The author presents the phenomenon of female impersonation providing the historical and sociological context.
"THE tantalizing mystery of "Mona Lisa's" smile may be that it is no woman's smile at all, but a boy's. This is a better guess than Freud's, that it is the smile, not of La Gioconda, but of Leonardo da Vinci's pathetically wanton mother, forever illuminating the subconscious of her talented bastard son. For, if the Gioconda smile has had its innumerable successors, so had it also its antecedents, and the first on record is not on a woman's lips but plays mysteriously around the mouth of a bronze half-naked boy hero of Israel-the David of Leonardo's master, Ver rocchio. The same enigma is there, the same subtle, amused perversity. The smile is to be found also on the faces of two other young men, John the Baptist and Bacchus, both in the Louvre. "From the locust eater of the Bible," writes Muther. "Leonardo made a Bacchus, an Apollo, who with a mysterious smile on his lips, and with his soft thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated eyes.""
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