Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa is a recurring work of art in Philip Carey’s artistic education, marking the difference between inherited admiration and the judgments he gradually makes for himself. Its place in the novel changes with his taste: Walter Pater’s celebrated writing first mediates its beauty, but Philip later rejects that literary mediation even as he continues to look at the painting within a broader, unsettled search for artistic standards.

A Masterpiece Encountered Through Words

When Fanny Price takes Philip to the Louvre, she shows him Mona Lisa. He feels some disappointment before the picture, but he has read Walter Pater’s description so closely that he knows its “jewelled words” by heart and repeats them to her. The encounter makes the painting inseparable, for him, from the language through which he has learned to approach it.

Fanny distinguishes verbal admiration from the experience of painting. She dismisses Philip’s recitation as literature and directs his attention to other works, including Rembrandt’s The Disciples at Emmaus, which she says he will have to feel before he knows anything about painting. Her insistence places Mona Lisa inside a larger lesson: knowledge of celebrated criticism may shape a viewer’s expectations, but it cannot substitute for a direct response to the work itself.

An Object of Changing Taste

Philip’s response develops alongside his arrival in the Latin Quarter’s contentious artistic culture. Impressionism is gaining ground, while older schools and their reputations are vigorously disputed. At a dinner where young artists ridicule Raphael and debate modern painters, Philip objects when the group’s imagined bonfire of the Great Victorians threatens to include Walter Pater. Lawson accepts his intervention and connects Pater to Mona Lisa, calling him its sole justification. The exchange makes the painting a meeting point between visual art and the critical prose that has enlarged its cultural meaning.

As Philip’s initial amazement at Impressionism gives way to admiration, he increasingly adopts the new movement’s standards. He pins photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia beside one another over his washing stand, and treats other judgments of art as newly settled: in his view, landscape painting begins with Monet. In this changed climate, the Louvre visit with Hayward reverses the earlier scene with Fanny. When Hayward asks to see Mona Lisa, Philip answers that it is “only literature.” The work that he had once approached through Pater now represents, in his impatient shorthand, the power of reputation and writing to dominate the act of looking.

The Painting and Philip’s Artistic Uncertainty

Philip’s dismissal does not amount to a stable or fully formed theory of art. His judgments shift as he encounters paintings, arguments, teachers, and artists who challenge his confidence. Fanny’s uncompromising guidance insists on felt visual experience rather than borrowed language; the dinner-table debate shows how taste can also function as a badge of belonging among young artists. Philip’s own certainty about modern painting is part of that social and artistic formation, not the last word on the value of older work.

That uncertainty persists beyond his Paris studies. Later, in a conversation about art, Athelny’s photographs of El Greco’s Toledo move Philip through their unfamiliar forms: their elongated figures and small heads initially puzzle him, yet he senses in them a troubling reality and a possible meaning he cannot explain. The episode does not return directly to Mona Lisa, but it echoes the earlier problem the painting embodies: artistic significance cannot be secured by reputation or borrowed formulas alone. Philip must encounter each work, and his responses remain subject to change.

Narrative Significance

Mona Lisa’s recurring appearances chart a movement from received authority toward a more personal, though never final, judgment. Pater’s prose lends the painting a beauty Philip can repeat before he can claim an independent response; later he treats that literary aura as a limitation. His reversal is both an artistic coming-of-age and a reminder that modern taste has its own conventions. The painting therefore matters not only as a Louvre masterpiece but as a measure of how criticism, artistic fashion, and experience compete to shape what Philip believes he sees.