“Rubens came upon an old collection of photographs of President John Kennedy: the photos were in colour, 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!” BeautyPaintingLaughterLaughImageVanishing Beauty Book:Immortality Source: Immortality