Mona LisaLeonardo da Vinci began work on the Mona Lisa in Florence Italy in 1503, during the height of the Renaissance period.
Historically, Mona Lisa was nobody special, probably the young wife as a Florentine merchant named Gioconda.
The portrait set the standard for high Renaissance paintings in many important ways. The use of perspective, with all lines converging on a single vanishing paint behind Mona Lisa’s head, and triangular composition established the important of geometry in painting.
The original name of the painting was not Mona Lisa – it was La Gioconda.
The Mona Lisa painting is more than a piece of remarkable artwork – it is adventure into the unknown. It is a human quality to want to know and understand others, even to understands ourselves.
In this sense, the Mona Lisa, is an attempt to look through the veil of the public self and into the mystery of the real self.
A young lady appears before us, yet she is unreachable and eternally unknowable, permanent enigma that centuries of art experts have not been able to solve.
Her cross hands complement perfectly the shape of her face, the torso and the landscape background.
Leonardo kept his painting with him until the day he died saying that it was still unfinished. He even carried the remarkable painting with him as he moved form city to city.
By 1952 more than 61 versions of the Mona Lisa had been created. From Marcel Duchamp’s goateed portrait in 1919 to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen series and Jasper Johns image in 1983, the Mona Lisa is not only the most admired, but also the most reproduced image in all art.
Mona Lisa
