Smiling over the Pyramid

Da Vinci: "La Joconde". Louvre, Paris
Michelangelo: "God, Creation of Adam". Sistine Chapel

Chen gives the puzzling Mona Lisa a sideways pyramidal composition and emphasizes this by including a desert landscape of pyramids.

Chen's eye and mind discovered four visual symbols in Western culture. The first was the pyramid, which he used to represent the essential of Egyptian civilization. Its spirit was geometric, firm, collective, immobile, hierarchic, stubborn, sealed off. It had a penchant for abstraction, stylization, and eternity.

Egyptian civilization was the cradle of Western culture, and the Renaissance, represented by this woman, was one of its distant flowerings. The hand of God, which reaches out to touch the portrait, suggests that deity had a direct role in that development.

This is the better pole of the Manichaean dualism suggested by Degraded Modern Man. Perhaps all is not lost, after all. (by Lawrance Jeppson)