The prolific author says the Mona Lisa looks ‘half-dead’ while speaking at Hay festival

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Leonardo da Vinci, the incomparable Renaissance master? Actually, he was rather sloppy, disappointing and derivative.

His greatest work, the most popular painting in the world? “The bloody Mona Lisa … this half-dead woman, this strange green-faced female.”

The contrarian views of the writer Germaine Greer added zing to an event on Monday at the Hay festival in Wales, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the death of a man considered the greatest polymath of all time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait. Photograph: Christophel Fine Art/UIG via Getty

Greer said she was repeatedly “disappointed in Leonardo as an artist”. On the Mona Lisa, she said the painting was typical of Venetian art in the period.

“The most important thing to me about this bloody picture is that this woman looks as if she is already dead,” said Greer. “As for the famous smile, this is what I call the Leonardo smirk. You find it everywhere.”

She pointed to his painting of St John the Baptist in the Louvre – “smirk” – and his drawing The Incarnate Angel: a boy “stark naked with a roaring erection … terrific”, she said dismissively.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leonardo da Vinci’s St John the Baptist. Photograph: Alamy

She recalled travelling from Australia to Europe as a young woman and visiting the Louvre in Paris. She went into the room with the Mona Lisa and was blown away by Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, a work that is “benign, it’s relaxed, it’s elegant, wonderfully painted, so warm and so immediate it just rushes straight at you.

“But no one is looking at it, they were all staring at this half-dead woman, this strange green-faced female.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visitors crowd to take pictures of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA

She said Leonardo was not someone committed to what he was doing in the way, say, Michelangelo was. He could be easily distracted.

“One thing that has always concerned me a bit about Leonardo … he was an entertainer. People loved his company, he was funny, he was spontaneous, he sang and accompanied himself on musical instruments. He was a bit flighty. I think he was easily distracted from his work.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Last Supper, which did not impress Greer. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Nor could Greer forgive him The Last Supper, “a sloppy piece of work. People have gone mad. They are starstruck by this man and I can see what’s fascinating about him, but I can’t forgive him for being sloppy with this sort of work.

“I won’t forgive him for The Last Supper. It’s on monastery walls all over Italy and it’s one of the worst.

“I can respect Leonardo as an experimenter, although sometimes he seems to me to be an experimenter a bit short of imagination. You wonder if he has human feeling.”