Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci

Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous artwork in the world. Painted in the early 16th century, it depicts a mysterious woman smiling. The Mona Lisa has fascinated people for almost the entirety of its existence, and its story extends far beyond da Vinci's Renaissance studio. Despite starting work on the Mona Lisa in the first decade of the 1500s, there is evidence that Leonardo da Vinci was still refining the painting around 1516 or 1517.

A popular piece of evidence used to claim that Mona Lisa is unfinished is her lack of eyebrows, but this is highly debated. Some historians argue that being eyebrowless was fashionable for Italian women in the early 1500s. In 2007, French engineer Pascal Cotte conducted high-resolution scans on the painting and discovered that Mona Lisa once had eyebrows, but they have likely faded as a result of time and poor restoration efforts.

One of the enduring mysteries of the Mona Lisa is her identity. A particularly intriguing theory proposed is that the painting is actually a self-portrait of da Vinci. Given that the Mona Lisa depicts a woman, this seems unlikely.

Before finding a home in the Louvre, Mona Lisa spent time with several French leaders. After da Vinci died, his favorite apprentice became the owner of the painting. It then passed into the hands of King Francis I of France, who displayed it in the Palace of Fontainebleau. Later, Louis XIV moved the Mona Lisa to the Palace of Versailles, where it stayed until the French Revolution. In 1800, Napoleon moved the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace. He hung the painting in his bedroom for about four years, so he could admire it whenever he wished.

In late August 1911, a maintenance worker at the Louvre stole the Mona Lisa. Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian nationalist who believed that the painting should be returned and displayed in his own country. He held onto it for two years, and was finally caught when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.

The theft of the Mona Lisa was a global news sensation, making the painting a household name as it is today. Before its disappearance, it was well known only among members of the art world and academics. People from all over the world, especially the French, followed the story of the lost masterpiece. People lined up for hours to see the blank space where the Mona Lisa once hung, bringing flowers and notes in her memory.

After the Mona Lisa was rediscovered in 1913, great strides were taken to ensure its security, but that didn't stop people from trying to harm the famous painting. In 1956, a Bolivian tourist threw a stone at it, shattering the protective glass and damaging the painting. If you look closely enough, you can still see where the pigment was damaged near the model's left elbow. In 1974, a protester sprayed red paint onto the protective glass at the Tokyo National Museum, where the Mona Lisa was being displayed, to protest the museum's lack of accessibility for disabled people.

When the Mona Lisa went on tour in the 1960s, it was given an insurance value of 100 million dollars, equivalent to about 870 million dollars today. The Mona Lisa currently holds the Guinness World Record for the highest insurance valuation for a painting, and it's hard to imagine another artwork taking its place anytime soon.