The Mona Lisa owes its fame to two things that built on each other. First, it is a portrait that changed the way a face could be painted, and painters and writers admired it for four centuries. Second, it lived through an extraordinary story: a theft in 1911, more than two years missing, then journeys around the world that drew millions of people.
The first reason explains why connoisseurs revered it. The second explains why the whole world knows it, including people who have never set foot in a museum.
Leonardo da Vinci began the portrait in Florence around 1503. The sitter was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a successful silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, and the painting takes both of its names from the couple. In Italy it is called La Gioconda, "the wife of Giocondo," a word that also means "the cheerful one." In English it is the Mona Lisa, from monna, short for madonna, "my lady."
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For a long time, the identity of the sitter was debated. A discovery made in 2005 in the university library of Heidelberg, in Germany, settled it. In the margin of an old edition of Cicero, a Florentine official named Agostino Vespucci had written a note in October 1503 mentioning that Leonardo was then working on the head of Lisa del Giocondo.
Leonardo never delivered the portrait. He kept going back to it for years, reworking the face, the landscape and the hands, and he carried it with him every time he moved: from Florence to Milan, then to Rome, and finally to France, where King Francis I welcomed him at the end of his life. The king acquired the painting, very probably in 1518, shortly before Leonardo died in 1519.
The painting then hung at Fontainebleau and at Versailles. After the French Revolution it went to the Louvre, which had become a public museum, though Napoleon Bonaparte took it to decorate his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace for a few years before it returned to the museum's Grand Gallery in 1804.
A portrait unlike any other
At the start of the sixteenth century, Italian portraits still followed habits inherited from the century before…
What You'll Discover
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How a workman walked out with her.
What a million Americans lined up for.
What the theft alone cannot explain.