push/stare

she was born this day to gentry family and well-to-do-ness, and as all good well-off were supposed to do then, promulgated a life of art and galleries. her husband commissioned a completely penniless painter, the size was to be extravagant, the social recognition and prestige of such scale had to be fully pursued. would she still do it, now? hundreds of years later the crowds push and shove, and swear words in dozens of languages echo around the click of buttons and the flash of small 4.5 inch screens. i didn't get it. surely the vast, overwhelming nature of the structure and all the riches it contained meant the crowds and the shoving and the rudeness weren't worth it for this one thing that has taken on a life of its own, one thing that wasn't so beautiful, really, yet still worth more than all else in its stead. maybe that's why it works; the sly, subtle smirk - missed if stared directly at - of someone whose Italian name roughly translates to 'happiness', at her all-knowing conclusion. people stare at her and idolize her more than any other former gentry and whatever they too hoped to achieve with their bourgeois language and evening parlances to expensive locations and commissioned frames who plaster the wall with extravagant scope, all because a broke artist saw in her something he wanted to capture. giocondo got the last laugh, i suppose, we just got left with the wonderment of how something could still be taunting us hundreds of years later.