Intro: Hello, friends! in this article we will know about who drew mona lisa, why mona lisa is so famous, how mona lisa was made, where mona lisa was painted, when mona lisa born, when mona lisa died, why mona lisa painting is so expensive, why mona lisa is in france,
On 21st August 1911, it was the time of Monday morning in Paris, France. There was a lot of commotion. People were going to work in their offices. Suddenly, three men came out of the Louvre Museum. The three of them had spent the night inside the museum. Now, they had an important property of the Louvre Museum in their hands. They were hiding it in a blanket and running away. They go to a nearby railway station, catch a train at 8.45 in the morning, and disappear. The whole world was unaware that they had just stolen a painting. And it's not a small painting. It's the world's most famous painting. The Mona Lisa. Today, the value of this painting is close to $1 billion.
What is the reason behind it? What secrets are hidden in this Mona Lisa? Why is this the world's most famous painting? Let's understand the mystery of Mona Lisa in today's artical. Mona Lisa's painting was made in 1503 by an Italian artist, Leonardo da Vinci. And he was an amazing man, you can't believe it. Because he wasn't just a painter, but an engineer, scientist, sculptor, architect, and theorist as well. He had knowledge of so many subjects, be it painting, cartography, astronomy, anatomy, botany, hydrology, geology, optics, or even paleontology.
A separate artical of him life can be made, so without talking much about him, we come to Mona Lisa. The most famous painting made by him. But whose painting was this? People have always been curious about the identity of the woman in the painting. The first explanation for this was made by an Italian artist named Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the autobiography of Leonardo da Vinci in 1550. According to Vasari, this woman was Lisa Ghirardini. She was married to a silk trader who lived in Florence. Francesco Giocondo. He said that Francesco had commissioned this painting for his wife, and hence the two names of this painting. The first name we all know, Mona Lisa, comes from Madonna Lisa. Traditionally, in Italian, the word Madonna is used for Madam.
So Madonna Lisa means Madam Lisa. And the short form of Madonna is Mona. Mona with a double N. Writing the same thing in English, an N was dropped, and Mona became Mona. Mona Lisa still means Madam Lisa or Lady Lisa. Then comes the second name of Mona Lisa, La Gioconda. After her marriage, Lisa Gerardini became Lisa Giocondo. An interesting thing here, in Italian, Giocondo means light-hearted or cheerful. It means cheerful. Today, Mona Lisa is also famous for her smile. This is how it was named La Giocondo. In French, the word Giocondo is pronounced as J. This is the reason why if you go to the Louvre Museum in Paris and look at Mona Lisa's paintings, it would be written La Giocondo in French.
Interestingly, despite this being revealed in 1550, people were not ready to believe that what Vasari had said was true. Many theories emerged that this woman was someone else. Some said that she was Leonardo da Vinci's mother. Some said that this was a painting by a queen in Italian aristocracy. The most interesting theory was that Da Vinci had depicted himself in this painting. This painting is not of any woman. Rather, this painting is Da Vinci's own painting. And they imagined how they would look if they were a woman. Artist Lillian Schwartz expanded this theory in an article in 1987. She used digital tools to try to show similarities between Leonardo da Vinci's face and Mona Lisa's face. With this logic, you can see similarities between two faces.
But today, we can say with certainty that the woman in this painting is Lisa Giacondo. A professor in Florence had researched this for 25 years, and found the archives, and in 2004, he got clear evidence to prove it. He also found that Da Vinci's family had a close relationship with Francesco Giacondo's family. He also found out that Lisa's wedding was registered on 5th March 1495, when Lisa was 16 years old, and Francesco was 30 years old. He found that Leonardo da Vinci's father and Lisa's husband knew each other very well. And it's possible that the commissioning of this painting wasn't done by Lisa's husband, but by Leonardo's father. Valenti says that when Mona Lisa was made, Lisa was 24 years old. And there are two reasons behind making this painting.
In the first year, 1503, when Francesco and Lisa bought their own house, or the second, in December 1502, when her second son was born. The second reason seems more probable, because three years earlier, in 1499, Lisa had lost her daughter. If you look at this painting carefully, you'll see that there's a veil on Lisa's hair. Many people call it the morning veil. It's a veil that is put on when someone in the family has died. One question arises here, if Da Vinci was Italian and Mona Lisa was Italian, what is this painting doing in France today? In 1516, the King of France, Francis I, invited Leonardo da Vinci to live in France. Da Vinci shifted from Italy to France, and took the painting of Mona Lisa with him.
The historical records are unclear, but it's said that Da Vinci had not completed the painting yet. Even after 15 years of starting the painting, he was still working on it. He was trying to modify it and make it better. Meanwhile, in 1519, Leonardo da Vinci died while living in the King's Palace. And the King kept this painting for his Royal Collection. About 150 years later, in 1797, during the French Revolution, this painting was taken out of the King's Palace and kept in the Louvre Museum. I made a separate artical on the French Revolution, if you haven't seen it, the link is in the description. The interesting thing is that because of this, Mona Lisa is stolen in 1911. I talked about this in the beginning of the artical.
The mastermind of this theft was Vincenzo Perugia, who stole this painting with his two friends. He was an Italian nationalist. He believed that this painting should be with Italy, not France. That's why he stole it and took it to Italy. Stealing such a famous painting is a risky task. Especially when the painting costs millions of dollars. So obviously, after this theft, Vincenzo wouldn't feel safe at all. who was an Italian nationalist. Let's talk about it in the next artical. But before that, let's know the speciality of this painting. Why is it so special? The first thing is that Mona Lisa was not painted on paper, canvas, or cloth. In fact, it was painted on a poplar wood. It was the favourite wood of the Italian painters of that time. Secondly, this painting isn't too big in size. Look at these photos. The ones in the museum. You can see its size in comparison to humans. It is only a 77 cm x 53 cm painting. But it is still considered so special because it was the first painting of its kind in Italy, that was so closely focused on humans.
It is a half-length portrait. Today, such shots are very common in photography. But at that time, no one made such paintings. Overall, if you look at the colour grading of this painting, you will see shades of brown and yellow. It looks like a very dull painting. It is so yellowish that a professor declared Lisa a cholesterol patient at one point. But there are two reasons for this. The first is that a varnish layer has been applied on this painting. So that the moisture doesn't have a bad effect on the painting. Because this painting is made of wood. So it is important to protect it from humidity and moisture. And secondly, over time, there was bleaching in it. Originally, when this painting was made, it was more bright and colourful.
Some people tried to recreate it, to see how this painting would look originally. Da Vinci used a very special painting style in this painting, which is known as sfumato. The technique of blending. The background that you see in this painting, there's a landscape. It's the Arno Valley of Italy. There are no clear boundaries in the background and Mona Lisa. No outlines were made. In some places, Mona Lisa's hair was shining in the landscape. Blurring the outlines and blending the colours, this is the technique of sfumato. And this is the secret behind Mona Lisa's mysterious smile. Look at Mona Lisa's smile carefully. The more you look at her smile, the more serious your face will look. But now, look into Mona Lisa's eyes. Suddenly, you'll see how Lisa is smiling.
You'll see it in any part of the painting, be it the background, whether it's Mona Lisa's forehead or her eyes, you will see this effect. Lisa's face starts smiling more when you don't focus on her smile. Da Vinci took the most time to create this smile. He spent many nights in a hospital in Florence, where he went to the dead bodies, to remove the skin. He wanted to study the muscles and nerves in the face. How do they smile? He wrote in his book, The muscles which move the lips are more numerous in man than in any other animal. It was very difficult for him to dissect the lips because the muscles here are very small and large. During this experiment, Da Vinci also studied horses.
He compared the expressions of humans to the faces of horses. In the notes, he writes, Notice whether the muscles that raise the nostrils of the horse is same as that which lies here in man. Perhaps, in history, some other artist would have dissected a horse and a human, and done these experiments. His obsession with Mona Lisa's smile didn't end here. After this, he also researched optics. He found that the light rays, don't come from a single point in our eyes, but from the retina. The part in the middle of the retina, known as fovea, It helps us see the finest details. On the other hand, the rest of the retina, picks up shadows and black and white things more. Using this knowledge, he focused on the shadows in such a way that when you look at Mona Lisa with your peripheral vision, meaning, you're looking here and Mona Lisa is there.
Even if you don't focus on Mona Lisa, her smile still affects you. When you look at Muskan closely, you'll see that it has a central line, a flat line. This is the reason why when you look at Muskan, you feel that she isn't actually smiling. But on the other hand, the shadows created by the sfumato technique, have such an effect that when you look somewhere else, that Muskan comes into your peripheral vision and its shadows shine. And then you feel that Lisa is smiling. Now, how would you feel if I tell you that Mona Lisa doesn't have one painting, but two paintings. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's the truth. The painting of Mona Lisa, which we all know, was made in the same time as another painting.
The story of this second Mona Lisa begins in 1504, when another legendary artist named Raphael, made a rough sketch using pen and ink. This sketch looked something like this. And if you compare it with the Mona Lisa of Louvre, you can see a huge difference. In Raphael's sketch, there are two columns, behind Mona Lisa. The researchers thought that Raphael must have made his drawing based on Mona Lisa's actual painting, so it wasn't a big deal. But this theory was disproved by a German art historian in 1993. And Professor Palanti, whom I spoke to earlier, who had been researching Mona Lisa's identity for 25 years, confirmed that Raphael, for some time in Florence, lived right in front of the Kondo family's house. Does this mean that Raphael made his own painting, with the same subject, with the same woman, in the same pose?
This seems quite unbelievable. Another answer to this question could be that another Mona Lisa painting exists, which Raphael drew after seeing it. And this second Mona Lisa painting appears in the world in 1914. A novelist living near London, John R. Eyre, had a new version of the Mona Lisa. This is the painting of the new Mona Lisa. The same painting on which Raphael made his drawing. The second Mona Lisa is 3.5 feet taller than the one in the Louvre, and 5 feet wider. If you compare these two paintings, you'll see three things. First, the woman in the new Mona Lisa looks younger. Second, the head of the new painting is tilted forward. Third, the expressions of the new Mona Lisa are straightforward and clear.
There's nothing mysterious about the Mona Lisa of Louvre. And the two columns in the background, were also seen in Raphael's drawings. Looking at all these reasons, experts tell a new theory, that Leonardo da Vinci was actually working on two Mona Lisas. Both of these Mona Lisas were actually made by Leonardo da Vinci. But the Mona Lisa found at Isleworth, This was the first version of Da Vinci's painting. Back then, he was experimenting with his style. And this is the reason why the Mona Lisa in that painting, looks quite young compared to the other Mona Lisa. This is a theory that is a topic of debate today. In 2010, the Mona Lisa Foundation started an investigation on the Mona Lisa in Aylworth, to find out the secret behind it.
And he came up with another theory. He said that the face and hand of the new Mona Lisa, was made by Da Vinci himself. But the background was made by an inferior artist. It's possible that it was a person who worked at Leonardo's workshop, who finished the painting. These two theories are the only theories to this day. Because no solid evidence has been found on any side. When we come back to the theft of Mona Lisa, we find out that the mastermind of the theft, Vincenzo Perugia, was actually an employee at the Louvre Museum. One day, he hid in the corner of the museum, and spent the whole night there. After which, he stole the painting in the morning. He believed that Leonardo da Vinci, because he was Italian, so this painting should be in an Italian museum.
As soon as the news of the theft spread, headlines spread all over the world. 500 detectives started searching for the thief. But no one could find it. For 2 years, Perugia kept this painting at home. They thought about what to do with it. The whole world was looking for it. Finally, they were impatient and tried to sell the painting. An art dealer living in Florence tried to sell the painting. Giovanni Poggi. Giovanni became suspicious and confirmed by looking at the stamp on the back of the painting, that this was the stolen painting. They are being sold as the most wanted objects in the world. Because of this, Vincenzo is arrested and sentenced to 6 months. The painting is brought back to the Louvre Museum and kept there.
On 4th January 1914. Today, this painting is kept here behind a bulletproof glass. In strict climate-controlled conditions, where the humidity is maintained at 50%, plus or minus 10%, the temperature is strictly maintained at 18-21°C. The most interesting thing about this story is that after the robbery, Mona Lisa's popularity started to rise. And it became the world's number one famous painting. You heard it right. Before the robbery, Mona Lisa wasn't that famous. People who were interested in art, knew about Mona Lisa. But the common people didn't know what Mona Lisa was. So today, if you ever go to the Louvre Museum and see Mona Lisa's paintings, and you see crowds everywhere, So this popularity is blamed solely on Vincenzo.
