Do we know who the Mona Lisa was ?
Commissioned around 1503, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous portrait in the world. But who was the Mona Lisa?
With the artist himself making no mention of the work, a string of possible sitters have since been identified – including, bizarrely, da Vinci himself in drag – but it seems likely to immortalise Lisa del Giocondo (nee Gherardini), the wife of a Florentine cloth merchant.
Although by no means conclusive, details about the family and the painting itself offer some clues. A middle-class couple with aspirations to wealth and status, at around the time it was commissioned they celebrated both the purchase of their own house and the arrival of a son – both events worth commemorating.
The painting’s alternative title, ‘La Gioconda’, may even allude to both to the model and her famous expression, being not only the feminine form of Lisa’s married name but translated roughly as ‘the happy one’.
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It took Leonardo da Vinci 10 years to paint the Mona Lisa’s lips |
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When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, one of the suspects was Picasso. |
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The Louvre has a naked version of the Mona Lisa, painted by one of Da Vinci’s pupils. |
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When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, people flocked to look at the space where it had been. |
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Though the Mona Lisa was a commissioned project, Da Vinci decided to keep the painting for himself. After his death, it was bought by the King of France and remained in royal hands for more than two centuries. When the French Revolution changed the tone of the city, the masterpiece was transferred to its current home, the Louvre. However, Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly “borrowed” it for a while to decorate his bedroom wall |
