Rubens came upon an old collection of photographs of President John Kennedy: the photos were in color, there were at least fifty of them, and on all of them (all, without exception!) the President was laughing. Not smiling, laughing! His mouth was open, his teeth bared. There was nothing remarkable about it, that’s what contemporary photos are like, but the fact that Kennedy laughed in all of them, that not a single one showed him with his lips closed, gave Rubens pause. A few days later he found himself in Florence. He stood in front of Michelangelo’s David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy. David, that paradigm of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile! Since then, he had often tried in his imagination to retouch figures in famous paintings to give them a laughing mouth; it was an interesting experiment: the grimace of laughter could ruin every painting! Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!
Even though he spent so much of his time in galleries, it took Kennedy’s photographs to make Rubens realize this simple fact: the great painters and sculptors from classical days to Raphael and perhaps even to Ingres avoided portraying laughter, even smiles. Of course, the figures of Etruscan sculpture all have smiles, but this smile isn’t a response to some particular, momentary situation but a permanent state of the face, expressing eternal bliss. For classical sculptors as well as for painters of later periods a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility.
Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil. Either the evil of pain: the faces of women bent over the body of Jesus; the open mouth of the mother in Poussin’s Slaughter of the Innocents. Or the evil of vice: Holbein’s Adam and Eve. Eve has a bland face and a half-open mouth revealing teeth that have just bitten into the apple. Alongside, Adam is a man still before sin: he is beautiful, his face is calm, and his mouth is closed. In Correggio’s Allegories of Sin everyone is smiling! In order to express vice, the painter must move the innocent calm of the face, to spread the mouth, to deform the features with a smile. There is only one laughing figure in the picture: a child! But it is not a laugh of happiness, the way children are portrayed in advertisements for diapers or chocolate! The child is laughing because it’s been corrupted!
—Milan Kundera - Immortality (1990)
