude mud huts of Mali to the daub-and-wattle dwellings of Neolithic Britain, the mystery of childbirth had always been closely tied to the distaff half of the species. Until the Church had come to power, at any rate.

He stared at the picture and wondered why his creator, Dan Brown, had made him such a big pussy. Could it be that Brown really wanted to be a woman himself?

Which, for what it's worth, is my theory.

posted by AndrewR at 08:01 PM

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