Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda (La Joconde), is a 16th century oil painting on poplar wood by Leonardo da Vinci and is one of the most famous paintings in Western art history. Few other works of art are as romanticized, celebrated, or reproduced. It is owned by the French government and hangs in the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

The painting shows a woman looking out at the viewer with what is described as an "enigmatic smile".

Title of the Painting

The title Mona Lisa stems from the Giorgio Vasari biography of Leonardo da Vinci, published 31 years after Leonardo's death. In it, he identified the sitter as Lisa, the wife of wealthy Florentine businessman Francesco del Giocondo. "Mona" is a common Italian contraction of "madonna," meaning "my lady," the equivalent of the English "Madam", so the title means "Madam Lisa." In modern Italian the short form of "madonna" is usually spelled "Monna," so the title is sometimes, though rarely, given as Monna Lisa.

The alternative title La Gioconda is the feminine form of Giocondo. In Italian giocondo also means 'light-hearted' ('jocund' in English), so "gioconda" means "light hearted woman". Because of her smile, this version of the title plays on this double-meaning, as in the French "La Joconde."

for the painting in the 19th century. Before these names became established, the painting had been referred to by various descriptive phrases, such as "a certain Florentine lady" and "a courtesan in a gauze veil."

History

It is probable Leonardo began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503, and, according to Vasari, completed it four years later.

Leonardo took the painting from Italy to France in 1516 when King Francois I invited the painter to work at the Clos Luce near the king's castle in Amboise. The King bought the painting for 4,000 ecus.

After Leonardo's death the painting was cut down by having part of the panel at both sides removed. Originally there were columns on both sides of the figure, as we know from early copies. The edges of the bases can still be seen.

The painting first resided in Fontainebleau, and later resided in the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, it was moved to the Louvre. Napoleon I had it moved to his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace; later it was returned to the Louvre. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, it was moved from the Louvre to a hiding place elsewhere in France.

The painting was not well-known until the mid-19th century, when artists of the emerging Symbolist movement began to appreciate it, and associated it with their ideas about feminine mystique. Critic Walter Pater, in his 1867 essay on Leonardo, expressed this view by describing the figure in the painting as a kind of mythic embodiment of eternal femininity, who is "older than the rocks among which she sits" and who "has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave".

Theft

The painting's increasing fame was further emphasised when it was stolen on August 21, 1911. The next day, Louis Beroud, a painter, walked into the Louvre and went to the Salon Carre where the Mona Lisa had been on display for five years. However, where the Mona Lisa should have stood, in between Correggio's Mystical Marriage and Titian's Allegory of Alfonso d'Avalos, he found four iron pegs.

Beroud contacted the section head of the guards, who thought the painting was being photographed. A few hours later, Beroud checked back with the section head of the museum, and it was confirmed that the Mona Lisa was not with the photographers. The Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid in the investigation of the theft.

On September 6, avant-garde French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be "burnt down", was arrested and put in jail on suspicion of the theft. His friend Pablo Picasso was brought in for questioning, but both were later released. At the time, the painting was believed lost forever. It turned out that Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia stole it simply by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom closet, and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed. Con-man Eduardo de Valfierno master-minded the theft, and had commissioned the French art forger Yves Chaudron to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original. Because he didn't need the original for his con, he never contacted Peruggia again after the crime. After keeping the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was caught when he attempted to sell it to a Florence art dealer; it was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913.

Other incidents

During World War II the painting was again removed from the Louvre and taken to safety, first in Chateau Amboise, then in the abbey of Loc-Dieu and finally in the Ingres Museum in Montauban.

In 1956, the lower part of the painting was severely damaged when someone doused it with acid. On December 30 of that same year, Ugo Ungaza Villegas, a young Bolivian, damaged the painting by throwing a rock at it. The result was a speck of pigment near Mona Lisa's left elbow. The painting is now covered by bulletproof security glass.

From December 14, 1962 to March of 1963, the French government lent it to the United States to be displayed in New York City and Washington D.C. In 1974, the painting exhibited in Tokyo and Moscow before being returned to the Louvre.

Prior to the 1962-63 tour, the painting was assessed for insurance purposes at $100 million. According to the Guinness Book of Records, this makes the Mona Lisa the most valuable painting ever insured. As an expensive painting, it has only recently been surpassed by Pablo Picasso's Garcon a la pipe, which was sold for $104.1 million on May 4, 2004. However, this does not account for the change in prices due to inflation -- $100 million in 1962 is approximately $608 million in 2004 when adjusted for inflation using the US consumer price index.

On April 6, 2005 — following a period of curatorial maintenance, recording, and analysis — the painting was moved, within the Louvre, to a new home in the museum's Salle des Etats. It is displayed in a purpose-built, climate-controlled enclosure behind unbreakable, bullet proof glass.

Identity of the model

Lisa Gherardini

Vasari identified the subject to be the wife of socially prominent Francesco del Giocondo. It is known that del Giocondo, a wealthy silk merchant of Florence and a prominent government figure, lived. Until recently, little was known about his wife, Lisa Gherardini, except that she was born in 1479 and raised at the family's Villa Vignamaggio in Tuscany, and that she married del Giocondo in 1495.

However in 2004 the Italian scholar Giuseppe Pallanti published Monna Lisa, Mulier Ingenua (Mona Lisa: Real Woman), a book in which he gathered archival evidence in support of the traditional identification of the model as Lisa Gherardini. According to Pallanti the evidence suggests that Leonardo's father was a friend of Lisa's husband. "The portrait of Mona Lisa, done when Lisa Gherardini was aged about 24, was probably commissioned by Leonardo's father himself for his friends as he is known to have done on at least one other occasion". Pallanti discovered that Lisa and Francesco had five children and that she outlived her husband. She lived at least into her 60s, though no record of her death was located. Most scholars now agree that she was indeed the model.

Other suggestions

Despite this theory, various alternatives to the traditional sitter have been proposed. During the last years of his life, Leonardo spoke of a portrait "of a certain Florentine lady done from life at the request of the magnificent Giuliano de' Medici." No evidence has been found that indicates a link between Lisa Gherardini and Giuliano de' Medici, but then the comment could instead refer to one of the two other portraits of women executed by da Vinci. A later anonymous statement created confusion when it linked the Mona Lisa to a portrait of Francesco del Giocondo himself – perhaps the origin of the controversial idea that it is the portrait of a man.

Dr. Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs suggests that the Mona Lisa is actually a self-portrait. She supports this theory with the results of a digital analysis of the facial features of Leonardo's face and that of the famous painting. When flipping a self-portrait drawing by Leonardo and then merging that with an image of the Mona Lisa using a computer, the features of the faces align perfectly. Claims were made that Leonardo was homosexual and thus wanted to paint himself as a woman. Critics of this theory suggest that the similarities are due to both portraits being painted by the same person using the same style. Additionally, the drawing on which she based the comparison may not be a self-portrait.

Maike Vogt-Luerssen argues that the woman behind the famous smile is Isabella of Aragon, the Duchess of Milan. Leonardo was the court painter for the Duke Of Milan for 11 years. The pattern on Mona Lisa's dark green dress, Vogt-Luerssen believes, indicates that she was a member of the house of Visconti-Sforza. Her theory is that the Mona Lisa was the first official portrait of the new Duchess of Milan, which requires that it was painted in spring or summer 1489 (and not 1503).

Aesthetics

Mona Lisa is famous for her beautiful changing smile and eyes that continue to stare and follow you no matter in which direction you turn.

The portrait presents the subject from just above the bust, with a distant landscape visible as a backdrop. Leonardo used a pyramid design to place the woman simply and calmly in the space of the painting. Her folded hands form the front corner of the pyramid. Her breast, neck, and face glow in the same light that softly models her hands. The light gives the variety of living surfaces an underlying geometry of spheres and circles, which includes the arc of her famous smile. Sigmund Freud interpreted the 'smile' as signifying Leonardo's erotic attraction to his dear mother; others have described it as both innocent and inviting. It is said by some that the painting is centered on the heart.

Many researchers have tried to explain why the smile is seen so differently by people. The explanations range from scientific theories about human vision to curious supposition about Mona Lisa's identity and feelings. Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University has argued that the smile is mostly drawn in low spatial frequencies, and so can best be seen with one's peripheral vision. Christopher Tyler and Leonid Kontsevich of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco believe that the changing nature of the smile is caused by variable levels of random noise in human visual system. Dina Goldin, Adjunct Professor at Brown University, has argued that the secret is in the non-static position of Mona Lisa's facial muscles, where our mind's eye unconsciously extends her smile; the result is an unusual dynamicity to the face that invokes subtle yet strong emotions in the viewer of the painting.

It is also notable that Mona Lisa has no visible facial hair at all - including eyebrows and eyelashes. This is probably because it was common at this time for genteel women to shave them off, since they were considered to be unsightly. For modern viewers this adds to the slightly mysterious semi-abstract quality of the face.

In late 2005, Dutch researchers from the University of Amsterdam ran the painting's image through an "emotion recognition" computer software developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The software found the smile to be 83 % happy, 9 % disgusted, 6 % fearful, 2 % angry, less than 1 % neutral, and not surprised at all. Rather than being a thorough analysis, the experiment was more of a demonstration of the new technology. The faces of ten women of Mediterranean ancestry were used to create a composite image of a neutral expression. Researchers then compared the composite image to the face in the painting. They used a grid to break the smile into small divisions, then checked it for each of six emotions: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness.

Although utilizing a seemingly simple formula for portraiture, the expressive synthesis that Leonardo achieved between sitter and landscape has placed this work in the canon of the most popular and most analyzed paintings of all time. The sensuous curves of the woman's hair and clothing, created through sfumato, are echoed in the undulating valleys and rivers behind her. 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 and genius.

The enigmatic woman is portrayed seated in what appears to be an open loggia with dark pillar bases on either side. Behind her a vast landscape recedes to icy mountains. Winding paths and a distant bridge give only the slightest indications of human presence. The blurred outlines, graceful figure, dramatic contrasts of light and dark, and overall feeling of calm are characteristic of Leonardo's style.

The painting was one of the first portraits to depict the sitter before an imaginary landscape. One interesting feature of the landscape is that it is uneven. The landscape to the left of the figure is noticeably lower than that to the right of her. This has led some critics to suggest that it was added later.

The painting has been restored numerous times; X-ray examinations have shown that there are three versions of the Mona Lisa hidden under the present one. The thin poplar backing is beginning to show signs of deterioration at a higher rate than previously thought, causing concern from museum curators about the future of the painting.

The Da Vinci Code

The painting features significantly in The Da Vinci Code, a popular novel written by Dan Brown in 2003 and a film due to be released on May 19, 2006 (directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen and Alfred Molina). Brown's hero, Harvard professor Robert Langdon, claims that the painting expresses Leonardo's belief in the "sacred feminine" and that the title is a coded reference to the Egyptian gods Amon and Isis, "Mona" being an anagram of the former and "Lisa" being a contraction of l'Isa, meaning Isis. This hidden reference is supposed to signify Leonardo's secret opposition to orthodox Christianity and belief in the ideal union of masculine and feminine principles, as does the sitter's androgynous features. In this context he also refers to the self-portrait theory.

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