Mona Lisa Leonardo Da Vinci

Mona Lisa

Leonardo da Vinci began painting his famous masterpiece, Mona Lisa -- or Gioconda -- in 1502, and completed it four years later. Although an extremely versatile artist and one of the major representatives of the Italian Renaissance, it was Mona Lisa that has elevated Leonardo to his current status, and has established him as one of the greatest artists of all time. This relatively small painting created new forms and offered new perspectives, succeeding in crafting an incredibly intense masterpiece into a compact 30" by 20 1/2" frame. As for its technique, the Mona Lisa is an oil painting, and has been restored many times. It is currently located in the Louvre museum, in Paris where curators have started to worry that the painting appears to be deteriorating more rapidly than in past decades, and that multiple restorations might negatively affect its original colors.

One cannot discuss the Mona Lisa without discussing its creator, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, just outside Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a 25-year-old notary, Ser Piero, and a peasant girl named Caterina. His father took custody of Leonardo shortly after his birth while his mother remarried and moved to a neighboring town abandoning her newborn son. Both his parents had more children with their new spouses, and in the end, Leonardo had a total of 17 half siblings. Growing up, Leonardo's interests were varied largely thanks to his father granting his adolescent son access to scholarly texts (Taylor 22). He was also exposed to the family's painting tradition which allowed him to experience with art from a very young age. When he was about 15 years old, his father apprenticed him to the renowned workshop of Andrea del Verrochio in Florence, where Leonardo started to demonstrated his talent and skills (Hegarty 24). However, he was not focused solely on painting. He was also interested in architecture, mechanics and human anatomy. His meticulous studies and sketches were collected into various manuscripts and codices.

Leonardo's greatest painting masterpiece is the Mona Lisa. The task of analyzing the painting cannot exclude a short overview of the context of its creation at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On its creation, Italian painter Vasari wrote, "Leonardo undertook to paint Francesco del Giocondo the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, and after he had lingered over it for four years, left it unfinished" (Vasari in McCurdy 88). This was, in fact, true as Leonardo did not finish the painting until his return to Florence from the Romagna, in March 1503. He completed it within four years. History shows that the model for the painting was a member of the Neapolitan family of Gherardini, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. She was presumably between her twenty-sixth and thirtieth year when Leonardo started to paint her portrait (McCurdy 90). Leonardo took the painting from Italy to France in 1516 when King Francois I invited him to work at the Clos Luce neat the king's castle in Amboise. The king would soon purchase the painting from Leonardo, and place it in his residence at Fontainebleau, where it would remain until moved by Louis XIV to the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, the painting was moved to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Napoleon I had it moved to his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace but later it was returned to the museum. During the Franco-Prusian War of 1870-1871, the Gioconda was moved from the Louvre to a hiding place in France.

As with any other masterpiece, the Mona Lisa has sparked many controversies related either to its creation or its tumultuous history over the ages. One of the most interesting debated began after Leonardo's death when it was believed that the painting had been cut down by having part of the wood panel at both sides removed. It has been speculated that early copies contain columns on the laterals of the central figure that no longer exist. In fact, there have been speculations that Leonardo created more than one version of the Mona Lisa as several art collectors over the world -- particularly in France and the United Kingdom -- have claimed to own an original Leonardo masterpiece. The controversies around her smile and eyes have generated almost as much research and debate as the painting itself. Anyone who has seen Leonardo's Mona Lisa had the illusion that the Gioconda was staring at them irrespective of their angle. There have been numerous scientists who have attempted to deconstruct this particular aspect, and explain how human sight responds to Mona Lisa's eyes. For instance, Margaret Livingstone, a professor at Harvard University, has argued that the painting is most effective when viewed peripherally, and that Gioconda's smile is most striking when looking directly at her eyes.

Contemporary response was not necessarily favorable to the painting as Leonardo's contemporaries did not consider the Mona Lisa Leonardo's most important work. Several accounts of Italian painting written during the artist's life or a little later, fail even to mention it. For instance, Paolo Giovio, writing shortly after Leonardo's death in 1519, simply states that he painted the portrait of Mona Lisa, "wife of Francesco del Giocondo, which was bought by King Francis I, it is said, for 4000 scudi." (Boas 212) In fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the only aspect which was truly interesting to critics and art commentators was the price of the painting which was considered immense for that period of time. The only relatively positive recorded comment on the Mona Lisa during the sixteenth century was that of Lomazzo who praised it along with portraits by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto as "peculiarly adapted to its subject." (Ibid) The most influential of earlier comments on the painting belonged to Italian painter Vasari who established a tradition as far as Mona Lisa criticism. It is not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the Mona Lisa is established as a true masterpiece. Pere Dan, who was in charge with making a catalogue of the artworks at Fontainebleau, called it "une merveille de la peinture" -- a miracle of painting (Boas 213).