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"Mona Lisa" is an oil painting on a poplar wooden panel. It is a work of art by the Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci that he completed between the years 1503 and 1519 when he was living in Florence, Italy. It is the most famous and most expensive painting in the world. It is owned by the French government. It is located in the Louvre Museum in Paris and attracts more people every year. 9 million visitors to watch it.
Painting history and specifications
Historical sources confirm that Da Vinci was commissioned to paint the painting in Florence. He began in the year 1503 and completed it in France in the year 1519. There, the King of France, Francis I, owned it, before its ownership was transferred to King Louis XIV, then to the French Republic after the revolution, to become a French state-owned heritage.
Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa on a wooden poplar board, 77 centimeters long and 53 centimeters wide, in oil colors. It appears to be a small painting of an ordinary beautiful woman, dressed in dark clothes and without jewelry, and arouses admiration with her mysterious smile and look.
It is a painting whose value is not valued in money, and cannot be bought or sold according to French heritage law.
France keeps the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum (Shutterstock)
Who is the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa?
There is a lot of speculation and controversy regarding the identity of the woman in the Mona Lisa, and scholars and historians have offered a number of explanations, including:
The hypothesis of the biographer Giorgio Visari in 1550, in which he believes that the picture is of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo, hence the alternative title of the work, which is “The Gioconda”.
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, believes that the model may be Leonardo da Vinci's mother, Caterina, as he believes that the Mona Lisa's mysterious smile arose from a memory of Caterina's smile.
A third proposal presented by a group of scholars indicates that the painting was in fact a self-portrait of Leonardo, given the similarity between the woman’s features and the artist’s features. They believe that his impersonation of a woman was an artistic mystery to the artist.
The reason for the painting's fame
There is no single explanation for the popularity of the Mona Lisa. Rather, it is the result of several circumstances combined, such as its presence in the Louvre Museum, which is one of the most visited museums in the world.
The painting contains a number of rectangles, circles, and triangles that fulfill the golden ratio. It is not a work of art that can be enjoyed or criticized from an aesthetic standpoint only, but rather it is a fine mathematical work in the first place.
The golden ratio in mathematics is achieved when the sum of two numbers divided by the largest is equal to the ratio between the largest to the smallest of the two numbers. It is a defined mathematical constant with a value of approximately 1.618.
The golden ratio appears in geometry, art, architecture, and in the Mona Lisa itself. If we draw a rectangle around the face of the Mona Lisa, we will find that it achieves that ratio, and if we divide this rectangle with a line passing through her eyes into two halves, we will find that the two resulting rectangles achieve the golden ratio again, that is, the ratio of the length of her head to her eyes. Golden.
The painting was stolen
The Mona Lisa was stolen on August 22, 1911, and the operation was accompanied by a media sensation that brought the painting global attention.
When news of the theft spread, people rushed to the Louvre to see the place of the painting, which had become empty. The director of paintings at the museum resigned following the incident, accusations of fraud spread in the newspapers, and the painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso was arrested on suspicion of his involvement in the case.
Two years later, the painting was found in Italy after an art dealer in Florence informed local authorities that a man had contacted him about selling the Mona Lisa.
David Feldman (right), Vice President of the Mona Lisa Foundation, shows similarities in a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci in Geneva in 2012 (Reuters)
This man was an Italian immigrant in France named Vincenzo Peruggia, and he worked some time at the Louvre installing glass on a group of paintings, including the Mona Lisa.
He agreed with two of his colleagues to steal the painting. They took it on the night of August 22 and hid it in a closet all night, and in the morning they were able to escape with it outside the museum.
But Peruggia was unable to sell the painting due to media attention, and he was arrested and sentenced to prison for stealing it and the painting was returned to the Louvre.
Mona Lisa travel
Throughout the ages, French officials rarely allowed the painting to be released outside of France, but this happened a few times. When First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy requested that the painting visit the United States, French President Charles de Gaulle agreed.
The tour took place in 1963, and the Mona Lisa traveled in a business cabin on an ocean liner, and was displayed in the only museum in New York and in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The Mona Lisa remained in the United States for 6 weeks, during which it attracted about 40,000 people daily, and large crowds in Japan also received the painting about 10 years later.
Preserving the Mona Lisa
During World War II, the "Mona Lisa" painting was transported to several locations in rural France, where it was identified as one of the most important works of art in the Louvre, and was returned to the museum in 1945 after the declaration of peace.
The painting shows signs of bending as a result of the resistance of the frame and the curvatures added by early restorers. Pins were also added behind it to prevent the expansion of a small crack appearing near the upper center of the painting. Later, restorers glued a heavy cloth over the crack instead of pins.
The glass protecting the Mona Lisa was replaced with bulletproof glass after several attacks in 1956, in which one person sprayed acid on the painting and another threw a rock at it.
One of the attacks caused damage to an area near the Mona Lisa's elbow on the left side, and the bulletproof glass withstood subsequent attacks by spray paint in 1974 and a coffee cup in 2009.
After a 4-year renovation of the Louvre Museum at a cost of $6.3 million in 2003, the Mona Lisa now has a special room with a controlled temperature of 43 degrees Fahrenheit and a glass ceiling that allows natural light to enter.
The Mona Lisa painting and its impact on art
The influence of the Mona Lisa on the Renaissance and subsequent periods was enormous, as it led a revolution in contemporary portraiture, and Leonardo's preparatory drawings encouraged other artists to undertake freer studies.
Da Vinci even influenced the costumes that artists wore for their characters. In his book “A Treatise on Painting,” published long after his death, he wrote that art should avoid fashion.
Therefore, the Mona Lisa shows this aspect perfectly, as she wears a colorful dress that is loosely wrinkled at the neck instead of the tight clothes that were common at the time.
Other versions of the Mona Lisa
There are at least 12 replicas of the Mona Lisa, many of them by Leonardo's students, one of which in the Prado Museum in Madrid was painted many years later than the original.
However, during a restoration of the painting in the early 2000s - which included the use of hot infrared reflection to examine subsurface work - the painting's conservators discovered that it had changes that resembled the original.
The results indicated that the artist painted the copy while Leonardo was working on the Mona Lisa in his studio, and the copy became in the Prado, and is the only known copy that was completed during Leonardo’s lifetime.
Source: Al Jazeera + websites