What makes mona lisa so great

When everyone had gone home, he slipped the painting out of its frame and took off with it. For a while it was suspected that famous artist Pablo Picasso might even be the thief, which caused a sensation.

The police printed 6, copies of the Mona Lisa and distributed the paper image to the public. Every newspaper covered the story. Millions of people saw the painting and had an opinion. The story went viral. The Mona Lisa became the Kim Kardashian of her day — everyone knew who she was.

Her portrait resides in majestic glory in the Louvre where she is visited by more than 6 million people a year — keen to see for themselves just what makes the Mona Lisa so special.

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Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! Archive All posts by date. Advertise With Us. The Mona Lisa was painted over the course of several years by Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine polymath and artist who created some of the Renaissance's most iconic works.

Born Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci in , he was the illegitimate son of a nobleman, and although there is little information about his childhood, scholars do know that as a young man he was apprenticed to an artist and sculptor named Andrea di Cione del Verrocchio.

He created many sophisticated pieces of art over the course of his career, and in the early s, began work on what would come to be known as the Mona Lisa. Unlike many artworks of the time, the Mona Lisa is not painted on canvas. Instead, she is painted on a poplar wood panel. While this may seem odd, keep in mind that Leonardo was a sculptor and artist who had painted on large walls of plaster throughout much of his career, so a wooden panel probably wasn't much of a stretch for him.

It is generally believed that the painting is of Lisa Gherardini , the wife of a wealthy silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo.

The word mona is a colloquial version of the Italian word for madam or ma'am, hence the title Mona Lisa. The work's alternate title is La Giaconda. It is believed that the painting was commissioned by Giocondo to commemorate the birth of the couple's second child.

Over the years, there have been theories that Lisa Gherardini was not in fact the model in this painting. Speculation abounds that the mysterious woman in the image could be any one of a dozen Italian noblewomen of the time; there is even a popular theory that the Mona Lisa is a feminized version of Leonardo himself.

In general, art historians agree that the Mona Lisa really is Lisa Gherardini. Scholars also agree that Leonardo created more than one version of the Mona Lisa; in addition to the del Giocondo commission, there was likely a second commissioned by Giuliano de Medici in The Medici version is believed to be the one that hangs in the Louvre today.

Unlike some artwork of the sixteenth century, the Mona Lisa is a very realistic portrait of a very real human being. Alicja Zelazko of Encyclopedia Britannica attributes this to Leonardo's skill with a brush, and his use of art techniques that were new and exciting during the Renaissance. She says,. In addition to the use of sfumato , which was rarely done at the time, the woman in the portrait has an enigmatic expression on her face.

At once both aloof and alluring, her soft smile actually changes, depending on the angle from which the viewer is looking. Thanks to differences in spatial frequency perception within the human eye, from one viewpoint she looks cheerful The Mona Lisa is also the earliest Italian portrait in which the subject is framed in a half-length portrait; the woman's arms and hands are displayed without touching the frame. She is shown only from head to waist, sitting in a chair; her left arm rests on the arm of the chair.

Two fragmentary columns frame her, creating a window effect that looks out over the landscape behind her. Leonardo wasn't the first to create the appearance that a subject's eyes are following people around the room, but the effect is so closely associated with his skill that it has become known—somewhat incorrectly—as the " Mona Lisa Effect. For centuries, the Mona Lisa hung quietly in the Louvre, generally unnoticed, but on August 21, , it was stolen right off the museum's wall in a heist that rocked the art world.

The painting was stolen Monday morning, but the interesting thing about it was that it wasn't 'til Tuesday at noon that they first realized it was gone.