Why Are There So Few Smiles in Museums?

For most people, a trip to the museum is not the most eagerly awaited outing; those who lack the solemnity required to gaze upon "great art" are not welcome there. Yet it is not only classical columns and grand marble staircases that create the museum's stately, sombre atmosphere. Walking through opulent halls hung with centuries-old masterpieces, you will notice that almost no one on the walls is smiling back at you.

Writer Nicholas Jeeves, who has studied smiles in portraiture, observes that throughout recorded human history an open smile was "very much out of fashion." Today we understand a smile as a sign of friendliness, happiness and goodwill. When taking a photograph, it is practically obligatory. At first one might think that Westerners of the past avoided smiling in portraits to hide rotten teeth, but in fact poor oral hygiene was so common in those days that it did not seem off-putting at all.

The real answer is far simpler – nowadays taking a selfie requires smiling for barely a second, whereas sitting for a portrait once took hours upon hours. Posing was exhausting work. We all know what happens when we try to hold a smile too long – by the end we're grimacing, baring our teeth in an ugly rictus. "A smile is like a blush," Jeeves writes. "It is a reaction, not an expression, and so it is difficult both to sustain and to capture."

Even when a painter did manage to persuade a sitter to smile, the public immediately received the portrait as radical – the smile became the focal point of the painting, which was rarely what the paying patron wanted. One of the few artists who kept returning to the smile was the Italian Renaissance master Antonello da Messina. Messina learned the latest oil-painting techniques in the Netherlands, where close observation of the surrounding world and its direct depiction were highly prized. He used the smile in his portraits as a reflection of his realistically rendered sitters' inner lives. His "Portrait of a Young Man," painted around 1470 – long before Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" (1503–1519) – long held the title of the most enigmatic smile in the art world.

Antonello da Messina, "Portrait of a Young Man," 1470

Who knows how Leonardo persuaded the Mona Lisa to smile – it was probably hard to hold that expression of tightly pursed lips. The sfumato effect, which lends the smile its ambiguity, leads to a broader discussion about the depiction of lips in portraiture – "an endless debate – gravity or mockery," as Jeeves puts it. Does La Joconde look out at viewers with a flirtatious invitation or with angry contempt? To us, the most wonderful smile Leonardo ever painted appears in "Saint John the Baptist" (1513–1516), a work regarded as deeply ambiguous. In fact, the knowing smile of Saint John is a far more common phenomenon in the history of Western art.

Leonardo da Vinci, "Saint John the Baptist," 1513–1516

In 17th-century Europe, aristocrats decided that bared teeth, whether in public or in art, were indecent, and so left that expression to the lower classes – drunkards and stage actors. The Dutch, meanwhile, were deeply engaged with depicting everyday life, and with it, smiles. For the many painters who portrayed smiles – including artists from the lower classes such as Jan Steen, Frans Hals, Judith Leyster and Gerrit van Honthorst – Dutchness, both in painting and in life, symbolized dissolute living.

The subjects of Van Honthorst's "The Merry Fiddler" (1623) and Leyster's "The Concert" (1623) are smiling, and the painters continue the Renaissance tradition of depicting music in painting as a symbol of love. In these works, hints of drunkenness and sexual implication are unmistakable – the fiddler holds out a glass of wine to the viewer, his flushed cheeks betraying the source of his merriment, while the three young musicians in the concert scene appear about to fall into one another's arms.

Judith Leyster, "The Concert," 1623

Van Honthorst, "The Merry Fiddler," 1623

These painters were undoubtedly influenced by their Italian predecessor Caravaggio. In his shocking painting "Amor Vincit Omnia" (1602), an allegory of love and adolescent beauty, musical instruments lie scattered across the floor. The young Amor stands naked, arrows in hand, smiling lasciviously at the viewer. His brazen expression was so unusual at the time that, according to Jeeves, viewers understood it as "a celebration of homosexual passion."

Elsewhere, the sustained, tight-lipped smile familiar from the Mona Lisa can be found in elegant portraits of women, where it becomes a demure hint of seductive intent and sexual availability. This is borne out by Peter Paul Rubens in his portrait of his wife ("Portrait of Isabella Brant," 1620–1625) and by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in "Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc" (1823).

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, "Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc," 1823

Peter Paul Rubens, "Portrait of Isabella Brant," 1620–1625

Almost as soon as photography appeared in the mid-19th century, the smile became a standard part of the portrait. Contemporary painters working with portraits often use smiles to conceal negative sociopolitical meanings. Yue Minjun (you can see the artist's work HERE), for example, a member of China's Cynical Realism movement, built a career painting caricatured self-portraits in which he reproduces masterpieces of the Western canon with a manic, gaping grin. Behind these smile-masks lie weighty political critique and social insight. Is a smile an expression of openness, or of closure? The history of art shows that, across all eras, it has always said a great deal about how we view ourselves and others.