If you want to publicize a cause or gain notoriety by damaging a work of art, then you can choose the most famous one. When pumpkin soup was thrown at the bulletproof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at the Louvre over the weekend, images of the painting hidden by mounds of liquefied food duly emerged around the world. So why is Mona Lisa so famous? Here are 10 things you need to know about the most idolized painting in the world.
Relating to: Protesters threw soup at Mona Lisa in Paris
Mona Who?
Leonardo da Vinci began his portrait of Monna Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine merchant, in 1503. “Monna,” short for Madonna, was a term of respect for women in Renaissance Florence. Leonardo had recently rejected an offer from Isabella d’Este, Marquess of Mantua, to paint her and instead commissioned this portrait of “Lady Lisa,” a middle-class Florentine woman. Perhaps he painted it because it fascinated him or to celebrate the bourgeois trading city.
The man who loves women (painting)
Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy as a young man and never married, instead remaining close to his male students. However, when it came to portraits, he preferred women. Mona Lisa is the last in a series of magnificent portraits of women, beginning with Ginevra de’ Benci in about 1475, in which she revealed female character, strength, and freedom in ways no other artist had done before.
return table
In the years before Mona Lisa, Leonardo tried to give up oil painting completely. He had always been a slow painter and spent most of his time conducting scientific experiments instead. He told a messenger from Isabella d’Este that he was too busy with mathematics to paint her. He later served Cesare Borgia as a military engineer in his most daring attempt to leave art behind. After this terrible experience, he began painting the Mona Lisa in Florence.
famous for 500 years
To the disappointment of soup-throwers, the Mona Lisa smiles at the world from a secure display case fronted with heavily reinforced glass; this reflects this painting’s unique celebrity status as well as previous crimes, including the theft in 1911. Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp paid tribute. The Mona Lisa’s strange imprint on modern mass culture. No painting has rivaled this appeal: but this is not just a modern phenomenon. As early as 1505, a woman named Maddelana Doni had clasped her hands in imitation of Lisa’s in a portrait by Raphael, reproducing her already iconic pose.
Leonardo’s favorite
Perhaps Mona Lisa’s biggest fan was Leonardo himself, because he could not let her go. He never delivered the work to Lisa’s husband, who commissioned it; instead, he chose to rework the painting for years, adding new subtleties and mysteries. A year before his death, when he received visitors from Italy at the chateau in Amboise gifted to him by the French king, Leonardo showed them his lifelong love, the Mona Lisa.
Anatomy of a Smile
Raphael’s early imitations of the Mona Lisa reproduce her pose but not her smile. Scientific imaging appears to confirm that Lisa del Giocondo was not initially smiling. Leonardo spent much of his time in the 1500s dissecting corpses to reveal the inner secrets of human anatomy, including facial muscles. Anatomical drawings of the lips and notes on how they move show that he developed the Mona Lisa’s smile to illustrate how our face physically works, adding golden skin and delicate lips on top of the information from Lisa’s skull outward. This is the beautiful human machine.
Idol of Henry VIII
One of the first victims of Mona Lisa’s smile was Henry VIII of England, serial wife killer and religious tyrant. It was Henry. After the (natural) death of his third queen, Jane Seymour, Henry sent court artist Hans Holbein to Brussels to portray a potential bride, 16-year-old Cristina of Denmark. In Holbein’s painting, Cristina, who is already a widow, is dressed in black but lights up the room with her smile. She sounds strangely familiar she. Holbein had seen the Mona Lisa and was imitating the most seductive smile in art. Henry fell in love with the painting, declared his love, and asked for sweet music – but was it really the Mona Lisa he admired?
hydraulic secrets
One of the most mysterious things about the Mona Lisa is the ethereal landscape of green, brown and blue behind it. This puzzle is intentional. Leonardo seems to want us to wonder where the road and the bridge, the steep rocks, the river and the mountains are. He makes them both specific and vague, as if to mock us. It is quite clear that he is actually talking about the Arno River flowing through the hills of Tuscany, a sight full of memories for him. At the time he was initiating the Mona Lisa, Florence’s enemy was attempting to change the course of the Arno to destroy the economy of Pisa. Is this scene a reference to the plan he prepared with Florentine military expert Niccolò Machiavelli?
Marcel and the Mustache
In 1919, Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of conceptual art, drew a mustache and beard on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and called it LHOOQ; which, when read out loud, means “She has a hot ass” in French. The joke is more than just graffiti. Lisa looks good with her beard. Some people can’t resist the idea that he’s really a man, maybe he’s hiding a portrait of Leonardo. Leonardo actually mixes “male” and “female” qualities in his faces, and androgyny may be one of the reasons why the Mona Lisa is so memorable.
Oh mother!
Perhaps the deepest secret of the Mona Lisa is not about science or sexuality, but about the artist’s own infancy. The landscape in the background brings to mind the hills around Vinci, the Tuscan town where he was born in 1452, the illegitimate baby of a lawyer and a peasant girl named Caterina. He later had a stepmother, but his biological mother remained a ghostly figure in his memories of the Tuscan countryside; She looked a bit like Mona Lisa. Is this woman in his dream his personal idealized, long-lost Madonna, his own mother goddess, the maternal figure he enthrones in his art, smiling benevolently at him?