If you want to publicize a cause or gain infamy by destroying a work of art, you might as well choose the most famous of them all. Last weekend, when pumpkin soup was hurled at the bulletproof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre, photos of the painting obscured by blobs of liquid food appeared around the world. But why is the Mona Lisa so famous? Here are 10 things you need to know about the most idolized painting on earth.
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 had recently rejected overtures from Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, to paint her, and instead began work on this portrait of ‘Lady Lisa’, a middle-class Florentine woman. Perhaps he painted her because she simply fascinated him, or to celebrate his bourgeois merchant city.
The man who loved (painted) women.
Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy as a young man and he never married, but was close to his male students. But when it came to portraits, he preferred women. The Mona Lisa is the last of a wonderful series of female portraits, beginning with Ginevra de’ Benci around 1475, in which he brings out feminine character, strength and freedom in a way no artist has ever known before.
The comeback painting
Leonardo tried to give up oil painting completely in the years before the Mona Lisa. He had always been a slow painter and spent much of his time on scientific experiments. He told an emissary of Isabella d’Este that he was too busy with mathematics to paint her. He then served Cesare Borgia as a military engineer in his boldest attempt to leave art behind. After this frightening experience, he started the Mona Lisa in Florence.
Famous for 500 years
To the frustration of soup throwers, the Mona Lisa smiles at the world from a secure display case with powerful reinforced glass on the front, reflecting this painting’s unique celebrity status as well as previous crimes including the 1911 theft. Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp both paid tribute to the strange imprint of the Mona Lisa in modern mass culture. No painting has ever matched this allure: but it is not just a modern phenomenon. As early as 1505, a woman named Maddelana Doni folded her hands in imitation of Lisa in a portrait of Raphael, reproducing with her pose what was already an icon.
Leonardo’s favorite
Perhaps Leonardo himself was the Mona Lisa’s biggest fan, because he just couldn’t let it go. He never handed the work over to Lisa’s husband, who commissioned it, instead choosing to continue reworking the painting for years, adding new subtleties and mysteries. In the year before his death, when he received visitors from Italy at the castle of Amboise given to him by the French king, 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 originally smile. Leonardo spent a lot of time dissecting corpses in the 16th century to discover the inner secrets of human anatomy, including facial muscles. His anatomical drawings of lips and notes on how they move suggest that he developed the Mona Lisa’s smile to show how our faces work physically, adding golden skin and delicate lips to an acquaintance of Lisa from the skull to outside. This is the beautiful human machine.
The idol of Henry VIII
One of the first victims of the Mona Lisa’s smile was the 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 portray a potential bride, the 16-year-old Cristina of Denmark. In Holbein’s painting, the now widowed Cristina is dressed in black, but she lights up the room with her smile. It’s strangely familiar. Holbein had seen the Mona Lisa and he imitates the most seductive smile in art. Henry fell for the painting, declared himself in love and called for sweet music – but was it the Mona Lisa he really loved?
Hydraulic secrets
One of the most mysterious things about the Mona Lisa is the green, brown and blue ethereal landscape behind her. This puzzle is intentional. Leonardo seems to want us to wonder where the road and the bridge, the jagged rocks, the river and the mountains are. He makes them both specific and vague, as if to tease us. It is actually quite clear that he is referring to the Arno River 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 an allusion to the plan he devised together with the Florentine military expert Niccolò Machiavelli?
Neville and the Mustache
In 1919, conceptual art inventor Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and beard on a reproduction Mona Lisa, giving it the title LHOOQ, which, when read aloud, sounds like the French word for “She has a hot ass.” The joke is more than graffiti. Lisa looks good with facial hair. Some people can’t resist the idea that she is really a man, perhaps she is hiding a portrait of Leonardo himself. Leonardo actually combines ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ features in his faces, and the androgyny may be one of the reasons why the Mona Lisa is so terrifying.
O mother!
Perhaps the deepest secret of the Mona Lisa is not about science or sexuality, but about the infancy of the artist himself. The landscape in the background is reminiscent of the hills around Vinci, the Tuscan town where he was born in 1452, the illegitimate baby of a lawyer and a country girl named Caterina. He later gained a stepmother, but his biological mother remained a ghostly figure floating in his memories of the Tuscan countryside – a bit like the Mona Lisa. Is this dream woman his personal idealized, long-lost mother figure, on the throne of his art, smiling benevolently at him, his own Madonna, a mother goddess?