To really understand the true importance of the Mona Lisa, you have to go back to the old question: why is she smiling? But the only way this works is by contemplating it not as a question, but as an answer. But that doesn’t really explain the painting’s appeal – she doesn’t really symbolise the breadth of Leonardo’s interests and ideas (about mechanics, astronomy, architecture, optics and more). (Appearing to be an earlier portrait of del Giocondo, the “ Isleworth Mona Lisa” still has experts bickering over authenticity a century later.) The 21st century (and the novel The Da Vinci Code) has only amped up her supposed enigmas, making her an occult mystery, shrouded in conspiracy theories and buried in fake news. The Mona Lisa was finally recovered in 1913 – the same year that the “second” Mona Lisa was discovered in an English estate. Then, in 1911 the painting was stolen from the Louvre among the suspects questioned were poet Guillaume Apollinaire and … Pablo Picasso. First, the journal of a visitor to Leonardo’s workshop in 1517 came to light, clearly implying he saw not one but two very similar Mona Lisa paintings, which suggested that the portrait in the Louvre might not be of Lisa del Giocondo, but a mysterious someone else. Then, in the 20th century, the Mona Lisa went from painting to pop idol. After briefly hanging in Napoleon’s bedroom in the early 1800s, the painting went to the country’s new art museum, the Louvre, where interest in her (and her smile) caught on and built slowly over the next century. Leonardo died in France in 1519 the painting went to its owner, King Francis I of France, Leonardo’s last great patron it remained with the French monarchy until the revolution.
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