by If you want to promote a cause or gain fame by vandalizing a work of art, you can choose from the most famous of all. When pumpkin soup was spilled at the bulletproof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre at the weekend, pictures of the painting hidden by gobs of liquefied food were seen around the world. But why is the Mona Lisa so famous anyway? Here are 10 things you need to know about the most idolized painting in the world.
Related: Protesters throw soup at the Mona Lisa in Paris
Mona Who?
Leonardo da Vinci began his portrait of Monna Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine merchant, in 1503. “Monna”, short for Madonna, was a term of respect for women in Renaissance Florence. Leonardo recently turned down overtures from Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, to paint her, and instead began this portrait of “Lady Lisa”, a middle-class Florentine woman. He may have painted her because she was interested in him, or to celebrate his bourgeois merchant city.
The man who liked (painting) women
Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy as a young man and never married, but instead was close to his male students. But when it came to portraits he preferred the women. The Mona Lisa is the last of a great series of portraits of women beginning with Ginevra de’ Benci around 1475, in which it brings out female character, strength and freedom in ways no artist has ever seen before.
The painting back
Leonardo tried to give up oil painting entirely in the years before the Mona Lisa. He was always a slow painter and spent much of his time doing science experiments instead. He told a hemissary from Isabella d’Este that he was too busy with mathematics to paint her. He then served Cesare Borgia as a military engineer trying to leave art behind. It was the change from this terrifying experience that led him to begin the Mona Lisa in Florence.
Famous for 500 years
Frustrated with soup slurps, the Mona Lisa smiles at the world from a secure vitrine fronted with strength-reinforced glass, reflecting the unique celebrity status of this painting as well as previous crimes including its theft in 1911 .Both Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp paid homage to the Mona Lisa’s strange imprint in modern mass culture. No picture has ever rivaled this beauty: but it is not just a modern phenomenon. As early as 1505, a woman named Maddelana Doni folded her arms as she imitated Lisa in a portrait by Raphael, reproducing her pose on an existing icon.
Leonardo is your favorite
Leonardo himself was perhaps Mona Lisa’s biggest fan, as he couldn’t let it go. He did not hand the work over to Lisa’s husband, who commissioned it, instead choosing to continue reworking the painting over the years, adding new unease and mystery. When he received visitors from Italy in the year before his death, in the chateau at Amboise given to him by the king of France, Leonardo showed them the Mona Lisa – his lifelong love.
Anatomy of a smile
Raphael’s early imitations of the Mona Lisa reproduce her pose but not her smile. Scientific imaging seems to confirm that Lisa del Giocondo did not smile at first. Leonardo spent much of his time in the 1500s dissecting a body to draw the inner secrets of human anatomy – including facial muscles. His anatomical drawings of lips and notes on how they move suggest that he developed Mona Lisa’s smile to show how our faces work physically, giving Lisa golden skin and smooth lips known from head out. This is the beautiful human machine.
Idol of Henry VIII
One early victim of Mona Lisa’s smile was the wife of serial killer and religious tyrant Henry VIII of England. After the (natural) death of his third queen, Jane Seymour, Henry sent his court artist Hans Holbein to Brussels to depict a potential bride, 16-year-old Cristina from Denmark. In Holbein’s painting the widow Cristina is already covered in black but she lights up the room with her smile. It is oddly familiar. Holbein saw the Mona Lisa and imitates the most inspiring smile in art. Henry fell for the painting, declared he was in love and asked for sweet music – but was it Mona Lisa he loved?
Hydraulic secrets
One of the most mysterious things about the Mona Lisa is the ethereal green, brown and blue landscape behind it. This response is intentional. Leonardo seems to want us to think where the road and the bridge are, rough rocks, river and mountains. He makes them both specific and vague, as if to tease us. In fact it is clear that he is referring to the river Arno flowing through the hills of Tuscany, a landscape full of memories for him. At the time he started the Mona Lisa he was involved in an attempt to change the course of the Arno to destroy the economy of Florence’s enemy Pisa. Is this landscape a model for the scheme he prepared with the Florentine military expert Niccolò Machiavelli?
Marcel and the Mustache
In 1919 the inventor of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and beard on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, giving it the title LHOOQ, which, when read aloud, sounds like the French for “She’s got a hot arse”. The joke is bigger than graffiti. Lisa looks good with facial hair. Some people can’t resist the idea that she is actually a male, perhaps hiding a portrait of Leonardo himself. Leonardo mixes “male” and “female” qualities in his faces, and the androgyny may be one of the reasons why the Mona Lisa is so ugly.
Oh, mother!
Perhaps the Mona Lisa’s deepest secret is not about science or sexuality, but about the artist’s own infancy. The landscape in the background suggests the hills around Vinci, the Tuscan town where he was born in 1452, the illegitimate child of a lawyer and a country girl called Caterina. He later had a stepmother but his biological mother remained a spectral figure floating in his memories of the Tuscan countryside – a bit like the Mona Lisa. Is this dream woman his idealized, long-lost personal mother image, enthralled by his art, smiling at him well, his own Madonna, mother-goddess?
