Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Vincent Perugia, it can be said, was the best PR agent the Mona Lisa ever had.
The Mona Lisa is a small painting with a big story.
Itself, it is small.
It's just 77 by 53 centimetres.
And it's painted not onto canvas, but onto a panel of poplar wood.
The painting shows a seated woman from the waist up.
She's got her hands folded and she's turned slightly towards the viewer.
Behind her, there's an imaginary atmospheric landscape of winding paths and distant mountains.
The painting was begun in perhaps 1503 by none other than Leonardo da Vinci, and he continued to work on it for many years after beginning it.
The woman in the picture is usually identified as Lisa Gerardini.
Her husband was the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, so she's therefore known as La Gioconda, the feminised form of the name of her husband.
So her name was Lisa, and Mona is short for Madonna, so it actually means My Lady.
So My Lady Lisa is what Mona Lisa means.
In Italian, it's still La Gioconda, and in French, it's La Joconde.
So one way or another, even though people think nobody knows who the sitter is, it's actually in the name in many languages.
Leonardo was known for a technique called sfumato.
And what that literally means is smoked or blurred.
And Leonardo applied thin glazes to blur edges and transitions in his paintings.
And one result is that the portrait feels soft and her expression seems endlessly changeable.
And this is behind the enigmatic feel that the painting is often said to have, because it seems that her eyes and mouth are so softened that they allow for multiple readings by different viewers.
Showing 161–180 of 436 · page 9 of 22
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