Lisa Gorton: a note on Mirror Landscape

Lisa Gorton reflects on Mirror Landscape (1 May 2026), a major collection of new and selected poems by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet. The new poems focus on mirrors and landscapes as they are employed by the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, with a particular fascination for the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.

‘The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’, said Walter Pater in 1873. ‘She had simply become an incubus,’ said art critic Bernard Berenson. ‘Glad to be rid of her,’ he added, when the painting was stolen in 1911. Duchamp scrawled a moustache across her face, wrote L.H.O.O.Q. on his photograph of it – sounding out the words ‘elle a chaud au cul’ (‘her arse is on heat’). In his essay Why they attack the Mona Lisa, Salvador Dali argued it was because she looked like a mother – only she ‘smiled ambiguously’. ‘The world’s most famous painting’, says the Louvre website now.

I wanted to rediscover this portrait of a woman who has the look of someone looking, not being looked at. Over six years I wrote the title poem ‘Mirror Landscape’. The poem works across a gap, like that gap between a mirror and its landscape. On one side of it is history. On the other, invention; and each side can be read without the other. The long poem is also mirrored in a sequence of prose poems, ‘Speaking Shadows’. I was thinking about art’s relationship to power, reflecting on Leonardo da Vinci’s last days in Rome, working with mirrors and their distorted perspectives under Giuliano de’ Medici’s patronage.

In my years looking at this painting, I discovered a heraldic device hidden in shadows inside its landscape. That heraldic language was once as familiar as company branding is now. But the language of heraldry is lost; now that device presents itself as a little anomaly, a strangely dark curlicue of shadow in that vast landscape at her back. Anyone can open one of the Louvre’s photographs of the painting and see it for themselves.

This device was the personal emblem of Leonardo’s last Italian patron, Giuliano de’ Medici. Giuliano adopted it late in 1512; it marked his return to Florence after eighteen years of exile. In 1513 his brother, recently elected pope, called Giuliano to Rome and handed Florence to their nephew. So, this device signals that the picture in the Louvre belongs to those few months when Giuliano led Florence.

This confirms an eyewitness account of the picture. In October 1517 a cardinal and his secretary went to visit Leonardo in his studio. Leonardo was old, his right arm was paralysed, he had a pension from the king of France. The cardinal’s secretary was keeping a diary. He copied down what the old artist said. The artist showed three paintings: the patron saints of Florence, John the Baptist and St. Anne, and a commission from ‘the late Magnifico, Giuliano’: ‘una certa donna Fiorentina, facta di naturale’. ‘A certain Florentine woman, painted from life’. Or, ‘a certain female Florentia, painted from life’.

Marking when the portrait was painted and why, this little device challenges old assumptions about who it is looking out at us from the bullet-proof glass, and smiling—