Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa from 1503 to 1506, but was considered incomplete by Da Vinci until 1516. Da Vinci was never paid for the painting and it never made it to it's intended client. The woman in the painting is thought to be Lisa Gherandini Giocondo who was about 25 at the time of the painting.
1. It was painted between 1503 and 1506. It is believed that Leonardo da Vinci started painting the Mona Lisa between 1503 and 1506, likely when he was living in Florence, Italy.
The Mona Lisa is famous because it is widely praised as evidence of the Leonardo Da Vinci's mastery of human anatomy and natural realism. The Mona Lisa is also famous because of its exhibition at the Louvre, as well as its widespread reproduction in popular art and culture.
The Mona Lisa is priceless. Any speculative price (some say over a billion dollars!) would probably be so high that not one person would be able or willing to purchase and maintain the painting. Moreover, the Louvre Museum would probably never sell it.
Unlike some artwork of the sixteenth century, the Mona Lisa is a very realistic portrait of a very real human being. Alicja Zelazko of Encyclopedia Britannica attributes this to Leonardo's skill with a brush, and his use of art techniques that were new and exciting during the Renaissance.
One long-standing mystery of the painting is why Mona Lisa features very faint eyebrows and apparently does not have any eyelashes. In October 2007, Pascal Cotte, a French engineer and inventor, says he discovered with a high-definition camera that Leonardo da Vinci originally did paint eyebrows and eyelashes.
The tiny delineations at the corners of the mouth become indistinct, but you will still see the shadows at her mouth's edge. These shadows and the soft sfumato at the edge of her mouth make her lips seem to turn upward into a subtle smile. The result is a smile that twinkles brighter the less you search for it.
Based on the mid-sixteenth century biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Giorgio Vasari, many historians believe the painting is a portrait of Madam Lisa Giocondo, wife of a wealthy Florentine. It is from Vasari that the painting received the name Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda in Italian or La Joconde in French.
What are some fun facts about the Mona Lisa for kids?
Mona Lisa was an actual person. Born in 1479, she lived in Florence, Italy. Her husband, Francesco del Giocondo, a rich silk merchant, asked Leonardo to paint her portrait around 1503. In Italy, the Mona Lisa is known as La Gioconda, from Mona Lisa's married name.
Made by Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous painter of his time, around 1503, the painting was commissioned by a rich Italian merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, who wanted to place a portrait of his wife, Lisa, in their new home.
If the law of France was ever to change according to the “Guiness World Records”, the Mona Lisa was valued at 100 million dollars in 1962 for insurance purposes. With inflation taken into account, today's value of the Mona Lisa would be nearing a billion – 1.5 billion pounds.
Security elements were of the highest order and conservation characteristics had to protect the precious poplar wood panel of the painting from sudden changes in relative humidity and from pollutants brought in by the approximately six million visitors that crowd in front of the masterpiece each year.
In her modest realness, the Mona Lisa is a colossus – not only the face of Renaissance humanism, but a new standard for art as much an intellectual exercise as an aesthetic one. Those are the mundane truths. The Mona Lisa smiles because she was painted smiling.
The portrait, in fact, is considered to have an enigmatic facial expression, sometimes smiling, sometimes not, but always with her gaze fixed on the observer, whatever her/his position in front of the painting.
The Scream, painting by Edvard Munch that became his most famous work. He completed two versions in 1893, another in 1895, and yet another likely in 1910. The Scream is one of the most familiar images in modern art.
The sense of overall harmony achieved in the painting—especially apparent in the sitter's faint smile—reflects Leonardo's idea of the cosmic link connecting humanity and nature, making this painting an enduring record of Leonardo's vision.
Vincenzo Peruggia (8 October 1881 – 8 October 1925) was an Italian museum worker, artist and thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris on 21 August 1911.
Two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Mona Lisa is recovered inside Italian waiter Vincenzo Peruggia's hotel room in Florence.
The first and most violent attack that the Mona Lisa endured was in the year of 1956. The work was on display at an exhibition in the south of France in Montauban when a vandal threw acid at the work. It had hit the lower section of the canvas. This incident prompted the museum to encase the painting in glass.