With the possible exception of the Statue of Liberty, the Mona Lisa is probably the world's most famous work of art. Measuring only 30 inches high by 21 inches wide, it was painted between 1503 and 1517 (see below), in oil on a white wooden panel (of Lombardy poplar). It's the portrait of a lady, probably Lisa del Giocondo, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo – a moderately successful cloth and silk merchant who later became a local official in Florence. He came from one of Tuscany's most prominent historical Noble families.
Lisa Gherardini was born in 1479, into an old and aristocratic Florentine family which had lost much of its influence. She married del Giocondo at the age of 15, and they had five children together. They are thought to have led a comfortable and ordinary middle–class life. Lisa outlived her husband, who was considerably her senior; she died in 1542, aged 63.
The painting is linked to Lisa del Giocondo through the work of the Italian Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari, who wrote in 1550 (31 years after the artist's death): "Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife." Mona in Italian is a polite form of address, originating as ma donna ('my lady'). In Italian the painting is more commonly known as La Gioconda – a play on the married surname of the supposed subject; gioconda being the feminine equivalent of the English word 'jocund', it means 'the happy (or jovial) one'.
Leonardo's assistant Andrea Salaì, at his death in 1524, owned a portrait that had been bequeathed to him by Leonardo, which in his personal papers was named la Gioconda. As recently as 2005 it was confirmed that Leonardo had painted such a work, and at the appropriate date, when a scholar at Heidelberg University discovered a marginal note in a 1477 printing of a volume by the ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. Dated October 1503, the note states that Leonardo was at that time working on a painting of Lisa del Giocondo.
Vasari states that after lingering over it for four years, Leonardo left the portrait unfinished until 1516, when he moved to France and took it with him as a gift for King Francis I. He probably finished it in the following year.
The record of a visit by the Italian Cardinal Louis d'Aragon in October 1517 states that the Mona Lisa was executed for the deceased Giuliano de' Medici, Leonardo's steward at the Belvedere Palace between 1513 and 1516. This has led to speculation that there are two Mona Lisas, and the one in the Louvre (see below) is the Medici version; but this record is probably incorrect.
After Leonardo donated his gift, the painting was kept at the Château de Fontainebleau – one of France's largest royal palaces, situated on the outskirts of Paris – and Louis XIV moved it to Versailles. It remained there until 1797, when it went on permanent display in the Louvre (after spending some time on the bedroom wall of Napoleon Bonaparte, in the Tuileries Palace).
The Mona Lisa was not widely known outside the art world until the 1860s, when a portion of the French intelligentsia began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. By 1911 it was still not popular among the lay public, but on 21 August of that year it was stolen from the Louvre.
The painting was first missed the next day by the painter Louis Béroud. After some confusion as to whether it was being photographed somewhere, the Louvre was closed for a week for investigation. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire came under suspicion, and was arrested and imprisoned. Apollinaire implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated. The real culprit was Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre employee – he'd helped to construct the painting's glass case. He carried out the theft by entering the building through a staff entrance during regular hours, hiding in a broom cupboard, and walking out with the painting hidden under his coat after the museum had closed.
Peruggia was an Italian patriot, who believed that Leonardo's painting should have been returned to an Italian museum. He may have been motivated by an associate, whose copies of the original would rise significantly in value after the theft. After keeping the Mona Lisa in his Paris apartment for two years, Peruggia returned to Italy with it – keeping it hidden in his apartment in Florence. Eventually growing impatient, he attempted to sell it to Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery. Poggi was (not surprisingly) suspicious, and called in the art dealer Alfredo Geri. Once Geri had authenticated the painting, he and Poggi called the police, who arrested Peruggia at his hotel.
After its recovery, the painting was exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery for over two weeks, and subsequently in galleries all over Italy. It was the newspaper headlines that it attracted at this time, and the notoriety generated by the scale of the police investigation, that made the Mona Lisa one of the world's best–known works of art.
In Italy Peruggia was hailed for his patriotism, but in France he served six months in prison for his crime. The painting was returned to the Louvre on 4 January 1914.
In 1932, the American journalist Karl Decker claimed (in the weekly Saturday Evening Post) that in the year following the theft he had met an alleged accomplice named Eduardo de Valfierno, who claimed to have masterminded the crime. Forger Yves Chaudron was to have created six copies of the painting to sell in the US, while concealing the location of the original.
On 30 December 1956, a Bolivian national named Ugo Ungaza Villegas threw a rock at the Mona Lisa while it was on display at the Louvre. The rock shattered the glass case and dislodged a speck of pigment near the left elbow of the sitter. The painting was protected by glass because a few years earlier, a man who claimed to be in love with the painting had cut it with a razor blade and tried to steal it. Since then, bulletproof glass has been used to shield the painting from any further attacks.
On 21 April 1974, while the painting was on display at the National Museum in Tokyo, it was sprayed with red paint by a woman protesting against that museum's failure to provide access for disabled people. On 2 August 2009, a Russian woman, distraught over being denied French citizenship, threw a ceramic teacup bought at the Louvre, which shattered against the glass enclosure. The painting survived both of these attacks undamaged.
This popup article has been compiled from edited extracts of various pages on Wikipedia.
© Haydn Thompson 2020