FOR THE LOVE OF MONA LISA

Detroit Free Press- Monday, August 1, 2005

by Erin Chan, Free Press Staff Writer
Photos by J. Kyle Keener/Detroit Free Press



The Print Gallery in Southfield is home to all kinds of Mona
Lisa items,including a switch plate, top left, and a bar of soap,
bottom right.		 Southfield
gallery owner
shares her
favorite portrait
with the masses
in a new exibit
that opens today		 Diane Shipley DeCillis meant the Mona Lisa to symbolize a kind of proletarian calling card for her gallery, a way to say: “Art lovers of the world, unite!”
That was two decades ago.
Now, DeCillis has used the famed painting of the brunette woman with the enigmatic smile to give her Southfield store, The Print Gallery, an identity- and international recognition.
Today, DeCillis will unveil the exhibit “Mona Lisa Mania” at the gallery. The exhibit includes a 44 inch by 62 inch Mona Lisa done as a paint-by-numbers portrait. This month, “Mona Poetica” (Mayapple $16.50), an anthology of poetry about the Mona Lisa co-edited by DeCillis, will make its debut.
And on August 28th, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), will air an hour- long special on the Mona Lisa with five minutes of so-called punchy footage featuring DeCillis, her gallery and her affinity for the masterpiece, according to Peter Newman, a BBC director.
(Newman, who is managing the television shoot, says it is unlikely the broadcast will be available to American viewers.)
De Cillis first showed her love of the Mona Lisa in the 1980’s with a few images on business cards and a scattering of prints at her gallery, which she opened on Northwestern Highway in 1979. Diane Shipley DeCillis, 54, of West Bloomfield, looks through a Mona Lisa cutout at her gallery in Southfield.
Her relationship blossomed into commissions for aprons and T- shirts with playful images, like the Mona Lisa eating spaghetti and meatballs and shouting “Mangia!”- “Eat!” in Italian.
Then DeCillis began to study the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci and became so intimate with it that she began referring to the painting as a person.
“No matter who you are or where you go, everybody knows who the Mona Lisa is,” says DeCillis, 54, of West Bloomfield. “She has become a symbol of the masses to me”. In 1998, DeCillis created a web site- www.monalisamania.com- to give fans a forum to share theories about the painting.
Four years ago, the site nabbed a mention by Donald Sassoon in his book, “Becoming Mona Lisa” (Harcourt 2001; $16.00), which has become a sensation among Mona Lisa lovers akin to Dan Brown’s best- seller “The Da Vinci Code,” which also mentions the painting.
Kelly McGuire, an employee at The Print Gallery who helps run the Web site, says it averages 1.3 million hits per month. Born with tousled brown locks that echo those of the Mona Lisa, DeCillis has become so immersed in the portrait the no longer considers the Mona Lisa snow globe or Mona Lisa mask or Mona Lisa trophy in her office novelties.
“At this point, she’s like a family member,” DeCillis says.
Diane Shipley DeCillis keeps this Mona Lisa snow globe in her office.
The Mona Lisa has managed to stay a hit for an estimated 502 years. Pop artist Andy Warhol made several screen prints of the Mona Lisa. Celebrated contemporary artist Jean- Michel Basquait portrayed a marred Mona Lisa as the center of a dollar bill.
In 1999, at the height or former President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, the New Yorker magazine ran an illustrated cover of the Mona Lisa- and replaced her face with that of Monica Lewinsky.
“Once something goes into popular culture, then it transcends just art history and it becomes a part of everybody’s visual landscape,” says Gilda Snowden, 50, who teaches art history at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit. “That’s what the Mona Lisa has done.”

There are three reasons Newman has found, that the Mona Lisa has reached the status of superstar:

• The painting’s world tours, particularly one to the United States in 1963.
• The frequency the image is used for advertising.
• How the image has been brought into consumer culture, not just with print reproductions, but with images of Mona Lisa on such things as socks, chocolate bars, coasters, kaleidoscopes, cameras, coffee packets and more.

Diane Shipley DeCillis talks with BBC producer Peter Newman
right, about topics they will cover during an upcoming interview.

Like the Beatles, the Mona Lisa drew hordes of people when the painting came to America, first at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Susan Madigan, an art historian at Michigan State University, remembers smelling sweat and feeling cramped amidst crowds before being pushed in front of the portrait at the Met 42 years ago.
She stood before the painting for about two minutes, thinking it was small at 30 inches by 21 inches, but she was absolutely awed.
“It was almost like being in church,” says Madigan, 54 of Brighton, Peering at the Mona Lisa reproductions at The Print Gallery before sitting down for an interview with the BBC. “I know it sounds like a stupid thing to say, but this was by Leonardo da Vinci! This was the Mona Lisa!”
DeCillis has seen the painting only once, at age 15, when she went to the Musee du Louvre in Paris with her family.
The Louvre has housed the painting since 1797. In April, the museum gave the painting a new room. Like Madigan, DeCillis first focused on the painting’s size.
Then she recalls standing back, watching people examine the painting with wonder and becoming enthralled. Before leaving the Louvre, DeCillis nabbed a book about the museum from the bookstore- it carried (what else?) the image of the Mona Lisa.
Seated in her office last week, DeCillis recalled the moment with delight, that was the first image of the Mona Lisa she had ever purchased. There would be more.
“She would collect prints and stack them under her bed,” says DeCillis’s mother, Freda Shipley Reid, 72, of Waterford. “And she would say, ‘Someday, I'll have my own gallery.”
The Print Gallery, which sells jewelry and gifts in addition to specializing in framing, does just under $1 million a year in business.
And because of DeCillis, its reputation cannot be separated from the Mona Lisa, an image that has made its way to the rooftop of the gallery, luring customers with serenity, simplicity, and ahhhhh, smile.


Theories abound about
the Mona Lisa
Compiled by Erin Chan. Sources: "Becoming Mona Lisa" by Donald Sassoon and Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, www.monalisamania.com

For centuries, people have come up with theories about the woman behind the most famous image on Earth.
Here are some:

• She was pregnant: This theory, fist proposed in 1959 by English scholar Dr. Kenneth Keele, holds that because the painting shows the woman with an enlarged thyroid gland she must be pregnant.

• She was a he: Art critic Georges Isarlo proposed that Mona Lisa was a transvestite in 1952 after watching a college play that included a man dressed as a woman. Decades earlier, artist Marcel Duchamp poked fun at the painting by drawing a mustache and beard on a postcard of the Moan Lisa.

• She had a toothache: In 1992, Joseph Borkowski, a professor of operative dentistry, likened Mona Lisa’s expression to that of someone who had lost her front teeth.

• She is a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci: when flipping a self-portrait by Da Vinci and merging it with the Mona Lisa through digital analysis, Lillian Schwartz found their facial features aligned. In response to the theory, distinguished art historian S.J. Freebergsaid, “The Mona Lisa will survive this crap.”

• She was just a normal gal: Ed Harrison, 45, of Clawson opined on the painting while pulling Mona Lisa T-shirts off an automatic press Tuesday at Kurt’s Kustom Graphics in Ferndale. “She’s not like some beauty queen who’s full of make up,” Harrison says. “She looks like…an aunt.”

• The Mona Lisa is a philosophy: “The Mona Lisa is Leonardo’s representation of life and the universe, not of a particular person. It is both feminine and masculine, dark and light, yin and yang”. This is what Korie Marshall, 32, of Nova Scotia, Canada concluded in posting on Diane Shipley DeCillis’s Web site.

• She’s had some orthodontic work done: “Mona had braces and was too embarrassed [sic] to show her teeth. I can imagine Mona’s father exclaiming, ‘Mona, after all the money we spent on your braces, that’s the smile we get?’” This is what Molly B., 13, of Lancaster, S.C., concluded in a posting on DeCillis’s Web site.